1588 A Calendar of Crime

by Shirley McKay

  Robin said, ‘He was. And, if he were not, why is he not found?’

  ‘Have ye lost something, lads?’

  The gardener appeared, coming through the gate, and Robin stammered, ‘Doves.’ But Henry leapt up, telling him to shush, and answered cheerfully, ‘Good morrow to you, Jock.’

  The gardener pulled off his hat. ‘Your pardon, good my master, I did not ken you then. Who is your young friend?’

  ‘This is Robin Grubb. You do not need to mind him. He kens to haud his tongue. I came to thank you for your posy. It has won the lady’s heart.’

  ‘Ah, tis good to hear. I hope it brought you profit, sir.’

  ‘Indeed, it did that.’ And there followed an exchange of nudging and guffaws, bewildering to Robin, who was looking up a tree. He tugged at Henry’s sleeve.

  ‘Whisht a while,’ Henry said. But Robin stuttered ‘Bird’, and pointed to a hawthorn branch, high above the spot where they had left the corpse.

  ‘Aye, son, tis a rook,’ the gardener explained to him, in a kindly voice, as though he were a fool, which given Robin’s gaping mouth and staring eyes and stammering did not seem off the mark. ‘He lives in that tree. There is his nest, the rookery above. He has a mistress, and a clutch of eggs. An insolent limmar, he is. Well, sirs, I will leave you to it, there is leeks and parsley wanted for the pot. If ye could find your way,’ he appealed to Henry, ‘to settle your account, then I would be grateful. Tis some while now, I doubt. It vexes me to mention it, but I heard a rumour that you were not good for it. Tis slander, says I, for I ken for a fact his faither, Lord Balfour, is a rich man.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Henry said. ‘I will look to it today.’

  ‘I thank ye for it, sir.’ The gardener retreated through the college gate.

  Robin said, ‘This is a terrible thing.’

  ‘Terrible,’ Henry agreed. ‘I do not have the money to pay him.’

  ‘I do not mean that. The bird. Do you not see? It is him.’

  Henry stared at him. ‘Do you mean to say you think Lord Sempill is the rook?’

  ‘Of course he is. He has transfigured himself. It is plain to see. There can be no other explanation. And – and – there was a feather left beside him on the ground. A black feather,’ Robin said.

  ‘That is true. There was.’ Henry gave some thought to this. It was well known that witches were able to transform themselves into the likeness of birds. They applied magic ointments so that they could fly. ‘But still,’ he said judiciously, ‘there is no certain proof.’

  ‘You did not see him, though. Naked in the courtyard, leaping in the air. Like he was trying to fly. Like this, an’ this, an’ this.’ Little Robin Grubb, who had never heard of a galliard or pavane, nor ever learned to dance, began to cut a caper underneath the tree. The rook became alarmed, letting out a squawk and swooping at his face before retreating smartly to the safety of its branch, where it cawed again.

  This terrifying outcome served to settle it. Robin ceased to prance, shaken to the core. And Henry said, ‘Tis true, he has the look of Bumbaise. The beadiness of eye, the beakiness of neb. I fancy there is something also in the coat; his black silk shot with shades of emerald and blue. Come, now let us go. I do not like it here.’

  ‘The principal said do not come back till the lord is found,’ Robin pointed out.

  ‘Well, we have found him. What can we do? We cannot catch him.’

  Robin said, ‘I can. I know how tis done. We must come at dusk, and you must shine a light, a lantern, in his eyes. That will make him blind, and I will shoot him down with a little pellet I have in my sling. It will not hurt him much. Then when he is captured they will make him turn back into himself, and everyone will see that he is a witch.’

  ‘Are you not afeart of him?’ Henry Balfour marvelled. For he had reached the limit of his own thirst for adventure.

  ‘Na, I am not feart. I have a stone my grandame gave to me, protective against charms. You may haud it, if you like.’

  ‘Wondrous Robin Grubb! When I quit the college, as I am afraid I may do very soon, will you come with me? You can be my page.’

  Robin answered frankly. ‘I do not think I will. For fear I won’t be paid.’

  III

  The commissioners were lodged in an inn by the West Port, the newly built triumphal entrance to the South Street. All three had stayed the night. Colluthie’s house was close, but he would not go home, determined to remain wherever Sempill was. The stranger was it then that he did not complain when Sempill disappeared. Nothing but his dinner taxed Colluthie now. He had declined the ordinary at the common board, of bannock, beer and broth, asking for a tray to be sent up to the room he shared with Philip Clench. Lord Sempill had reserved a chamber to himself, though no one could establish whether he had slept in it; his servant William Soutar had been quartered in the barn. Soutar was intelligent, an honest, gentle clerk who Philip hoped would join them; Colluthie disagreed. ‘Discretion now is all. We must talk alone. We cannot be attended, vexing though that is,’ he said. But he did not seem vexed, nor disposed to talk of any kind at all, as he ate his meal. He had called for capon, roasted on a spit, rabbits in a pie and a jug of wine, chewing over carefully the matter on his mind.

  Philip Clench ate sparingly. And it was Philip who was first to break off from rumination. ‘What should we do, then?’ he asked.

  Colluthie dabbed a napkin on a spot of gravy that had settled in his beard. ‘I will write a letter to the king, this after-dinner time, asking him to grant me charge of the commission. When I have his answer, then we shall proceed. These colleges, ye see, are obdurate and obstinate. But we shall bow and bend them, supple to our will. Meanwhile, we maun wait, and bide his Grace’s time. Send to the cook if there is some cheese, and mebbe a pippin or two. Won’t you have some pie? The flesh is soft and sweet.’

  Philip stared at him. ‘No, I thank you. What of Lord Sempill?’ he said.

  ‘I shall make report that he deserts his post.’

  ‘Deserts? What cause have you to say that he deserts his post? He has disappeared.’

  ‘Call it what you will,’ Colluthie wiped his fingers, sticky from a bone, ‘ye ken as well as I do he was in a dudgeon with St Leonard’s yesterday. They played him for a fool.’

  ‘Nor did we fare better,’ Philip pointed out.

  ‘Aye, that is true,’ Colluthie allowed. ‘But for the reason, solely, that we lacked the authority. Our president is weak, therefore we are weak. While he is our president, that cannot be helped. But when I am in charge, there will be a change. These scholars at the colleges will sing out loud and shrill. And they will rue the day they led us such a dance.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Philip, troubled at his tone, ‘his absence does not stir in you a proper true dismay.’

  ‘Aye? And why should it?’ his colleague replied. ‘Sempill is done. He is spent. His word is worthless here. He kens as much himself, wherefore has he slunk off hameward in his shame, as the whipped dug creeps, cringing to its kennel.’

  Philip shook his head. ‘He has not gone home. His horse is still here in the stable.’

  ‘Oh. Is it?’ For a moment, Colluthie was taken aback. ‘You have looked into that?’

  ‘William Soutar has. Tis wonder to me now, that you have not yourself. A man who did not ken you better, as an honoured laird, might suspect you had a part in Lord Sempill’s disappearance, so little do the reasons for it seem to give you trouble.’

  ‘An honoured laird indeed. Consider, Master Clench, and mind who ye are talking to.’ Colluthie was amused, rather than incensed. He did not count Philip Clench, or anything he said, of importance to his cause.

  It was Philip who appeared to be itching for a fight. ‘I would rather be kent for a master of arts, than for the proud possessor of a poke of land. Colluthie, are ye called fer? Where the Deil is that? A man might be a laird perforce of his inheritance, or upon the favour of a fickle king, as quickly lost as won. But my good name was worked fo
r, at the university, and my honours earned,’ he cried.

  Colluthie answered with a smile, sour enough to wither him. ‘Ah, there it is,’ he said, ‘Now it all comes out. I wonder that you kept your sly tongue still so long. You are one of them. Where was it, then, St Leonard’s? You are of their camp, cut from their same cloth. No wonder you would side with the doltish Sempill. It is your intent to collude in their concealment. Now I see it all.’

  ‘As it happens,’ Philip said, sorely stung by this, ‘it was not St Andrews. It was Aberdeen. But that is not the point.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Colluthie, ‘where your loyalty lies.’

  ‘That is not in question. I will report, impartially, the facts. But those facts include the absence of Lord Sempill, missing from his charge, which alarms me somewhat, more than it does you. We cannot proceed until he is found.’

  ‘Aye, very well,’ Colluthie said at last, weary of the feud. ‘If it will appease you, send Soutar out to look for him.’

  ‘He has gone already, of his ain accord. Which ye would ken,’ said Philip, ‘if ye cared at all.’

  The servant William Soutar had sacrificed his dinner to the search. He began his inquiries at the kirk of Holy Trinity, the centre of all commerce and conversation, from the most exalted to the carnal kind, and discovered that Lord Sempill had no dealings there. Next, he tried the taverns, with the same result. At the town house, he reported him as missing to the clerk, who pinned up a notice of it at the mercat cross. It was quiet in the tolbooth, and in the street itself, for it was not market day; his lordship, to be sure, was not lost among a crowd. Therefore was his absence all the more remarkable. Lord Sempill had not been seen in any place that day, though several folk had spoken with him on the day before. How could a man have vanished so completely in so close and circumspect and quisitive a town? William widened his search, southward to the Kinness burn, and lands that lay beyond the South Street colleges. Here he saw the gardener scattering some seed, and two truant students fleeing through the trees, guiltily returning to the books they shirked. He continued west, as far as the new mill, where the farmers congregated with their sacks of grain, and returned along a path that circumscribed the town, following the course of the mill lade to the harbour. He considered whether Sempill could have fallen in the lade, somehow slipped and drowned, but concluded that an obstruction of Sempill’s bulk and weight would have stopped the flow of the chain of mills that churned the millstream on, seamlessly and smoothly. No sound more alarming than the water’s rush, the singing of the blackbird, the mistle thrush or lark, coming at the beck of an early summer day, broke upon the peace. At the harbour, he found fishermen, and asked if any stranger had chanced to hire a boat, or if some ship had lately put out from the port. When they answered not, he walked along the sands some distance to the east before returning to the pier to climb up the Kirk Heugh, surveying through an archway the grounds of the cathedral, and exploring to the north the rocks below the cliffs, extending from the harbour to the castle beach. The castle was closed up, and he passed its precincts, calling at the cook shop, through the Swallow Port and up on to a precipice, from which vantage point he scoured the white peaks of the waves, where nothing dipped and floated but the shrieking gulls. He continued west, past the guid wife’s crackling house, where the candle tallow carried on the wind, to the golf links and the coning warrens kept to feed the town, but found nothing but a rabbit kitten, keeking through the grass.

  Having now concluded his circuit of the town, with neither hide nor hair, William took up camp in an alehouse on the North Street, to consider his next move, and to slake his thirst with a welcome pint. A friendly lass looked out a hunk of bannock too, a herring and a cheese, and he made good a dinner for the time that he had lost.

  The alehouse was quiet, for those who had the time could ill afford to drink, at this hour of the day. In the one public room, where William pulled a stool up to the common board, a solitary drinker drained his worth away, already in his cups. ‘Good morrow to ye, man. Will ye share a drink with me? For I am celebratin’,’ he invited William.

  William answered, ‘That is civil o ye. I will not say no. For I have had the devil of a futless chase today. What cause have ye to celebrate? Is it a holy day?’ The celebrant he judged to be twenty-eight or thirty, weathered in his face and in his ragged hands, leathered hard with work. There was something else about him, sorely out of place.

  ‘Haly as a wedding day,’ he answered enigmatically, ‘for my auld master’s deid.’

  William sympathised. ‘Tyrannical, was he? I have had the luck to work for men like that.’

  ‘No bit of it, ye ken. He was no so bad. He was guid eno’ to leave to me a legacy. An’ when I am done here, cheerful and fu’, I will treat with my sweetheart to make her my wife. Prithee, drink to that!’

  The friendly lass returning with a stoup of liquor filled up William’s cup. ‘If the lassie has sense, she will refuse him,’ she said.

  ‘Aw, crowdie mowdie, dinna be like that.’ The drunken suitor pawed her. She slapped his hand away.

  William Soutar caught it, grasping firm his wrist. ‘Away now, whit are ye, her faither?’ his captive protested.

  ‘That coat that you wear is some very fine stuff. I wonder that a loun like you could manage to afford it,’ William Soutar said. He recognised the cloth. How could he not, when Lord Sempill himself had asked him only yesterday to replace the button that was missing from the cuff? The pity was, his lordship had not left it for repair when he took it off. If he had taken it off.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the man who wore it now. ‘Did I no say the noo I had come into guid fortune?’

  ‘So I doubt, ye did. An’ awbody kens, fortune is a wench that brings muckle good to some. Yet I marvel she should bring ye Lord Sempill’s coat.’

  To the scuffle that ensued, the magistrates were called, and the drinker was taken to be questioned at the tolbooth, suspected of the robbery, and probably the murder, of the missing man. He was locked up overnight for the attention of the coroner, who had means at his disposal to elucidate the corpse, which he had doubtless hidden somewhere in his coat.

  When the laird of Colluthie heard of these events, he put aside the letter he was writing to the king to see how they turned out. The thought that Lord Sempill might be lying in a ditch, murdered by a stranger, was sufficient to provoke in him a rumble of alarm, not least for himself. The commissioners kept together, for safety, in the inn, while a search was made. The excitement occupied them through the afternoon. At the close of day, they heard that no further trace of Sempill had been found, and sat down to a plate of beef and buttered bannock, restorative to spirits that were chopped and churned. Yet no sooner had they settled than their supper was disturbed by the coming of a boy with a live bird in a bag. When they saw what he brought, and listened to his tale, all three men were amazed. Philip Clench could see, in Colluthie’s face, the gamut of emotion ranging through his mind: a gargoyle of dismay, bafflement and fear, of horror and disgust, and incredulous delight.

  Hew Cullan, riding home, had not heard the news. He saw the men returning from their searches through their fields, unaware that they were looking for a corpse. Night began to settle, grey upon the waters ebbing from the shore, and on the path ahead. He came back through the gardens, heavy with the scent of rose and hawthorn blossom, and through the shadowed hall, closed off to the sun, where someone had left out a little pot of violets on a window sill. He took the violets up to Frances in her room.

  She was sitting by the window with a candle at her elbow and a letter in her hand. There was a little colour, fragile but perceptible, in the cheek she turned to him, patiently, to be kissed. Her eyes were bright with tears.

  ‘You have been crying,’ he said. Fear began, again, to close upon his heart.

  ‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘I had a letter from my cousin Mary Phelippes. She has sent some things.’

  She showed him: a lace cap, a napkin
, a white infant’s smock. He looked at her blankly, closed in a grip that dulled understanding. Frances read the look of terror in his face. ‘No, it is not that. See, Flora sleeps.’ She made him turn his head to look into the crib, where he saw his child, temperate and still, pink inside her swaddling clothes, that might have been a shroud. ‘Mary lost a child, and cannot have another,’ she explained. ‘Therefore did it touch my heart that she sends Flora clothes.’

  ‘I recall. Tis sad,’ he said, foolishly, and numbed.

  ‘We are so lucky, Hew.’

  It had not felt like luck to him. He remembered still – remembering was not the word, he could not cleanse the stain of it completely from his consciousness, no matter how he tried – when his bairn was born, lifeless in a tide of so much silt and blood he could not comprehend how Frances had clung on. She had been ill for months. His sister Meg had brought the infant back to life, by what he understood to be some secret form of magic. What else could it be? The child was small and frail, born before its time, wrestled to the world translucent in its skin, its first cry weak and tremulous. Flora had been nursed for weeks by Bella Frew, along with her boy Billy, while Frances recovered her strength. Now there was a life, a colour in the cheek of both his wife and his daughter, timid as a shoot that felt its way out tentatively from the barren earth, tender to the frosts and the scorching sun.

  ‘What does she say in her letter?’ he asked, careful to conceal the turmoil of his mind.

  ‘That she has been helping Thomas in his work.’

  ‘With the ciphers?’ Phelippes was perhaps the principal cryptographer to the English Crown. Hew had worked with him, under Secretary Walsingham, at a time and place that seemed a world away.

  ‘That is not unlikely. But she does not say. She says that he is exercised at present with despatches that concern the war with Spain – for it is a war, whatever men may think. There is a present terror and a danger to the queen, for the stand she has taken in the Netherlands.’