Patrick had not been unwell. His long, ranging body did not show a mark. The broad hand that dropped where Thomas had pushed it lay open, the palm facing up to the sky. The fingers that curled there did not flex again.
Patrick’s body lay beside him in the bed. But there was nothing left of Patrick in it. Death had stripped it bare.
His mother was not well enough to understand the news. But his father had uttered a terrible cry. ‘I have lost God,’ he had said.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ the minister who came to bury Patrick said. ‘God has not forsaken you. He puts you to the test. Why should he test one who might not be saved? Ye mauna gie up hope.’
Patrick was not in the corpse that was put in the ground. He came to see his brother three times after that. The first and the second time it was in a dream, the hairs on his arm, the laughter in his voice as clearly defined as they had been in life, and nothing like the shadow he had left in death. The third was in the garden of their father’s house, where he came to Thomas in a copse of trees. He was insubstantial then, but Patrick all the same. His presence was a comfort, and Thomas spoke to him. But when he told his tutor Patrick had appeared – his father at that time was distracted and remote – the tutor had explained it was the devil’s work. It was not Patrick’s spirit that had come to him, for the souls of the dead did not roam the earth. It was the devil that had taken Patrick’s shape; that was a thing that the devil liked to do, and an easy trick for him, to lead a man astray. The tutor had made Thomas pray, hard on his knees till he was stiff and sore, and the devil went away. The tutor said, ‘Give thanks, that God has seen it fit to put you to this test,’ a sour note to his voice, as though he envied him. Thomas was confused. ‘I thought it was the devil?’ he had said.
Thomas turned thirteen. He had grown to the age that Patrick had been, and beyond it. Yet he had not thrown off the trappings of a child. He was small and bairnlike, and his skin was smooth. His voice, when he sang the psalms, was as faint and feeble as a boy of nine’s, rising sweet and tremulous. Only now had it begun to creak and crack, as though it were the devil mocking at God’s word. His tutor said he should not fight what was a natural thing. But Thomas did not like that he had no control of it.
His father had enrolled him at St Andrews University. At fourteen, he was ready to depart. His brother, had he lived, would be there before him, in his second year. Now Thomas was advised that he must go alone. His tutor had instilled in him the Latin he would need. He had instilled in him, besides, a fear of the devil and a deep mistrust in God, which Thomas had been wise enough to hide. He spent much of his time praying on his knees, with his tutor by his side, to force the devil out. The tutor had been doubtful that they would succeed.
His father did not ken of their struggles with the devil. He had retreated to a torment of his own. But he emerged from it long enough to tell his son that he would be going to the College of St Salvator. ‘They call it the Auld College. You will like it there. You will have the company of bairns your ain age. Young men, I mean.’
Thomas had telt him that he did not want to go. ‘Let me stay with you.’ He had had no company but the tutor’s since his brother’s death, and he wanted none. His father had turned, so that Thomas could not see the expression on his face. ‘It is for the best.’
The tutor was dismayed at the father’s choice. He had taken his own degree at St Leonard’s, and after at St Mary’s had studied for the Kirk. It was no fault of his own that he found no living there, and had to tutor boys. (It was not, Thomas thought, for the want of prayer). St Leonard’s was a fount of religion, and a solid rock of the Reformation. The college of St Salvator was a place apart. The principal was kent to have some Catholic sympathies. He held certain views. Discipline was lax, and heresies advanced.
The father had stood fast. He had been a student at St Salvator’s himself, and he had no reason to suspect its present principal. Giles Locke was a doctor of physick. He had saved lives.
‘Lives, aye,’ the tutor had retorted. Though it was plain he hinted ‘at the cost of souls’, the father would not move. So this was the place where Thomas was sent.
‘You will have to try especially hard,’ the tutor said to him. ‘See it as a test.’ His pouting made it plain enough he did not hold out hope.
The night before they left, Thomas had gone in to take leave of his mother, lying in her bed in the place where she was kept. ‘Minnie,’ he had told her, ‘I maun gang awa’, to the university.’
She had turned her smile to him, hesitant and sweet. ‘Patrick, is it you?’
‘Aye, Minnie, Patrick,’ he had said.
His father had not travelled with them to St Andrews, but sent Thomas with the tutor, who was embarking on a project there. He was on a mission to discover Jesuits. It was not clear if the mission came from the Kirk, or from God himself, but he was very pleased at it. It filled him full of zeal. It was more deserving than tutoring a boy, even one that had the devil at his back.
At matriculation, the tutor disappeared. He did not recommend him to the college principal, or to the professor who was master of the law, whom he seemed to hold in a high contempt. When Thomas took the test in proficiency in Latin, he kept back from the crowd. When Thomas was accepted, he was nowhere to be found.
The regent for the year was Master William Cranston, a placid, earnest man. He did not work himself up to such a frenzy of zeal as the tutor did, but he was more particular on small points of grammar. His methods of instruction were thorough and pedantic, tending to the dull. Besides the Latin grammar he lectured on Isocrates.
There were twelve other entrants in the first year class. ‘We are thirteen,’ said a boy called Crabbe. Malcolm Crabbe was loud, and irrepressibly profane. He was the sort of boy the tutor warned against. He came with an impressive cache of contraband, including a collection of the latest pamphlets, which he rented nightly to the students in his year. Crabbe knew a trick to reignite a candle when the lights were out. His library was popular. And though Thomas did not choose to subscribe to it, he heard the highlights broadcast in the twilight hours. Most prized were accounts of the Spanish fleet, together with the torments of the Inquisition, which the boys elaborated with their own effects. When the master’s back was turned, they would act them out. Sometimes, they complained, ‘Crowe does not pay into the fund. Why should he be privy to the play?’ Then Crabbe would smile. ‘Ah, leave him be.’ He was wise, like Solomon. The rest deferred to him. They called him Cancer, the Latin word for Crabbe. A canker was a thing that ought to be cut out. Thomas had no doubt he was the devil in disguise.
Thomas felt confined by the college crowd. He liked the chapel best, which looked out on the street. The neglected kirk was often damp and dark, and few went there from choice. Thomas entered now, assured of peace and solitude, and found his favourite place to kneel and say his prayers. The reformers had relieved the chapel of its vanities, and made a gaudy shrine a clean and wholesome place. They had stripped the windows of their painted glass. But there were fragments still, shards that had remained embedded in the frames, like a blink of blueness in a glowering sky. Sometimes, when the sun was out, it would light upon them, scattering the motes of colour on the floor, trailing clouds of dust. Thomas had discovered how to catch the light, squinting through his fingers as he knelt to pray, playing with the prism of the dancing sun. It was like a rainbow, and the play of God, coming from the place where Patrick was. He had lit upon it on the first day of the term, when the college was assembled in the chapel vaults. He kept it to himself, a secret thing, and rare, for in the weeks that followed there was little sun.
There was none today. And though he knelt in the line of the red and yellow glass nothing filtered through to the earth around his feet, which was desolate and bare.
He closed his eyes and prayed for his mother and father to be well, and to be brought to a certain sort of lightness, though he was not certain what that light might be. For his mother, it was kindness that sh
e was unwell. But what was kindness now might not be in the end. He prayed to God to rid his heart of sin and doubt. He asked him for courage, when the devil came. But he felt no conviction in the words he spoke, without the force of his tutor, praying at his side. ‘I too have lost God,’ he thought. ‘I am abandoned, and can have no hope.’
Opening his eyes, he was not dismayed to see another ghost. It brought a kind of comfort, though he was afraid. The tutor said the spirits were a test. If he was tested still, then he was not yet damned. He was only sorry that it was not Patrick now. And though he prayed again, he could not find the words to make it go away.
This ghost was a man with a small pointed beard and sallow-coloured skin, of a saturnine complexion while he was alive. The curling locks of hair once luxuriantly dark were matted and unkempt. The ruff round his neck was blackened with blood, from a slack cut to his cheek. But the wound that had killed him was spilling from his side, where his fingers laced to hold the innards in. His doublet and hose were tattered to strips, ribbons of yellow and red. That he had been a soldier with the Spanish fleet, Thomas knew at once. He matched the descriptions Malcolm Crabbe had read. He was standing in the place where the altar would have been, back when the chapel was a Catholic church. He looked straight at Thomas, and let out a groan. He spoke an imprecation, in a foreign tongue, holding out his hands. ‘He is Catholic,’ Thomas thought, ‘and will ken Latin.’ He supposed the devil was restricted to the form he took, and that it must inhibit how he shaped his words. But he knew better than to speak to him. The tutor had succeeded in curing him of that.
William Cranston, in the dinner hall, observed that his charges were particularly loud. The golf had not been an unqualified success. Rather than allowing them to exhaust their passions, it had set them free; once unleashed they seemed even harder to contain. Wednesday was fish day, and the substance of the supper was a bowl of wattir-kail. Even this did not serve to suppress their spirits. Hew Cullan and Giles Locke, as extraordinary professors, lived outside the college, and they took their meals at home. Cranston envied them. At the plague in 1585, he had lost his class. Not that, God forbid, they had been carried off, but the closing of the college meant a year had dropped out, and no more than three regents were required. He had filled in the time teaching grammar to the son of the earl of Cassilis and enjoyed the table there. Now he was returned, he found that common living did not taste as sweet.
He sighed as he listened to the chatter in the hall, and tried to prevent its breaking out in Scots. Malcolm Crabbe’s golf ball had been ‘goited’ in the sand. ‘Immissa est pila in arenam’, he corrected. Malcolm said, ‘Et tu, magister?’ and his colleagues sniggered. This will be a long year, William Cranston thought. Is it possible, just possible, I have grown too old for it? But what is the alternative? Eking out a living at some far-flung kirk?
He felt a draught from the opening door, and looked across for someone to call upon to close it, the servant, perhaps, with a stoup of ale, of the weakest, watered kind. Instead he saw a student, one of his own, late to the board. He felt a prick of conscience, for he had not noticed that the boy was absent, and he should have done. He responded crossly, ‘Why have you come late?’
The boy was Thomas Crowe, the smallest and most timid student in his class. He had shown up nothing, in the last few weeks, suggesting he had character or a spark of spirit. It was not surprising he had not been missed. William noticed now that he was deathly pale. The play at the golf had not improved his colour, as it had his friends’. William Cranston sometimes saw that look on the fourth year students in their final term, as they were preparing for examination. They were hunched and hollow, starved of air and light, withered from long days of work and endless sleepless nights. That numbness he had seen upon the faces of some who mounted the black stane as wretched as a felon taken to the block. He had not seen it in a first year at the start of term. ‘This boy is not well,’ William thought. He recalled some dark shadow in the boy’s family, a kind of consumption, perhaps. He must consult with Giles Locke.
Thomas had crossed to the place where he sat. He looked at him, wraithlike. William said, ‘Well?’
The boy’s eyes were trusting. His young voice was brittle and childlike, to cut through the laughter of men. His Latin came clear, and was heard through the hall. ‘Master, and it please you, will you pray with me? I have seen the devil in the college kirk. He has taken up the corpus of a Spaniard for his ghost. And I do not have the courage to confront him by myself.’
Giles Locke said, ‘I blame the storms.’
‘As I recall,’ said Hew, ‘you predicted there would be no storms.’
‘Did I not tell you, too, that prophecy can never be exact? I did not pretend to know the mind of God.’
‘Then when you said the words “there will be no storms” you forgot,’ Hew teased, ‘to take account of God?’
Giles retorted huffily, ‘I never made a claim to perfect science. God kens; so should you. This quarrel does not help us, Hew. It is a plain truth that a storm can play havoc with the mind. Young imaginations are yet more subjectable. Bairns are more rebellious when there is a wind. But Thomas Crowe insists he saw a ghost. Whatever else is put to him, he will not be swayed. He does not believe that he imagined it.’
‘If he believes he saw a ghost,’ said Hew, ‘then perhaps he did.’
Giles Locke raised an eyebrow. ‘I have heard you say such things do not exist.’
‘A searching eye sees all, and rules nothing out,’ Hew said. ‘But I believe that what he saw owes more to human mischief than the devil’s kind. To put it plainly, now, I do not believe that spirits walk the earth. Where is Thomas Crowe? I will talk to him.’
‘Ah, I hoped you would. He is in the fermary, where he is treated for his melancholy.’
‘Is he melancholic?’
‘I imagine so,’ Giles said. ‘What man would not be, who has seen a ghost? If not before, then after. A ghost is cold and dry, to the last degree. Whether there is malice in it I will leave to you. For I have no doubt that you will find it out.’
The fermary, as Giles Locke called it, was a small, separate building to the north side of the college, which the doctor had established following the plague, to contain infection. Here students were confined who showed sign of fever, or suffered from the flux. The servant Kennocht Cutler acted as the fermer, tending to their needs, and putting into practice what the doctor had prescribed.
Today, there were two patients in his ward. George Robertson, a tertian, had a tertian fever, brought on by excitement at the golf. Following his breakfast of a pat of butter (loosening), on a hunk of bread (absorbing) and a roasted egg (binding), George would be discharged; his symptoms had subsided in the night.
The second patient, Thomas Crowe, did not have a fever. His pulse was slow and strong, and his piss was clear. His bowels were brought to flux through the doctor’s clysters, while it was the vomitaries left him limp and pale, wringing out the flush of colour from his cheeks. He had been thoroughly purged. And yet he was not cured. The infection in this boy was of a stubborn, dangerous kind.
The floor of the fermary was strewn with herbs. Meg’s work, Hew supposed. Though women were forbidden to pass through the college gates, her influence was plain in the comforts Giles prescribed, though absent in the plying of emetics. Meg approved purging only to countermand poisons. But perhaps it was a poison that afflicted Thomas Crowe, working on his mind?
The pungency of rosemary did not clear the air. Hew felt in his wam a sympathetic lurch. But the old hands in the sick room were inured to it. George Robertson finished his breakfast with gusto, licking his fingers. It was better than the bannock served up in the hall.
‘You do not seem ill,’ Hew told him.
‘That is the thing about a tertian fever. It manifests itself every other day.’
Hew knew George quite well. His fevers – tertian, quartan or quotidian – re-emerged at intervals convenient to himself. Hew could gue
ss their source: flannels warmed to boiling point and secretly applied. Kennocht was perhaps complicit in the case. The two appeared fast friends.
‘Well, I will be gone,’ George Robertson said cheerfully. He thanked Cutler for the egg, and his gentle care. ‘Good morrow, little friend,’ he said to Thomas Crowe. ‘May God requite your prayers.’
Thomas Crowe was sitting silent on his bed. He did not look up.
‘Why do you say that?’ said Hew. Giles Locke had left instruction that Thomas Crowe should not be left alone. Solitude was perilous in a case of melancholy. Yet Hew was not so sure. Was the ghost a trick that had been played on him? If so, then his companions must come under scrutiny.
George looked surprised at his question. ‘He is sic a pious little soul.’ He seemed to bear no malice for the boy.
‘How are you today?’ Hew asked Thomas Crowe, once Robertson had left.
1588 A Calendar of Crime Page 18