1588 A Calendar of Crime

by Shirley McKay

  Colin shook his head. ‘There is a back door. She went out by there.’

  Grief had made her dull. But she regarded him with a kind of pity, which drove him to the edge of a terrifying precipice. ‘That door is locked, too. I have the key.’

  That key was like a blade, cunningly slipped out, just to cut him down, paring off his reason by degrees. It glinted in her hand.

  He whimpered. ‘She was sitting there, just there, in the chair.’

  ‘In that chair?’ As she moved towards it, the servant gave a cry.

  ‘She sees,’ Colin thought. ‘Though she will not say. Her mistress now appears to her, as she did to me.’

  Relief did not last long. The woman reached her hand out to the empty armchair, finding something there. ‘This was her hankercher,’ she said. Her simple face had crumpled, as the tears began to spill. ‘God forgive my foolishness. For though I ken that she is in a better place, and I will be there after, we three were together very many years. God bless her guid soul.’ She lifted up the handkerchief, dabbing at her eyes, and Colin saw upon it spots of his own blood. His hand flew to his tooth, his mouth began to move against the searing pain, and the sound that came from it was very like a sob.

  III

  BALFOUR

  ‘a counterfeit and deceiving spirit’

  Hew came from his lecture on the third day of November to find Roger Cunningham waiting in his room. Roger was playing at a game of knucklebones with a silver button and a rotten tooth. He threw the tooth and caught it.

  ‘If this is how you spend your time,’ said Hew, ‘I am not surprised that you persist in haunting us. Though I would remind you that you are expelled.’

  ‘I have something for you,’ Roger said. He ignored the jibe.

  ‘Not that, I hope.’

  Roger put the tooth in a pocket. ‘Not this. This is a part of my collection. Something you will want.’

  ‘Aye? And what is that?’

  ‘News,’ Roger said. ‘I have brought you news. I know that it will interest you. Thank me, if you like.’

  ‘I may thank you, or no, when you tell me what it is.’

  ‘Do you ken a man called Colin Snell? He was a student here at the New College, who had in mind to hurl me into their latrines. I nearly died.’

  ‘An exaggeration. But I mind the man.’

  Roger grinned at him. ‘I knew you would. Well, he has returned. This is his tooth.’

  ‘I dare not ask,’ Hew said, ‘how he came to part with it.’

  ‘I pulled it out myself. I never saw a man so pitifully feart. He almost shat himself. I had to let him think I had forgot the jakes. I minded it, of course.’

  Hew said, ‘You are a fiend.’

  ‘That is unkind. I did not hurt him, more than necessary. Which was quite enough. Colin Snell is in a wretched state. He is presently in the care of James Melville of Kilrennie, who has brought him to his uncle at the New College. It was James who paid me to extract the tooth. He is a patient but practical man. Colin Snell is lunatic.’

  ‘That is very sad. But I do not see what it has to do with me.’

  ‘I though you would be interested in what has made him mad. He has seen a ghost.’

  ‘Really? Where was that?’

  A second ghost was surely more than a coincidence. Hew wondered whether Roger had heard of Thomas Crowe, and hoped that he had not. Rumour quickly spread. Roger was by no means the common sort of gossip; he was far more dangerous than that. He kept his secrets close, waiting for the moment when they could be put to their best effect.

  ‘At the Poffle of Strathkinness. He was on a priest hunt there, when he saw the spirit of a woman called Ann Balfour.’

  ‘Is Ann Balfour dead, then?’

  Roger said pleasantly, ‘I imagine so, if she is a ghost. That is what I heard. I listen, and I hear things. Colin Snell did not confide in me. But I heard James Melville talking with his uncle, and this is what I learned. James had from Colin a precise and curious account. He had gone to the Poffle on November first. When he arrived, he found Ann Balfour sitting in her chair, with a breakfast tray beside her. The breakfast was untouched. Colin Snell made much of the breakfast. James said he was quite fixed on it. Some words were exchanged, between Colin Snell and the woman there. Then Colin went to search the rest of the house. In a vault underground, he found Ann Balfour’s body, watched by her servants. She had been dead since the day before. The servants had watched, all through the night. There were no other persons in the house.

  ‘When Andrew was informed of this, he sent a party from the Kirk. The party confirmed that Ann Balfour’s body had been decently laid out. Her family had turned up, and arranged for her burial at the kirk of Holy Trinity.

  ‘She was buried yesterday, in fact. The party found no trace of a spirit in the house. The servants were distressed at Colin Snell’s suggestion that the devil had appeared to him, in the form of their mistress. They are of the superstitious kind, who believe that ghosts are the spirits of the dead. But they did not believe their mistress could have roamed abroad, as that was what their vigil was intended to prevent. They had believed a death at Halloween put the corpus under threat, yet they were convinced they had averted it. They saw and heard no ghost. The consensus is that Colin is insane. He is kept at the college, where he is asleep, silenced with a draught. Now, are you not pleased that I have brought this news?’

  Hew did his best to feign indifference to it. ‘I hope that you have not spread your prattle far and wide. It does not do to fright the world with ghosts.’

  Roger laughed at that. ‘You need not fear. I do not lightly break a patient’s confidence. I saved the news for you. It is a gift, to thank you for the help you gave to Sam at Candlemas. I know it is exactly the sort of thing you like. Confess, you are agog. Now that I have telt you, we are even, are we not?’

  Pulling out the tooth, he looked at it again. ‘When I have gathered teeth from all my old adversaries, I will make a necklet,’ he said. ‘One of yours among them will look very fine.’

  ‘When I have the toothache, I will remember that. I will not come to you,’ said Hew.

  ‘Ah, but you should. I am very good.’

  ‘Be gone, ghoulish creature. You are very bad. Possibly the worst loun in the world.’ Hew chased him out. But he was not displeased.

  He went in search of Giles, and found him in the chapel. Giles appeared distracted. ‘I was thinking that we should repair the roof.’ Hew did not comment. He recognized the roof was not why Giles was here.

  ‘Did you want something?’ Giles said.

  Hew said, ‘Indeed. Did you ken that Ann Balfour was dead?’

  ‘I certified the death.’

  ‘You did not mention it.’

  Giles replied simply, ‘You did not ask.’ His daily life dealt so often in such small departures, that they passed him by without report. ‘Her death was unremarkable. I found her sitting peaceful in her chair.’

  ‘Was the death expected?’

  ‘It was not unexpected. What is your interest, Hew?’

  Hew did not answer the question. Instead he asked, ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was on the morning of October thirty-first, All Hallows Eve. A boy from the farm at the Poffle came to fetch me.’

  ‘Were there other people in the house?’

  ‘The servants. The boy from the farm. I saw no one else there. Why?’

  ‘A man called Colin Snell believes he saw her spirit, on November 1st. He went to her house, on a hunt for priests.’

  ‘What? Another ghost?’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  Giles looked, in that moment, so intently troubled that Hew thought, ‘He believes the spirit Thomas saw was real. That is why he came here to the kirk.’ Giles Locke was a Catholic, after all.

  But the doctor’s mind was on another track. ‘Who is Colin Snell?’ he asked.

  ‘He was once a student at the New College. He was disgraced, in the affair with Roger Cu
nningham.’

  ‘Ach, I knew the name. It was in a letter that I had from Stephen Crowe. Colin Snell was tutor to his boys.’

  ‘Then they are connected,’ Hew exclaimed. ‘It cannot be by chance that both have witnessed ghosts.’

  ‘I fear an epidemic,’ Giles said gloomily. ‘There has been contagion here. So much must be plain. But why should it continue now they are apart? Colin Snell has had no communion with the boy. I mind now, he was absent at the start of term. Thomas telt me he had come here with his tutor. But when we looked for him, to have his own report, he could not be found.’

  Hew said, ‘He hid from us, perhaps.’

  ‘Now you trouble me. I do not like to think that such a man insinuated into that poor boy.’

  ‘Perhaps it is the boy insinuates in him.’

  Giles shuddered. ‘Horrible, quite horrible. I do not like to think it. He is just a bairn.’

  ‘Do not be distressed,’ said Hew. ‘Whatever is the source, I will find it out. But we must be vigilant. There is more to this than we had supposed. How does the patient?’

  ‘You had best ask Meg. He is her patient now. What use was I to him? To ply purges on a boy, who had starved himself?’ Giles responded wretchedly. ‘I depend on her to put right our neglect.’

  Hew saw that it was conscience that had brought him to the kirk, not the fear of ghosts. He came there to atone, to make his peace with God, for the guilt he felt for failing Thomas Crowe.

  Colin Snell was fettered in a fractured sleep, and unable to confirm his own account to Hew. But a word with James left him in no doubt.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Hew, ‘he did not find his priest?’

  ‘There is no priest,’ James said. ‘I doubt you may have heard of one called Father John, who was well kent here. He compeared before the Kirk session at St Andrews, several months ago, and was ordered to desist from holding Mass. He was sick and frail, and no action was pursued against him at that time. Shortly after that, he passed away. I tried to say as much to Colin Snell. He would not hear. He is a fanatic, Hew. There is no kind of reason to his mad pursuits. I bitterly regret I sent him to those boys. God kens what hard doctrine he instilled in them, when they came already from a tragic house.’

  The story of that house had lately been disclosed, in letters to Giles Locke from the father Stephen, after Thomas Crowe had fainted in the kirk. The doctor had examined him, for the first time thoroughly, and had found his fragile body beggarly and thin. It soon became apparent he had starved himself. The regent William Cranston was unable to recall ever seeing Thomas eat his dinner at the board. Thomas was a quiet boy, who did not draw attention to himself. In his defence, Cranston said he had never come across a boy who did not want to eat. The students in the main had ferocious appetites. They were never satisfied, but always wanted more. Which Doctor Locke would ken, if he ever stayed to supper in the hall.

  Giles had blamed himself. In particular, it vexed him that he had ordered purges for a patient who was plainly ill. It was his fault, entirely, that the boy had fainted. The visions he had seen – which the purging had exacerbated, rather than relieved – resulted from his fast, for fasting was a cause of illusions in the mind. He believed the fasting had been caused by melancholy, and that Thomas Crowe had simply lost his appetite. Hew’s investigations bore this out. It did not take him long to find the bits of bread that Thomas Crowe had hidden in his room. The bread was hard and stale.

  The remedy prescribed was the soundest cure of all. Giles had taken Thomas home with him to Meg, trusting her to mend the harm that had been done.

  Hew continued, meanwhile, to pursue the ghost. While it had a cause in Thomas Crowe’s poor health, he believed its substance had a human source. It did not take him long to find it. A brisk inquisition of the first year class – who were awed by the sight of Thomas carried out – had delivered Malcom Crabbe and his pamphlets to his hands. Hew was impressed by the contents of the library.

  ‘“A pack of Spanish lies” may be well and sound. But I like this one best: “A new ballet of the strange and most cruel whips which the Spaniards had prepared to whip and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish ships in July last past. To the tune of The valiant soldier.” You cannot hum that, I suppose?’

  Malcom Crabbe could not. ‘It is an English song.’

  ‘A pity. Else we might have sung it with the Gude and Godlie ballads. There are pictures too, of the different whips. I did not know they carried male and female kinds.’

  Malcolm rushed headlong, mistaking for approval what was meant for irony. ‘They do. This one with the barbs is to flay the women, after they have spoiled them.’ He read a little late the look upon Hew’s face. ‘Well, that is what the verse says,’ he concluded lamely.

  ‘Although their bodies sweet and fair/their spoil they meant to make/And on them first their filthie lust/and pleasure for to take,’ Hew read aloud. ‘These Spaniards show no courtesy.’

  ‘No, sir. They are vile.’

  ‘Do you think,’ said Hew, ‘this filth is fit to bring into the college here?’

  Malcolm Crabbe thought. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Why not, do you think?’

  ‘It is not in Latin?’

  ‘That is a small part of it. But you make a good point. You can take the “Pack of lies” and turn it into Latin. I will keep the rest.’

  ‘Will you burn them, sir?’ Understanding dawned, or more likely, Hew considered, had been lurking all the while. Malcolm Crabbe was wise enough to know to play the fool.

  ‘I will not. For that is what the Spanish do. Where did you get them from?’

  ‘From my father. He is a merchant, who deals in quilibets.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In what-nots, sir. It is a Latin word. I thought you would have heard of it.’

  ‘I know the word,’ said Hew. ‘But I had not come across it in that way. He can have the pamphlets back, at the end of term, when I will want a word with him.’

  ‘Ask for almost anything, he will find it for you,’ Crabbe said with a grin. ‘But his speciality is moments of the day. Mementos and remembrances. He says the Spanish wars will make our fortune yet, if they do not drive us to our graves.’

  Hew had taken the pamphlets back to Kenly Green, and had read them overnight. Their lurid accounts were sufficient to cause nightmares in a time-served soldier, never mind a timid and impressive boy. Though some boys were protected by the callousness of youth, to one with a tender, troubled intellect the pamphlets were the kindle for the flame. Hew had dismissed the bloodspot in the kirk as a skew irrelevance. The source for the substance of the ghost was plain.

  So he had believed. Thomas would recover, and the case was closed. But now that he had heard the tale of Colin Snell, he was not so sure.

  He found Thomas Crowe sitting up in bed. Already, he could see a little colour in his cheeks. ‘I do not suppose,’ said Hew, ‘that there are spirits here.’

  Thomas Crowe agreed that there were not.

  ‘Was it Colin Snell who taught you to fast?’

  He threw out the name, randomly and carelessly, to see the boy react. Thomas clutched at the sheet, but gave no other sign. His answer was carefully staged. ‘It behoveth them which are vexed with spirits, to pray especially, and give themselves to fasting,’ he said. He spoke no word of Snell, but recited from a book.

  ‘Yet you have been fasting for a while. For a long time, I would say, before you saw the spirit. Were there other ghosts? Ones you saw with Snell?’

  ‘Will you call Mistress Meg? I do not feel well,’ Thomas said, and voided the contents of his stomach down the bed.

  ‘You have upset him,’ said Meg, when Thomas was cleaned up again, and settled down to sleep. ‘I will not have it, Hew. He is here to rest.’

  ‘I have upset him?’ answered Hew. ‘Some who knew no better might say it was the devil made him spew.’

  Meg shot him a look
. ‘God help him who dares to say it in this house. The truth is, his stomach cannot hold so much. He has not eaten nearly enough, over a very long time.’

  ‘We have been derelict in our care of him.’

  ‘That. Giles is distraught, and with cause. But it goes back much further than that. No one cared, or noticed, what he ate at home. He has starved himself, perhaps for years.’

  ‘Why would a boy choose not to eat?’ asked Hew.

  ‘Grief does strange things.’

  ‘From grief?’ he repeated.

  ‘It is not as simple as that.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  He wanted answers, always. Meg said, with a sigh, ‘I cannot say, for sure. But I believe he does not want to grow into a man.’

  For Hew, the answers were not satisfactory. He could not question either Thomas Crowe or his tutor Colin Snell in the way that he would like. Both of them were in a far too fragile state. Yet he was determined to expose the cause. ‘If you are a ghost,’ he promised, ‘I will chase you out.’ It astonished him to find he spoke the words aloud.

  He resolved to begin at the Poffle of Strathkinness. That was a place where a man might find a spirit, on an ordinary day. He had been himself, to visit there at Candlemas, when Ann Balfour he supposed was already close to death. Certainly there had been a pall about the house. And Ann Balfour was the kind of woman who might well return, to haunt a man in death, just to make a point.

  He dismissed the thought, as quickly as it formed. Whatever Ann’s belief about the spirits of the dead, Hew did not believe their souls came back as ghosts. A spirit was a darker, more malignant thing. If it did exist, it was the devil’s plaything, for it was very rare indeed that such a thing was God’s. More likely though by far was that it was constructed by a human mind. Fearful men imagined fearful things.

  He did not go at once to Ann Balfour’s cottage, but called first at the farm a mile away. At this time of year, the land took on a melancholy hue. The harvest was coming to its close, the supple greens and golds mellowing to greys, the trees bending stark, yearning in the wind. In another week or so, it would be slaughter time, the keening mothers giving up their calves. The farmhands in the fields were raking up the dregs of summer. Winter was approaching, soft upon the storms.