The Fanatic Page 15

  During his time in exile, Mitchel went with his cousin John to Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Leyden and Ostend. He made some of these journeys on his own also, accompanying or receiving consignments of cloth, wine and other goods. It was petty, tedious work for which he had no enthusiasm. Months passed. At night he dreamt of Edinburgh, and a gate that dripped blood whenever he approached it.

  He knew it was time to be moving. He had saved money from his work – enough to repay Major Weir and have some left over. If he could work his way back to Scotland he might have more. But John was trading entirely within the continent. He got him to write him a letter of recommendation and went looking for a cargo that needed a native Scotsman to supervise its passage.

  One night he dreamt of the gate again. It was like the Netherbow but not it. He expected the blood but when he reached the gate it swung open. Jean Weir was beyond it. She beckoned him on, giving him a silly, doited smile as he passed her. Then he was in a darkened room. It was the Major’s house but it was not. It was a prison. A man was sitting under a tiny window, trying to read from a book. The room was full of smoke. Another man was standing by the door, puffing away at a pipe. The first man was coughing from the smoke. The smoker laughed. Mitchel saw his big-nosed profile. It was Weir. There was the sound of a gun going off.

  Edinburgh, April 1997/July 1668

  It was happening again. Carlin felt the fire and the sweat coming over him as he strode along the Cowgate ahead of the tour party. It was a mild night, the cloak was heavy and warm. Maybe it was the baldy wig, not allowing his scalp to breathe. He pulled it off and stuffed it into the plastic bag under the cloak. The black staff felt soft and hot in his hand. He had to get past the bridge, where he’d succumbed to the oppressive feeling last time. He pressed on.

  He felt like someone else. A voice was going away at him, inside, saying something. He thought it might be MacDonald, who seemed to know just what he, Carlin, was looking for, even though he himself didn’t. He wondered if it was Lauder and his Secret Book. It had to be Lauder’s voice, surely, he was hearing? There was one passage he could remember quite clearly.

  What is madnes? In France a man tauld us this story, that some gentlemen ware at Paris who on visiting the bedlam there the governour & physicians ware occupiet wt other matters, so they gave them into the hands of a fool to shew them the place. Thus this man pertinentlie gydes them throw the chambers saying heres one that is mad for love, here on other thats mad wt too much study, here a third mad wt drink, one a hypocondriack &c. The gentlemen being much impresst wt the luciditie and sense of their gyde, they come at last to one who, he informs them, thinks him selfe the Apostle Sanct John. But the gyde knew this was not so as he, being Sanct Petir, had nevir opened the door of heaven to him yet. The doctors after tauld them he was once a professor in the college of Sorbonne, but too much learning had reduced him to his present state.

  Aye, maybe that was it: Lauder’s voice. Another world coming through those old pages, invading him. But if that was what was happening, how could he tell which voice in his head was his? The mirror was one thing, but this … He’d be no better than the man who thought he was Peter. Carlin got paid for what he was doing and he wore a kind of fancy-dress but otherwise what was the difference between them? And if he was mad, how would he recognise his madness?

  He turned up Stevenlaw’s Close, which, at its foot, was more a narrow road or vennel than a close. The tour route went up the hill a few yards and turned left before the close narrowed, went along another vennel, and emerged into Tron Square at the back of the tenements of the High Street. Gerry would lead his party across the square towards Assembly Close, which opened onto the street, but then shepherd them ahead of him to the right, along a narrow passage that gave onto Covenant and Burnet’s Closes. It was out of one of these that Carlin was supposed to make his final appearance. When Hardie had shown him the set-up the first time he had queried the location.

  ‘There’s folk stey in these hooses. Dae they no get fed up wi aw the racket?’

  ‘Never had a complaint yet,’ Hardie had said. ‘I guess that’s just something you accept if you live in the heart of the Old Town. I mean, if you can’t handle us going by, how are you going to cope with the pubs emptying, or all the people hanging around during the Festival? If you don’t like it, don’t live here, that’s what I say.’

  Just short of Tron Square there was a patch of broken concrete, dotted with weeds, set deep in shadow in the angle of a brick wall. As Carlin went past it something moved out from the weeds, touched his foot. He jumped back with a cry.

  ‘Jesus fuckin Christ!’

  Something was curled up in there under a blanket. Somebody. It was a leg that had slid out.

  ‘Sorry,’ said a muffled voice. A moment later it added, ‘Fuckin hell, look at ye. I’m the one that should be gettin the fright.’ It sounded like just a young boy.

  ‘I’m the one that should be apologisin,’ said Carlin. ‘Did I wake ye?’

  ‘Ay, kinda. I was jist settlin in. Didna think there’d be anybody much comin by here at this time.’

  ‘Oh.’ Carlin hunkered down. ‘Well, I’m sorry tae disappoint ye, but ye’re right in the road o aboot twenty tourists that are headin up here in the next five minutes.’

  ‘Fuckin hell. This is a guid spot tae. Oot the wey. Nae hassle. Or so I thought.’ The body began wearily to gather itself, as if to move on.

  Carlin peered a little closer. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’m no bein nosy but … are you a lassie?’

  ‘Mebbe. Could be. How? Whit’s it tae you?’

  ‘Christ,’ said Carlin. A deep memory and fear welled in him. A lost girl surrounded by strangers. He said stupidly, ‘Some folk dinna think aboot lassies sleepin oot in the street.’

  ‘Oh, right, I get it. This is when ye feel that sorry for me, ye tell me I can kip at your place, then ye get me hame and there’s only the wan bed. Well, sorry, mister. Been there, done that, as they say.’

  ‘Na, na, that’s no whit I meant. It’s jist, you lyin oot here like this, and this crowd comin – that’s no on. That’s nae use at aw.’

  ‘It’s awright, I’m on ma wey. Nae bother, right?’

  ‘Na, you stay put. Jist stay exactly where ye are. Canna hae aw thae folk trampin through a lassie’s bedroom. Specially when ye’re tryin tae kip.’

  ‘Whit ye gaun dae aboot it?’

  ‘Go back tae sleep. They can go anither wey the night.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Whit’s yer name?’

  ‘Karen.’

  ‘It’s awright, Karen. I’ll take care o it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s ma job.’

  He didn’t have long. He ran on through the square, out onto the High Street, then doubled back down New Assembly Close. This came to what seemed a dead end, but it wasn’t quite, he knew that. You went down some steps, along the back of the houses, and you came to a wooden door in the wall, with a snib on the inside. You couldn’t open it from the other side without a Yale key. He put the snib off and went through. He was back at the top of Stevenlaw’s Close, the steep narrow section. He belted down to the corner of the vennel near the foot and waited for the tour party. He could hear them coming up from the Cowgate, the guide giving them stuff about Sir Walter Scott’s birthplace across the way.

  When the first of them, led by Gerry, turned into the vennel, Carlin did the wildest fucking haunt he could muster. In fact he’d never really put any effort into it before that time. The result was spectacular. Pandemonium broke out. The tourists at the front screamed and tried to fight their way back against the press of those behind. Carlin steeled himself for contact, grabbed Gerry by the wrist and indicated with his staff that they should go back and carry on up the close. Gerry stammered a bit, then found his voice.

  ‘Well, folks, I did warn you to expect the unexpected. It seems that Major Weir in person has arrived to escort us on the final leg of this walk.’ They got ahead of the
crowd as Carlin led him up the slope. Under his breath Gerry said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Carlin said nothing but glowered at him and kept the haunt going. Total silence, total staring absence of expression, that was the thing. The party were tripping along behind him like weans after a piper. ‘Explain later,’ he said to Gerry, and came to a sudden halt. He let go his arm, swirled his cloak and pointed the staff menacingly, then spun around and flew into the narrow entry ahead. He put on a burst of speed, slipped in through the wooden door, quietly closed and snibbed it. He heard voices expressing astonishment at his disappearance. Then he made his way silently back down past where the girl was, and away.

  He didn’t give a fuck about explaining later. Gerry could talk his way out of it. It would make the tourists’ night. He wondered about Karen, if she’d be there the next night, and what he would do if she was. He passed under George IV Bridge and thought of the weight of the library with its rows and rows of books pressing down through the layers of the city. When he reflected on it, the blue carbon-copied pages of the Lauder manuscript seemed unconvincing. Anybody could have put that stuff together, Carlin thought: D. Crosbie, whoever he was; MacDonald himself even, although why he would do such a thing was beyond imagining. And yet … and yet, before, the Secret Book had read so true; had pulled Carlin in and got him thinking Lauder’s thoughts, walking in his doubt-ridden, anxious footsteps. How could that happen?

  His mind flicked through Lauder and alighted on a little passage and he laughed out loud.

  Ther ware 4 French peasants in a village ance, that fell to talk about the King. They sayd it was a braw thing to be a King. Says the first if I ware King I would lie at ease all the day on that hy stack wt my belly to the sun. The second says, I would sup every day at bacon swimming in its juces. If I ware King (says the 3d) I would feid my swine from upoun ane horse. The 4t, alas, ye have left me nothing to choose; ye have chosen all the best things.

  Maybe he was the victim of a complex practical joke. Hugh Hardie, D. Crosbie and MacDonald could all be in it together, Jackie Halkit the lure on which they had reeled him in. The unwitting lure? Or maybe she was in as thick as the rest of them. Conspirators of history.

  He found his way back to Anderson’s Close, the Stinking Close of Weir’s time. He was still in the Weir gear: it was strange, you could wander around this part of town in this rig-out and people hardly paid you any attention. A couple of times he’d met another ghost on the street, going to or from his work. Deacon Brodie, or a monk or something. ‘Aye,’ the monk nodded as he passed. ‘Aye,’ said Major Weir. They were from different centuries but they never even blinked.

  Carlin emerged at the Cowgatehead and walked the few yards to the Grassmarket. He stood there watching people entering and leaving the pubs; noticed lights coming on and going off in the hostels for derelicts, and in the flats above the shops on the Castle side of the street. Some of those flats were council-owned, others were private, expensively refurbished – this part of town retained that mix of social classes and types that had characterised it for centuries. And yet, Carlin thought, there were not so many people here as there once were. There were more people in Edinburgh, sure, but not here in its heart, where once all the world crammed and jostled together. In the 1660s, thirty thousand souls maybe, and multiplying fast, once the plague no longer thinned them. A paltry figure these days, of course, at the height of summer, during the Festival; and at other times like the big council-promoted Hogmanay celebrations, when thousands spilled up from Princes Street. But these were exceptions and the crowds were not real crowds; not real people who lived in a real place, but people passing through a moment, for whom the Old Town was the decor for a party, a pasted-up backdrop.

  Carlin in the shadows looked further, deeper in. He saw sheep in pens, tethered cows, snapping dogs and flaffing hens, a gridlock of carts and horses. He saw the crowds of filthy ragged people, the barefoot bairns, the hawkers and chapmen, soldiers, fleshers with their packs of dogs to guard the cattle, traders, ministers, merchants’ daughters douce to look at but with tongues that would clip clouts, wifies at the well, women selling and buying food, wool, milk, cloth; he smelt the sweat of their common crushed struggling humanity, the mixture of glaur and blood and rubbish and shite trampled underfoot. He heard the din of bleating, bellowing animals and shouting herds, saw the battlements looming high above on the north side, the inns and drinking shops clustered along the base of the rock, the gaunt scaffold rising above the crowd at the head of the street. On one side, behind him, the mouth of the Cowgate; on the other, the foot of the zig-zagging West Bow down which the condemned would be drummed …

  Carlin saw it all. It pressed in upon him like heat from a furnace.

  Weir and Mitchel; Mitchel and Weir. Mitchel the vehement, the insecure, the enthusiast, the unconfident, grasping at knowledge with his ignorant fists. Weir, thirty years his senior, a man of reputation – devout, militant, sure in his commitment to the letter and blood of the Covenant. Weir has connections. Mitchel has none. It is 1658 and he is a penniless graduate. He needs a job.

  One of those of the kirk party appointed to judge James Graham was Sir George, eighteenth laird of Dundas. As Montrose’s jailer. Weir had come into contact with him. Now he hears that Dundas is looking for a chaplain and tutor for his bairns. Through an intermediary, he secures Mitchel an introduction.

  Sir George is impressed by Mitchel’s youth, and by his poverty. He gives him the job, and Mitchel flits from the Cowgate to Dundas’s castle out by Kirkliston. It is a strange, difficult situation. Though he is adequate at prayer, he is woefully bad at teaching. As Dundas is too busy with political affairs to notice, and his children too spoilt to care, this might not be disastrous; but Mitchel is an outsider. The other servants dislike him. They think him too sanctimonious for his own good, and it does not take them long before they believe they have found out his weakness. There is an auld taigelt gardener with a bored young wife, and it is obvious that the new tutor is susceptible to her charms. Rumour is spread like dung on rosebeds: Maister Mitchel is lustful; Maister Mitchel covets his neighbour’s wife; Maister Mitchel commits adultery in his heart. Best of all, Maister Mitchel, aloof and totally unaware of the slanders circulating about him, is riding for a fall.

  His accommodation is simple but secluded, a kind of summerhouse built onto the garden wall. One moon-bright night the gardener’s wife is seen slipping across the lawns. The servants follow, note that the key is on the outside of the summerhouse door, and, when the hapless couple are at their coupling, they gently lock them in and run to fetch the laird. Some minutes later, a dog begins to bark. The woman tries to leave, becomes distracted: if her husband should discover her … Her master, watching the proceedings from a balcony of the castle, already has, and sees Mitchel help her through the window, and begin to lower her, dangling on one end of his shirt, to the ground. But the shirt is not long enough, she is afraid to jump the last few feet. Mitchel has to lean out further and further, clinging with one hand to the window frame, stretched like a lizard naked on the wall, till at last the shirt tears and she falls into some bushes. Oh, the sight of their pale limbs straining in the moonlight. Oh, the dishevelled skirts of the woman fleeing across the grass. Oh, the shame, next morning, of the tutor summoned before Dundas and dishonourably discharged. O James Mitchel, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, thou shalt be cast out from thy mistress and from the garden of the laird.

  He returns to the Cowgate, disgraced but not humbled. He knows that great sin often comes before a calling. Even Samuel Rutherford fell in fornication and lost his first teaching post at Edinburgh just before beginning his pure ministry at Anworth. Mitchel waits in anticipation.

  But times are changing for the godly party. Charles II, who can lie with a dozen gardeners’ wives and neither think shame nor be expelled for it, is restored to the throne. He has no intention of going on his travels again. A parliament and independence
are restored to Scotland, Scotland is restored to the rule of bishops and royalist incendiaries. All the acts and laws of the previous twenty-three years are annulled by an Act Rescissory. Presbyterianism is in retreat, riven by splits and factions.

  Meanwhile the wife of Mitchel’s old mentor Major Weir has died and he has moved a short distance from Mistress Whitford’s to a house just off the West Bow, where he bides with his sister Jean. The Bow is a refuge of the saints in Edinburgh: a hotbed of holiness. Mitchel visits the Major, seeking his help again. If Weir no longer cuts the figure he once did in Edinburgh, he still has some influence among the disaffected, the many who are now obliged to toil under the yoke of episcopacy, waiting their chance to restore God’s nation to God. Through Weir’s intercession, Mitchel is found another place as chaplain, this time in the devout family of a niece of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston.

  Johnston – a symbol of all that has gone hideously wrong. Once a pillar of the Covenant, he sold himself to Cromwell in London, then fled abroad at the Restoration, but was tracked down and extradited from France. Brought to Edinburgh and tried on his knees before parliament, he was reduced to a babbling, begging wreck, unable even to remember the words of his Bible. Johnston, the scourge of kings and princes, wound up hanged and his head spiked on the Netherbow Port, next to the fading skull of his former friend James Guthrie. Thus are the saints made martyrs; and thus the martyrs made a mockery.

  Mitchel performs his new duties dully, without enthusiasm. This is not what he was put on earth for. Then in 1666 unrest among the godly explodes into rebellion in the west. An army of a few hundred – a thousand at most – marches through the middle shires towards Edinburgh. Mitchel abandons his job and rushes to join them. But this is not yet his time. He is sent back on an errand to the city, and while he’s away the miserable force is met in the Pentland Hills and destroyed by the Muscovite beast General Tarn Dalyell, whose beard, uncut since the execution of King Charles I, reaches to his waist, whose boots belch the smoke of hellfire and can walk at night on their own, and whose life can only be taken by a bullet made of silver. The rising of the saints is a complete failure. Mitchel is one of those specifically excluded from a pardon for his involvement in it and flees abroad to Rotterdam. A year later, though, he is back in Edinburgh, and now at last his time is at hand.