A Game of Sorrows Read Free

brute, that I truly loved her and that she must become my wife.
    The remainder of the afternoon was spent on the necessary preparations for my departure, but by six o’clock most had been done and, as was my habit on a Tuesday evening, I threw on my cloak and went down through the college and into town, to William’s house on the Upperkirkgate. I did not go in by the street door but went instead by the backland. As ever, I was greeted first by Bracken, William’s huge and untrained hound, bought in the mistaken belief that he might one day again hunt as he had in the days of his youth. As he had learned, a busy young lawyer with the demands of wife and family hunts only in his dreams. The huge dog pressed me against the wall with his paws, and administered a greeting more loving than hygienic. I pushed him off, laughing, to attend to the other urgent greetings taking place around my knees. Two little boys, one as fair as the other was dark, clamoured loudly and repeatedly for my attention. It was little effort to sweep both of them up in my arms.
    ‘Uncl’Ander, Uncl’Ander,’ insisted James, the white-haired, two-year-old joy of my friend’s life, ‘make dubs.’ And indeed, the hands which he pressed to my face were covered in the mud the children had been playing with.
    ‘And what would your mothers say if I was to come into the house covered in such dubs?’
    ‘No tea till washed,’ said the serious little Zander, shaking his dark head. I kissed the hair on it. How could it be that I felt such love for another man’s child? But I did. I had loved him from the moment his mother had held him out towards me and, without looking at me and almost with defiance, told me she was naming him Alexander, Zander, after me. The child of a rape, the son of a filthy, bullying brute of a stonemason. It had been she, and not he, who had been banished the burgh of Banff in shame when her condition could no longer be hidden; she who had been sent to a loveless home where she was not welcome. And alongside the stones and the abuse hurled at her as she had crossed the river had been me. I had not known it then, I am not sure when I did finally know it, but at some point on our silent, reluctant journey together that day, she had utterly captivated me. Bringing her to the home of William and Elizabeth had been the best thing I had ever accomplished in my life, for them, for her, for her child, and for myself. But two years had been long enough; too long, and I was determined that on my return from Poland Sarah and Zander would leave the house of the Cargills and make their home, for life, with me.
    The boys were wriggling down and began tugging at my sleeves to pull me after them into the house for supper. I stopped them by the well and we all three of us washed, although in truth my hands were dirtier after cleaning the two boys than they had been to start with. I steered the children past the still bounding dog, through the back door, and right into the kitchen. Lying in a large drained kettle on the table was a huge salmon, freshly poached and cooling, its silvered scales dulled and darkened, its flesh a wondrous pink, full of promise. It must have been one of the last of the season. I would relish it, not knowing what manner of food I might have on my travels to come.
    At the other end of the table, bent over her flour board where she thumped with an unnatural venom at the pastry for an apple pie evidently in preparation, was Elizabeth Cargill. Instead of putting down her rolling pin and coming over to greet me by the hand as she would usually have done, she looked up tersely, gave a pinched, ‘Well. Mr Seaton,’ and returned with increased vigour to her thumping. Davy, William’s steward, sat in a wooden chair by the fire, plucking a bird. I looked to him for some explanation but was rewarded only with a narrowing of his thunderous brows and a muttered quotation from the book of Deuteronomy. The boys themselves seemed taken