Free Crucible by S. G. MacLean

he shouted. ‘Go!’ He pushed me out in to the corridor and slammed the door shut once again behind me. Before I could gain my senses I heard the key turn in the lock and the bolt shot to.
    I had never seen John, meek and mild John, act in this way, never heard him talk so wildly. I stood there a few minutes, knocking, calling his name, but to no purpose – I did not hear another word or sound from the room, and in time I had to leave off and turn back towards the stairs, having learned much to alarm me, but nothing of John’s Saturday morning visit to the library and still less to help me understand the killing of Robert Sim.
    Had it been possible, I would have gone then to seek out Dr John Forbes, professor of divinity in the King’s College, and for many years mentor and friend to John and me both, but I knew he was away in Edinburgh, on business for his father, the bishop, and so there was no one here to whom I could take my concerns. I went slowly back through the quad, paying little attention to the scholars around me; soabsorbed in my thoughts that I was not looking where I was going, and on turning under the archway that would take me back out to the High Street, walked right into Andrew Carmichael, sending flying the lecture notes he was carrying.
    ‘Alexander …’
    ‘Andrew … here, let me help you with these.’ We bent together to pick up the papers. ‘Geometry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you would like to come down and give my third-year class a lesson. The finer points of Euclid seem somewhat to have eluded them.’
    He laughed. ‘And me. Were it not for these dictates of my old professors at Herborn and Franeker I fear I would be lost myself.’
    The papers, as I handed them back to him, were now somewhat dusty and in a disorder that would take him some time to sort out.
    ‘Andrew, I am truly sorry. I was not paying proper attention to where I was going.’
    ‘You do seem somewhat distracted.’ He waited, and I almost let the moment pass, so that he began to turn away. I made the decision. ‘Andrew, is there somewhere private that we might talk?’
    ‘There is my chamber, up there.’ He indicated a window in the Dunbar building.
    ‘Near to John Innes?’
    ‘Directly below him.’
    ‘Perhaps that would not be the best place today.’
    I looked back towards the quad and then out to the High Street; where there were not students there were townspeople, going about their business from booth to booth, talking with their neighbours in doorways or across dikes, hanging out linens or watching children play on the greens. There seemed nowhere where two men might talk and their conversation not be remarked and overheard. After a minute or so of us both casting around, Carmichael indicated the garden of the Mediciner’s manse. ‘I am sure Dr Dun would have no objection to our talking there.’
    Patrick Dun, my own college principal was also, through lack of personnel and as a testament to his own great experience and abilities, Mediciner of the King’s College here in Old Aberdeen, and in virtue of his position had a house and garden from the university. I agreed with Carmichael, and we had soon crossed the street and passed through the ornate iron gates in to the gardens of the Mediciner’s manse. It was a place where I had spent many happy visits since my return to Aberdeen from Banff five years ago. Dr Dun had been the very first, after my marriage to Sarah, to invite me to bring my wife and child to dine at his home, and he had made sure too that everyone knew he had done so. He might as well have stood at the market cross and proclaimed that my wife would be accepted by all in the two colleges or they would answer to him.
    Carmichael and I chose a stone bench at the end of the path between orchard and herb garden, far from the street yet far enough from the house that we would not beoverheard by any in it. I knew it to be one of the principal’s favourite places, in his rare moments of rest. Roses