Time and Tide (20 page)

Hew had some doubts on the wisdom of this, and Meg, when she heard it, cried hotly, ‘It is not the miniature, that moves my mother's milk!' She was stung by indignation into breaking off her tears. ‘It is Sandy Kintor!'

Hew exchanged glances with Giles. ‘What is it you have heard?'

‘Sandy is dead,' Meg replied desolate. ‘Sandy is dead. I heard the news from Maude, who heard it from the baxters at the inn. And he it was who made these little toys, when I first arrived at Kenly Green. Our father took me there, for solitude and rest, when I was sore afflicted with the falling fits. For it was months, in truth, before we found the medicines to keep the fits at bay, and I was frail and sick. And our father protected me, shut me up close and cloistered from the world.'

‘I did not know,' her brother answered awkwardly.

‘You were at the school, and at the college, then. And father did not want for you to know. Our coming caused a stir among the tenants of the land, until they were right used to it, and some did spurn and fear this rare, strange, haunted girl, and the nurse who healed her, Annie Law.'

Giles said, ‘Stuff!' indignantly, still loyal to Meg in retrospect. She smiled at him. ‘I do not blame them for it; they are country folk, and we met ignorance enough back in the town. I did not see it like that then, and was a sad and lonely bairn. But Sandy Kintor working at the mill had heard of my sad plight, for the mill is a fine gossip shop, where people pass the time whilst waiting for their turn. “I heard it at the mill,” is what the midwives say when they bring me the news. So doubtless it was broadcast at the mill that Matthew Cullan had a queer wee bairn, who best was to be pitied,
and at worst to be reviled. I was like poor Lilias, then. I know what it is like.'

‘You never were like Lilias,' insisted Giles. I will not hear you talk like that.'

‘Not in my heart, then understand me. But like her enough, in the eyes of the world,' replied Meg. ‘The miller soon did settle that, coming to the house with a basketful of toys, and his son and daughters that were closest to my age – Janet and Elspet and Sandy his boy, that no one but his mother ever knew as Alasdair. You must remember them, Hew!'

But Hew did not. They were part of Meg's childhood, not his.

‘And father, when he saw how much it pleased me, let me run and play with them, and paddle in the burn, and they became my friends. Sandy, most of all. He was the dearest boy. Subtle, and a dreamer. You would have liked him, as I think.'

‘I think that she was sweet on him,' her brother winked at Giles. He was trying to subdue the aching in his heart.

‘When I was six years old, I loved him, unequivocally,' Meg conceded openly. ‘But we were not long friends, for millers' bairns are not weans long, and he was put to work. He did not have the knack for it. He longed to go to sea.'

‘Childhood sweethearts!' smiled her husband. ‘This is news to me!'

‘In truth, I had forgotten it myself,' admitted Meg. ‘This whirligig,' she said to Lilias, who clutched it tightly in her hand, ‘will spin round in the wind.'

‘I confess I am astonished,' muttered Hew, ‘how quick the baxters were to spread the news.'

‘Rumour travels fast,' reflected Giles, ‘both good and bad.'

‘We do not like the baxters,' Lilias said complacently, spinning round the sails upon the wooden mill. ‘And they do not like him.' She pointed up at Hew.

‘What do you mean?' asked Meg. ‘They do not like Hew?'

‘He meddles in their gild. It is a thing they keep locked in a box.'

‘They are a gild. They do not keep the gild locked up in a box,' smiled Hew.

‘They do,' insisted Lilias. ‘It is a secret box.'

‘What does she mean, that you meddle?' pressed Meg.

Hew pulled a face. ‘I gave them some advice,' he admitted. ‘Legal advice. In short, they demanded it. It turned out awry, and was not well received.'

Lilias shook her head. ‘You meddled with the windmill. Now your miller's dead. And that should be a warning to you, so the baxters said.'

‘Who was it said that?' demanded Giles.

Lilias shook her head. ‘The baxters said it. Mixter maxter maks guid baxters. But we do not like the baxters, for they take our bread.'

‘It is the foolish chatter of a child,' concluded Hew.

‘She hears things; you should heed her, Hew,' his sister countered anxiously.

‘She has told us nothing we did not already know. Tam Brooke said the same thing at the green this afternoon. The baxters are unsettled, and they want the mill; the rumours start to spread, and that is what she heard.'

‘Even so,' muttered Giles, ‘you should take better care.'

‘What say you, that it was because of me that Sandy Kintor died?' demanded Hew.

‘We do not say that. You know that we do not say that.'

‘His was not the first suspicious death,' said Hew. ‘Then there is Henry Cairns.'

‘What of Henry Cairns?' asked Meg.

‘There, at least,' said Hew, ‘we steal a march on you. The miller Henry Cairns is taken sore and sick. Most likely poisoned, as I think.'

‘Poisoned, aye,' conceded Meg, ‘though by no human hand.'

Her brother stared at her. ‘What do you say?'

‘His wife came by this morning, Giles – I forgot to mention it – for vomiter and purgative, and told to me the tale. Henry has been eating mussels,' she replied.

‘Mussels?' echoed Hew.

‘Mussels would account for it,' Giles accepted sagely. ‘Trust a woman's tale.'

‘He bought them from a fishwife,' Meg explained, ‘on his way to kirk, a little pot of mussels, steaming in their broth. Effie told him not to, for Henry broke the Sabbath rule, in buying them that day. But he could not resist them, and drank them at a gulp. It was God's judgement, Effie said, that he defiled the sacrament. She did not care if Henry went to Hell, but she would not be dragged there in his wake. She is sour and cross, and Henry Cairns is mortally ashamed.'

‘Dear, dear, poor man,' said Giles. ‘Together with the horrors he has seen, he must think himself upon the brink of Hell. You see, Hew,' he went on, ‘there is no malice there, but foolish misfortune.'

‘I see,' Hew exclaimed, ‘that there are no secrets to be kept from Meg, while she is close confined; and I must marvel at it. How is it that you hear things, Meg? All things come to you!'

His sister smiled. ‘As Lilias, in her confinement, hears the baxters' secrets, and writes them in her song. She hears their secrets closest, for they take no note of her. Men do things; women know things. And that is the way of the world.'

The mill at Kenly Green was working still, for Sandy had resumed where his father had left off. Hew continued past it to the little cottage where the miller had lived with his wife, further up the burn. The cottage was clean swept and neat; the widow had contrived to keep everything in place. She welcomed him, with a deferential patience that he felt he did not deserve, bidding him to sit close by her at the fire, and feeding him with biscuit bread left over from the wake. The baxters had provided it, from kindness, free of charge.

‘Was that no' a'fy guid of them?'

Hew agreed it was. The sugary confection turned to powder in his mouth. The miller's eldest daughter had been married in the spring, and he had sent a hogshead from his cellars for the feast; he worried now it had not been enough. The mill house, he remembered, had been dressed with yellow flowers.

‘It is kind of you to come and see us,' said the miller's wife. Ellen was her name. And he had been afraid that he would not remember it.
Sandy, Ellen, Janet, John
, he whispered in his mind.

‘Your faither ay was kind to us,' she said.

‘Mistress . . . Ellen, I am sorry for your loss. If there is aught you need . . .' There would not be, of course. ‘The papers are drawn up today; the mill and cottage are secured, in Sandy's name and yours. My nephew is your landlord now, though that is but in name, for nothing else has changed.'

He cursed himself, for want of tact:
for nothing else has changed
.
Yet Ellen did not seem to notice it. ‘That is your sister's wean. How do they now?' she asked.

‘Well . . . they do well. They both are . . . quite well. Matthew will be christened, at the Holy Trinity.'

‘Aye? Then that is braw,' she approved. ‘Is he a bonny bairn?'

‘He is,' he answered desperately. ‘A fine and bonny bairn.'

‘And is it then his mammie, he looks after? Or has he mair a likeness o' his dad?'

‘Of both of them, I think.'

‘His mammie is a bonnie lass,' she said.

He found the small talk stifling, and could think of no way out. ‘I thought that I might have a word with Sandy at the mill.'

‘With Sandy?' Ellen echoed, baffled for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean with Alasdair.'

‘With Alasdair. Of course.'

‘Now that is a kindness, sir, and he will be pleased. That will please your brother, will it not?' She turned to her daughter Janet, who was standing by the fire, as though she wanted confirmation of the fact. Janet stirred a pan of pottage on the flame.

‘He will like it well enough,' she answered, Hew sensed disapprovingly.

‘He will like it more than that,' her mother said. ‘He liked your sister, too,' she turned again to Hew. He sensed that she was drifting now; he did not know if it was Sandy that she meant, or Alasdair.

Janet murmured, ‘
Maw
. . .'

‘Whisht. He does not mind an auld wife's tale. You dinna mind it, dae ye, son?'

Hew promised he did not. ‘They played thegither at the burn when they were bairns. A miller's boys are not bairns long. She likely has forgotten it.'

‘He does not want to hear it, maw,' the daughter sighed.

‘She has not forgotten it,' said Hew.

‘He never meant to have the mill. He never wanted it.'

‘Is it Sandy that you mean?'

The miller's wife meant Alasdair. ‘He does not want the windmill. And I am glad for that. They say there is a curse upon it. It brings death by drowning.'

‘I do not believe that, Ellen. Nor should you,' insisted Hew. ‘Your husband did not drown.'

‘Did he not, though?' she looked at him curiously. ‘His breath was stopped with corn. And is that not a drowning, after all?' Ellen dropped her eyes, and stared into the fire, as if she did not see him there. She did not say another word, and so at last her daughter answered for her with a sigh. ‘I think, sir, you should go, and see my brother at the mill.'

Ellen had been right, that her son was pleased to see him. It was for a reason Hew had not supposed. Alasdair was by the dam that ran into the mill. ‘There is something I must show you, sir.' He closed the sluice, that acted as a brake to stop the wheel. ‘Will you come into the mill?'

Inside, his younger brother looked up from the stones. ‘The wheel has stopped.'

‘I stopped it. Go and tell your mammie you are come hame for your supper.'

The small boy gawped at him. ‘But it isna suppertime.'

‘
Do it
, John.'

John lingered at the door. ‘Since Master Hew is come, will you not say about the pig?' he asked.

‘Whisht.' His brother frowned. ‘He has not come about the pig.'

‘What about the pig?' asked Hew.

‘We want to have a pig,' said John. ‘Tis common for a mill to have a pig, to eat the bran and husks.'

‘I do not see why not,' said Hew. ‘I will send you one.'

‘You mauma dae that! Or my mither will think, that I asked you for one.'

‘But you did,' Hew answered with a smile.

‘My mither disna like pigs. Her faither was a fisherman,' the boy explained. ‘She will not eat the pork.'

‘Many folk will not eat pork. Shut up about the pig,' his brother said.

‘Do you think that pigs can see the wind?' said John.

‘What do you mean?' asked Hew.

‘My faither said that pigs could see the wind. They see it coloured red,' the boy replied.

His brother said, ‘Tis you that will see red, if you will not be gone.'

The small boy turned and fled.

‘It killed my faither,' said the miller's son – he was the miller, now, thought Hew – ‘and it will not kill them.'

‘What did?'

‘What I am to show you. Wait, and I will close the hoppers at the top.' The miller stopped the flow of grain and blew away the dust of flour that had gathered on the stones. ‘The bottom is the bedrock,' he explained to Hew, ‘and it is firmly fixed. The top stone is the runner, and that is where she turns.'

‘I see it,' answered Hew.

‘Yet what you do not see, is that the runner has been dressed with a hundred little grooves, these furrows that are cut in it; they shear the grain like scissors, so it is not crushed. The sharpness of the cutting is what turns the corn to flour.'

Hew saw, and understood.

‘These little cuts grow blunt, and the stone must be resurfaced, once or twice a month. It is a skilled and careful task. My faither had the art, as I myself have not, so I must use a stone dresser, a pickman, as we call them, for picking out the grooves. The millstones are expensive, and are carefully preserved. They are bought in from abroad. The best are Cullin stones.'

‘Cullan?' queried Hew.

‘It is a place that they come from, on the river Rhine.'

‘Cologne, possibly?'

‘I do not ken it, sir. But they come from across the sea, and are worth a lot. Now it is essential, that the stones do not grind dry, that is to say, they must not be set too close, or without a grain between them. For one thing, it might strike a spark, and set the mill on fire. But more than that, it hurts the stone. A moment's rubbing dry shows more wear on the millstone than several weeks of grinding. And for that reason every miller has a bell tied to the hoppers with a rope, that will ring to warn him if the grain is running low, that he can keep them filled, when he cannot spare a boy to watch them all the while. My youngest brother has the task of heeding to the bell, and checking that the corn runs free, and in a steady stream. It is a tedious thing, and yet it is a vital one, that I have done myself, and God help the bairn who chanced to fall asleep at it, and had a rude awakening from his dreams. No matter that; it comes to John, as once it came to me. A miller kens his millstones. He knows them by their hum, the sweetness of their song when they are running true. And no one knew them better than my faither did. Well, sir, when my faither went to speak with Robert Wood, they went together to his mill. My faither looked over the stones. He told me they were badly worn, and that there was a deal of damage to the grooves, as though they had been badly set, and left to grind to dust. He said the same to Robert Wood. And Robert Wood the landlord swore the stones were freshly dressed, the day before the miller died, and were not turned since.'