A battered leather scrip was flung across one shoulder. In it was his bible, and a length of rope. The bible was a satisfying burden on his back. It made his shoulder ache. The bairns who mocked were fooled by his lopsided gait. He was lean and strong.
The rope was to restrain the priest, if he put up a fight. Colin would have liked something more substantial, shackles or a chain, but the blacksmith’s fee had proved to be prohibitive. His pocket knife was tucked safely in his belt. A priest, though he was slippery, was unlikely to be armed, and Colin could make use of anything to hand. God would provide. But the first and most essential weapon in his armoury was that of surprise.
Ann Balfour’s house was three miles from St Andrews, lying to the west, and another mile from the closest farm. In summer, it was hidden from the road by trees, its presence hinted vaguely by the wisp of smoke. Now the fields were bare, and the wind had stripped the trees of leaves, it was mantled still in holly, thistle clumps and thorns, so that Colin breaking through found his calves streaked red with blood and bramble juice. A tree branch snapped back, snatching at his scarf, and scratched him on the cheek. Smarting, he fought free and fell upon the cottage rising from the gloom. The door stood wide open, almost as though he had been expected there. Yet he saw no sign of life.
He left the door ajar, to let in the light, while he looked around. Inside, he found a panelled hall, furnished with a settle and a bed, with some kind of carpet on the walls. There were shutters on the windows, which Colin tried to open, finding that the hinges had been rusted fast, as though no one had opened them for years. On the wall were the stubs of candles, recently burnt out. The wax that puddled in the cups smelt of mutton fat. He prised a candle out, and teasing up the wick, lit it from a flint. It took him several strikes before it was alight. Blowing on his fingers, which the sparks had burnt, he held the stump in front of him, and leapt to see a shadow in the corner of the room become a sombre figure in a high-backed chair. When his heartbeat settled and he dared approach, he saw it was Ann Balfour, apparently asleep. Her face was covered with a veil of gauze, and her hands were clasped white against the lap, voluminous and dark, of her satin gown. It was the hands that captured him, before he had the chance to look up to her face. They were slender hands, the fingers long and delicate. The nails were clean and trimmed. But the skin was parched and crumpled, each blue vein pinched out.
Ann Balfour spoke. ‘Who are you?’ she said.
Because he had supposed she was asleep, he could not help but jump at it. Her voice was tight and quivering, an auld body’s voice, distant and superior, cool in a way that irritated him. She was never meant to have the upper hand.
‘I am Colin Snell, come from the Kirk.’ He tried to make the words full of weight and matter, inspiring her to dread.
‘Thank the Lord for that. I thought you were a ghost.’ Ann Balfour did not seem the slightest bit afraid.
She was nearly blind, Colin Snell had heard. He came a little closer, holding up the candle to her face. She did not flinch from it. He saw sunken features, hollowed out with age. An aquiline nose. An old woman’s whisker, white on her chin, standing proud. Her eyes, which did not see, were penetrating still, washed out to a crystalline blue. She seemed to look through him.
‘The kirk of Holy Trinity?’ she asked. ‘I had not heard there was a new incumbent.’
‘The College of St Mary,’ he was forced to say.
‘I did not ken there was a chapel there.’
Colin Snell was vexed that she had caught him out. Blustering, he told her, ‘The Kirk kens that you are harbouring a priest. I have been sent here to apprehend him.’
The words should have filled her with terror and dismay. She should be whimpering, falling to her knees. He scarcely could believe it when he heard her laugh; a rasping, creaking sound. ‘The Kirk is misinformed.’
‘If the priest is here,’ he telt her, ‘I will flush him out.’
He knew the priest was there. He could smell him in the air. The scent of incense drifted from the candles, which had been blown out. He sniffed experimentally.
‘Camphor,’ she said. ‘It is for the moths. The tapestries are full of them.’
He knew then that the priest was concealed behind the arras. It was plain as day. He took up his staff with a cry, and began to flounder round the room, flailing at the tapestries, which fell down from the walls, scattering their dust, and clouds of moths flew out, landing on his face.
Ann Balfour said, ‘Dear me. Why would ye do that?’
When the streaming in his eyes had stopped, he returned to her, brandishing the staff. He hoped she found it menacing.
Plainly, she did not. ‘You have cut your cheek. Let me.’ She reached out to him with a pocket handkerchief, doused in some peculiar kind of scent. Her hand touched his face, and Colin jumped back with a jolt. The brush of her fingers, papery dry, kindled the flame in his tooth. Moaning, he cradled his cheek.
‘What is the matter? Poor man.’
He could not speak for the pain. When the words came, they were clumsy and thick. ‘Tell me where he is.’
Ann Balfour gazed at him. ‘I do not understand you. There is no one lives here but the servant Adam Cole, and his wife Grizelda. No one else at all.’ She put a curious emphasis upon the final phrase, seeming to amuse her.
He saw there was a tray of breakfast by her side. The breakfast was untouched. The servants must have left it there.
‘Where are the servants now?’ he asked.
‘If they are not about, then I cannot say. Perhaps they have gone out to the farm.’
The door was left wide open. But the farm at the Poffle was a mile away. ‘And left you alone?’ Colin said.
‘They are good servants. They will not have gone far. Besides, they are old. They cannot go far.’
He told her that he meant to search the house. ‘It will be the worse for you, if you not confess to something that I find. Better own it now.’
She declined the chance, with a gracious bowing of her head. ‘I do not recommend you go into the loft. The boards are rotten there.’
He told her to stay put. ‘Do not quit this place.’
Ann Balfour smiled. ‘Where would I go?’ She closed her eyes again and clasped her hands. He thought he saw a movement in her lips, though he heard no words. He looked around again, and noticed that the bed was stripped.
‘Why do you not sleep in your bed?’ he asked her. She was laughing at him, he was sure of it.
‘Bless you,’ she said. ‘I do not sleep.’
He supposed he had found her at her papish prayers, and grimaced in disgust. He had a will to hurt her. She was old and frail, and it would be no more than the bending of a twig. But the moment was not now. It would come.
The house was not grand, and would not take long to search. The chamber where she kept had a single room behind it, serving as the kitchen and the nether hall, where the servants slept in a curtained crevice, set into the wall. Here Colin poked and prodded with his stick, but found no one underneath. The kitchen fire was cold; the ashes had been dampened down sometime in the night, and had not been kindled that day. Where were the servants, then? Had they left the house before the sun was up? A pat of primrose butter and a pot of cheese were covered with a cloth. Ale in a barrel was frothy and wholesome. He drew off a cup. There were oats in a sack, sufficient to make cakes, and haddies that were blistered to a honeyed black, hanging from a rack, yet the griddle pan was cold. There were plums and pippins, and a bowl of milk. Yesterday’s bread, in a crock. In the larder he found more things to eat. A clutch of small wild birds, plucked of their feathers, packed in a dish like hatchlings in a nest. The carcase of a hare. An extravagant pie, adorned with fruits and leaves moulded from the paste.
He returned to the hall to look in on Ann Balfour.
‘Your servants have not gone out for provisions. You are well supplied.’
She took a moment to answer. He did not care if he disturbed her at her p
rayers, or if she was asleep. Eventually she said, ‘Did I say they had?’
‘There is food for you. Why do you not eat?’ For some reason that he could not fathom, the untouched tray offended him. It was not rational to accuse her. That he understood. And yet he felt a viciousness that spurred his questions on.
‘I find,’ Ann Balfour said, ‘I have little appetite.’
‘Then who is all the food for?’ The house was full of food. The servants must intend to be away some while. Where, then, had they gone? Surely she must know.
‘That is for the guests,’ she said.
‘What guests?’ The door was left open, so that anyone who passed could easily walk in. But no one would pass. The house was not on the way to anywhere at all.
‘There are always guests, at a time like this. You are a guest, and hungry, I think. You are most welcome to eat.’
He recognized at once that he was ravenously hungry, astonished that he had not noticed it before. A man who did God’s service needed proper sustenance; well then, he would take the woman at her word. He returned to the kitchen and piled a plate with cheese, haddies and some pickle he had found in a jar, slathering some butter on a slab of bread. Vengeful, he carved deep into the piecrust, scooping out the meat to mash up to a jelly in the corner of his mouth. He had eaten little for the last few days, tormented by the raging in his tooth. Now, God was kind; the red volcano slept. Colin had his fill, and more; and when he looked upon the carnage he had left, the pastry coffin torn and pillaged of its flesh, the loaf smeared with butter and the butter strewn with crumbs, and remembered his excess had been visible to God, he felt a little sick. He must not lose sight of the reason he had come. He would make amends by discovering the priest.
Priests of the Catholic Church were well kent to indulge themselves. If the pie had been intended for the Jesuit priest, then it was likely that the priest was gross in size and slothful, and could not run far. Colin had no doubt that he was hiding in the loft. Perhaps at this moment, he was peering down, bleating out his rosary, fumbling at the beads, quivering with rage and indignant at the pie; the short work Colin made of it he would make of him.
Ascending to the loft, Colin reappraised this rosy view of things. The entrance to the loft, and the ladder which led up to it, had not been constructed to admit of corpulence. Any priest who hid there was of the wiry kind. He himself was lean. Yet with his staff in his left hand, and a candle in his right, and the rope and the bible banging on his back, he struggled to climb up. He needed the candle to illuminate the rafters, and the staff to subdue whatever lived up there. Colin’s dread of rats equalled the revulsion he felt for Catholic priests.
The hole at the top was a squeeze. Colin set his candle down on a board in front of him, hauling himself up. The light was a drop in the pooling darkness, and Colin stretched his staff before him as a probe, prodding into chasms where the candle did not reach. This is how it must feel to be blind, he told himself, pleased at the conceit. God wanted him to see, to ken what that was like. The floorboards below were spongy to his feet; he could feel them sag. About that, at least, Ann Balfour had not lied.
He proceeded cautiously, stooping where he felt the rafters at his head. Once, he lost his footing, and fell into a pile of something soft. He wrestled for a moment, fighting his way out of what appeared to be a bundle of old clothes. Like the tapestries below, they were full of moths, and a woollen shawl fell to nothing in his hands. He satisfied himself that there was no place here to hide. Disheartened, he climbed down, missing his footing at the bottom of the steps, and landing with a thud. He felt a little flustered, certain that Ann Balfour must have heard the bump. He was followed to the ground by a cloud of dust, and brushing himself off, he found he had a cobweb caught up in his cap.
From the kitchen, he looked out to a yard at the back, where he saw some hens scratching in the dust, and a pile of wood, neatly chopped and stacked. Looking for a door that would take him out, he came upon a cupboard, four or five feet high, built into the wall. Large enough, perhaps, for a man to hide. But when he looked inside, he saw a flight of stairs.
The steps led underground. And Colin knew at once that he had found the place.
Colin felt a thrill that he had experienced only once before, when he had smacked against the hard core of his fist the pulp of Roger Cunningham, and had conceived the plot to throw him in the jakes. His reactions then had been muddled in their heat; he now saw that was wrong, but he still believed the sentiment was sound. Evil must be carefully, thoroughly snuffed out, retribution calculating, slow. A cornered rat might fight. But Colin was prepared to take him on.
He had no need of the candle coming down the stairs. There were several lanterns lit along the way, to illuminate his path. In the vault ahead, he could hear a murmuring, he could smell the swirling of a dark, Massy scent, in the very bowel and belly of the house.
Yet he was unprepared for the thing he found. The tunnel opened out into a vaulted chamber, with a blaze of candles burning on all sides, and many others molten, puddled on the ground. The perfume he inhaled was candlewax and grease. Where he had expected to come upon an altar, a simple homemade cross was nailed up on the wall. Where he had expected the vestments of a priest were two aged servants kneeling on the floor, a man and a woman, whispering their prayers. In a kist between them Colin saw a corpse, carefully laid out.
The woman raised her eyes. ‘You are not kin. Who are you?’ she said.
He could not take his eyes from the body in the kist. He felt compelled to ask, yet dared not shape the question. In his heart, he knew. He answered in a whisper, ‘I am Colin Snell, come frae the Kirk.’
The old man looked up at him, sorrowful and dignified. ‘What kirk is that?’
Colin said, ‘The right an proper one.’
The old woman sighed, while her husband said, ‘Kirk or no kirk, show my mistress some respect. Tak aff your hat.’
Colin clasped his bonnet limply in his hands. ‘When did she die?’
The woman said, ‘Yisterday, early in the morn. The boy frae the Poffle went to fetch her folk. They will bury her. Hae the grace to leave us, sir. There is nothing here for you to do.’
‘Have you kept watch here, all night?’ He knew how such vigils were kept. The servants were praying for Ann Balfour’s soul. He felt a cold kind of clutching, somewhere in his bowel. If Ann Balfour was dead–
‘Who is it sitting up the stair?’ The words were out. And his belly lurched at the glances they exchanged.
‘Wha dae ye mean, sir?’ Adam said.
His guidwife rose stiffly from her knees. ‘Can it be the family come so soon? I will gang an see.’
Adam stayed behind to watch over the corpse. It was plain he was devoted to his mistress. It was plain he did not want to leave her side.
Colin went behind the woman up the steps. Her responses to his questions, simple as they were, brought him little hope. Ann Balfour had died in her chair early in the morning of the day before, leaving her breakfast tray untouched. Adam had left his wife to wash and dress the corpse, while he walked the mile to the Poffle farm. The sons from the farm had helped to take the body to the cellar underground, where it would be cool, until the family came.
‘We have stayed by her side, ever since.’
‘Did she have a priest with her, in her final hours?’
The woman was scornful. ‘A priest? Where wid she hae that? There is no priest for miles, thanks to your ain kind.’
As they came through the kitchen, she caught sight of the pie. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Mercy!’ she cried. ‘Go tell my husband that we have been robbed! There is a thief somewhere in the house.’
Colin felt obliged to confess. Weakly, he told her he had been asked.
‘Who asked you?’ she said.
‘I believed it be the mistress of the house.’ He withered in her gaze.
‘Shame on you, sir, for a wicked lie. For a man o’ the Kirk! That pie was sent this morning from t
he Poffle farm, for the funeral feast.’
He followed her, quailing, to the hall. The woman in the chair would put the servant right. Someone from the family, recently arrived, exhausted from the ride. So he told himself, knowing in his heart it would not be so.
The entrance hall appeared just as he had left it, except that the front door was closed. ‘There is no one here, sir,’ the servant said. She opened up a shutter, letting in the light. Colin was astonished at how easily it moved. The woman let slip a small mew of distress. ‘Forgive me. I forgot the tray.’ He sensed that the apology was not meant for him, but for someone else. In the light from the window he saw that the bread on the tray was hard. Yesterday’s breakfast. Yesterday’s tray. How was it he had failed to notice that before?
She had seen the tapestries. ‘What happened to the cloths? Who has torn them down?’
He brushed her questions off. ‘There was someone here. She has gone outside.’
She looked at him, wondering. ‘Are ye sure, sir? I left the door locked.’
She showed him. It was locked still, and the key was inside.
‘If it was locked,’ he said wildly, ‘how did I come here?’
‘I thocht to ask you that,’ she said.
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