The Fanatic Read online

  A woman was weeping. ‘They were bairns,’ she said. It seemed that she was ashamed even to speak such a thought before him. ‘They were jist bairns like oor ain, even if they were savages.’

  ‘Then the waters had overwhelmed us,’ the minister thundered back, ‘then the proud waters had gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.’

  His strides were now so long that the boy James had to trot to stop himself being dragged. His hand was gripped in the iron hand of the minister. They were approaching the high bridge over the river. The soldiers had dismounted and left their horses tethered at one end. As the minister and the boy drew close they saw that the Irish was up on the parapet, his knees bent as he tried to maintain his balance. Swords were jagging against the backs of his thighs. They saw him stumble in the air, half-turn, heard his scream as he fell into the gorge below.

  By the time the pair reached the middle of the bridge, the soldiers were leaving. One of them, wiping sweat from his brow, nodded a greeting to the minister. ‘Warm work the day, sir.’

  The minister hoisted James up above the parapet so that he could see into the slow-moving river below. The Irish was face down, his body spinning like a graceful dancer in the current.

  ‘Is he deid?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Aye,’ said the minister. ‘I doot the faw has killt him.’

  The boy raised his head and looked further downstream. There was a bend in the river there, and a rocky bank where a number of men were standing. Some were dragging things like swollen sacks from the water. Others had pikes fifteen feet long, and were using them to impale the floating sacks and bring them into the bank. The Irishes. There were piles of them lying wet and motionless in the sun. The river churned in little eddies as it swept round the bend, bringing the bodies in to where the men waited for them. If any of the Irishes still moved, if they tried to swim past or clamber out, men with pikes and clubs swarmed over them, and when they dispersed again the Irishes were still. The boy saw wee bundles the size of himself spread out among the skirts and plaids of the dead women. They were like dolls.

  ‘This river flows tae Hell,’ said the minister. ‘All God’s enemies sail on her.’ His voice had become gentle again. ‘James, we are a chosen people. We must dae God’s work. Dae ye ken yer Bible?’

  ‘Aye, sir. I read it tae ma mither when I’m wi her.’

  ‘And when ye’re wi yer uncle?’

  James shook his head. ‘He disna hae a Bible.’

  ‘Ye shall hae a Bible o yer ain. And perhaps, if ye study hard at it, ye could learn mair than readin. Ye could be a college lad, wi the richt assistance. Would ye like that?’

  He lowered James from the parapet. The boy’s last sight was of the body of the Irish he had found asleep on the moor, still spinning slowly as it approached the crowded bend of the river that flowed to Hell.

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  ‘Would ye say I was weird?’

  ‘Fuck aye, I would certainly say ye was weird.’

  ‘Whit wey am I weird?’

  ‘Whit wey?’

  ‘Awright. In what ways would ye say I was weird?’

  ‘Well, there’s this talkin tae yersel for a start. That isna normal.’

  ‘Who says it isna? Whit dae you ken?’

  ‘It isna considered normal. It’s considered a sign o insanity.’

  ‘Baws tae that. Ye’ll need tae define normality first, and then insanity. Name anither instance o ma supposed weirdness.’

  ‘Ye seem very defensive. Truth gettin tae ye?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘It wasna a question.’

  ‘Answer!’

  ‘Shut up. I’m thinkin.’

  After a long pause the mirror said, ‘Whit aboot the wey ye talk tae ither people?’

  ‘Whit dae you ken aboot that? Ye’ve niver seen me.’

  ‘I hae an informer.’

  ‘Aye, I ken whae that is. Weill, onywey, whit aboot it?’

  ‘That’s weird tae. Aw that monosyllabic stuff, starin intae space, repeatin back whit folk say tae ye. Dinna kid on ye’re no aware o it yersel. Dinna pretend ye huvna noticed.’

  ‘That’s how I am.’

  ‘It’s no how ye are here. Listen, we’re haein a normal conversation, awmaist.’

  ‘Listen?’

  ‘Ye ken whit I mean. You answer ma question. Whit aboot that, how ye talk tae people?’

  ‘That’s how I am, oot there.’

  ‘Ah. An interestin qualification. Whit are ye, some kinna agoraphobic?’

  ‘You ken I’m no.’

  ‘I only ken whit ye tell me.’

  ‘I ayewis lie tae ye.’

  ‘That sounds like the start o wan o thae undergraduate pub philosophy discussions. Ken, a statement that contains its ain internal contradiction.’

  ‘Right. An organism that contains the seed o its ain destruction. So can ye no deal wi that, eh? Whit’s up? Am I makin ye feel uncomfortable?’

  ‘If I could,’ said the mirror, ‘I would turn ma face tae the wa.’

  Wednesday. Carlin stood patiently in the Scottish department in the basement of the Central Library on George IV Bridge, while an old guy in a mouldy raincoat produced a dozen books from an enormous briefcase and asked if he could renew them all again.

  ‘All of them?’ asked the librarian.

  ‘Yes please. I’m doing research. I need them all.’

  ‘Well, so long as nobody else has requested them. Could I have your card, please?’ She began to bring up the different titles on screen, checking them in and checking them back out again. The old fellow wiped his brow with his raincoat sleeve.

  ‘You could save yourself carrying them back and forth if you phoned us,’ the librarian said while she worked. ‘We can renew them over the phone.’

  ‘I’m not on the phone,’ he said.

  She reached the last book. ‘This one’s been requested, I’m afraid. I can’t let you have this one again.’

  ‘But I need that one. That’s the most important. In fact, it’s essential.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You could request it back again, for when the reader who’s requested it returns it, but you can’t have it just now.’

  ‘Don’t you have any other copies? I mean, who else is wanting to look at that particular book?’

  The librarian checked on the computer. ‘No, that’s the only copy. I’m sorry, but it has definitely been requested.’

  The old man tutted. ‘Well, who is it that wants it? It’s very obscure. Nobody else would be interested.’

  ‘Somebody obviously is,’ said the librarian.

  ‘Give me a name then,’ said the auld yin.

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘The other ones are no use without that one. If I can’t have that one I don’t want any of them.’

  ‘But I’ve just renewed them all for you.’

  ‘I didn’t know you weren’t going to let me keep that one. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have bothered asking for these ones.’ He turned and stumped out through the door.

  The librarian sighed and began to cancel all the entries she had just made. A queue had formed. There was a cough from behind Carlin and a man’s voice asked quietly who was next.

  I am,’ said Carlin.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  He had very thick-lensed black-framed glasses and what was left of his reddish hair was stretched across his freckled pate like an abandoned cat’s-cradle. Something about his appearance appealed to Carlin; he looked like he might lead the same kind of isolated life. Together, they took a few steps away from the desk, a move that seemed to be spontaneous, shared by both of them.

  ‘I’m lookin for as much information as ye have aboot someone called Major Weir. D’ye ken him?’

  The man smiled. Carlin noted from a badge on his lapel that he was addressing Mr MacDonald.

  ‘You’ve come to the right place. The infamous Major. Yes, I think we
’ve a few bits and pieces on him.’

  For the next ten minutes MacDonald darted among the stacks, producing books of varying size and antiquity. He got Carlin to fill in some request slips for the more obscure ones. Most of the material was incorporated in secondary sources, and much of it had clearly been recycled from one book to another over the years. There was a good chunk in Robert Chambers’ Traditions of Edinburgh. Weir was mentioned delicately in Hugo Arnot’s Celebrated Criminal Trials. The supernatural elements of his tale were detailed in George Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, and in a strange document called ‘A Collection of Providential Passages Antient and Modern Forreign and Domestick’ written by James Fraser, who claimed to have known the Major. There was a modern collection of Scottish Ghost Stories which had conflated the most salacious details from these and other sources. There was a book of Justiciary Proceedings containing the seventeenth-century equivalent of transcripts of the Weirs’ trial. Their names cropped up in most books on Edinburgh’s past, usually with the true nature of their crimes glossed over or summarised as ‘too horrible to dwell upon’.

  By careful cross-reading, Carlin began to deconstruct Hardie’s potted account: Weir’s sister was called Jean, not Grizel (the latter name, that of a former landlady of the Major’s, having somehow attached itself to her at some stage). Jean, not her brother, was accused of witchcraft, and she was found not guilty of it, but was convicted of incest. Weir was accused of fornication, adultery, bestiality and incest, and convicted on the latter two charges. The lurid tales of witchcraft and satanism, it seemed, had been spread like a coverlet over the truth. But if reality was hidden, there was barely disguised glee in many of the accounts that a man so grimly good on the surface should have been found so exotically bad underneath: a witness enthusiastically reported that Major Weir and his staff, which was burnt at the stake with him, ‘gave rare turnings’ in the fire at the Gallowlee.

  MacDonald seemed to have an extraordinary knowledge of where to locate even passing mentions of the case. He sat Carlin at a desk with a pile of books and periodically appeared at his side with another old clothbound volume. ‘This is interesting,’ he’d say. ‘There’s a record of the court proceedings in this one.’ Or his finger would point at a column of dense print: ‘Just here. Another devilish trick our dear Major was supposed to have performed.’ Carlin nodded his thanks and read on.

  MacDonald came back after a while with a small cardboard box in his hand. ‘Have you used a microfilm projector before?’ he asked. They went over to the big-screened machine and MacDonald took a roll of film out of the box and fed it onto the spools. He flicked a switch and the machine whirred into life.

  ‘You turn this spool to go forward, this one to go back,’ he explained. ‘This is your focus control. Sit down, please. Now wind it forward.’

  A grainy image of antique-looking print appeared.

  This is a copy of a pamphlet called Ravillac Redivivus,’ said MacDonald. ‘It was written in 1678 by an Englishman called George Hickes, chaplain to the then Scottish Secretary of State, the Duke of Lauderdale. Francois Ravaillac was a French Catholic who in 1610 stabbed King Henri IV to death for supposedly betraying the faith. The pamphlet goes into some detail about this crime.’

  ‘Whit’s it got tae dae wi Weir?’

  ‘Well, Hickes was a propagandist. The pamphlet’s title was supposed to show that Ravaillac’s fanatical spirit was alive and, ah, kicking in Scotland, but at the opposite end of the religious spectrum, in the person of one James Mitchel. Mitchel was a Covenanter who’d tried to assassinate the Archbishop of St Andrews. Hickes’s pamphlet is a hatchet job, basically, linking Mitchel to the bestial Major Weir. That’s your connection. The two of them had once shared lodgings in the Cowgate, at the house of Grizel Whitford, and Royalists like Hickes were keen to rake up as much muck as possible about poor old Mitchel. Being associated with Weir would be like getting a reference for a teaching post from the Marquis de Sade.’

  Carlin said, ‘It says Mitchel got a degree fae Edinburgh University. Like masel. Canna hae been aw bad then, eh?’

  ‘Well,’ said MacDonald, ‘it might not have meant quite the same thing in those days.’

  Carlin went back to the shelves to try to find out more about the period. He felt ignorant and cheated because he had only a sketchy idea of what had happened in Scotland in the reign of Charles II. Or any of the Stewarts for that matter. He had gone through a four-year history degree at university without once having had to open a book about the history of his own country. He had studied American, Russian, British (meaning English, a gorgeous tapestry with a few Celtic fringes tacked on to stop it fraying), medieval and modern European, but Scottish history had not been considered a necessary ingredient to a well-rounded higher education. And then, when he unexpectedly got good results in his finals and the possibility of staying on as a postgraduate arose, he found he needed some distance, physical distance, from what he had been doing. And from Edinburgh too. He got out.

  Years later, thought became important again. His mother had died after more than a decade fading away among her ever-growing collection of curios, and he was astonished to find that, in spite of her habit of accumulation, she had not spent all his father’s savings. The money that came to him meant that he had some freedom. He applied to go back to the university to do research. It seemed natural to go into more depth in one of the areas he had studied for Honours. He ended up with a vague proposal to study military strategy in the German spring offensive of 1918. After seven months he admitted defeat: history, which he had hoped would welcome him back, was tired of him and spat him out.

  In retrospect he was glad, or at least not disappointed, that he had not finished his PhD. It would have taken him back into the past again, and that was not what he needed. The trouble was, between the present and himself there was virtually no rapport. He rolled around in it like a discarded coke bottle on the top deck of a bus. History had kicked him out, maybe for his own good, but it had left him stranded. And now he felt it pulling at him again, like a needy, wilful parent.

  By the end of the afternoon Carlin had worked his way through all the sources supplied by Mr MacDonald, and a few others that these had led onto. He felt like a door had been opened for him. He certainly knew a lot more about Major Weir and the society he lived in than Hugh fucking Hardie did. In fact he reckoned he now knew as much about Weir as anyone, with the possible exception of MacDonald. Maybe he could compete on the last ever series of Mastermind, with The Life, Times and Sexual Deviations of Major Weir as a specialist subject. Carlin took the pile of books back to the desk.

  MacDonald approached him from the lending stacks.

  ‘How did you get on, Mr Carlin?’

  ‘Awright. Ony chance I could keep a couple o these aside till tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course. You can keep them on reserve for up to six days. After that, if you’ve not been in, they just get reshelved.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Carlin.

  I was thinking about your request a little while ago. I’m sure there’s another reference to the Weirs somewhere – quite a detailed thing – but I can’t recall it. If I think of it before you’re in again I’ll put it aside as well.’

  ‘Ye’ve a guid memory,’ said Carlin. ‘It’ll come back tae ye.’

  ‘Yes, it will,’ said MacDonald. ‘I’ve been here forty years. You get a pretty good knowledge of the stock over that length of time. Especially the older items, the stuff that’s been here since before you arrived. It becomes like your own furniture.’

  Carlin said nothing. He thought MacDonald had finished. He was turning to leave when the librarian rushed on unexpectedly.

  ‘Furniture’s to be used, that’s what I think. If not, chop it up for firewood – why not? Something like this happens – you coming in here – it starts a ball rolling, doesn’t it? A mechanism – cogs turn, balances shift. I’m always interested that other people are interested.’

&nbs
p; ‘Interested?’ Carlin said. ‘Whit in?’

  ‘That’s the thing – anything, anything at all. You never know what significance will be found in the utterly trivial. Otherwise’ – he made a sweeping gesture that seemed to incorporate not just the Scottish department but the entire library on all its floors – ‘what would be the point of all this? What would be the point?’

  Carlin smiled. It was as if the man was justifying his existence.

  ‘I’ll be in again the morn,’ said Carlin.

  ‘Good,’ said MacDonald. ‘Ask for me if you need anything, won’t you?’

  He had to go back to his flat in off-Bruntsfield to collect the wig and cloak for that evening’s performance. He left the library and walked along George IV Bridge, passing the bronze statue of Greyfriars’ Bobby beside which, even this early in the year, a couple of tourists were photographing each other. But the past – Carlin’s past – was there with them too; he could never go by that dog without seeing it coated in yellow paint – some unsentimental person had once cowped a tin of the stuff over the statue and now he always saw it like that.

  There had been a jeweller’s shop right beside it called Abbotts of Greyfriars, then it became a fruit-machine arcade, now it was a grocer’s. The arcade owners had economically removed the A and two Ts from the old fascia and rearranged the remaining letters to read BOBS OF GREYFRIARS: every time Carlin saw the shop-front now, with its fruit and veg stacked out onto the pavement from the windows, he glanced up and remembered that earlier transformation, and saw the flashing lights that had beckoned folk in to chance the coins in their pockets.

  To his left, down Chambers Street, was the Museum, where, if he looked, he would catch the echo of someone he had once seen, a tiny lost lassie in a blue coat crouched on the steps. He kept going. Further along, in Forrest Road, was Sandy Bell’s pub, where he had once watched an old man share his pint with his dog and then order the beast outside when it failed to buy the next one: there was a thin, skeerie-looking mongrel hotching anxiously outside the door now as he passed.