A Chorus of Innocents

by P. F. Chisholm

  Very slowly Tait nodded. “Ay, ladyship, ye’re right. But he disnae have any shoes tae wear for it.”

  “Does he have a jerkin?”

  “He’s got mine if he wants?” said the other lad, “and my clogs.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Jimmy trotted after her proudly, nearly drowned in his elder brother’s jerkin and tripping every second step in his clogs.

  “I’ll hae a pair of clogs when me dad finishes them. He’s only whittled the one so far, because I grew out of my baby pair.”

  “That’s good,” she said, absentmindedly.

  “Ay, and I like me bare feet better, though it’s cold in winter. My clogs pinched something terrible and I like to feel the Earth with my toes.”

  “Hm.”

  “D’ye think the minister’s ghost’ll walk, missus? With him being murdered and his murderers not hanged yet?”

  “I haven’t seen him, Jimmy, and I’ve slept two nights in the house where it happened.”

  Jimmy’s mouth opened in an ’o’ of astonishment and he stopped.

  “In the manse?”

  “Yes, Jimmy, with Lady Hume and her woman. Where else did you think I was going to sleep?”

  “I didna think ye slept.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “I do.”

  “Och. So ye havenae seen anything?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  He nodded. “Ye don’t think his ghost’ll come after his murderers and their helpers, do ye?”

  “I don’t.”

  He nodded again. “That’s good is that.”

  “And anyway, they say that his soul’s already gone to God.”

  “Ay, but if he were a Papist then he’s gone to hell. Or he knows that’s where he’s going and he doesnae want to go and so his ghost’s walking.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t really think what to say. “I think the funeral will stop any of that nonsense,” she said eventually, “and perhaps your singing will help him go to Heaven.”

  “Nay, lady,” said the boy gently, “everybody goes to hell, really, only some o’ the pastors don’t. I was happy the minister might go to heaven, but if he was a Papist there’s no chance.”

  “Will you go to hell then?”

  “Ay, o’ course,” he said. “The minister said not but mebbe he’s a Papist. Was. But all the Borderers go to hell; it’s warmer there and better company.”

  She had nothing to say to that.

  ***

  It was the baker who told her something about Jamie Burn, one of the two names Tait gave. He was only a part-time baker, firing up his rock and clay oven in his yard about twice a week for those who wanted bread rather than oat bannocks, quite daring and modern. Otherwise he was a farmer like all of them and he had his vegetable garden as well and even a couple of apple trees that were only thirty years old that his father had planted after the fighting. His father was an enterprising man and had laboured to build the oven, but then died of a flux the year before.

  “Ay,” said Clemmie Pringle, “that’s why I know it, from being up in the middle of the night to fire the oven. I’d see things, men going to and from the manse, well huddled up under their cloaks and sometimes men who went into the manse and didn’t come out for a couple of days but ye wouldna ken they were there.”

  They had been careful but of course that had encouraged nosiness and like all villages everyone was starved for news and delighted to chew over the comings and goings at the manse.

  “That barber surgeon, Mr Anricks, I seen him go in any number of times coming to and from Edinburgh and London I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “What do you think it’s all about?”

  “Papists, of course!” And Clemmie crossed himself against the thought.

  “There aren’t any here, surely?”

  “Ay, well, how would ye know seeing how they have to be secret here where the Humes are for the new religion. It’s not like the West March where the Maxwell keeps Jesuits in his household and pops a fig to the king except when he comes on a justice raid.”

  “And you, Mr Pringle, are you a Papist?”

  Clemmie crossed himself again and shuddered. “Nay, I’m a’ for the Protestants. Who wants priests coming here telling us what to do and praying in Latin where ye dinna ken what they’re saying at all? If I could read, I could even read the Bible because it’s in Scots.”

  It would soon be time to wait by the grave for Jamie Burn’s corpse; there were three men digging the grave in the old churchyard now, though given the amount of argument over it, it was just as well that the ground was soft from the wet.

  Elizabeth wondered what had happened to the linen and after getting directions from Clemmie, she went down there and found the bushes still festooned with it and most of it dry by now. Well Poppy would need her linen so she found two of the women of the village and convinced them to come and help her fold it up and bring it into the manse.

  ***

  Afterwards, she had to hurry to the church where Jock Burn and three others of the family had a litter and put onto it Jamie’s body, wrapped in its shroud. They walked over to the churchyard with it, a good procession of all the people in the village, all the children too, down to the babies in their swaddling clothes raging at the world. Even Clemmie Pringle the baker was there and Jock Tait and the Taits, narrow-eyed and sour-faced, but there. Elizabeth wished Poppy could have seen it.

  There were two new people as well who stood next to the Dowager Lady and Kat. One was a ten-year-old boy of outlandish, almost elven beauty, fair hair, and blue eyes. The other was a broad middle-aged man, with brown hair and grey eyes, and a solid look around his mouth with broad sturdy arms and shoulders. They must be Cousin William and Lord Hughie, she thought.

  It was Jock who said a few words at the graveside. “Ay well,” he said, “ye ken this is my nephew, Jamie Burn. Some of ye ken what he was, when he rode wi’ me and his brothers and his cousins and he was a good brave man, though he was young. And then he changed. He went tae the university as a servitor, and he took his degree in Divinity, something no other Burn has done nor will do, quite likely. And then he came back here to be your minister and I hear he did as good a job o’ being a minister as he did when he wis reiving Fenwick cattle.” There was a subdued snicker from the Burns—clearly a story there. “And somebody came to him two days gone and twinned his body and his head, took his head right off wi’ a sword and we dinna ken who it was or we’d do something about it, ay, we would.” He paused there and everyone was silent, even the squalling baby. “So…eh…we hereby commit his body to the Earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. He’s deid and God’s got him and there’s the end on it.”

  They took the corpse off the litter and put it in its grave and Jock sprinkled the first spadeful of Earth. The others put more Earth on top.

  Elizabeth wished she could have said something about Jamie, about him being a good husband and a good dominie and schoolmaster, about him being a good man whatever he had done in the past. But women didn’t speak at church. So she nodded at the boys of the school and they lined up by the grave, pushing and shoving a little. Lord Hughie gravely left his grandam’s side and went and stood with the school, who made room for him among the altos. Jimmy Tait was shining and serious in the front.

  They sang about the rivers of Babylon, in parts, with Jimmy’s voice soaring up the register like a lark and the voices of the other boys turning and twisting in the patterns of the psalms. Then Jimmy started “The Lord’s my shepherd” all by himself, only a little sharp from nerves, and the others came in until they were in the House of the Lord together and you could see it in their minds, almost, a good strong defensible bastle with a wall.

  Elizabeth had already heard them sing it once so she could look about her and see that rough reivers and Jock himself were crying great tears down their faces, but tha
t Lady Hume had her mouth shut like a trap and a frown of disapproval on her face; others in the village, like Clemmie Pringle and Jock Tait, they were open-mouthed with astonishment at what the boys were doing. At the end of it, Lord Hughie went back to his grandam, who ignored him.

  And then as the grave mound was finished and patted smooth with the spades and shovels, Jock Burn hurried back to where the smell of mutton and beef was clear as a bell.

  She had arranged with Young Henry to bring the beer out after the body was in the ground, for fear of cunning reivers and also in case anyone disapproved of ale-drinking before the burial, which smacked of Papistry and waking the dead.

  They had two trestle tables set up on the green to take the barrels and Jock Burn called Elizabeth over to take the first mug of the mild, seeing as how she’d been defending it all night and her with only an apron to help.

  She smiled and laughed, and Sim and Ekie Widdrington were there, with a different set of bruises on their faces, possibly from Young Henry, to apologise for conniving at the theft of one of the barrels and drinking some of it theirselves. Elizabeth listened graciously and said all was well that ended well.

  She saw a man standing in the corner by the barrel, drinking from a horn cup of his own and wondered who it was for his black wool doublet and hose were London tailoring, if she was any judge, though from a long time ago. Well she could ask him, so she went over to him and said, “Good day to you, sir, though it’s a sad occasion.”

  He took his old low-crowned hat off to her and made a neat bow. The man was balding though not very old, balding in the ugliest way possible: up the sides and from a bald patch in the centre so there was a moat of baldness around a lone patch of hair on his forehead. It was dull sandy coloured hair; he was not a big man though he had big knuckled hands and a small potbelly and altogether, although he wasn’t positively ugly, you would never look at him twice.

  “Yes, it is, my lady,” he said. “A great loss.”

  “And who are you? Are you one of Jamie’s university friends?”

  “Not quite, ma’am. My name is Simon Anricks, I’m a tooth-puller, a barber surgeon.”

  Ah, the putative Jesuit. His voice was London with a tinge of West Country in it and clearly educated. Very different from the old tooth-drawer they had had before the Armada that Sir John Forster had arrested and found in fact to be a Papist spy. Was that why Tait was so suspicious? Was he mixing them up?

  “Is business good?”

  The man smiled. “Good enough. There are plentiful broken teeth from fights and of course scurvy-rotted teeth as well, though I find fewer of the worm-rotted teeth here than I do in Bristol or London.”

  “Worm-rotted?”

  “Why yes, ma’am. There’s a school of thought that says the holes in the teeth we find in courtiers and merchants’ wives are chewed by tiny worms that live in the stomach and come up into the mouth at night.”

  “Good God!”

  “It’s hard to know what else would make holes so I admit that as a working hypothesis. I have a suspicion that they are attracted by sugar, for in days of old, before we brought sugar from Araby, it’s said there were far fewer of them, though more of the flat worn-down teeth.”

  “What about people who can’t afford sugar?”

  “Exactly ma’am. I find very few of the holes indeed among the poor and the peasants, and when I do, a little questioning often finds that they have a taste for sugar plums or honey or orangeadoes. Here, in the north, of course such refinements are almost unknown and indeed there are even fewer of the wormholes.”

  “Have you ever seen a…a toothworm?” asked Elizabeth, fascinated against her will.

  “I have made some efforts to find them, sitting up till past midnight in the dark with a patient and then opening the mouth very gently with a candle—alas, I have never seen the worms themselves except of course in the stool where they are so common as to be unsuspicious. They must be a special variety of the normal worms of the stomach. Perhaps, as some say, they are invisible—but I do not think so, only very hard to see and perhaps very shy of light.”

  “Why can’t they be invisible?”

  “Because then we could not hope to see them, and so I prefer to believe the optimistic view.”

  Well that certainly sounded a bit Jesuitical, but it could just be that he had read a lot of books. How on earth did you find out if someone was a Jesuit without actually asking them outright?

  “Perhaps I should eat fewer of the sugar plums I like myself.”

  “Indeed, my lady. I would recommend it. I would also recommend scrubbing your teeth every night with a good rough toothcloth dipped in salt.”

  “I’ve always done that. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Well they should.”

  “Did Jamie Burn have bad teeth then?” She knew he didn’t. His teeth were white and even and like a horse’s.

  The man laughed a little and Elizabeth tried hard not to suspect he was laughing at her clumsy attempts to cross-examine him.

  “He had one tooth he had broken years before which needed drawing and I drew for him. And then we got talking over brandywine and ended by being friends. He needed to talk to someone who read the kind of books he did. I was able to lend him my favourite book by Thomas Digges, about the heavens and crystal spheres, and we had many good discussions about it and others like Lucretius’ De Rerum Naturae and of course some of the Hermetic books.”

  “What are they?”

  “They are books written by Hermes Trismegistus which deal with…er…well with astrology, among other things.”

  Elizabeth felt a thrill of suspicion go through her and then damped it down. Astrology was perfectly unexceptionable and didn’t the Queen have Dr Dee, her own personal astrologer to cast her horoscope for her? In fact an astrologer was much more respectable than a Papist.

  “As Dr Dee does?”

  “Yes, indeed, although the good doctor is now more interested in angel magic, which I believe is leading him astray.”

  “Astray from what?”

  “Why, my lady, from the far more interesting question of what are the crystal spheres made of and is it true, as Copernicus writes, that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way about?”

  “What?”

  Mr Anricks smiled diffidently. “I know, ma’am, it sounds quite insane and so I thought it when I first came across the idea, oh, years ago now. But if you read the account of it in Thomas Digges and think about it, well, it seems less mad the more you think about it, that’s all I can say.”

  Elizabeth blinked at him. The idea made her feel very queasy, as if the Earth underfoot were not quite as solid as it seemed.

  “Well, everyone knows the Earth is round,” she began slowly, “but surely it’s at the centre of the universe? How can it not be? And wouldn’t we feel it if the Earth were…were moving around the Sun?”

  “Perhaps not, if the movement was very smooth. The Earth is enormous, of course, that was measured by Eratosthenes of Cyrene before Christ was born.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He was very clever: he measured the exact curve of a row of posts of exactly the same length placed beside the Nile at intervals and from that worked out the curve of the Earth by the Art Geometrica. Some twenty-five thousand miles around.”

  “Good…heavens.”

  “Quite. If Columbus had heard of Eratosthenes, he would probably never have set out.”

  There were so many questions she wanted to ask him. Are you a Papist? Are you a Jesuit? What was it you really talked about with Jamie? Not for the first time, she wished Poppy was there where she should have been instead of nearly forty miles away in England.

  They were tapping the third barrel of beer over by the trestle tables and the spit-roasted mutton and beef was being consumed by hungry men who were standing arou
nd shouting at each other. Behind her she could hear an argument that was not, for a wonder, about whether a shod horse went better than an unshod one. It was a new one and equally fatuous: Which would win in a fight, a billy goat or a ram? It seemed plans were afoot to find out.

  The boys were being congratulated on their singing and munching hunks of mutton themselves, while their parents did the same. Little Jimmy Tait was swaying already with the mild ale he’d drunk. It was mid-afternoon and the party would go on into the night. Now if Robin were here he would be wandering around asking Jock Burn how his horses were and telling stories and he would stand over there, by the untapped barrels and laugh and accept a bet on the idiotic ram versus goat question.

  He wasn’t here. He was far away in the West March and probably thinking of any number of things, none of which were her. Probably he had forgotten all about her as indeed he should. Perhaps his father had found him an heiress to marry and rescue his fortunes. Perhaps he had found another woman to be his ladylove—or at least to bed since the Italian woman who had been all over him in Scotland was now rumoured to be the Earl of Essex’ mistress.

  She had eaten a trencher of roast mutton and some bread. She had to stay until the cakes were brought out but then she thought she would retire from the fray and try and get an early night. But no, she would have to wait until Lady Hume and Kat went to bed.

  Could she start for home now? No. The earliest she could do that was tomorrow when she planned to be up early—though she would have to make allowances for Young Henry’s hangover and the hangovers of the cousins. Probably not tomorrow then, or only late tomorrow, she could stay the night at Sir Henry’s house in Berwick and hope he hadn’t finished whatever he was up to in Scotland so she wouldn’t have to deal with him. Then a long run down to Widdrington. If she could take remounts she might be able to do it in one day. It was an awkward distance, about forty miles as the crow flies.

  Absentmindedly she drank a bit more of the mild ale she preferred. Two men were taking their doublets and shirts off—why? Ah yes, a ring was forming of cheering men and some of the women, with the boys at the front. Two of the lads were also taking off their jerkins. Cumbrian wrestling. It wasn’t really the season for it, but no doubt there was a bet involved, or more likely several.