Authors: Shirley McKay
They rode on at a gentle pace, where the track was broad enough to travel side by side, coming past the corn mill, decked with summer flowers. The children were at play, tying ribbons to a pole.
‘I never saw so many people celebrate the May, since I was a bairn. Perhaps it is the sun,’ Hew smiled. The morning mists had broken on a cloudless summer’s day.
His sister shook her head. ‘It is not the sunshine, but the absence of the Melvilles, at the Kirk Assembly, lifts a heavy cloud. Their sermons are a shackle that have kept us all subdued.’
Hew protested, ‘Ah, but that is harsh! For they are good men, Meg, and ardent in reform, Andrew, in particular, the scourge of all hypocrisy, of which you should approve. He brings fame and honour to the university, and a sense of order to the town.’
‘He is the scourge of all,’ corrected Meg. ‘I have heard him preaching in the kirk of Holy Trinity, and nothing you can say of him will make me doubt him less. His language is vindictive, wrackful, and intemperate. I cannot help my feelings, Hew. I wish you were not friends with them. It makes you sad and serious.’
‘What poffle,’ muttered Hew.
‘It is not poffle. Look at you!’ Hew wore a summer suit, of dark grey satin silk, without lace or ornament. ‘You look like a lawyer, or a scholar at the kirk.’
He laughed at that. ‘I am a scholar, Meg, and a lawyer too.’
Meg swept this aside. ‘And you have given Paul your gooseturd hat and hawking cloak. He wears them as his courting clothes.’
‘Then I wish him more luck with them, than they brought to me. I am a professor, Meg. Would you have me come to college dressed in salmon slops? What would the students think of me?’
‘Stuff! They think the world of you.
Clare Buchanan
telt me that her brother is devoted to you.’ She stole a sideways glance at him, to see how well disposed he was to mention of the name, but Hew shrugged off the barb.
‘George is a bairn, and a straw in the wind, too easily blawn. I maun dress according to my place. And I cannot imagine why you would find fault with it,’ he countered, reasonably.
Still she was not convinced. ‘Here dawns a cloudless play day. Giles, to mark the May, puts on a yellow coat – a sensible precaution, for judging at the butts. Yet you are dark and drab.’
‘Tis prophylactic gainst the May. For fear that I should fall, and be carried off to elfin land, like the fair Tam Lin:
‘When we were frae the hunting came
‘That frae my horse I fell
‘The quene o’ faeries she caught me
‘In yon green hill to dwell,’ sang Hew.
Meg sighed. ‘I wish you would be serious.’
‘You wish I would be serious. And yet just now you railed at me, for seeming dull and sad—Hola! Whoa, there! What is that?’ Hew cut their quarrel short, reining in his horse. For on the track in front of them a woman sat full squarely, skirts hoiked round her knees, peering at her toes. ‘Aaeeie,’ she wailed at them. She tried and failed to stand. Dun Scottis gave a snort.
‘The queen of the May. Fair fou and drunken,’ grinned Hew.
‘Ah, do not be unkind,’ his sister scolded him, ‘I know her, I
doubt. She is Alison Peirson, a tenant of yours.’ She slipped down from her horse, handing Hew the reins, and hurried on ahead. ‘Mistress, are you well?’
‘Quite well, I thank you, lass. What spectacle are you?’
Alison scrubbed at her eyes, pink and dim with dust. She peered at Meg distrustfully, through the clearing mist. ‘Aye, I ken you noo, Matthew Cullan’s lassie, wabbit wee bit blunderer, they ca’ed ye
loupy loup
. For that ye had the falland ill. They cured it wi’ a spell.’ Whatever harm had fallen to her did not curb her tongue.
Meg glanced back at Hew, who was out of earshot, looking for a place to tether up his horse. Dun Scottis, put to pasture, would be hard to shift. ‘The falling sickness has no cure. It is controlled with physick,’ she replied.
‘Aye, ye would say that.’ Alison lurched forward, standing up unsteadily. ‘You can help me, lassie. Learn to me a charm.’
Meg could smell the liquor, curdled sour and sweaty, sickly on her breath. ‘I can give you physick, if you are not well.’
‘Physick will not help it, lassie. Oh, but he is ill with it! Afflicted sore and sick.’ Alison began to wail with great sair rending sobbing, clinging to Meg’s sleeve.
‘Tell me, who is sick?’ Meg fell back a step.
‘Bless you, lassie, no one,’ Alison corrected. ‘I can gie ye money, see?’ She reached into her serkinet, fishing out a purse. ‘Teach to me a spell.’
‘I cannot help you, then. I do not deal in charms.’
‘What is the matter here?’ Hew had left the horses tethered in a field. He saw a whey-faced woman in her early thirties mouthing at his sister, clutching at her sleeve. Hearing his approach, she startled and shrank back. ‘What nether soul is that?’
‘It is my brother Hew,’ said Meg. ‘ We are on his land.’
‘His land?’ Alison looked up Hew, with dark grey doubting eyes. ‘Nay, tis not his land. For it was once the bishops’ land, and will be once again. There are, ye see, three kinds of laird . . .’ she recollected hazily, ‘and he is nought but one of them. He is not the master here, nor yet the laird of me. Inchmurdo . . . Inchmurtah.’
The words had a strange resonance, as though they were a prophecy. Hew urged, ‘Madam, you are ill. I will take you home.’
Alison composed herself. ‘Tis only a bit blister. I have lost a sock.’ She lifted up her skirts, showing her bare foot. ‘A braw wee sock of blue. Mind, now, if ye come across it. I would like it back.’
The wine draught had worn off; she felt the dark hurt spreading, deep inside her shirt, and knew she must be gone. She had not known what possessed her, spilling out the prattle Patrick once had telt to her, about the bishops’ land. She hobbled down the path. Not far now, she saw smoke, the safety of Boarhills.
As Hew prepared to follow her, his sister called him back. ‘She does not want us, Hew. You must let her go. She is not far from home.’
‘I saw beneath her kirtle, Meg, her flanks flayed black and blue.’
‘I know,’ his sister sighed. ‘But we cannot help her, if she will not make complaint. She has fallen to the May, as several others do. She is a strange soul, Hew. She came with her father, to live at Boarhills, when I was no more than a lass. The father is dead now. And Alison grows herbs to sell to the apothecaries. When their backs are turned, she makes them into remedies.’
Not so different then, from any other woman who grew flowers for simples, including Meg herself. But something in her tone provoked Hew into asking, ‘Aye? What sort of remedies?’
‘Mostly, harmless ones.’
‘Then she is a witch?’
His sister shook her head. ‘That is not a charge that you should throw out lightly. Poor Alison. She has been sorely used, and yet she does not help herself. Those words she spoke to you were almost like a curse.’
Hew reflected, ‘Aye? Inchmurtah is a place. It is the ancient mansion house upon our father’s land, long before he had it, fallen into ruin. It belonged to the archbishops once, and at the Reformation came into his hands. What Alison referred made a kind of sense, which leads me to suppose . . . But you are pale and cold! And you
are trembling, Meg.’ He had forgotten, for the moment, that she was not strong, that she had been walking since the early hours. ‘The sky begins to darken; I must take you home.’
They rode together on the track, where neither of them spoke. The physick wife had cast a cloud upon the first of May.
Chapter 4
Mary’s Thorn
At eleven in the morning on the sixth of May, Hew Cullan crossed the South Street to the college of St Mary, to find the doors were bolted fast against the world. He rattled at the locks. ‘Am I come too late?’
The porter peered doubtfully out from a grate. ‘Are ye here for the speech?’
Behind him through the opening Hew could see a crowd, the flurry of black gowns, gathering like birds. Bells rang out the hour. The swallow wing took shape, and swept across the square. Since he knew better than to quarrel with the man who kept the keys, he persisted patiently, ‘If it is not too late.’
The porter pulled the bolt across. His answer would have passed for logic in the schools. ‘Though ye be ne’er so late, ye will not be the last. The orisons will not commence till Master Andro quits his house, and he will not do that till I have left the gate, and I will not do that until the house is filled, and a’ the men and masters settled in the hall, and so you see, though you are last, ye cannot be the hindmaist yet; however late ye be, he taks the latter place. For such is his prerogative.
Primus est, et ultimus
.’
‘But since the house is full . . .’ Hew watched the last gowns flutter, flapping up the tower.
‘It is, sir, passing full,’ the doorkeeper agreed. ‘All our bursars here, and some of our young laureates that went into the Kirk, and all the blessed doctors save for Master James, that has privilege of absence for the month of May to get to know his wife.’ He glossed this with a wink.
‘And then there are they fremmit folk, fae diverse forrain parts, that come frae far and wide to hear the maister speak, that you wad not believe the babble that we hear, an’ that besides the Latin a’ the scholars ken; ye wadna care to wager on what tongue they may be thinking in, nor trust the words they speak. But Master Andro calls them honest, Christian men, and so we must believe it, sir. Besides that, we have students from St Leonard’s, the tertians and the magistrands, and their regents too. Had we expected such a crowd, we should have kept the hall for it, and made shift for our dennar in the school of Greek.’
The common hall lay south, and at the present hour was set up for the dinner board of bread and boiled blood sausages, the earthy, iron black stench of which came creeping through the grate.
The porter counted further, flexing two fat fists, ‘Of masters we have Doyle and Rollock, Rutherford and Black, Professors Groat and Bisset, Robertson and Grubb.’
‘What, Bartie too?’ Hew was drawn, despite himself, into the porter’s list. Bartie Groat was mathematician at the college of St Salvator, and the third professor, after Giles and Hew. His post had been translated from St Mary’s, after Andrew Melville was appointed there as principal. To Bartie, it was exile to the frozen North. He hankered for the sanctum of the leafy South Street colleges. The salt air and sea winds did not agree with him, provoking the rheumatics and stirring up his fleume. He felt cut off from the higher faculty of theologues, reduced to a mere pedant in the faculty of arts; his stipend was diminished, and paid to him in sufferance, his students were green striplings, nackets fresh from school. Though most of the philosophers had baulked at the reforms, Melville’s warmth and vigour slowly won them round. Now Bartie had capitulated, only Giles stood fast.
‘Most all of the professors here,’ the porter read Hew’s mind, ‘apart from Doctor Locke.’
‘Tis likely he was called away,’ Hew excused his friend. ‘Perhaps, if all are here, you might fulfil your charge?’
‘Why, bless you, sir. Tis done.’ The porter took the hint, ‘Best look sharp an’ run, else you may mak us late.’ Hew took his chance to hurry through the gate and cross the empty courtyard to the founder’s tower. The college had been built upon the site of the old pedagogy, the college of St John, the ruins of which were still apparent on its eastern flank. St Mary’s, called the New College, was laid out on three sides: a high wall to the north, that looked upon the street, contained the port and lodge and Andrew Melville’s house. The schools and bursars’ lodging houses filled the western range, entered by a staircase in the corbelled tower. On the south side were the common hall, the kitchen and latrines, and beyond, the college gardens, extending to the burn. The land adjoined the parish of St Leonard’s to the east, a boundary disregarded by the college doves, who were border reivers of a most pernicious kind. Hew knew the college well, and as he hurried to the lecture, he saw nothing out of place. He heard the fluting birdsong, and the drone of bees, saw pigeons on the bell-tower, blackbirds in a bush, smelled summer rose and cabbage kale, the soup of the latrines.
The cobbled square was empty now, the noontide sun on lattice windows casting quiet light. The lecture hall was up a flight of stairs, through the western entrance at the founder’s tower. A hawthorn tree in blossom gave out gentle scent, just outside the door. A scattering of petals shivered in the breeze. Hew ran quickly up the steps, and turned into the upper school, where rows of students murmured, settled on long forms. It took a moment for his eyes to find the light in darkness, blinkered by the glare of the early summer sun. The order of the lecture room was strictly hierarchical, the front row set apart for the first ranks of the faculty. A natural gap had fallen there, dividing Bartie Groat from young Professor Robertson, who taught the New Testament in Greek. Bartie suffered from a damp, persistent phlegm, for which he tried a remedy of hardboiled egg and garlic flower, and Robertson had edged upwind. Bartie shuffled sideways, so that Hew could share his place. He acknowledged his arrival with a hoarse harrumph, filtered through the muzzle of his pocket handkerchief.
‘Tis already past the hour, the lection starting late. Which means that we are likely to be late out for our dinner; the bursars will have finished all the kichin, and left us nought but bannock, soddins and cauld broth.’
Bartie took his dinner daily in the hall. On flesh days, he supped mutton soddins in a broth of kale, and on fish days, wattir-kaill, thin cabbage soup, with sops. He looked forward through the morning to his share of
kitchen
– the scraps of meat or cheese sent up to spice the dish – which halfway through the dinner hour was certain to run out.
‘It is too much to be hoped for,’ he continued peevishly, ‘that Andrew Melville wad have thought to give a dennar for his guests.’
‘Our funds are sorely stretched,’ the professor of Greek testament responded to the slur, which Bartie had spat out, above and beyond the discretion of his handkerchief.
Hew said, ‘Whisht, he’s here.’
The master made an entrance through the nether door, and came to take his stand behind a small lettrin, raised up from the floor. His appearance brought a murmur of excitement to the crowd, for people came from far and wide to hear the great man speak. Giles Locke was dismissive: ‘Half of them are spies.’ Yet there could be no doubt he had a faithful following. There was scuffling at his back, where the students vied for space, and he struggled to move forward through their solid flanks. Melville was a small man, with the slight build of the scholar who was sickly as a child, and on this bright May morning he did not look not well; a pallor and a light sweat played upon his lips. Bartie saw it too, for he murmured in Hew’s ear, ‘There goes a man who bears upon his shoulders the sad weight of the world, or has a careful conscience, think you not?’
The mathematician’s pale blue eyes were keen and penetrating through their watery film; often, there was clear sharp light implicit in the gloom. Bartie Groat was more perceptive than his snuffling countenance implied. ‘Tis very like that some malignant fever wreaks its work in him. Such sickness, so beginning, is quick to
spread perniciously. Observe; see how he sweats, his green and sickly air. I should make haste to leave, for fear to spread the pestilence.’
Hew answered, ‘Aye, perhaps you should.’ He had no time to spare for Bartie’s sly malevolence, scantily dissimiled in a thin cloak of concern.
Bartie gave a snort. ‘You lawyers are so keen to look for subtle evidence, you do not see the proof before your eyes. That man is sick, or something worse.’
‘What worse?’ challenged Hew. But Bartie had no chance to expand upon his gossiping, as Melville took his place behind the lectern at the front, as a man mounts to a scaffold, and began to speak. ‘Welcome to ye, gentlemen, for it is pleasing to the heart to see so many hamely, gude and godly faces gathered in the hall. As ye are aware, I lately have returned from my duties at the General Assembly, and ye may be assured I come among ye from that same Assembly strengthened and reconforted, that ye shall find in me a firmness of resolve and steadiness of purpose in no way weakened or made faint, whosoever shall oppose me, with whatever kind of darts. And he that is against us, let him fear and quake, for God is on our side.’
This opening struck a curious note, for what purported to have been a sermon on the wedding vows. But Andrew Melville, ay contentious, could strike fire from any stone. Bartie whispered at Hew’s side, ‘The wedding is the hardest band that ony man may tak in hand,’ and winked at him.
Melville cleared his throat. ‘But of that heavy purpose, I will come to speak to you at a more fitting time. For we are come today, with gladness in our hearts. My nephew James was marrit, at that same Assembly, on the first of May. Wherefore, in his honour, I would say to you . . .’
He spoke then at some length and in the Latin tongue upon the risks and virtues of the married state, with divers illustrations, glossed in Ancient Greek. Marriage, as they knew, was not a sacrament, but
a covenant, to which God was a witness, and a party, therefore sanctified. The text was plain and clear, but somehow lacked for Hew the spirit of true confidence. Andrew seemed distracted, and his tone was flat. He came to his conclusion somewhat short of the full hour.
‘He has read your thoughts,’ Hew winked at Bartie Groat, ‘curtailing his devotions, to respect your dinner time.’
Bartie harrumphed, ‘I should hope. A fine piece of stuff were that, for a man to swap his pottage for. Ye should marry, Hew,’ he added unexpectedly.
‘Are you so converted, then? I thought you disapproved of marriage, as a general rule.’
‘As a rule, I do,’ Professor Groat agreed. ‘In every common sense, the married state debilitates. I have seen it happen, time and time again. First there comes the wife, and then there comes the bairn, and then you find your master is never so collegiate, nor stoops to tak his supper in the common hall. Professor Locke your brother is a case in point.’ He waved off Hew’s objections with a fierce flap of his arm. ‘Women are the wrack, that wreaks havoc on our colleges, and we were better served in them, when no one had a wife. Yet I make ain sole exception, only in your case.’
‘Indeed, and why is that?’ Hew inquired, amused.
‘Since you do not sup in college, more than once a week, your further dereliction might be hardly felt.’
Hew grinned. ‘Ah, my thanks for that.’
‘And,’ Bartie went on, ‘a wife might you keep you out of trouble, and from dabbling in controversies, and divers dark affairs, which if they do not see you honoured, are like to see you hanged.’
‘And,’ said Hew, ‘for that.’
‘Don’t mention it. Your hanging would impart distress, and disgrace upon the college, which we could do without, and would effect in me, as I confess, a sorrow in more personal terms, for I have grown quite used to you; your wit is not unwelcome, and I am growing old, and have no use for change, though change is bound to
come.’ Bartie blew his nose. His sudden and habitual lapsing into sentiment sometimes forged a mask for a more subtle shift. And so it happened here, as he went on, ‘Moreover, it will keep you from your keeking glances at the students’ sisters;
one
such, in particular.’
‘I cannot imagine,’ Hew protested, laughing, ‘what you think you mean.’
It was more than likely Bartie had perceived the tightening of his throat, the subtle change in tone. Through a film of fleume, with piercing bird bright eyes, he picked up all that passed. What was seldom clear was how much of Bartie’s gossip was benign, and how much of it was motivated by malicious spite. For the moment he did not remark upon it, but took the conversation back to the place where it began, with geometric cunning.
‘And, if you were married, Giles would give a banquet with all kinds of sweets and delicats; no question of a lecture, we should have a feast.’
‘If you would have a feast,’ Hew recovered his composure, ‘take a wife yourself.’
Bartie took this seriously. ‘Alas, I am too old for that, and far too deep entrenched in single, college life. Now we must join this crowd, and try to make our way out through the thristing multitude, if we have any hope of arriving home by suppertime.’ He clambered from the bench to push and grumble through the ordered lines of scholars waiting to depart. As Hew stood up to follow, Melville left the platform, coming to his side. ‘I am right glad to see you, sir,’ he addressed him warmly. ‘Giles Locke has not come with you, I suppose?’
Professor Groat was out of earshot, which was just as well. Hew used his discretion. ‘Sadly, he is not. He may have urgent business.’
‘Ah, do not pretend,’ Andrew Melville smiled. ‘I know how he thinks.’
Hew answered this more honestly, ‘I cannot think you do.’ Giles’ mind was supple, searching and inquisitive, its thrist for science balanced by a loving heart. He doubted whether any man was less equipped to fathom it.
‘I assure you,’ Melville said, ‘whatever he believes in, I admire his skill. I hoped he might be here today, though I did not expect it. I require his help. But yours may do as well. I wanted some advice.’
Hew had grown accustomed, as professor in the law, to hearing colleagues’ queries on the law of property, much as Giles was courted for a cure for piles. The doctor’s brisk prescription, of hot coals to the fundament, made sure that the inquisitor did not inquire again. Since Hew was not so bold, his heart begin to sink. ‘Do you have a question,’ he suggested, ‘on the law?’