Fate and Fortune

by Shirley McKay

  ‘In one sense, he is worse,’ Giles answered cautiously. ‘In truth, not wholly worse, though not improved. He is frail still, quite frail. For want of good warmth and sunlight, his humours run cold. Since you saw him last, it may be said, in some respects, at least, his health is worse. And yet he is not dead. And since he is alive and has survived the winter and the winter oft does carry off the weakest and the sick, and since he was disposed to die the last time that you saw him, then you might conclude him somewhat better now. Aye, he is quite well. And will be glad to see you.’

  ‘And I him,’ Hew muttered, too baffled to smile.

  A Winter’s Tale

  As the party began to disperse, some to find a bed, and some to drink and gossip through the night, Hew found himself alone before the fire. He was closing his eyes and was almost asleep, when a slight cough disturbed him. The lawyer, Richard Cunningham, smiled apologetic ally. ‘Forgive me, Master Cullan, I did not mean to startle you. I had hoped to offer my condolences, apart from present company. Yet you look so peaceful here. I’ll leave you to your thoughts.’

  Hew struggled to his feet. ‘I pray you, stay a moment,’ he answered wearily. ‘My cousin Flett was rude to you. I hope you will excuse him. You are welcome in this house.’

  ‘His words are of no consequence. I meet many men like him. But I wanted to say to you simply, and privately, how much I regret your father’s death. He was – though I should hesitate to say it to his son – almost a father to me. Years ago, when first I did come to the bar, he oversaw my steps. I might say, he shaped me. I have felt his loss.’

  ‘You were his pupil?’ Hew was moved by the simplicity of his expression. There was a gentleness in the man’s manner that appealed to him, reluctant as he was to be drawn in conversation.

  ‘I could have had no better teacher.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Your words bring comfort. I have thought, these past hours, how little I have known him.’

  ‘You were always in his heart.’

  ‘Has my sister seen to your needs here?’ Hew changed the subject abruptly. The advocate bowed.

  ‘She has been too kind. Your bed is soft and clean. And yet I must confess, it troubles me to take it from you; you have travelled hard, and through the snow, and you have lost a father; and for all its comforts I may not rest easy while I take your place. Will you not share it with me?’

  Hew waved a hand. ‘Certainly, no, I shall sleep here. The lamps are lit, the fire is warm; I shall not want a bed. I pray you, sleep easy, as I shall.’

  He would not want for sleep; he felt beyond exhaustion, longing to close his eyes.

  ‘Here, with the servants and dogs?’ the lawyer looked sceptical. ‘You are master of this house. Besides, if I might mention it, you look ravelled to the bone, and your cousin Flett is like to drink into the night. The clamour will disturb you. Come with me, rest in the quietness; or, if you will not, then share a private drink with me, without these distractions. I will not trespass on your thoughts.’

  ‘You are kind, sir.’ Hew felt the waves of weariness consume him, and he allowed Richard to lead him out like a child into the stillness of his room.

  ‘Your servants have been good enough to lay a fire in here. Come, sit by the brazier. You’re shivering.’

  The lawyer called for drink, settling Hew in close beside the fire. With the solace of good wine, Hew felt refreshed.

  ‘Shall I leave you to sleep?’ Richard asked politely.

  ‘I think I will sit awhile. Stay, if you will.’

  ‘In truth, I should prefer to. For I’m weary now myself.’ Richard loosened off his collar. ‘Ah, these clothes! I know not what they starch this with, tis stiffer than the jougs! The servant has arranged your room most prettily. Do I detect your sister’s touch?’

  Hew acknowledged it. For there was lavender among the rushes on the floor, and petals on the sheets, that scented fresh and sweetly; and the water in the bowl that bubbled by the fire was seasoned with dried flowers and fragrant herbs. Two candles were lit in their cups on the wall, not tallow but beeswax, dimpled and new, and on the fresh-laid sheets his mother’s crimson counterpane turned back upon their crispness made him want to weep, so achingly familiar in the candlelight. His books were there, brought from his boyhood, his laver, his inkstand, and pens.

  If the lawyer had observed how all this had affected him, he chose not to remark it, rinsing his mouth in the warm scented water, wiping his beard on the cloth.

  ‘Your father,’ he reflected, ‘might have served the Crown, if he had stayed. No doubt your mother’s death affected him. And yet we never understood why he retired.’

  ‘My sister was unwell,’ Hew answered woodenly. ‘We came here for her health.’

  ‘So I have heard.’ The lawyer let the question drop unasked. He sat upon the counterpane, tugging at his shoes. Presently he ventured, ‘You’ll permit I call you Hew? I knew you as a child.’

  Hew nodded warily.

  ‘I wish to ask you something. Now, perhaps, is not the time, but tomorrow … well, we shall be occupied, and it is the nature of my business, that I may not linger long. Tis only recently that I renewed my old acquaintance with your father, since my boy was come here to the university. And I was sad to find him in decline. Nonetheless, I was fortunate enough to spend a little time with him before he died, and as fathers will, we discussed our sons.’

  Hew had stiffened. If the lawyer noticed this, he chose to pass it by.

  ‘And we were both proud fathers, I am not ashamed to say. It will embarrass you, no doubt, as it would do my own boy, to hear how we indulged ourselves. Yet you will permit my saying, for tis meant as a kindness, that your father was most touching in his pride for you. He hoped that you might follow in the law.’

  ‘I know it,’ Hew said heavily, ‘and I have tried the law. That much my father knew. I am not disposed to like it.’ He stirred in his chair, setting down his cup.

  ‘I understand. Perhaps I ought not to presume to put my case. No matter, though. The fact is this: If you were to consider the law as your profession, then nothing would please me more than to take you for my pupil and to oversee your coming to the bar. You are, I understand, full learned in the civil laws, and ripe for your probation. None would be more welcome in my house.’

  Hew was silent a moment. His eyes were low, upon the fire. Quietly, he said, ‘You are too kind.’

  ‘Do not speak of kindness. I may not pretend that I am half the man your father was. Yet if I could impart to you, the half I learned from him, I might serve you well. In modesty, I hesitate to mention this, but my regard has influence. The position of king’s advocate is not beyond my reach.’

  Cunningham’s tone was earnest, unaffected, and Hew softened his response. ‘I know your reputation, sir. The honour you impart is undeserved. I would not, for the world, have done you a discourtesy. But I must protest again, I am not suited to the law.’

  The lawyer nodded. ‘Your father thought otherwise. But there again, we may be blind to our children’s predilections. All too often, it would seem, we cast them in our moulds. Now there’s my own boy begged to be a cabin boy,’ (despite himself, Hew smiled), ‘and here I’ve gone and put him to the university.’

  ‘Ah, but then you knew he would not care to be a cabin boy,’ Hew objected shrewdly.

  ‘Did I though? But how? No matter, now. I am resolved, I shall not try to sway you, nor take offence if you decline. Do not make your answer yet awhile. Only, may I ask you, why you are so set against the law? You have spent many years in study. Was it all for nought?’

  ‘I cannot readily explain it, sir, without I prick old wounds. I once had a friend indicted for a crime, a heinous crime, that he did not commit. I knew my friend was innocent, and I had proofs, and knew the law, and yet I could not prove it by the law, wherefore I do hold it in contempt.’

  The lawyer was listening intently. Urgently he asked, ‘Your friend was hanged?’

  Hew shook his head
. ‘I set the whole before the king, who pardoned him.’

  The lawyer smiled. ‘Which tells me you have wit, and may well serve the law, when you well understand it. I wish I had had your insight, when I was your age. Yet we are alike. For something of the sort befell me too, some twenty years ago. I was a probationer, working with your father, in the tolbooth of St Giles. I was an arrogant lad, subtle, I confess, and I had learned the law and all its tricks. I could not wait to play them for myself. I saw the law as sport, and took delight in it, like racquets in the caichpule, batting back and forth. Your father had his chamber in the close among the notaries; I work there still, though in those days I shared lodgings in the low shade of the kirk, and now my house looks down upon it from the hill. But then, the world ahead of me, I was proud and eager, and ambitious for success. The first case I defended on completing my probation was almost, I might say, a friend. He was one of the writers who worked in our row, who prepared our papers and made notes for us. And he was privy in this role to rare and secret documents. We knew him as a meek and modest man, whose life consisted solely in the functions of his office, and a sober, fond devotion to his wife and child. Well, there was at this time a great lord taken for a spy, imprisoned in the castle at Blackness and due to stand his trial. You will permit I cloud the details; they are secret even now. But on the day before the trial, documents were brought before his gaolers that sanctioned his release, a pardon in what seemed our queen’s own hand, that bore her signet seal. He was released unto his friends and thence to England, where he pursued his plot against our Crown. The pardon was a forgery, the gaolers tricked; and the signet seal was traced to an old letter in our writer’s rooms. He had trimmed it with a knife and stuck the seal afresh to calculate his forgery, and it was neatly done.’

  ‘But he was guilty, then?’ concluded Hew. ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘I can only guess for profit. He would not confess. And to the last, he did protest his innocence, which made it all the worse. He begged us to defend him. This modest little man, who spelled our writs so patiently, with whom we shared our drinking on a quiet afternoon, came begging to our chambers, pleading for his life.’

  ‘But was my father there? What was his part in this?’ Hew pursued uneasily.

  ‘He was otherwise engaged, and could not take the case. And so it came to me, the wretched man so grateful it was touching to behold. He fell upon his knees and kissed my hand. And standing up alone there for the first time in that court without your father’s counsel … I confess that I failed him. I did not argue well, I could not make a case; in short, the man was hanged.’

  Hew shook his head. ‘Consider he were guilty, then it was not your fault. And if the man was innocent, then that must prove my point about the law.’

  ‘I did not consider it. I knew that I had failed him. For I had been afeared and flustered in that court. I was afraid, in truth, I should be tainted with his crime, who must defend the man, and not the fault. The charge was treason, after all. And yet there were no proofs, for he did not confess, no witnesses came forth, another could have found that seal, and stole it from his room. I should have made his case, and I could not. Then afterwards … Afterwards I went to your father and I told him what had happened. He spoke to me with such understanding, with such kindness, that I swear it made it worse. But that was not the worst, for he insisted we attend the execution.’

  ‘My father did!’ exclaimed Hew. ‘That was not like him!’

  Richard regarded him gravely for a moment. ‘I believe it was,’ he contradicted quietly. ‘For Matthew said, if we would know the law, then we must know the whole of it; and see the consequence of what it was we did. And while your father was most gentle, yet he was severe, and I was half afraid of him. He took me to the mercat cross and made me watch that poor man die, nor suffered me to look away until the last. I wish I might tell you, he died cleanly and bravely. But it was not so.’

  Shaken, Hew murmured, ‘And yet you went on in the law?’

  ‘At first, I was resolved to leave it there and then. Your father did convince me I might turn my rage to good. And I did, though I fear not in the way he intended. Matthew thought an advocate might also have a conscience. In personal life, I would agree. But in the court, it’s different. The lesson I learned there, was not to fail.’

  ‘You do not persuade me to pursue you in the law,’ Hew said bluntly.

  The advocate smiled. ‘It is the devil’s tale, I do confess. I know not why I told it. You are the first to hear it these past twenty years. The lateness of the hour, your father’s death, have moved me to break confidence. Let us blow out the light.’

  He lay in his shirt beside Hew on the bed, and drew the thick curtains to close out the draught. The small fire beyond burned down in the darkness. The water in the basin had begun to ice and crack.

  Human Remains

  Matthew Cullan was buried in the kirkyard of St Leonard’s on the last day of the old year 1580, on the 24th March.* It was also Good Friday, a coincidence that surely would have pleased him as he made his final journey underground. Dying, he had scornfully declined the burial ground most proper to his person and his means. He would not lie within the audit of that kirk, but stayed a papist to the last beyond the stubborn outcrop of its walls.

  Matthew would have liked the bells to ring. But in the wake of the reformed kirk, his children had to settle for the mortbell swung before the kist, their only consolation that the bellman sulked and shivered in the absence of his hat. The purpose of the bell was purely practical: it did not serve to mark the passing of the dead, but to summon tenant farmers from their scattered cottages to assist the coffin on its progress to the grave. The kist was carried from Kenly Green, at the outskirts of the parish of St Leonard’s, to the little chapel in St Andrews, a distance of almost four miles. The clatter of the handbell was unwelcome in the fields, where the black ewes dropped their lambs into the bitter sunshine, and the shepherds turned their backs, pretending not to hear. And so the bulk of the burden was borne by Hew Cullan, by his sister’s husband Giles, by Matthew’s ageing steward and his son, by the lawyer, Richard Cunningham, and by Nicholas Colp. Robin Flett was sick, and begged to be excused.

  Nicholas appeared, as wan and frail as ever, to insist upon his place in the procession, with a fierce intent of purpose that put the rest to shame. Giles had nodded calmly, ‘Aye, for sure, he’ll walk with me.’ And Hew observed the doctor hoist the bier upon his shoulder, where his cheerful bulk took on the greatest weight, and, wheezing surreptitiously, he braced his other arm across the back of Nicholas and bore the brunt of both, the living and the dead, in one consoling stroke. Thus strengthened by the force that walked behind him, Hew began their slow procession through the slush.

  The pale salted sunshine had dampened the track, the snow dissolved to mud, and the fringe of the mortcloth was trailed in the mire. No one spoke; there was no sound save the gulls, the distant rush of sea, the coarse discordant jangling of the bell, and they were glad enough to come into the town, borne eastward by the seagate, when the scholars of St Leonard’s came obedient to the bell to take their burden from them to the quiet earth. The bearers’ arms hung slack as Matthew Cullan’s kist was dropped into the ground. There, without comfort of psalm, the last frozen clods were thrown over him.

  Once these rites were done, a quietness descended on the tower house, as the visitors departed one by one. Richard was the last to leave. He had business with the coroner, and intended to remain in Fife for several days, returning to the capital once the skies were cleared. He left Hew with assurances of goodwill and welcome, if he ever changed his mind. Then, at last, Hew found himself alone, to dispose of the remains, and consider his father’s affairs. Matthew had died well in every sense, leaving behind a great deal of money. His property and land accrued to Hew. The fabric of the house, their mother’s linens, drapes and plate, was left to Meg, and taken down accordingly. Hew felt its inner life disintegrate, wrapped and boxed a
nd carted down the narrow lane. This was not his childhood home. He had grown up in Edinburgh, in the shadow of St Giles, and remained there at the grammar school when Matthew had retired to Kenly Green. His education both at school and at the universities had long ago eclipsed all family life. His sister Meg was sensitive to this. ‘One day, you will bring your wife here. She will want her own things,’ she told him, rolling up the tapestries. She declined her father’s standing bed, its drapes and feather mattresses. So great a bed would dwarf their little house, scarcely worth the cost of carting it, dismantled, down the muddy track to town and up the winding stair. She also had refused their mother’s crimson counterpane that had lain on Hew’s bed since childhood. The colour did not please her, she had claimed.

  Matthew’s legacies stretched far beyond the tower house, as his man of law explained. ‘Your father owned land and properties in Leith, and a small house in the Canongate, somewhere near the water port. Those are let out to tenants, and the rents accrued – they now must be considerable – collected by an Edinburgh goldsmith, your father’s man of business there, George Urquhart. His buith is on the north side of the hie gate, close to the kirk of St Giles. I recommend you go to him, when this weather clears. I will write you letters that will prove your claim. There are also’ – he frowned a little, squinting at the document – ‘large sums of money paid on account to a printer, Christian Hall, residing near the netherbow.’

  ‘A printer?’ Hew was interested. ‘Paid out for books?’

  ‘I think not. Over several years, sums of several hundred pounds have been ventured there. Whether as a loan, it’s impossible to say. But more than enough for the whole press entire. Tis likely that George Urquhart can explain the terms to you, and if there is a debt, you may recover it.’

  ‘Perhaps I own a printer’s shop,’ suggested Hew, amused.