The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to do it at all if you don’t want to! Shall we head on upstairs? I think this might have been a living space of some kind, if the old kitchen and storerooms are downstairs from here, anyway.’

  He points across the room to the outer wall, the one adjoining the walled garden, where a huge stone fireplace stands, quite empty. Up above it, though, there is yet another armorial panel, much less worn than those outside. They can make out a boat with a furled sail and oars, two lions and, in the top right-hand quadrant, a fish and what might be a hand, although time has reduced it to an indeterminate blob.

  ‘McNeill,’ she says.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Daisy shrugs. ‘I remember stuff like that. I’m a history geek.’

  ‘You don’t look very geeky to me.’

  Before she can respond, he heads for the stair again and she follows him. There are two more floors above this one, but, mercifully, this is the most cluttered. In the room above, they find a few more boxes and chests, and a wooden bedstead, in solid oak.

  ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Would you look at this, Daisy!’

  ‘Is it really as old as it looks?’

  ‘I should say so.’ He runs his fingers over it, over the multitude of carvings. She can see leaves with birds half hidden among them, flowers – roses and thistles – and foliate heads of some kind. ‘God alone knows how they got it up here. Must have come up in bits. But why wouldn’t you use something like this if you were lucky enough to possess it?’

  ‘Maybe my grandmother found it intimidating. She was here on her own most of the time.’

  ‘I suppose so. But it would take a normal mattress. It’s big, but if you set it up it would be more chunky than anything else. A sturdy bed. Antique beds tend to be a bit smaller than our king-size things.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure I’d want to sleep up here, though. Not the way it is now.’

  ‘No. Well, there is that.’

  There’s not much more in the room, except for a low and unobtrusive doorway leading to a narrow back staircase, corkscrewing off into darkness.

  ‘A secret stair. Maybe that leads down to the doorway at the seaward side of the house,’ she ventures.

  ‘Probably. I suppose they would need more than one way out in case of unwelcome visitors. You could cover this with tapestry or whatever and nobody would know it was here.’

  They leave the bed behind and head upstairs again. Hector seems to have got used to the spiral stairs and happily gallops ahead of them. They find themselves in a high room, with more windows looking out onto land and sea. There’s a small stone fireplace, an oak press and a high-backed oak chair, both with rudimentary carvings of stylised oak and ivy leaves, and an empty stone closet in one corner.

  ‘A privy maybe. Renaissance en suite. Do you know that they used to keep their clothes in them because the smell of pee killed the bugs? Or so they thought.’

  ‘What a mine of information you are, Daisy!’

  ‘Mostly useless.’

  A sudden breeze seems to have got up, a squall blowing in from the sea as it so often does. You can feel it buffeting walls and windows, finding a way into the room, the damp smell of salt and seaweed everywhere.

  No, she thinks, I wouldn’t like to sleep up here at all. It would be a lonely place to be. The word comes drifting into her mind and stays there. Lonely. Somebody was lonely up here. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but it’s true, nevertheless.

  Beyond this room, the stairs go on only a little way until they stop at a wooden trapdoor, which no doubt emerges onto the battlements at the top of the tower.

  ‘We’ll save that for another day,’ Cal says, to her relief. ‘We’d need to get a ladder up here.’

  Emboldened, they head downstairs and keep going, below the level of the rest of the tower, where they find what must once have been a kitchen. There’s another enormous stone fireplace, and a little warren of other rooms branching off, storerooms probably. The whole place smells damp. It’s a basement rather than a cellar. There are windows, but they are high up in the walls and only a little light filters in. It’s a gloomy place and nobody would want to linger long here. The stone floor exudes coldness and in parts seems to be bedrock, part of the hillside upon which the tower is built, rather than any kind of flagstones.

  ‘No dungeons,’ she says. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Do you want to look at some of the pictures?’

  A sort of exhaustion seems to have possessed her. There’s so much to take in. But she agrees. ‘Why not? We have to start somewhere, don’t we?’

  They head upstairs, back into the main room, where Cal hauls one of the piles of pictures away from the wall. A large and leggy spider scuttles away, making both of them jump back.

  ‘You too, eh?’ he says.

  ‘I never kill them if I can help it, but they scare me. They’re a lot worse dead than alive, though.’

  Hector is very interested in the spider. He pursues it across the floor but it scuttles behind one of the tea chests. He whines at it for a little while, but then gives up and comes back to look at the pictures.

  ‘They only make you sick, Hector,’ says Cal, rubbing his ears. ‘Then you eat them again.’

  The pictures are a mixed bunch: there are old prints, foxed landscape engravings mostly, in heavy black frames. There are a couple of Victorian woolwork pictures, cornucopias of flowers, that seem to have survived unscathed, very dusty but well framed and under glass.

  ‘Not my thing, but maybe yours,’ Cal remarks in passing.

  ‘I like them a lot. People buy them to turn into cushions sometimes. Or to cover stools and chair seats.’

  There is an exceedingly ugly portrait of a military man, a print done in a beautiful and very detailed stipple engraving. It seems a waste of such an effective technique on such an ugly person. Cal has no hesitation in saying so. Daisy has been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘All the same, it’s probably worth quite a bit,’ he says. ‘Look – Bartolozzi. That’s a very good name.’

  ‘So it is. And I won’t mind selling it.’

  She waits for him to say, ‘I could maybe sell it for you’, but he doesn’t.

  There are several landscapes in oils, too grubby for it to be immediately obvious whether they are collectable or not. There are cows, drinking from a burn, and a stag on a high hill. There is a pair of pictures of Highland lochs in gilded frames. None of them seems very old or particularly interesting. But then, he slides out a smallish picture from the back of the pile. It is wrapped in black silk, from which it emerges in glorious colour.

  Even in this low light, the picture is stunning.

  The frame is almost bigger than the canvas, in carved and gilded wood, with scrolls and leaves and a riot of lily flowers, garlanded round it. It is clear that this has been a precious thing. It is a portrait of a very young woman, eighteen or nineteen years old perhaps, gazing straight out at the artist, pensively and with only the faintest smile. Nevertheless, she is not shy of him. There is a certain warmth in her gaze.

  She has red hair, what you can see of it, because it is quite severely parted in the centre and then swept up and back into a head-dress that is floral in some way, perhaps with embroidered or ribboned flowers with jewelled centres, the edges ornamented with tiny pearls, freshwater pearls maybe, and a single pearl hanging down in the very centre of her parting. You can actually see the gentle frizz of hair that has escaped confinement, just a shadow of it on the sides of her forehead. The skill of this seems extraordinary to Daisy.

  The girl has no earrings, but she does have a short necklace of larger pearls, just visible in the ‘v’ of her gown, the high white collar curving up and outwards, neatly pleated and with a tiny ornate lace trim, like tatting, along the edge, the whole thing framing her face, intensifying her pretti
ness. There is all the freshness of youth about her: a high forehead, wide-set, ingenuous brown eyes, straight nose, a firm rosebud mouth. Over that fresh, white, inner garment, she is wearing a vivid yellow bodice, startling in the intensity of its colour, some kind of textured silk, closely fitted, with the seams braided for emphasis and with – when you look more closely – tiny fleurs de lys embroidered onto the fabric. You can just see the way it buttons up the front, the round buttons constructed of the same braid, but this is not a full-length portrait, which is somehow tantalising. The skirt is almost certainly in the same gorgeous fabric. Her left hand is raised across her body, just below the full curve of her breast, and the hand has all the smoothness of youth about it. Beneath the edge of her sleeve, more pleated silk or satin trim peeps out, softening her wrist. She is holding a spray of white lilies, their yellow centres reflecting the colours of her gown. They are so glowing, so vibrant, that you can almost smell them.

  She looks like a young woman of great character. No shrinking violet she.

  It is one of the most beautiful pictures Daisy has ever seen.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Look at her. Would you just look at her!’

  Cal is examining the canvas but there seems to be no signature of any kind.

  ‘Shall we take it down into the light?’ he asks, tentatively.

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. We can’t leave her here, can we? Let’s take her into the light.’

  TWELVE

  1588

  He had almost forgotten what it was like to sleep in reasonable peace and security. First, the woman called Beathag had taken them outside to a place where a vigorous stream ran down from the slopes above the house and collected in an arrangement of stone cisterns. Here, she encouraged them – or perhaps briskly instructed might be a better description – to shed their clothes and immerse themselves fully in the cold water at the very bottom of the slope, before it drained away into the sea. Their clothes were so filthy that they had become moulded to their bodies, and in places, skin came away with fabric. She had rolled up her sleeves and pushed their heads brusquely below the surface, like a violent baptism. Kill or cure, Mateo thought, as he came up spluttering, worried about this renewed onslaught on Francisco’s constitution. But at least if it killed them, they would go to their God in cleanliness. Francisco merely did as he was told. He seemed too weak to protest. Then as they emerged pink and shivering, Beathag, who seemed to be not at all disconcerted by the sight of two naked young men, had wrapped them in rough linen sheets and instructed them in words, and in mime, to rub themselves dry and warm.

  Before she took their foul clothes away, however, Mateo managed to extract his last and most precious item from the inner folds of his linen undershirt. It was a gold ring, too small to fit over most of his fingers, but he managed to slide it onto his pinkie, where he stood a chance of hiding it, temporarily, and where it would be safe enough until he could find a way of secreting it elsewhere. When both men seemed reasonably clean and decent, Beathag took them back into the house, this time into the lower floor of the tower, where there was a warren of rooms: sculleries and storerooms for the use of such members of the household as could not be accommodated in the more comfortable family chambers on the upper floors of the tower, in the hall itself or outside in the stable lofts. It was some time before they would fully understand the layout of the house and, for now, they did only as they were bidden. It had occurred to Mateo that they would be banished to some distant and chilly garret above one of the stables, but then he thought that McNeill wouldn’t trust them anywhere near his precious horses. No. They would be housed somewhere where he, or other members of the household, could keep an eye on them.

  It was fully dark outside as Beathag took them to a small chamber with a fireplace where a peat fire gave off welcome heat, the whole faintly illuminated by a lamp that smelled strongly of fish. She gave them to understand that they were lucky, since very few rooms in this part of the house had such fires, and those were reserved mostly for extra cooking, when there were visitors. There was a rudimentary wooden bed with a heather-filled mattress and woollen blankets that smelled of last summer’s lavender. She left the men to dry themselves properly, and came back in a little while with a heap of clothes: saffron shirts, woollen trews and plaids, well worn, patched and darned to be sure, but clean enough. Then she drew from her pocket a pair of wickedly sharp shears, at which Francisco backed away in alarm, but she only smiled, and mimed cutting his hair. When he still seemed reluctant, Mateo sat down on the only chair in the room, a very rickety driftwood affair that had clearly been relegated from one of the family bedchambers, and allowed her to chop away at the dark hair that had grown long and matted in the months of their voyage and subsequent pursuit. When she had also trimmed his beard to her satisfaction, she motioned to Francisco to take his place on the chair.

  ‘There now, lads,’ she said, in her curiously accented Scots, when she had finished. ‘You look more like good Christian lads than daoine borba – than savages.’

  She swept the matted locks into a heap with a heather broom that she had brought, and then left them in peace for a while with their clothes and with a fine toothcomb between them. ‘You can have the pleasure of using that yourselves,’ she said. ‘See that you do. My Lady Lilias has a horror of the wee mialan. The headlice. Although the Good Lord knows most folk have them.’ She told them to find their way back to the great hall once they were dried and decently dressed.

  Once they were clothed – not without difficulty – in the strange foreign garb, Mateo found a convenient inner pocket for his precious ring. They surveyed each other in astonishment.

  ‘What have we come to?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mateo. But it seems safer than anywhere else we’ve been for the past months.’

  ‘That’s true. Or I hope so. They are a rough and ready people, but they don’t seem inclined to murder us in our beds. Not when they have clothed us. After a fashion.’

  Francisco sighed. ‘I’m glad to be here. Although I would be happier still to be at home.’

  ‘You’re not alone in that, Paco.’

  ‘But how are we to get there?’

  ‘I have no idea. And I don’t suppose you have either.’ The notion of all the miles of ocean that lay between this place and their own island was dizzying. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Francisco yawned. ‘I would like nothing more than to sleep for a week.’ His eyelids were drooping, even as he mentioned the word, but his face was flushed, and Mateo noticed with some alarm that his breathing was laboured.

  ‘Are you well?’ he asked.

  As always, Francisco nodded. ‘Of course. Yes. I’m well.’

  The truth was that they could both have slept where they sat, but it was hunger that drove them back to the great hall and the fireplace with its cooking pots. They attracted a good deal of unwelcome and occasionally downright hostile attention from those people who worked in and about the house and its surrounding land, and who had come in for a rudimentary supper before bed.

  ‘This is but half the household,’ explained Beathag, who seemed to be summoning more of the Scots tongue the more often she spoke to them. ‘The cattle are not yet come back from the shielings on the higher pastures, but that will be happening soon and then we’ll have a full house of it.’

  The main meal was in the middle of the day, she explained, but she served the two strangers with bowls of fragrant pottage, decent food that they had not tasted for many a long day.

  ‘McNeill tells me that you must be fed,’ was all she said. ‘And that nobody is to insult or attack you.’ She raised her voice as she said this, so that some of the assembled company could hear. It was clear that McNeill’s word was law here, which was reassuring.

  Mateo thought he could taste barley, rabbit, vegetables of some sort. There were flat oatcakes to go with the stew, and a mild ale that h
ad a faint scent of honey about it. So they were not to be starved, at least.

  Mateo warned Francisco not to eat too much, just at first, since they had eaten so little for so long, but he need not have taken the trouble. The younger man ate only a few mouthfuls of the savoury stew, then handed the earthenware bowl back to his cousin. ‘You finish it, Mateo. I’m afraid I can’t.’

  Ruaridh McNeill came down to greet them, although there was no sign of Lilias or her sister, who had presumably already retired to the upper rooms of the tower. He drank with them, and seemed more disposed to be friendly.

  ‘Rest for a few days. Then we’ll see if we can find some work for you,’ he said. ‘Although if you are who you claim to be, the sons of noblemen, I doubt if you have any skills that we can use.’

  Mateo suppressed a momentary indignation. They were in no position to argue. ‘When our strength returns, I’m sure there is plenty that we can do. But we don’t know the customs of this country and you must instruct us, or find somebody who will.’

  ‘Aye well, you might be more of a hindrance than a help. What did you do aboard your ship? Other than plot invasion?’

  ‘I was navigator. My cousin assisted me.’

  ‘A navigator eh? Who instructed you in those arts?’

  ‘The same man who tutored me in English and philosophy. And mathematics.’

  McNeill regarded them steadily. ‘They are seen as dark arts in some quarters.’

  ‘Mathematics?’

  ‘Aye. Not so far removed from magic. Those who are adept in such things sometimes have an evil reputation.’

  ‘There’s nothing magical about mathematics. And nothing evil about me.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But it may seem so. To the uninitiated. How are you with horses?’

  ‘Competent. We have horses at home.’

  ‘And can you build a drystane wall, or mend thatch?’

  ‘I’ve never tried. But I can learn.’

  McNeill smiled grimly. ‘Good. Our winters can be very wild but the house must be made ready for the storms, the beasts too when they are brought back, and all their housing as well. I’m sure we can find plenty for you to do. But what of your cousin? He looks like thistledown, as though a strong wind might blow him over.’