Authors: Pat McIntosh
‘So what do we know, maister?’ asked Lowrie.
‘I’ve told you often enough,’ said Gil, ‘use my name. We’re both sons of the College of Glasgow, whatever else is between us.’ He used his eating-knife to cut the meat on his platter into smaller pieces, while Lowrie muttered something in embarrassment. ‘We’re still at the stage where we have a great handful of facts which might or might not be related, and no idea how they join up. One lassie was freed from the Cross in the middle of the night, by one or more people, and then vanished in her shift. Nobody seems to have heard of any friends she might have hereabouts, and nobody admits to having seen her.’
‘Why?’ prompted Alys.
‘We don’t know that either.’
‘The reason,’ said Catherine in her elegant toothless French, ‘that the girl was freed and has vanished may indicate the person who freed her.’
‘Very true, madame,’ agreed Gil, and translated quickly for Lowrie, ‘but I’d be grateful for hearing anything at all about her.’
‘And the other lassie,’ said Alys. ‘Peg, is that her name?’
‘Last seen about ten o’clock leaving the Trindle, turned up dead and bound to the Cross wearing Annie Gibb’s sacking gown and her own plaid—’
‘Then Annie had more to wear than her shift,’ said Alys. ‘Or she would have kept the plaid, rather than leave it with a dead woman.’ She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, swallowed, and said, ‘What time did you think Peg had been left there?’
‘Not long after she died, your father reckoned.’
‘I thought that was the cord,’ said Lowrie.
‘Aye, you’re right,’ agreed Gil, running the conversation through his mind again. ‘He said the cord was in place before she began to stiffen.’
‘Could it have been,’ Alys checked, grimaced, and went on, ‘could she have been throttled before she was tied to the Cross?’
‘Mai— Gil thought not,’ said Lowrie, ‘because of the way her hair was caught under the cord.’
‘So she was killed, and then stripped and tied to the Cross, and then throttled,’ said Alys, ‘all before she began to stiffen, although not necessarily all in one set of actions.’
‘If the woman who is dead,’ pronounced Catherine, ‘was killed merely in order to distract the demoiselle Gibb’s friends, that is a great crime. If she was killed by another person, for some other reason, then the demoiselle was fortunate not to encounter the killer herself.’
‘The town must have been going like a fair last night,’ Gil said wryly. ‘The prentices had a battle appointed and all, High Street, Drygate and Stablegreen.’
‘Could some of them have killed Peg?’ Alys asked. ‘Or spirited Annie Gibb away?’
‘I’d not ha thought it,’ Gil said. ‘The night battles aye used to be a matter of stalking, of pursuit and capture. We never involved the townsfolk if we could help it. Lowrie, was it the same when you were a bejant?’
‘It was,’ agreed Lowrie, his first year at the College much more recently behind him. ‘Is it worth speaking to Maister Mason’s fellow Luke? Or to young Berthold?’ He checked, his eyebrows going up. ‘Did Maister Mason not say Berthold was useless the day? That sounds as if he was abroad last night, for certain.’
‘Then you may both go down there after the dinner,’ said Alys, ‘and speak to them.’
Opposite her, Catherine looked disapproving, but said nothing. It was useless, Gil knew, to suggest Alys came too. They had both visited formally since the marriage, but Ealasaidh did not encourage dropping in.
The household at the White Castle had apparently dined later than that at the Mermaiden, and was still at table when Gil knocked on the broad planks of the door. Luke opened it, and greeted them with a wide grin.
‘Come away in, Maister Gil! That is—’ He looked over his shoulder, but his master endorsed the invitation from his great chair at the head of the board.
‘Yes, yes, come away in, Gilbert, take a seat! We have eaten most of the food, but you will take an oatcake and a mouthful of ale? Usquebae? Lowrie, you will take something too?’
Gil bowed to Ealasaidh where she sat tall and forbidding at Maistre Pierre’s right hand, and flourished his hat in a general greeting to the rest of the household ranged along the great board. Apart from Luke, now waiting to take their plaids, young Berthold and the mason’s older man Thomas were the only familiar faces; four women in various forms of the dress of the Highlands stared at him with what seemed like faint hostility. Berthold, on the other hand, was looking terrified. What has the boy been up to, thought Gil, accepting a beaker of ale and a buttered oatcake.
‘What progress have you made?’ his father-in-law was asking him. ‘Is there no trace of the missing lady?’
‘And is that right,’ said Ealasaidh disapprovingly, ‘that she does not wash herself nor comb her hair since her man died?’
‘Little progress.’ Yet again, Gil summarised what he had learned that afternoon, while the four Erschewomen whispered in their own language and Luke and Thomas craned to hear him. Both Maistre Pierre and his wife exclaimed over the thefts from the Almoner’s stores.
‘But does he not guard the place?’ the mason wondered. ‘How do the goods vanish?’
‘Is the one who died the thief, perhaps,’ suggested Ealasaidh, ‘or was she maybe meeting them at the wrong moment, the way they were killing her?’
‘That was what Alys thought, too,’ Gil said, and saw her face darken. What was it between the two of them, he wondered. ‘I don’t think there’s any connection, myself, but I’ll keep an open mind. What I would like, Pierre, is a word wi Luke.’ Further down the table, the boy’s expression changed. ‘I think he was abroad last night, and Berthold too. I’d like to hear if they saw anything – or nothing, for that matter.’
‘Willingly,’ said their master, ‘though I must still translate for Berthold, unless you think you may understand him, Lowrie?’
‘I’d be grateful, maister,’ said Lowrie. ‘He’s grasped a few instructions by now, but I’d not ken where to start asking him something like this.’
Luke, summoned from his place at the board to talk more privately by the hearth, looked apprehensive but admitted readily enough that he had been part of the night’s battle.
‘Who else was out?’ Gil asked. The boy considered, tugging at his untidy thatch of hair, his blue knitted bonnet clamped under the other arm.
‘There was all the High Street,’ he reckoned up, ‘and the Drygate, and the Stablegreen. There’s no so many of the Stablegreen,’ he expanded, ‘they mostly allies themselves wi the Drygate when we’ve a battle. It wasny serious, see, it was just a chase. There was rules.’
‘What were they?’ Gil recalled the distinction from his youth. A chase with rules usually meant there was no fighting, or at least no serious fighting; there might be a target to defend or capture, or some territory to be crossed without being caught, but always there was the Watch to be avoided.
‘We was to start at the Bell o’ the Brae and take the Girth Cross up at the Wyndhead,’ said Luke, ‘seeing there was a moon, but honest, Maister Gil, none o us saw aught o a lady in her shift, and she’d ha showed up in the moonlight, sure she would.’
‘Did you see anybody at all moving about the Wyndhead?’ Luke shook his head. ‘Not on the Drygate, Rottenrow, the Stablegreen?’
‘It was late, Maister Gil. Folk was a’ gone hame by then. I got a glimp’ o two fellows,’ the boy admitted, ‘came out o Rottenrow, turned up by the Stablegreen. Quite old, I’d say, maybe past twenty.’
Gil, who had turned twenty-eight last January, did not comment, but asked, ‘How were they clad?’
‘Och, they both had short gowns and boots on, and hats wi feathers. Gentry, for sure. We let them by, they were none o our mind.’
‘Anyone else abroad in the night?’ And that was likely the Muir brothers, he thought.
‘I’ve no notion,’ said Luke, ‘for we took the Cross just after that, and the Drygate was trying to get us off it.’
‘And Berthold was wi you the whole time?’
The boy looked uneasy, and glanced at his fellow where he still sat at the long board.
‘I couldny say that,’ he confessed with reluctance, ‘for it’s hard to keep track o one face in a scuffle. He was at my back afore we took the Cross, I ken that, but after they knocked us off I lost sight o him. He cam home a wee while after me,’ he added more confidently, ‘and gaed straight to his bed, but he’s maybe had a fright, or no liked the fighting, or something, for he’s no been great company the day, hardly had a word to say for hissel. Look at him now, like a coney in the heather.’
Berthold, summoned in his turn, did indeed resemble a cornered rabbit, all huge eyes and trembling limbs. He was about fourteen, a slight blond boy with fine features and short-sighted blue eyes. Gil surveyed him with sympathy; it was only a few months since the boy’s father and uncle had been killed, leaving him stranded here in a strange country, without protection, unable to speak Scots. Currently he was supposed to be learning the language under Maistre Pierre’s auspices, though Gil thought most of the teaching came in fact from Luke. Now, questioned in High Dutch, he answered hesitantly, shaking his head.
‘He says he was at the battle,’ Maistre Pierre reported, ‘beside Luke, but saw no person who was not involved in the game.’ He posed another question, and Berthold shook his head again. ‘He says he was with Luke the whole time, and saw what he saw.’
‘These answers are not compatible,’ Gil said thoughtfully. ‘Why did he come in after Luke? Where was he just before that?’
A quick glance towards Luke, now helping the Ersche maidservants take down the table, and a muttered answer. ‘Nowhere,’ translated Maistre Pierre sceptically.
‘Ask him, what did he see?’
Berthold understood that. Gil understood his answer, mostly from the tone of panic fear:
‘Nein, nein, ich habe nichts gesehen, nichts!’
‘Does he ken what happens to boys who tell lies?’ asked Lowrie. Berthold bent his head, crossing himself with a trembling hand, muttering that he did know.
Gil paused, considering what to ask next, and was forestalled by a knocking at the door. Startled, he looked at Maistre Pierre, who shrugged his broad shoulders. Thomas was already lifting the latch.
‘Is Maister Cunningham within?’ A strange voice, a glimpse of a blue gown of office. ‘They tellt me at his own house he was here. He’s sent for, to St Mungo’s. Another death. One of the vergers.’
‘Sheer chance that I found him,’ said Maister Sim.
‘Gil, you have to find what’s doing this,’ expostulated the Sub-Dean. ‘It’s no good for the kirk!’
‘Tell me again.’ Gil looked down at Maistre Pierre’s head, bent over the recumbent body of the irritating Barnabas at the foot of the steps which led down to this cross-aisle. Candlelight leapt round them, chasing the shadows between the arches, glittering on the water pooled round the verger’s booted feet and the skirts of his gown. ‘He was
in
the well? Here inside the Cathedral? How far in?’
‘No that far down,’ admitted Maister Sim. ‘He’d wedged on the bucket, see. We’d the Deil’s,’ he bit off the phrase and crossed himself, with an apologetic glance at the Virgin and Child on their pillar near the door of the lower church, ‘we’d a deal o trouble to haul him out, and at first we took it there’d been an accident o some sort, and then we saw—’
‘This,’ agreed Maistre Pierre grimly, his big blunt fingers going to the corpse’s neck. He lifted the end of the cord which hung over the high blue collar, and began to ease it away from the swollen flesh. ‘I think it the same kind as was used on that poor girl last night, and this time it is certainly what killed the man.’
‘So the same person?’ said the Sub-Dean. He was striding about the arcaded space at the top of the steps, his dark red gown swirling round him, slapping at the honey-coloured pillars with the pair of embroidered gloves in his right hand; Gil estimated they had cost as much as he could earn in a week, but Henderson was oblivious to the damage he might be doing to the stitchwork. The head verger, a spare foxy sensible man, stood grimly by. Two more vergers were keeping out of the way by the Chapter House door and the Dean’s secretary, scrawny and nervous in black, lurked anxiously in the shadow of a pillar. ‘Sim’s right, we have to put a stop to this, Blacader willny be pleased at all. Fast as you like, Gil, fast as you like.’ He paused in mid-swing, mouth open. ‘Was he throttled here in the Lower Kirk or was he brought in from elsewhere? Do we ha sacrilege? Do we ha desecration? Tell me that, Gil, answer me now! Where should he ha been, Galston?’
‘He was assigned to the Sub-Almoner this afternoon, Dean,’ said the head verger impassively.
‘He was dead before he went in the well, that much I can say,’ pronounced Maistre Pierre firmly. ‘His head was wedged in the bucket, which held water, Sim tells me, but he has not drowned.’
‘How can you tell?’ Lowrie asked from the shadows. Maistre Pierre glanced up at him, then pressed firmly on the corpse’s chest. Small bubbles gathered at the nostrils and the corners of the empurpled mouth.
‘There is yet air in his lungs,’ the mason said, ‘not water. His last breath—’
‘Euch!’ said Henderson; the gloves flapped as he crossed himself. ‘So he might ha been slain outside the kirk?’
‘He might,’ conceded the mason. He reached up and dislodged one of the fat creamy candles from the pricket-stand by his head and held it closer to the corpse, tilting it so that the wax dripped onto the tiled floor rather than his hand and ignoring the sharp intake of breath from all three vergers. ‘Where should he have been this past few hours?’
‘Right, so he was slain outside St Mungo’s,’ said the Sub-Dean with determination, ‘but we still owe it him to find out who slew him. No to mention who put him down our well. Let me hear as soon as you’ve sorted this, Gil,’ he said, and left, his secretary scurrying after him. Fading daylight flooded in as he hauled the heavy door open, diminished as it swung behind him. The latch clinked down as the secretary reached it with a faint bleat of dismay, and all the candle flames ducked and leapt up again, those in the pricket-stand as well as the banks of lights round the Lady Chapel and the tomb of St Mungo away among the treelike columns. Galston the head verger signalled to his minions, and one of them moved to check the lights, pinching out those which had begun to gutter.