The Merchant's Mark (28 page)

Maistre Pierre stirred on the bench beside Gil. ‘This treasure. Some of it was, I take it,’ he said, picking his words with care, ‘a loan from the Hospitallers to the late
King?’ An interesting assumption, thought Gil. ‘I think they want it back.’

‘Seems likely,’ agreed Sinclair.

‘I also think,’ continued the mason, ‘if it is hid in the obvious place, that we need to get it out before work begins in the morning.’

Sinclair gave him a sharp look, then nodded. ‘Also likely. I’d need proof the Order’s looking for it, of course.’

‘I think Johan can give you that,’ interposed Gil.

Sinclair looked round the room, and rose to his feet.

‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll go and find this Johan, will we? Where is he, in the Skelly Matt?’

The sky was still greenish to the west, but overhead it was dark, and the moon had not yet risen. The torches made little difference, and the shadows of the pinescented timber
stacks around the church jumped distractingly.

‘We do better without,’ said Johan, tramping his out underfoot. ‘Now where?’

‘The roof,’ said Sinclair.

The Hospitaller looked upwards, into the web of poles. ‘You mean we go up the scaffolding?’

‘There’s a ladder in the lodge,’ said Robison, ‘and another within the kirk.’

Behind him the musician eyed the towering bulk of the building in its cloak of timbers, and turned away.

‘Which part of the roof?’ asked Maistre Pierre. ‘Above the vault?’

‘No,’ said Sinclair. He grinned, in the leaping light of the torch in Robison’s grasp. ‘I’ll tell you no more. It’s well protected. If you’re the
craftsman I think you are, you’ll find it, and if you can find it, you can take the St Johns share. But mind, the rest’s to stay where it is, till it suits me to gie it ower.’

‘We’ll need lanterns,’ said Gil, ‘rather than torches.’

‘You come too?’ said Maistre Pierre doubtfully. ‘I cannot take two who are new to scaffolding.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ said Gil. ‘My brothers and I climbed every tree from Glassford to Carscallan.’

‘I also,’ said Johan.

Balthasar returned across the building site with three lanterns in his arms.

‘From the Skelly Matt,’ he said, distributing these. ‘Your dog’s fair creating, maister. Your man says he’s no sure how long he can hold him.’

‘Well,’ said Maistre Pierre, lighting the candle from his lantern at Robison’s torch. He fitted it back on to the spike and closed the trap. ‘Let us go, then, and solve
this puzzle we are set.’

The door of the church opened quietly when Gil lifted the latch. They stepped in, and it swung shut behind them with a boom which reverberated in what seemed like a vast,
draughty space smelling of incense and pine resin. The floor was flagged; when Gil held his lantern up the vault of the aisle where they stood glowed in the dim light, but beyond the pillars the
nave vanished upward into darkness, with a faint, distant hint of high scaffolding. How do the poles stay up there? wondered Gil.

‘
Mon Dieu
, the carving!’ exclaimed Maistre Pierre. He held his own lantern high and turned, staring up at the walls. Pillar, vault, arch and architrave, capital and springer
were carved into elaborate designs in high relief which seemed to move as the light passed over them.

‘Here is a ladder,’ said Johan. Gil craned to see where he was pointing. At the top of the wall-pillar beside the door was a complex scene: the crucified Christ surrounded by many
figures. There was something which might be a ladder at one side.

‘That is a Descent from the Cross,’ said the mason authoritatively from behind Gil. ‘It will not reveal where we must ascend. But I think you are right, my friend, we look at
the carvings. One of these moral jewels will tell us what we need to know.’

‘How many weeks do we have?’ asked Gil, looking round. ‘There must be thousands.’

‘We start here,’ said the mason, ‘and keep looking.’

They moved slowly eastward, pausing to identify each of the carvings so far as possible. Some were obvious, versions of the familiar scenes to be found in any church; others were more enigmatic.
There were angels enough to fill seven heavens, Gil thought, and Green Men to match them, but what was an elephant doing here?

‘Here is a Dance of Death,’ said Maistre Pierre, gazing upwards at an elaborately worked arch. ‘Very handsome drafting. Look how it fills the spaces.’

‘There Death takes a man with a spade,’ said Johan, pointing again. ‘Is the money perhaps buried beneath here?’

‘Sinclair said it was in the roof,’ said Gil.

Apart from their voices and footsteps, the church was quiet, but he found himself looking uneasily over his shoulder. Perhaps it was the eyes of all the Green Men, leering out of their foliage
in the lantern-light, that made him feel threatened.

‘What ever does this signify?’ he asked, pausing before the Lady Altar. ‘A falling angel, bound with a rope?’

The rope, by this light, looked as if one could lift it and knot the ends.

‘I cannot say,’ said Maistre Pierre at his shoulder.

‘The pillars,’ said Johan. They turned round, to see him staring to right and left. ‘Are these the pillars? I have heard much of them.’

‘Ah, mon Dieu,’
said Maistre Pierre again. He moved forward as if drawn by a cord, and bent to the southern pillar, holding his lantern close to the ornament and muttering
incoherently. ‘Dragons – and the vines – ah, the detail! This stone, it shapes like butter, it must be a dream to work!’

‘What’s that beyond the pillar?’ Gil asked. ‘Is it stairs?’

‘They go down, not up,’ said Johan.

‘Then so shall we,’ said the mason, dragging himself reluctantly away from the pillar. ‘Oh, and see, there is a sacrifice of Isaac on the capital. Now what is down
here?’

The flight went down steeply, into darkness only slightly relieved by Maistre Pierre’s lantern. Gil found himself hesitating at the top of the stairs, his uneasy feeling increasing. He
opened the horn window of his own lantern and held it up, looking about him, but its light went no more than a few feet.

‘You feel it too?’ said Johan beside him.

‘Come and look,’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘It is the drawing-loft.’

‘Loft?’ questioned Gil, setting foot on the stair. ‘Down here?’

‘How else should I call it?’

The chamber at the bottom of the stairs was at least half the size of the nave. It was much plainer, with only one or two carvings visible, and seemed to suffer from a lack of certainty about
its purpose, since it boasted an altar with piscina and aumbry and also a fireplace. As Johan followed Gil off the awkward steps and into the chamber, the mason looked round from his intent
scrutiny of the north wall.

‘See, it is the working drawings.’ He gestured at the curves and counter-curves scratched into the whitewashed surface. ‘That,’ he stabbed with one big forefinger,
‘is the profile for the east window tracery, I noticed it in particular. And here is the outline for that wall-pillar, the one that has the Descent on its capital.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Gil. ‘What else is there?’

‘It is many drawings, one on top of another,’ observed Johan. Maistre Pierre, his nose inches from the wall, did not reply. Gil set off round the room, finding one or two more
drawings which would have been better obliterated before the church was handed over, and paused in front of the two carvings by the altar.

‘Ah,’ said Maistre Pierre at last. ‘I see. It is a space at the foot of the vault.’

‘What is?’ Gil came over to look.

‘This sketch here.’ The forefinger stabbed again. ‘You see, here the vault, here the wall-head, and this is the string-course – the ornamental band along the wall-head.
And
here
, in this other drawing, we have a space behind the string-course.’

‘Do we?’ said Gil, peering at the scratches. ‘I can’t read it, Pierre.’

‘I can,’ said Johan unexpectedly, ‘but where is it? There is a lot of that string-course. It goes right round the church, does it not?’

‘Now there I might be able to help,’ said Gil. He returned to the altar. ‘See this? The arms of the founder – old Sinclair, this lord’s father –’

‘The engrailed cross. Yes, it is everywhere up above,’ agreed Maistre Pierre. ‘But what is that heart doing there? That is Douglas, surely?’

‘That’s right. Sir William’s first wife was a Douglas lady, I believe. Aye, it’s a heart.
Ubi thesaurus– Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also,’
Gil quoted, and suddenly recalled the harper saying the same thing. Could this be what McIan meant, he wondered, rather than some cryptic observation about my marriage? ‘If
we can find a heart up above too, maybe the treasure will be close by. I’ve seen none so far, but perhaps in the south aisle?’

‘It is worth the try,’ said Johan after a moment.

Maistre Pierre looked back at the scratches on the wall. ‘There is no other hint,’ he admitted, ‘and this one comes from St Matthew’s evangel. If we find no heart, we
must seek all about the string-course. Assuming it is all within reach of the scaffolding.’

At the top of the stairs, the darkness receded unwillingly from their lanterns. Gil stretched his ears, wondering if he had heard something move elsewhere in the building, or imagined it.
Maistre Pierre held the light to the window arch, and shook his head.

‘I never saw plants like that,’ he said. ‘And yet the carving is good, as if it is a true portrait. What are they meant for, do you think?’

‘Who knows?’ Gil stared at the carved leaves flopping back around what seemed to be fat heads of grain, then looked around. A bagpiper. An inscribed quotation from – from
– the book of Esdras, his memory supplied. What seemed to be the seven virtuous actions, though something was out of key about them. He moved on. On the other side of the virtues,
appropriately enough, the seven deadly sins, and in the window –

‘Ah!’

‘You found?’ asked Johan, and joined him.
‘Ach, ja
, is a heart.’

‘An angel holding a heart,’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘So the treasure must be aloft, on angel wings.’ He shone his lantern on the other corner of the window-embrasure.
‘And here we have Moses, if I do not mistake, with the tablets of the commandments, and on his head the horns of enlightenment. It fits. It fits well.’

‘Is here?’ Johan looked doubtfully at the vault of the aisle above them.

‘No,’ said Maistre Pierre, ‘in the roof of the nave, and next to the rib above this one.’

‘And how do we get to it?’ asked Gil. ‘Fly into the rafters, like St Christina the Astonishing?’

‘It is a vault, not rafters. Maister Robison spoke of a ladder.’

They found the ladder at the west end of the building, propped against the lowest levels of a tower of scaffolding which rose up into the dark. Maistre Pierre looked at it with disapproval, and
clicked his tongue.

‘I took him for a better craftsman,’ he said. ‘One does not leave the ladder like this to tempt the idle.’

‘This rises up here, at this end,’ said Johan. ‘We wish to be yonder.’ He waved his free hand eastward.

The mason gestured into the roof, just as airily. ‘The church is in use. They do not wish to fill it with Eastland logs. This tower section is only to go up by – you can see from
outside that further along, the poles come in at the clerestory and cross above the nave. There are no poles at floor level, so the clerks may make processions when they need to.’ He was
testing all the bindings on the structure within his reach as he spoke. ‘Now, we climb up. I go first, you follow, my friend, and then Gilbert. Follow me closely,’ he said, very
seriously, ‘and watch where I put my feet and my hands. And leave the lantern,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘if you cannot climb with it.’

He set off up the ladder with surprising nimbleness for such a big man, with one hand on the rungs, carrying the lantern in the other. Johan put one foot on the bottom rung, paused, put the
lantern on the ground, and followed him cautiously. Gil gave him time to get to the first of the creaking wattle platforms, eight feet off the ground, then stripped off his short gown and dropped
it by the foot of the ladder, thinking its folds would impede his movements, laid his sword on top of it and climbed up in his turn, taking his own lantern. As he found his footing on the platform
at the top, Maistre Pierre spoke from the other side of the building.

‘Three more to go. The next ladder is over here.’

Gil could see it, lit by the mason’s lantern, rising into the dark.

‘I –’ said Johan.

‘What is it?’ asked Gil. The man was rigid beside him, his arms held away from his sides. ‘Is it too high?’

‘N-no,’ said Johan with difficulty. ‘I – I –’

‘You must go back,’ said Maistre Pierre, striding across the hurdles. The whole structure bounced resonantly. Gil braced his feet and swayed with the movement, but Johan cried out
and dropped to his knees. ‘I have seen this before. It is the balance,’ the mason said to Gil, and bent over the kneeling Hospitaller. ‘Some cannot take it. Like seasickness.
Come, man. The ladder is here. Not far.’

Johan was persuaded on to the ladder, where he clung for a moment.

‘I am sorry!’ he gasped, and scrambled downwards. At the foot he stepped on to the flagstones and stood with one hand to his head, clinging to the ladder with the other.

‘You must stay here,’ said Maistre Pierre, bending to look at him over the edge of the wicker panels, ‘sword in hand, to defend us from attack. Can you do that,
brother?’

‘I can,’ said Johan, releasing his grip of the ladder. He nodded, gasping a little, the lantern-light gleaming on the pale skin of his brow. ‘I can.’

Maistre Pierre watched him for a moment, then nodded and returned to the next ladder, Gil following him.

‘Maybe you go first, Gilbert,’ he said. ‘If I fall on you, we neither of us survive.’

They climbed up, and up again, and then again. It was strange climbing into the dark. The small light from the lanterns illumined the wooden rungs and glimmered faintly on the scaffolding poles
and their rope lashings, but beyond them it struggled to touch anything in the void. Maistre Pierre came off the fourth ladder, looked about him, and set off with a confident, careful step along
the hurdles. Gil followed him trustfully, walking in the small patch of wickerwork visible around his lantern, aware that if he missed his step there was a long flight in the dark to the same
judgement which Rob now faced.