The Fanatic Page 12

  And it came to him then as he walked away, outpacing others from the crowd, with the very certainty he had always lacked: not his tongue but his arm would speak for Christ. O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. God had led him by his own mind’s wanderings to the answer. God had brought him to the scaffold, to watch McKail’s beautiful death. What for if not to show him the true path? What better purpose could there be than to be the instrument of God’s vengeance? And who better to avenge than sweet Hew McKail?

  He had been flitting between the houses of different sympathisers in the town, staying just for a night or two before moving on again. He had almost nothing in the world: a small amount of money, a change of clothes, his Bible and Joshua Redivivus, the title under which Samuel Rutherford’s letters had been published two years earlier. He was aware that those who were giving him shelter were increasingly nervous of his presence. An act of council had been issued by the government, listing disaffected persons and concluding:

  We command and charge our lieges and subjects, that none presume to reset, supply or intercommune with any of the foresaid our rebels, nor furnish them with meat, drink, house, harbour, or victuals; nor any other thing useful or comfortable to them; nor have any intelligence with them by word, writing, message, or otherwise, under the pain of being repute and esteemed art and part with them in the crime foresaid, and to be pursued therefore with all rigour.

  Most of the men named as rebels by the government had left Edinburgh days or even weeks before. It was time for him to follow. He went back to his tiny room in the Potterrow to gather his possessions.

  He sat on the narrow bed and took out Rutherford’s letters. They had been printed at Rotterdam, a sanctuary for the righteous, and Mitchel at once resolved that that was where he would go. He let the book fall open and read from the first sentence he focused on: Woe is me for the day of Scotland! Women of this land shall call the childless and miscarrying wombs blessed. The anger of the Lord is gone forth, and shall not return, till he perform the purpose of his heart against Scotland. Yet he shall make Scotland a new and sharp instrument having teeth to thresh the mountains, and fan the hills as chaff.

  A new and sharp instrument! Sharp. Mitchel believed in signs, and this was another. First Rotterdam, now Sharp.

  He lifted the Bible. He did not have quite the confidence to let it fall open anywhere, and stopped to think what to do. If there was to be a further sign, how would God lead him to it? By a path he already knew, surely. He chose the Old Testament, and the Book of Psalms. He looked on the last page of Psalms. He looked at the second last Psalm. Yes, God had guided his memory there: Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon their beds. And there he was – upon his bed! Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword in their hand; to execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; to execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all his saints.

  Tammas was shaking him. ‘Maister Mitchel? Are ye richt, sir?’

  He came back to where he was: in the Bass, with Tammas’s repulsive divoted face inches away from his own. The cell was full of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. I was in a dwam. I’m fine.’ But his leg was pounding again.

  Tammas was called away by another soldier. A boat was coming over from North Berwick, with several folk in it, and he was required to assist with the landing. He pulled to, but did not lock, the door behind him.

  Left alone, Mitchel slipped back into the past again.

  That year-end of 1666, he had left Edinburgh with a chastened but uplifted heart. The picture always before his eyes was that of Matthew McKail dropping to the cold earth as he slid from the corpse of his cousin Hew, once the last breath had left him. Matthew had gone to the hangman John Dunmore’s house the night before, and paid him six dollars and a few drinks to let him take the corpse. He had lain motionless for a moment, as if he also were dead, then got to his feet and tilted his glistening face to heaven. His fists were clenched and raised and it was as if he had taken some of Hew’s strength and been reborn with it. Mitchel imagined a caption under that picture, or a banner of words coming from Matthew’s mouth like those he had seen printed in pamphlets: The king of Babylon hath devoured me, he hath crushed me, he hath made me an empty vessel, he hath swallowed me up like a dragon; BUT THE VIOLENCE DONE TO ME AND TO MY FLESH BE UPON BABYLON, SHALL THE INHABITANT OF ZION SAY.

  Mitchel left the house in the Potterrow when the long night closed itself around the town, and walked in a little way, down Candlemaker Row to the Cowgate. From here, having checked that he was not being followed, he slipped into the warren of closes that lay in the elbow of the West Bow, passed into a tiny court, and mounted a set of steps to the house of Major Thomas Weir. He chapped gently but persistently on the door. The Major had helped him in the past. He must beg his assistance one further time.

  The door was let open a crack.

  ‘Is he in?’

  Jean Weir, the Major’s sister, held a lamp up to him, and he lifted his hat from his face so that she could see who he was. She stepped back.

  ‘Is it you, James Mitchel? Aye, come in. He is here. We are baith here, lamentin that puir broken laddie.’

  He followed her in. The house was warm against the bitter night. A fire blazed in the main chamber, and the Major had drawn a chair in close, and was contemplating the flames. His big nose and pale brow shone in the firelight but his eyes were dark.

  Even seated and unprepared for a visitor, Thomas Weir was an impressive presence. He was a man of straight lines, from his long face, protruding nose, and the strands of fine grey hair that hung from his head, to the bony angularity of his body. His thin white fingers trailed over the ends of the chair’s arms like roots. His legs, bent at the knees but sticking out towards the fire, were like pikestaffs snapped in the middle. And yet he was not ungainly. Mitchel had only ever once seen him stumble, and knew that if Weir stood up it would be, in spite of his advancing age, with a languid ease that much younger men did not possess. When he turned his head to see who had come in, the dark eyes flared briefly with a fierce and impressive energy.

  Mitchel had been to many of the Weirs’ prayer-meetings in the last ten years since their encounter on the High Street. Whatever doubts he had had about his own grace, he could not for long resist the Major’s reputation. Folk of the godly party would travel in from miles around to hear him, and he was often invited to journey furth of Edinburgh to join in other religious meetings, especially in the west country, where he and his sister were from. His tall dark-clad figure leaning on the blackthorn staff, his sonorous tones rising to tremulous ecstasy, could drive his listeners, especially the women, into a sweaty fervour. McKail, Peden – and Weir: these were among the men that Mitchel had heard in the last decade, and all of them had the gift of prayer and praise. To his deep regret he had never even seen Rutherford, and he had heard Peden and McKail only a handful of times; Weir he had heard more often than any.

  The Major seemed to like Mitchel. He encouraged him to attend and learn from him. But, as with the others, the lesson had been a hard one: he had become envious of Weir’s ability to be both passionate and articulate, aware of his own failings in spite of his best efforts. It was only now, in the wake of McKail’s death, that he understood that such power of delivery was only vested in these men by God, who had reserved an equal, more devastating power for himself.

  Jean was a few years younger than her brother but time had treated her more harshly. She was in her late fifties, but her face was sorely lined and she had a hirpling kind of walk and an almost permanently skeerie expression as though she was expecting a hit at any moment. She was nervous of the world and who could blame her? She would have been destitute and alone had her brother not taken her in when he was widowed. Mitchel had not seen Jean for some time and thought she
had aged greatly. In his experience, she only emerged from the protective shadow of her brother at the prayer-meetings, when she became animated and her face was lit with a sense of wonder that was childlike. Mitchel thought of her as one who perfectly represented the idea of the soul inhabiting the impure and frail clay of humanity.

  ‘Maister Mitchel,’ said Weir. ‘I have been expecting ye, since I heard your name proclaimed at the Cross.’ His voice was flat. He spoke, as he usually did in Mitchel’s memory, and as some others of the most rigid persuasion also did, with a layer of English smoored over his Scots. That too was a hard discipline – like reading out the Bible into a riving wind – that Mitchel for one could never master. It made most Scotsmen sound like shadows of themselves, but Weir somehow carried it off.

  His right hand rose to point at the chair opposite. Mitchel went to it and sat down. From its warmth he realised that he had taken Jean’s seat. He was about to stand again but Weir pointed at him, as if warning a dog to stay. Jean removed herself to a stool across the room, out of the immediate range of the fire’s heat. She smiled weakly at Mitchel, then bowed her head and picked up some unfinished needlework. Where she sat, he thought, she would hardly be able to see the needle, let alone the stitches.

  ‘I am staring into Hell,’ said Weir. His gaze was back on the flames. ‘I am staring into Hell and thinking on them that have sinned against God this day, in the torture and slaying of his servant. I hear them crackling and a-spitting there.’

  There was an exaggerated quake in his voice. He would have made a good dempster, reading to the condemned the sentence of the courts upon them. Thinking that thought, Mitchel said:

  ‘Them that has judged, they shall be visited with judgment.’

  ‘Aye, but how long? Why does God tarry so late in his vineyard?’

  ‘I am the man that will be his battle-axe,’ Mitchel said. It came from him spontaneously. As he heard himself utter the words he felt uneasy. Weir might turn and criticise him for his presumption. He went on quickly, ‘I am the wind that will eat up the false pastors. This has been given to me today. But the time is not yet. I must leave Scotland, but you will hear the roar of his anger when I return.’

  He was not certain of the phrases he used. Jeremiah, he thought, but some of them might have been his own. It didn’t matter: to be obscure was often a virtue, since God would make all clear in time. Mitchel felt God speaking through him. And Major Weir did not sneer or question. He looked at him with his bright eyes and nodded.

  ‘Aye, I believe you. I will hear that fierce wind, James Mitchel. But,’ he went on, ‘act not from the violence of your heart’s grief. Vengeance is not thine, but the Lord’s.’

  ‘I ken that,’ said Mitchel. ‘But we are pit here for God’s purpose. Even in the workin o his miracles, does he not uise us? For in dividin the Red Sea tae deliver Israel oot o Egypt, he commanded Moses tae stretch forth his hand. And Christ, when he opened the blin man’s een, made uise o clay and spittle. Ma time isna yet, but it will come.’

  Suddenly he had never felt so strong, so sure of himself. Verses from the Bible flooded his mind, and it was with difficulty that he stopped himself from spouting a string of justifications. How he could have impressed a prayer-meeting at that moment!

  ‘I must beg siller frae ye, sir,’ he said. ‘I must awa tae the Low Countries for a spell. It is in the cause of the Lord, but if ye will lend me enough for ma passage I will repay ye baith in siller and in deeds.’

  Weir’s face set like a stone. Mitchel knew that he was not a wealthy man, by the standards of some. On the other hand, he had no one to support but Jean. The Toun still paid him sporadically for work associated with the Guard and the collection of sundry duties: although his religious principles were obnoxious to the Ramsay regime, he was an experienced official. He was Mitchel’s best hope. They both understood this.

  The older man leant towards his sister. ‘Jean,’ he said sharply. ‘Will ye gang oot for a minute?’

  She instantly stood up and made as if to move ben, but he barked at her again. ‘Na, na – oot, I said. Ootby, if ye please. Maister Mitchel and I hae a private matter to settle.’

  ‘It’s gey cauld oot,’ Mitchel protested. ‘There’s nae need, surely.’ But Weir cut him with a look, and waited till Jean had gathered a shawl about her and stepped, without a word or a look of reproach, into the night. Weir stood up in a single movement and secured the door after her.

  ‘Ye must not think me harsh, James,’ he said. ‘My sister isna herself these days, I’m vexed to say.’

  ‘She’s dwaibly lookin,’ Mitchel agreed.

  ‘If it was but her body,’ said Weir. ‘But her heid’s no richt. I fear for her if I am taken by God afore her.’ He put the tips of his long fingers over his mouth for a moment. ‘She is going mad, my friend, that is the truth. I sent her out because I must save her from herself. If I dinna keep secrets from her she’ll ruin us. She would be out giving siller to every shoeless bairn in the street.’

  ‘I am sorry for yer trouble,’ said Mitchel.

  ‘Ye’re an honest man, James, and I trust ye not to cheat me. I’m not wanting your signature – a paper with your name on it would be a dangerous kind of surety just now, I’m thinking.’

  Weir moved around the room, as if trying to make a choice of some kind. Finally he stopped at a large chest that stood in one corner of the room. He bent and shifted it a foot or two out from the wall. Mitchel saw him reach down to the floor. There was the scrabbling sound of a board being moved and replaced, and then he pushed the chest back into its original position. He returned to the fireside carrying a small cloth poke, black with soot and grime.

  ‘This will see ye to Holland,’ he said, handing it over.

  Mitchel unfolded the cloth. A mixture of coins clinked as he did so. He counted it at a glance, rewrapped it and put it away.

  ‘I thank ye, sir,’ he said. ‘I hae been in yer debt afore, and I ken I hae been a disappointment tae ye, but ye niver disowned me. You forgave me ma weaknesses and ma sins. This will see me safe till I can win hame again. I’ll repay it wheniver I can.’

  ‘It is in the cause,’ said Weir. ‘As for the past, we have all sinned. God kens all things and measures us not by our sins but by our recognition of them. I’ll take the siller when ye return.’

  ‘I am in yer debt,’ Mitchel repeated.

  ‘When I am in need, I hope ye will do likewise by me.’ Weir took a pen and paper and wrote a few words. ‘This is for the guards at the Netherbow Port. They ken me of course, and this will let ye pass this night. There is a ship at Leith cried the Marcus that will sail with the next tide to Newcastle. Speir for it, and for a man cried John Forrester, from Ostend. This second note is for him. He is a discreet man that has carried our people before, and will get ye a passage for a fair price. From Newcastle the ship will gang down the English coast and syne across the sea to Flanders. Once there you are safe. Are ye for Amsterdam or Rotterdam?’

  ‘Rotterdam. I hae a cousin there that’s a merchant.’

  ‘There’s plenty honest Scots folk there,’ said Weir, ‘and the Dutch too are good Christians, which no doubt is why Charles Stewart sends his English warships against them.’

  He paused, seemed to hesitate. ‘I should say perhaps …’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘There is one John Nevay of Newmilns at Rotterdam. A powerful saint, as I mind. Do ye ken him?’

  ‘Na, I hae only heard o him.’

  ‘Be wary of him. Some think him too rigid, too hard in judging of others. He has not a good opinion of me, for example, although I never did him a wrong. I wonder whiles if his judgment is not unbalanced. Should ye meet him, I would advise against telling him I am your friend. It might set him against ye, and cause ye mischief.’

  ‘But why would he –’ Mitchel began, but Weir stood up and led him towards the door. ‘Wheesht, wheesht, James, we’ll no rake ower auld ashes when the fire’s weill oot. If ye meet him dinna tell him I s
aid this. And noo, James Mitchel, God gang with ye. I’ll hear in time if ye are safe.’

  He unsnecked the door and Mitchel was hit by the icy night. They looked around but the courtyard was silent and empty. ‘She’ll chap when she wants back in,’ the Major said. He might have been referring to a cat at a window. Mitchel felt a twinge of unease. He had always thought of Weir as his sister’s stern but protective guardian. There was an uncaring edge to his voice he had not picked up on before. Cruel, even. But there was nothing to be done about it. Folk were being hanged and dismembered for the sake of conscience. A woman going daft in her dotage was a small sadness by comparison.

  Weir closed the door and Mitchel hurried down the steps. He turned into the close to go back to the Cowgate, and from there to the Netherbow and Leith Wynd. From the shadows a shawled figure emerged.

  ‘Jean, Jean,’ said Mitchel. ‘Ye may gang hame noo. Hurry noo, afore ye freeze.’

  ‘I’ll no freeze,’ she said. ‘I’m weill happit. It’s no me that’ll freeze.’

  He was about to pass her when she reached up a hand and touched his cheek.

  ‘Are ye awricht, Jean?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re frozen,’ she said.

  ‘Na,’ he said, ‘I hae jist been in at yer fire.’

  ‘Ye’re aw frozen,’ she went on, as if she had not heard him. ‘Ilk yin o yese. Ye hae grat for a broken Covenant and the saut is frozen on aw yer faces. But wha’ll greet for me, eh? Wha’ll greet for me?’

  He was embarrassed. Weir was right, she was losing her mind. He clasped her hand between his for a minute. ‘Awa hame, Jean. I’ll pray for ye.’

  ‘Pray for me?’ She gave him a weird, silly smile. ‘Oh, I thank ye.’ If she had been capable of it, he would have said she was being ironic. He let go of her and headed for exile.

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Hugh Hardie had arranged to meet Carlin by St Giles on the first Sunday after he started working, half an hour before the tour was due to start. By then he would have done five nights and they could iron out any problems that had arisen, anything Carlin or he thought wasn’t right. ‘A kind of staff assessment,’ he’d joked.