The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by S.G. MacLean Page B

acquaintances, and in the first few months after my rejection by the Presbytery at Fordyce, I had eschewed the company of even my few good friends – the doctor, Charles Thom and Gilbert Grant in Banff, and the two or three companions of my student days who still lived in Aberdeen. They, a wonder to me now, had persevered with me throughout my darkest days of self-loathing.
    My astonishment at understanding, at last, that I really was not fit to be a minister had, for a while, almost robbed me of my senses. Days of wandering wildly along the cliffs andshoreline, eastwards then westwards with little consciousness of where I was had ended, not with my death on the rocks as might well have been expected, but with an exhausted collapse on the shore below Findlater. I had been found there by a local wise woman who many accounted a witch, but I did not believe she was. She dragged me – God alone knows how – the length of the beach to the cave in which she dwelt, summer and winter, and nursed me there. When my delirium was finally broken, she sent word to Jaffray of where I was to be found. The fact that I still lived was a matter of joy to him as well as to Gilbert Grant and, even then, to Mistress Youngson. It was not a matter of joy to myself. I drank, I wallowed in self-pity, I drank more, I railed in bitterness at my fate, in anger at all who came near me; I went with women and hardly knew their names. Three times I had been brought before the session, three times forced to sit in front of the whole kirk and proclaim a repentance I did not feel.
    For nearly six months it had lasted, until all who were left were James Jaffray, Gilbert Grant, and Charles Thom. No one else of any decency or standing would look me in the eye, and from my scholars I had little respect and deserved less. Mistress Youngson, the childless Mistress Youngson, who had taken me to her home and loved me as if I were her husband’s son, could scarce bear to look at me. Six months, until at last I stood on the precipice between existence and death. I was not dead, and though I did not live, I might exist. At first I relied almost entirely on Jaffray: he had persevered belligerently and relentlessly with me regardless of my assertions that I did not need him; Charles Thom in his own passive and morose way had done the same. GilbertGrant had simply waited, waited patiently for me to rediscover at least some civility, as he had known I would. My shame at my carriage towards him, when I eventually dragged myself out of the trough of aggressive despondence, was profound. His forgiveness was quiet and complete. But his wife could never forgive me; she could never forgive the hurt I had caused her husband – and even herself – and as she once told me, she had now seen the dark side of my soul. And here now, in this chamber, in the provost’s defence of me, a door had opened slightly offering a passage back towards the world of men. And there might be respect in that world, and it mattered all the more because the hand that had pushed open the door was not that of a friend.
    I nodded my head a little towards the provost in a gesture of thanks. ‘I will be of what assistance I can in this business. I can make no claim for great knowledge of the art of mapping, but what I was given to understand from Sir Archie you will know entirely. As to my discretion, Mr Guild need not fear: what is spoken of here will not be noised abroad by me.’ In enforced retreat, the minister favoured me with a look of practised contempt.
    The baillie, paying him no heed, strode towards the chest. ‘Then let us bend our necks to the task, for enough time has been wasted already.’ For the next three hours, until the light began to fade and other duties called the attention of the notary, baillie, provost and minister, we pored over the maps. As our examination progressed, the question arose as to what military uses they might be put to. One or two suggestions were somewhat