Crucible of Secrets

Book 4: Alexander Seaton

by S.G. MacLean

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Knowledge is power, and when it gets in the wrong hands it can be lethal. Alchemy and murder combine in a gripping race against time from the CWA award-winning author of The Seeker. 'One of the best writers of historical crime' The Times Aberdeen, 1631. University librarian Robert Sim takes receipt of a gift of books recently arrived from overseas, mysterious works on alchemy and hermetics - the pursuit of ancient knowledge. By nightfall he has been brutally murdered. His colleague and good friend Alexander Seaton is left with the task of hunting for clues as to his killer's motive, as well as locating the missing books. What did Sim discover in the package, and what makes these books so dangerous?

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Specks of dust danced in the beam of sunlight that fell across the smooth oak of the table in front of me. The smell of the wood took me back many summers, to the library of our rival college a mile away, and afternoons of accidental slumber of my own. At the other side of the room, I could see that only by dint of great effort could one of my scholars resist the urge to close his eyes and rest his head on the book whose swimming words had been eluding his grasp this last half-hour. In a few minutes more I would advise him to give up the fight and join his fellows in their games on the Links: few of them had been tempted to abandon the fresh air and sunshine for an afternoon in the musty silence of the college library. Certainly, the student who had scurried down the stairs as I had ascended them had been in some haste to escape its walls, not even taking the time to look at me as he’d thrown behind him some mumbled response to my greeting.

Robert Sim, the college librarian, was, as ever, bent over his work. He would have done well in the scriptorium of one of the old monasteries: a life of silence and scholarly labour would have suited him better than the engagement with society demanded in these changed days, but he had been born a century too late, and the library afforded him as safe a retreat as was to be had in our town. By his feet were two wooden chests, the keys of which he had attached to a loop in his belt. Since I had come in an hour ago, he had been carefully lifting items from the larger of the two and checking them against a list on his desk. Once or twice I had felt his eyes upon me, but the subsequent glances he directed towards my scholar made it evident that whatever he wished to discuss with me was for no one’s ears but mine. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I went over to the boy, whose head shot up in a sudden start of consciousness.

‘Adam …’

‘Mr Seaton! I was just resting a moment …’

I looked at the work he was labouring over. ‘Ah, The Politics. I see you have not yet progressed to the eighth book. Perhaps you recall from your dictats of my lecture on the subject …?’

The colour rose in his cheeks and he shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I have not, I mean, I do not have …’

I decided to stop tormenting the boy. ‘No doubt you will find the place when you return to your room later. While he censures the excessive physical training of such as the Spartans, Aristotle does allow that play is a necessary form of rest from the toils of the intellectual life. Perhaps you would profit more from some exercise of the body – a game of football, or some golf, down on the Links – with your companions, than by continued slumbers over his words in here this afternoon.’

The colour blanched from his face a moment, to be replaced by a broad smile when he understood he was not being chastised. He was on his feet, his gown thrown over his arm all in one movement.

‘Thank you, Mr Seaton,’ he said, as he bolted for the door.

‘Adam,’ I called after him.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘The book,’ I said, nodding towards the table where the great philosopher had been abandoned.

‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Affording me a sheepish grin, he was back at the table in two bounds, closing the book and returning it to Robert Sim, who did his best to hide his amusement under a furrowed brow of disapproval.

‘You are kind to the boys, Alexander. They labour the more to please you because of it.’

‘There is little to be gained from treating them harshly. Resentment will not breed good citizens.’

‘You are at odds with Mr Jack on that point.’

‘And on more besides. Should there come a day that you find me in agreement with Matthew Jack, on any matter, I insist you haul me before the principal and urge him to throw me from the college gates.’

Robert grinned. ‘You may be assured that I would.’

I nodded towards his desk. ‘Tell me, what are you busy at today – new acquisitions? Do not tell me the council has loosened its purse strings at last?’

He shook his head. ‘A benefaction. Dr Gerald Duncan. He was an early graduate of our college and passed the last twenty years of his life in medical practice in the Low Countries – Friesland – at Groningen and, latterly, Franeker. He attained a considerable estate. His medical books he left to the University of Groningen, but the others he willed to us.’

‘Is there anything of interest?’ I said, beginning to scan the spines of the works on his desk.

‘It is mainly political history, and works relating to the natural world. But yes,’ he hesitated. ‘There is something, however I …’

He glanced anxiously around him, ascertaining that we were, in fact, alone. ‘I must talk to the principal first, but I would value your—’

At that moment we heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Sim looked towards the door, startled, and as William Cargill appeared in the doorway there was a drawing tight of the librarian’s lips and the merest shake of his head.

‘Tomorrow then,’ I said, ‘after the sermon.’

He nodded, composing his features in a greeting for my friend. ‘William, it is not often we see you in here nowadays.’

‘Not as often as I would like,’ said William, striding in to the room with a degree of familiarity. ‘My dull lawyer’s work leaves me little time for the perusal of literature.’

‘It keeps the wolf from your door all the same.’

William grinned modestly. His calling had brought him far greater wealth than mine or Robert Sim’s ever would us. ‘I envy you these quiet hours, though. What have you been whiling away your time with today, Alexander?’

I indicated the work I had left open at my desk and he crossed the floor to look at it. ‘Kepler. Mathematics was never my strong point. And besides, he is a little too fanciful for me.’

‘You do not believe that God created a universe replete with secrets to be discovered, that the human mind might never be idle?’

‘Hmmph. I think there are enough secrets in our corrupt world, here, below the heavenly sphere, to keep a man busy enough. What say you, Robert?’

The librarian weighed his words before replying slowly, ‘I think you might be right.’

I looked at Sim for further explanation but he had turned away and begun to busy himself once more with the cataloguing of the books.

William closed the Kepler and brought the volume back to the librarian’s table.

‘I am not finished,’ I protested.

‘Oh, indeed you are. You must descend from your higher plane a while. Our wives and children have gone on ahead of me, and they will give short shrift to your philosophy. Baskets of food have been packed, rugs have been brought and commissions issued. I am not to emerge back out on to the street unless I have you with me.’

I sighed, knowing there was little point in further protest.

‘Will you not come with us, Robert? You are under no obligation to open the library on a Saturday at all, you know.’

‘I know, but I must finish this cataloguing, and then there are some accounts I must work on before I return to my lodgings tonight. Better to burn the college’s candles than my own.’ Although he affected lightness, I could see he was ill at ease, and I had no wish to prolong his discomfort by pressing him.

‘We will not keep you from it any longer then, Robert. But we will talk tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. After the sermon.’

Sarah’s expression as William and I stumbled through the door of my house on Flourmill Lane a little before ten that night was a study in disbelief.

‘What in the name of God … ?’

William held up a hand to stay her. ‘Alexander will tell you. I’d better get down to Elizabeth before she hears all about it from someone else.’ He nodded towards my left eye. ‘I’ll send up a steak for the bruise.’

He was gone, and my wife had still been unable to finish her sentence. I lurched towards the chair she hastily pulled out from the table for me, and sat down, grateful at last to be home. Sarah knelt before me and lifted my face the better to examine it. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ she said at last, and then, ‘Oh, no. Do not tell me you got into a fight with Andrew Carmichael?’

I shook my head and instantly regretted it, as a pain shot from my eye to the back of my skull. ‘No, I did not fight with Andrew Carmichael.’ Much though in my worse moments I might want to, but I could not tell her that. ‘We sat a long time, William, Andrew Carmichael, John Innes and I, after you and Elizabeth left with the children. Somehow the wine William had packed took on something of the quality of that of the wedding of Cana and it seemed foolish to put it away before it was finished.’

She smiled a little indulgently. ‘I guessed as much. And Matthew Jack?’

She had mentioned a colleague of mine, a fellow regent at the Marischal College, universally feared and universally despised, whose arrival amongst us on the dunes at the Links earlier in the day had brought an end to the charm of our picnic. It had been my fault: thinking to spare the scholars down on the strand, whom he was charged with overseeing, the burden of his company for half an hour, I had invited him to join us a while. His reply had been as graceless as I should have expected.

‘I would not intrude on your time with your family.’ There were still some in the burgh who took pains to remember that my wife had been carrying another man’s child when first I had met her, and Matthew Jack was one of them. He had managed to invest the word family with such contempt that I had been sorely tempted to haul him down to the water’s edge and hold his head under the incoming waves. I had settled instead for walking away, but it was too late. He had called after me. ‘But as you already have company – I see John Innes there, and Andrew Carmichael, is it not? – I will allow myself a half-hour’s respite to join them.’

The faces that had brightened in greeting when I appeared on the crest of the dune had fallen notably when they saw who I had brought with me, and within less than an hour Sarah and Elizabeth had gathered up the children – William’s five-year-old son James, our Zander, the same age, and Deirdre, nineteen months, the blessing of my life – and taken them home. I would have left then too, had not Sarah stopped me.

‘Stay. Spend a while longer here. You are too long indoors, out of the fresh air and sunlight, and you see too little of your friends. Elizabeth will not mind William staying, I am sure.’

‘He would only be under my feet,’ her friend had said, not looking up from her work of trying to dry her squirming son. ‘See he does not darken my door until sunset.’

And so they had left us with the wine and what was left of the bread and cheese, by the still-smouldering fire. Andrew Carmichael and John Innes were regents at our rival university of the King’s College in the Old Town, and talk between us soon turned to the poverty of our salaries and the scanty resources with which our scholars were forced to make do. ‘At least we have acquired some new books for our library,’ I said, and told them of the benefaction Robert Sim had been cataloguing that afternoon, and what I knew of its provenance and contents. William remembered having met Dr Duncan once, many years before, when the physician had made a trip home to the town of his birth. John recalled having heard that he had been a good friend in his younger days abroad of our principal, Dr Dun. Matthew Jack, never to be outdone, claimed to have met him once, at a Scots service in the kirk in Rotterdam. No one had disputed this, for it was well-known that there was scarcely a college or a kirk in reformed Europe in which he had not set foot, however briefly. Both Andrew Carmichael and I were happy enough to confess that we had never heard of him before in our lives.

John, ever the diligent scholar, had pressed me for greater detail of what I could remember of the benefaction, and our discussion moved on to what might be the intellectual merits of its contents. Matthew Jack, as was his habit, had some sniping riposte to anything good anyone had to say about the authors under discussion, or of the late physician’s choice of reading materials. It had been a great relief to the rest of us when he caught sight of two of the Marischal scholars breaking away from their classmates to try their luck with a group of young girls from the burgh. Within minutes Jack was back down on the sand and, having chased the girls away with threats of what he should tell their parents of their behaviour, was marching their two suitors back towards the town and the cold confines of the college walls.

I should then, perhaps, have offered to take Matthew Jack’s place on the beach until his return, but I had a kind of fascination with Andrew Carmichael that would not allow me to leave the conversation of my friends while he was still part of it. Whether John Innes knew of this, I could not tell. William knew; he watched my every expression, measured my every word, because of it. And Andrew Carmichael himself knew, of that I was certain. I had not realised it until earlier that afternoon.

After we had left the library and the respectable confines of the town to join our wives and children in their picnic amongst the dunes of the King’s Links, William had challenged me to a race. Our rivalry in this as in every sport was long-standing, and our progress from town gates to beach had been one of many misplaced elbows and attempted trips, shovings into bushes and much breathless laughter. By the time we had reached the brow of the dune where we were to meet our families, I was three strides in the lead and ready to crow at my triumph, but the sight I saw as I breasted that hill stopped me in my tracks, so that William all but careered in to the back of me. Elizabeth had taken my daughter and the boys to gather wild flowers amongst the rocks, and there, by the fire at which she had begun to grill some fish, sitting beside my wife, was Andrew Carmichael. The sight of him so close to Sarah hit me like a punch in the stomach.

He stood up, in some confusion, evidently as discomfited as I was.

‘Alexander, I … William. Hello. Good day. You have come to enjoy this fine weather. I will not disturb you in your meal, I—’

‘You will stay and share it with us,’ said William, striding past me and avoiding my eye. ‘And is that John Innes there with your students? Call him up to do likewise.’ He then poured out and handed to me a beaker of wine from a flask he had had his steward pack. ‘And take care the look on your face does not sour it,’ he muttered to me, under his breath.

Yes, Andrew Carmichael knew. A man of learning, a decent man, a good man, they all said. The man, half the town knew, but none said to my face, who when I had been in Ireland, three years ago, had fallen in love with Sarah, my Sarah, and who was, as I could tell every time I forced myself to look at him, still in love with my wife.

My first reaction on seeing him there had been what it always was in that first raw moment – I had wanted to hit him. But I spoke the truth to Sarah when I told her that, no, it had not been in a fight with Andrew Carmichael that I had come upon my bloodied nose and swollen eye. For after Matthew Jack had left us, and we four remaining had been able to speak freely, I had realised there was indeed much more than our mutual love for one woman that Andrew Carmichael and I might have in common. And with William and John we had talked for hours as the sea below us advanced and then began to retreat again from the shore, turning from blue to green to gold, under a sky whose colours flamed and blazed in mockery of our Presbyterian world.

And so our evening might have ended, had it not been for the commotion that reached us from the beach just as the embers of our fire were grown cold and the wine finished. The students of the King’s College and the Marischal College, forgotten all by their masters, had taken up a game of football, and as was inevitable, had come to blows. As was the tradition between them, old enmities between colleges, family feuds of many generations’ standing, found expression on the sands. The student who had been left in charge of the Marischal scholars came racing up the dune. ‘Mr Seaton, come quick! Alexander Irvine and William Forbes are in the middle of it. If someone does not stop them, there will be murder down there.’

And well might there have been, had we not between the four of us managed to separate twenty young men revelling in the fights and grievances of their fathers and grandfathers, but not before I had taken an elbow in the eye and an upper cut to the chin from a boy who did not see at whom he had lashed out until the deed was done. Matthew Jack had arrived back from his locking-in and haranguing of the two young gallants from earlier when the fight was at its height and our efforts looking in danger of being overwhelmed. Little affection though I had for him, I could not help but admire the bellow that issued from his throat, and the instant effect it had on those who were subject to his discipline. For a man so mean of frame, his very presence could inspire a great deal of terror. Poor John Innes, on the other hand, could inspire none, and had it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael, their charges from the King’s College might have rampaged long into the night. Eventually the two groups were separated with an effusion of blood and swollen eyes, but fewer broken bones than might otherwise have been the case.

As the scholars of King’s were led away back towards the Old Town, Matthew Jack had refused my help with our own, and driven them down towards the new burgh, declaring as he went, ‘These wretches will be lucky to set foot outside the college walls again between now and Christmas.’

I refrained from pointing out that the term would be over in little more than two weeks. I also knew that I, with the rest of the college, would be forced to spend an hour of my time on Monday morning in the college courtyard, watching Matthew Jack administer to these boys the beating of their lives.

Sarah listened to all this as she tended my eye and chin. The promised steak had been brought by a servant from William’s house and I had been instructed to apply it to draw out the bruising. ‘William was a little dishevelled looking, but he did not look to have been injured,’ she said.

‘No. His time in the law courts has kept him a more wary antagonist than I am.’

‘And the other two?’ she asked lightly.

I searched her face for some change in expression, but saw none. ‘Andrew took some blows to the shins, and John was winded, but that was all.’

She smiled. ‘I cannot imagine poor John in a fight.’

My saintly friend had been of little use in the fracas. Had it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael his scholars would have trampled him underfoot. I was not disposed to tell this much to my wife.

‘And Mr Jack has the boys back in the college?’

‘Aye, pity help them, for they will need it.’

‘Will they be all right? Tonight? None of them was injured?’

‘Some,’ I said, ‘although not greatly I think. I doubt whether Jack will rouse himself to check.’ I got carefully out of my chair. ‘I should go and see to it, and make sure that Dr Dun has my report of what happened down there today. Matthew Jack’s idea of the truth isn’t as other men’s.’

Sarah put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not yet, Alexander. You are in no fit state to go anywhere. You need to sit at rest a while and take a little food, to restore some of your strength. Besides,’ she added with a frown, ‘you cannot go to Dr Dun with ripped hose and a head full of sand, to say nothing of the blood on your shirt.’

‘I must see to the boys, Sarah.’

‘They are near enough grown men, and will come to no harm for your taking half-an-hour’s rest. You staggered in that door; do not tell me it was just the effects of William’s wine that made you do so, although I doubt Dr Dun would think so well of that either. And you do not need Matthew Jack noising it about the town that you are a drunkard.’

And so, given no option, I did as she bid me. I let her finish bathing me and and took some broth and dozed an hour in my chair. I went nowhere near the college, nor indeed out of my door for an hour or more after I had first intended to. I wish to God that I had done.

When I did venture out, it was not quite dark yet in the streets of the burgh, the late June light refusing until the last necessary moment to yield to the Sabbath. Nevertheless, lamps and candles were being lit inside homes where the evening light could not reach, up closes and beyond courtyards, through thick stone walls and shuttered windows.

There were one or two other solitary figures still out – I could not tell in the grimy grey who they were, and we none of us glanced more than a moment in each other’s direction – whatever business a man had out in the town at this hour of the night was his and not that of some passing stranger. It was a time when men took refuge in the shadows. Shadows, the word William had used when, on our way home from the fracas on the Links, he had finally broached the subject I had known would come.

‘You have no cause, Alexander, to suspect or mistrust him. He never set out to wrong you. Indeed, he did not wrong you, and you know that.’

‘I know it,’ I said, ‘but do not expect me to be at ease in his company: I do not like to see him close to her. Can you not understand? She is my wife!’

‘Now, yes, she is your wife. But she was not then, three years ago, when you disappeared into the night, taking ship for Ireland and a family you had scarcely spoken of. She was not your wife, nor your anything, and you had had two years by then – two years, when you might have secured her and did not.’

‘You know why – I did not think, I—’

‘You. Always you. But what of Sarah? Mother to a bastard child, servant in another man’s house, holding her head high in the face of all she knew was thought and said about her, and about Zander. You left her without having spoken a word to her. You left a scribbled note and went, and we thought you dead. Andrew Carmichael did not swoop down on her like some bird of prey, or fox in the night. He came to my house seeking my counsel on a matter regarding the law. He came a second time, and then a third, at my invitation, and it came as no great surprise when Elizabeth pointed out to me that he was falling in love with Sarah. Sarah did not return his feeling – she was in such a shock at your sudden leaving, such a certainty that you were dead or had gone to another, that she could not, whoever might have spoken to her. But he did speak, and he spoke kindly, and he listened to her and was a friend to her when you had abandoned her. And yes it was because he loved her and it was not done with disinterest, but who amongst us has ever loved with disinterest?’ William’s anger was risen now, and I knew it because he kept his voice so low. ‘And I’ll tell you this, Alexander. Had the day come when she had lifted her eyes to him, reached out a hand to him, been ready to go with him, I am not the one who would have stopped her, nor Elizabeth either.’

This stopped me in my tracks, for he, my best friend, had never told me this before. ‘But she never did, and he did not press the matter. He let her understand that when she was ready, he would be there, waiting. And that is all he did, and all she did, which was nothing. And from the day you returned, he stepped back into his shadows, and I do not think he ever spoke to her of it again.’

Yes, Andrew Carmichael was in the shadows, but those shadows were hanging over my life and try as I might I could not shake them off.

I sought to drive these thoughts from my mind as I crossed from the Guest Row over the Broadgate to the college. The buildings that rose above me, behind the houses and booths that fronted the street, were almost entirely in darkness; one or two lights flickered behind narrow windows on the turnpike stairs, but none from the students’ chambers. Even the gatehouse was in darkness and the porter away from his post. This was unusual, and increased my concern for the boys who had been left in Matthew Jack’s care. I made my way down a side alley that would bring me out by the wall of the college garden. I knew that the gate leading from the garden to the library courtyard was not beyond the ingenuity of a man of my height and years to scale.

I was surprised to find the gate to the library close ajar and creaking lightly on its hinges. I could not think who amongst the students could have been so careless on this of all nights, when Matthew Jack, and evidently the porter also, would be on the prowl along the corridors and stairways. A light from above caught my eye, a tiny flicker through a gap in the library shutters; I remembered having noticed it as I’d passed earlier with William. I had been all for going up to tell Robert to go home for the night, but William had persuaded me that I was in greater need of getting home myself, and so we had left him. I was surprised, all the same, to see that he was still there – he must have fallen asleep. It would not have been the first time, and yet I knew he had to read in the kirk early the next morning, and that it would not do for him to appear before the congregation unwashed and in his workday clothes. I decided to go and rouse him before I went to look for Dr Dun or to check what Matthew Jack had done to the boys.

The night-time scents of the garden still hung in the air, the honeysuckle and the climbing roses that tumbled over the walls and trellises contending with one another for mastery of the falling dusk, but as I rounded the corner in to the library courtyard another smell, sickly, warm and cloying, ros. . .