The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4) Read online

  ‘Louis,’ I called softly, for fear of waking those already in their beds. He did not hear me. ‘Louis,’ I called again, and this time the French master visibly jumped before he turned, startled, to face me.

  Relief flooded his face. ‘Mr Seaton!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Louis, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  ‘I, no, it is all right …’ It took him a minute for his breathing to return to normal.

  ‘You are late abroad.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, still breathing heavily. ‘I was in the old town, where I have some pupils. I had hoped to be back home before now.’

  As I took a step towards him, I could see he was trembling, and not with the cold.

  ‘Louis, what’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s nothing, just foolishness.’ He looked around him, then lowered his voice. ‘I have been listening too much to Christiane. She’s convinced someone has been watching the house. For the last two days she has been on at me about it, and I didn’t take her seriously. When you appeared so silently from that close, I thought for a moment …’ Then he laughed. ‘Dear Lord, I have let her nonsense turn my head. The council will have my licence from me if they suspect me of such foolishness.’

  ‘And who would teach their merchants and young gentlemen the intricacies of the French tongue then? I suspect you and your licence are safe enough. But let me walk as far as your house with you – I had wanted to hear more of what you know of Hugh and Seoras anyway.’

  Louis Rolland kept his school in a small house at the far end of the Schoolhill. His grandparents had fled Paris with their daughter, Louis’ mother, in the wake of the massacres of St Bartholemew’s Day, and he and his younger sister had been brought up in the tongue and manners of its people as much as they had the Scots. His lessons were in growing demand among the merchants trading in French goods, and students who aimed at higher studies in France or the Swiss cantons. I had tried to persuade him before that he should address me now as ‘Alexander’, and see me as a friend rather than the Mr Seaton who had taught him for the only year he had been able to attend the college. I tried again now, and he acceded, if a little uncomfortably.

  ‘I’m not sure there is anything I can tell you of the pair that will be of any use. As I say, they have been coming to me for lessons since the summer. Seoras’s father had a mind, it seems, that it would do his son no harm to serve a term in the Garde Eccosaise, and Hugh, of course, would go with him.’

  It seemed likely enough. Since our country was presently at peace with France, the Marquis of Huntly was free to assume his hereditary position of captain of the personal bodyguard of the king of France, and many young men of good birth seeking favour and preferment followed him. ‘And so they came to you, to learn the French tongue?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And do they progress?’

  He stuck out a bottom lip in a manner I had observed in other Frenchmen. ‘Well, Seoras in particular seems to have a natural gift. Hugh has to work harder, but to good purpose. By the time of their graduation next summer, I think they will both be ready to make their way in Paris unhampered by difficulties in language at least.’

  I sensed we were coming to the grain of the matter. ‘But there are other difficulties?’

  Louis seemed unsure as to how he should continue. ‘I know what’s being said about Hugh around the town and I have no wish to give credence to such talk …’

  ‘You may speak to me in confidence.’

  He nodded. ‘Very well. I do not dislike Seoras. In fact, there are times when he is very good company, but he is …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Difficult. Volatile. He’s not a person with whom I would ever truly feel at ease. Hugh can manage him – seems to understand his moods before they become dangerous – but of late he’s had less and less patience with him. It has made Seoras goad him all the more. These last few weeks there’s been a hardness between them that I did not see before.’

  ‘You have no idea what’s at the root of it?’

  He shook his head. ‘None. Seoras has always been hard work for Hugh, but there had been an affection there. Of late, I do not see that affection. I think Hugh’s tolerance with his foster brother is almost at an end, and I don’t see how they will travel happily together to France if the matter is not resolved. The atmosphere between them has become so unpleasant of late that I have stopped Christiane from joining in our classes – she used to come in to help me accustom them to conversation in French. I don’t think she’s sorry to have been relieved of that duty.’

  ‘She has much on hand in any case, it seems, with the schoolmistress trials and her help to George.’

  Louis smiled. ‘That has been a blessing. Although I fear it too might lead to problems. She has conceived a great liking for Guillaume.’

  ‘Charpentier? The gardener?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a very fine fellow, and I could not wish for a better husband for her, but I don’t think he sees her in that light at all, and then I will have a broken heart to attend to.’

  I patted him on the shoulder. ‘The troubles of a schoolmaster are legion,’ I said. ‘I don’t envy you. But tell me, how were things between Seoras and Hugh when you last saw them?’

  ‘Bad. It was late last Wednesday afternoon. We hadn’t got through the first part of our lesson, a conversation, before Seoras began to taunt Hugh. What about, I do not know, for when he is in the greatest devilment he will talk to Hugh only in the Gaelic tongue. Hugh was becoming visibly livid. I had to give the lesson up in the end, for fear of violence between them. Seoras never appeared for the Monday lesson, and I’ve seen neither of them since.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where Seoras might be?’

  He shook his head. ‘None. I was his French master, nothing more, and he certainly did not confide in me.’

  ‘And Hugh?’

  ‘Hugh? I think Hugh has spent his whole life knowing he cannot confide in anybody.’

  We had almost reached Louis’ house by now, the painted sign that hung from his porch illuminated by the blue light of the moon. He thanked me for walking with him, and as I was turning away he said, ‘If you should come upon my gardening friends, let them know the house will be locked soon. My sister and I must get to our beds.’

  ‘But they cannot be gardening in the dark?’

  ‘You would think not, wouldn’t you? But there are dugup bulbs to be dried apparently, long-buried roots, corms and tubers to be divided, sorted and noted for replanting. George, as you know, is a man of determination as well as genius: he has made sound an old gardener’s workshop where such activities might be carried out at almost any hour. He will have his Arcadia, come what may. He has cleared a yard too, for the wood that will be hewn. I have been promised enough firewood to take me through this winter and the next.’ He rubbed cold hands together in a fruitless effort to keep warm. ‘There are many benefits to be had in housing George’s workmen.’

  ‘But there’s a price to be paid too, I think. I cannot imagine the small one, St Clair, adds a great deal of cheer to your table.’

  Louis laughed. ‘Little cheer and even less conversation. But Guillaume more than makes up for it.’ He reached out his hand and I shook it.

  ‘We should talk like this more often, although perhaps in a warmer place,’ I said.

  After the door had shut behind him and I found myself alone in the street, the slight sense of foreboding I had felt earlier gradually returned. In the full moon, every star that I knew was visible to my eye. Every turret, every corbel, every rooftop was sketched sharply against the deep midnight-blue of a sky that on other nights was black. Frost glistened off the stones, sparkling almost at the reverberation of my footsteps. With Louis gone, I felt like the last living soul in a place abandoned. And yet, I knew I was not alone. It had only been a glimpse, as I’d turned from saying goodnight to Louis, but a glimpse had been enough to show me the figure, three-quarters hidden in the shadow of St Nicholas Kirkyard gate,
that watched me. The figure I had seen fleetingly at the top of the stairs in Downie’s Inn as I had spoken with Ormiston. Hood well down on his head, leaning awkwardly to one side as if the other could not properly support him, a hand hiding his face, it was the man who had approached my son at the harbour only yesterday, but this time I knew that the recruiting sergeant was watching me.

  I should have made for home then, quickly, but there was something I had to satisfy myself of first. I made my way once more down the vennel by way of the old place of the Blackfriars, through the rusted gates into the garden.

  The hut in which Charpentier and St Clair worked must have been somewhere on the other side of the garden, for no light or sounds reached me here from there. I walked along the moonlit pathways towards the place I sought. The grass was white and crisp beneath my boots, and I saw that I left a trail of light prints in the frost as I went. I tried to recall the sketches the artist had shown to me earlier in the day, and the one that came most clearly to my mind was that of the garden as he planned it; I had to search further back, to one that had been of less interest to us both, that of the long-neglected garden as it was now.

  My progress slowed as I had to pass beneath overhanging branches of beech and ash that blocked out much of the moonlight. The darting of a fox across my path startled me, but after a few minutes I had found it, beyond a screen of willows and knotted brambles – the pond. I approached it tentatively, grateful that the cold had turned the mud at the edges as hard as iron. I stooped down and saw that bootprints from before the freeze had now been sculpted into the earth. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but it did not seem to me that the markings showed signs of a struggle of any sort. I put out a foot and carefully tested the edge of the water – it had already begun to ice over and by the morning would be frozen through. I picked up a long, broken branch and started slowly pushing it through the iced water to probe whatever was beneath. I worked it through tangles of weeds, fallen branches and other debris until it reached the sludge below. I made my way around the edges of the pond in this manner for some time, until my fingers were in an agony of cold. At last, I came to where I had started and, in all, there was a relief of sorts, for I had not found the dead body of Seoras MacKay.

  I was almost back at the gateway when a sound, somewhere behind and to the left of me, took my attention. I turned around quickly, but not quickly enough, for all I saw of the man was the edge of his cloak and the back of his boot as it disappeared into an opening in the thicket towards the eastern gateway of the garden.

  Left standing with her back to me, at the entrance to what I recalled from Jamesone’s map as ‘the bower’, was Isabella Irvine. Her hood was down and her hair loosed. She seemed to watch the man long after he was gone. I stepped quickly behind an old rose as I saw her lift the hood to cover her head. Then she turned around and walked past me and out of the garden. I waited a moment and followed her, keeping as far back as I could without losing sight of her. I watched her until she was safely admitted to Baillie Lumsden’s house, then I turned at last towards Flourmill Lane and the cottage that would be my family’s home for only a few weeks more. I glanced in every doorway that I passed, turned at every movement, but I saw no more of the recruiting sergeant that night.

  6

  Lord Reay

  If I had hoped for a night’s sleep after my late wanderings I was to be sorely disappointed. At some point in the early morning, a little before five, the whole household was woken by a commotion out on the streets. Doors were being banged upon and all able-bodied men being called from their beds by night watchmen bearing torches.

  ‘The Wappinschaw!’ I said, struggling into my clothing as Sarah went to calm the frightened children.

  Outside, I joined my neighbours as they ran to the appointed station where Baillie Lumsden was directing the men of our quarter to our positions. Each month, though at a more godly and fore-ordained hour, we practised our muster for defence of the burgh from attack by sea. We had been well drilled, and I soon found my way through the smoke, the shouting and the running to my position by William on the Castle Hill.

  ‘What is it? Do they know yet?’ I scanned the horizon to the south-east but William pointed northwards, and I saw then the warning beacons, lighting the night all the way down the coast from Slains and Newburgh and Blackdog, and no doubt places further to the north that I could not see. And powering down that coast, torches burning and pennants flying, was a long barge, driven by two dozen oarsmen.

  ‘I cannot make the flags out – but they’re not Spaniards, nor even Dutchmen,’ said William, screwing up his eyes the better to see the advancing vessel.

  ‘No, they are not,’ I said dully, adrenalin giving way to a hollow dread, for, better-sighted than William, I could make out the flags, and with them the emblem flying at the head of the craft – I had seen it on the seal of a letter shown to me by Principal Dun only two days earlier. Sir Donald MacKay of Strathnaver, Lord Reay.

  ‘We are about to be visited by a kinsman of Lady Rothiemay,’ I said.

  I left it to William to explain to the provost; the Wappinschaw would by no means be stood down. I ran to the college and demanded entrance from the startled porter.

  Exempted from the Wappinschaw, the principal was patrolling the college corridors with the regents, making sure that all was well among the excitable scholars.

  ‘Where is Hugh Gunn?’ I asked breathlessly, as I at last found Dr Dun in the back-house where the poorer students’ dormitories were.

  ‘In the regents’ quarters, next to Peter Williamson’s chamber. Your own old room, I think. Why?’

  ‘Seoras’s father has arrived.’

  *

  It was in little over an hour that we finally heard the sounds of music, a march of pipe and relentless drum, coming up the Broadgate from the direction of the Shiprow. Two of the college’s burliest servants were left guarding the room where Hugh Gunn lay under the care of Peter Williamson and a nurse from the town, and all the other students were sent to an early breakfast, the regent in charge of them being warned to have the door to the dining hall bolted.

  From a high window overlooking the roofs of the houses fronting the college, we had seen the snake of almost forty men, their coloured plaids illuminated by the torches that flanked them, follow the pipe and drum towards our gates. At their head was a tall, richly dressed man, who even at this distance bore the habit of command like a second skin.

  ‘Well,’ said the principal, already making his way to the top of the stone stairway that came out in to the courtyard, ‘we are to be honoured with a visit sooner than I had hoped. Let us welcome our guest.’

  What honour he would do to us when he found his son missing and his foster son insensible I did not wish to think. I followed after Dr Dun.

  I had never seen Seoras’s father before, but as he marched through our gates I would have known him anywhere. He had the same restless energy as his son, the same lightening look in his eye, the same handsome cut of features that even the wounds of war could not disguise. Unlike his son, though, every inch of him proclaimed him to be a leader of men. He was perhaps forty-five years old, and stood a head taller than almost every man around him. Highland chieftain he might be, but he wore a finer cut of clothes than even Lieutenant Ormiston. The sword that hung at his side was the finest-wrought work I had seen, and the scars on the hands from which he had removed his gauntlets told that it had earned its place beside him. Out in the street, few had returned to their beds and all attention was on the great soldier and his retinue of savages. Many wore nothing on their legs or feet; those that did had trews with leather strappings crossed around their calves. They were all swathed in the coloured plaid that served as cloak, gown and blanket to them, over shirts of saffron. I felt for a moment a wrenching in the pit of my stomach for those of their like I had known in Ireland, seven years ago now, when I had answered, for a time, the call of my mother’s family there. But this was the matter of a l
ost boy, not a people, and I prayed God it might end better.

  The principal’s bow was deep and careful, MacKay’s response slow and gracious, and the college held its breath. Lord Reay’s voice held the easy lilt of one for whom Scots was not the mother tongue. He surveyed the gathering of academics ranged behind Dr Dun. ‘I see you have had intelligence of our arrival.’

  Patrick Dun was measured. ‘The beacon watch along the coast can be a little over-cautious, perhaps. There have been skirmishes to the north between Spaniards and the Dutch. We had not expected your Lordship for two days yet, or there would have been a more appropriate welcome for you, and’ – he looked warily past Strathnaver to the ranks of soldiers behind him – ‘your men.’

  ‘Ach, never heed my men. Not to be met by gunfire and cannon shot is courtesy enough for them, and they will find their welcome hot enough in a few weeks when they advance on German towns.’ His eyes were still scanning the gathering of teachers and college servants and he was losing interest in the conventional civilities. ‘But I do not see my son here to greet me, nor yet his foster brother. Seoras was ever a sluggard to rise from his bed, but I’m surprised not to find Hugh here.’

  There was a silence for a moment, and then Dr Dun cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps, if your Lordship would come inside …’

  Something in the principal’s tone did not please MacKay, and I wondered whether, on his march up from the quayside, some rumour about the disappearance of his son had already reached him. He glanced at his men gathered behind him. ‘I take it the students are at their breakfast, or in private study just now. Perhaps you would be good enough to have my sons sent to me.’

  Patrick Dun spoke again. ‘Will you come in to the college, your Lordship? Your men will be given food and drink in the Great Hall, and we could talk at our ease in the principal’s rooms. There is something you need to know.’