Time and Tide

by Shirley McKay

  ‘She hasna’ started with her labours yet. No doubt you will be telt, when her time is due.’ The servant had retreated, pulling back the door. Hew stopped it with his foot. ‘I think you know me better, Paul,’ he warned. ‘Since I am not the blacksmith, nor the barker with his bill, you do not close the door to me. It seems you have forgotten it.’

  The reprimand struck home. Paul began to stutter and to blush. ‘Tis only that . . . your pardon, sir, but do not tell the doctor. He is fair forfochten.’

  ‘Do not tell him what?’ a sleepy voice inquired, and Giles himself came rumbling through the hall, squinting at the light. ‘If that is Master Hew, then bid him wait until I’m dressed.’

  ‘By your leave,’ muttered Hew to the servant, who allowed him to pass with a hiss. ‘Do not say, sir, that I did not prepare you.’

  ‘Prepare me for what?’ Hew hissed back.

  ‘Why is it so dark in here?’ Giles had opened up the shutters, letting in the air, and blinking as the sunlight filtered through the room. ‘How comes the sun so bright?’ he pondered paradoxically.

  ‘How comes it that your household is asleep?’ retorted Hew.

  ‘I know not . . . What? What time is it?’ Giles rubbed his eyes.

  Paul answered, disingenuously, ‘Mebbe eight, or nine? I cannot rightly say, for I havna’ heard the clock.’

  ‘It is a little after twelve,’ corrected Hew. ‘And yet it is no matter, Giles.’

  Giles looked baffled, like a man disturbed from walking in his sleep, to find out he has trodden on his spectacles. ‘Of course it matters!’ He made sense of it at last. ‘I have missed matriculation.’

  ‘No matter, that,’ said Hew. ‘Professor Groat and I have managed it between us. And save for my solicitude, and Bartie’s speculation, we managed it quite well.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt that you managed it,’ protested Giles. ‘That is not the point. The point is in the principle; that is, I am the principal. Did I not tell you to wake me?’ he rounded on Paul. ‘Did I not tell you, expressly?’

  The servant stood his ground. ‘I do not recall it, sir. Now, I was looking for your hat, when Master Hew came chappin’ at the door; I’ll go and find it now, and by your leave. I doubt you must have left it at the college.’ He slunk off down the passage, with a backward glance at Hew, which plainly spoke, ‘You stirred it; now you settle it.’

  Giles looked hopelessly at Hew. ‘Much good my hat will do me now! I must be severe with him, for he has gone too far. He always goes too far. Does he? Has he? Has he gone too far?’ he flustered.

  ‘He does, and has, and always goes too far,’ acknowledged Hew. ‘And yet, on this occasion, he must be commended, for clearly he holds your best interests at heart.’

  The doctor groaned. ‘Then he is above himself, and ought to be dismissed!’

  ‘I cannot think that that will help. What is the matter, Giles? This is not like you,’ said Hew.

  ‘I am not quite myself,’ admitted Giles. ‘My world stands on its end. It is the helter-skelter of a dizzy heart.’

  ‘Indeed, that does sound serious,’ Hew answered with a smile.

  ‘It is serious. The matter is your sister Meg. She spent last night in thrall to the falling sickness.’

  ‘I feared it,’ Hew exclaimed, ‘though am loath to hear it. How does she now?’

  ‘Sleeping like a child. The worst of it has passed; the nurse has come to sit with her. I closed my eyes a moment . . .’

  ‘Then Paul is right and I am to be blamed for waking you,’ Hew declared emphatically. ‘The crisis point is over, rest assured.’

  ‘Rest assured?’ Giles cried. ‘If I could rest assured . . .! I am helpless to help her, Hew. Helpless.’

  It was the closest he had come to frank despair, and Hew felt at a loss. ‘You are too much in the dark,’ he tried at last, ‘and want a little sun, to show this prospect in a fairer light. Come, then, walk with me. The air will do you good.’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I cannot leave the house.’

  ‘And yet, a moment past, you were all for setting out, to see the boys matriculate,’ Hew reminded him. ‘You are disordered, Giles, and have lost your balance. Come, I insist. We’ll keep the house in sight.’

  They settled on the path above the castle beach, and walked along the cliff top to the summit of Kirk Hill, that led down to the harbour and the shore.

  ‘I am right sorry,’ ventured Hew at last, ‘to hear that Meg has taken fits again, at this close stage of her confinement. I cannot comprehend it, for I thought the sickness well controlled.’

  ‘For that,’ Giles returned, ‘you had not reckoned with the wind.’

  ‘What has the wind to do with it? You sound like Bartie Groat!’ objected Hew.

  Giles looked small and cowed in the shadow of the cliffs, his towering bulk diminished by the water and the sky. ‘Do you not see it?’ he urged.

  Hew resisted stubbornly. ‘I do not see at all.’

  ‘Then I shall explain it,’ Giles answered with a sigh. ‘You are my dearest friend, and know me well enough to know I do not sink to superstition, like Professor Groat.’

  ‘I thank God for that,’ snorted Hew.

  ‘And yet it is a fact that the wind effects disturbances,’ the doctor went on earnestly. ‘It sets the world on edge. The master at the lector-schule remarks it in his bairns, running wild and shrieking when the gusts blow high. It has no less effect upon your sister Meg, and one well fraught with danger, in agitating sickness, and precipitating fits. I can no more control it than the raging seas.

  ‘The sailors with their quadrants cannot make the compass of the ocean’s toss and turn, where chance clouds overlap the constant flux of tides. We draw the moon and oceans, the heavens and the stars, and shape their folds of darkness to our little worlds, yet for all our charts, we cannot map the surface of one fragment of the whole. We think ourselves ay at the centre, at its very heart, that somehow we have harnessed nature, bending wind and water to our will, yet all the while we are as nothing, specks and motes caught in the breeze, that nature taunts and tosses like the frigate in a storm.’

  ‘I know you do not think that,’ remonstrated Hew, ‘who own the finest sets of instruments that I have ever seen.’

  ‘They are but trinkets, toys. I thought to make a horoscope!’ Giles contested bitterly, ‘But think of that! I thought to mark his coming on a chart. And would that smooth his passage, do you think? Would such calculations help the bairn?’

  ‘Well, I do confess, I have never made much sense of your prognostications; I make a poor astronomer,’ reflected Hew. ‘Yet I will affirm your measure over nature, your medicine and your physic over its disease. As I have seen Meg, with her potions and simples, mop out corruptions and clear up the cough.’

  ‘Meg is a special case,’ conceded Giles. ‘She turns nature in upon itself, and bends it to her will. Then nature is become an art, and sickness makes the cure.’

  ‘Well then, trust in her. She proves it can be done. And when your courage fails you, put your trust in God.’

  ‘Amen to that.’ The doctor fumbled in his pockets, drawing out a string of beads. Awkwardly, Hew turned away, allowing Giles the quietness of prayer. He watched a young girl clamber over rocks, throwing pebbles on the beach below. The girl glanced up and caught his eye. Then, to his astonishment, she ran across the sand to turn a perfect cartwheel, white limbs whirling naked in the shadow of Kirk Hill.

  ‘Look there!’ Hew exclaimed. ‘And you might find your thesis proved: the world turns upside down!’

  Giles looked up and frowned. He slipped the rosary into his pocket. ‘That is Lilias Begg, who should not be out alone. She is an innocent; a natural fool. The louns unkindly cry her, daft quene of the shore. Come up, Lilias Begg!’ he called out to the child, while Hew gave thanks to God for the distraction.

  The girl smoothed down her dress, and climbed the steps carved in the cliff, her bare legs flecked with sand.

  ‘
If she is seen as lewd and loose, the kirk will hold her mother to account,’ Giles asserted anxiously.

  Hew objected, ‘Surely, she is just a child!’

  ‘She is seventeen. Lilias Begg!’ Giles called out again, ‘Where is your mother? Does she know you’re gone?’

  ‘You do not need to shout,’ said Lilias sweetly. ‘For, I am here.’

  She turned a somersault. ‘I can coup the lundie,’ she announced.

  ‘So I see,’ Giles tutted. ‘Lilias Begg, this will not do.’

  Lilias Begg had skin like milk, paler than a swaddling bairn’s, that never saw the sun. She had brittle, flaxen hair, fairer than the smallest child’s, and fey, elfin features, like a faun from faerie land. She stared at Hew with solemn eyes, and did not return his smile.

  ‘Where on earth has she come from?’ Hew whispered to Giles.

  ‘She is the daughter of Maude Benet, that keeps the haven inn, and of Ranald Begg. A drunkard and a sot,’ Giles declared contemptuously. ‘He drank himself into an early grave, and left the world a better place once he had gone to Hell. He beat Maude Benet senseless, when she was with child. For which he put a shilling in the poor box, and escaped a fortnight in the jougs.’

  It was rare for Giles to speak so unequivocally, and rarer still to hear him damn a man. The damage to an unborn child had cut the doctor deep. Nonetheless, he qualified, ‘Or so I have been told.’

  Lilias said suddenly, ‘I am the whirlijack.’

  ‘And what is that?’ demanded Giles.

  ‘The whirlijack.’ Lilias began to spin like a whirlwind, perilously close to the edge of the cliff.

  The doctor caught her hands. ‘Be still; you will dance us all giddy! Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘I am the whirligig, that spins the world.’

  ‘The seed pods from the sycamore,’ suggested Hew. ‘The leaves and fruits are blown all over town.’

  ‘Aye, but spins the world?’ Giles fretted. Something had unsettled him, returning him to gloom. He was already looking back towards the house.

  Lilias said helpfully, ‘It came here on a ship.’

  ‘Some trinket she has picked up at a fair,’ Doctor Locke concluded. ‘A trick to catch the wind. This is Master Hew,’ he turned again to Lilias, ‘who will take you home.’

  Hew spluttered, ‘I will what?’

  ‘Tis plain enough,’ insisted Giles. ‘She will not go alone.’

  ‘Ah, but surely, Paul . . .’ said Hew.

  ‘Paul would prove no match for her,’ Giles argued. ‘For all she is an innocent, she’s cunning, in her way. She will lead a man a dance if he allows her to. Now she has come of age, it is her natural instinct. If Lilias is taken by a man, then it must be someone who can give a good account of himself.’

  Lilias smiled knowingly. ‘I saw a man, in my Mammie’s bed. I saw a man, and his hands were all black,’ she confided.

  ‘Dear God!’ muttered Hew. ‘I take your point,’ he said to Giles, ‘though it is scarcely reassuring.’

  The doctor hesitated. ‘I would go myself . . .’

  ‘Peace, I’m on my way. Lilias, take my hand!’ Hew addressed the girl perhaps more brusquely than he had intended, for her lip began to quiver. ‘I want Mistress Meg.’

  ‘So that is it,’ Giles sighed. ‘Meg has ay been kind to her, and gives her sugar suckets for the cough. I will have some suckets sent to you,’ he promised, ‘but you cannot see her now. Mistress Meg is not well.’

  Lilias asked brightly, ‘Will she die?’

  Hew said, ‘Hush, for pity’s sake!’ as the girl began to sing, ‘Mistress Meg is dead and gone, poor dead sailors all are gone.’

  Giles cleared his throat. ‘No one here is dead and gone. Yet I must leave you to it. In the temporal sense,’ he excused himself to Hew, ‘I have been gone too long.’

  ‘Aye, for certain, go,’ his friend assured him. ‘I will see her home.’

  He turned to Lilias Begg. ‘You are trouble, as I think.’

  Lilias smiled. ‘Come see!’ She took his hand and ran, down Kirk Heugh and through the harbour, turning south along the shore, past the priory and the Sea Port, past the fishing boats and mill. The boatmen stared at Hew, in his scholar’s drabs. ‘This is not the way,’ he panted, ‘to your mother’s house.’

  Lilias giggled, stopping short. ‘Look! Look there!’ She pointed to the rocks at the far side of the bay at Kinkell Braes, across the damp dark sands, flattened by the ebb and flowing of the sea. The tide was coming in, and a thinly straggled crowd came scrambling up the beach, retreating from the wreck. Four horses were backed up from the bulkhead of the ship, straining at the water’s edge. Lilias stood pointing, laughing in delight, ‘Look! There it is, the whirlijack!’

  And there it was, the whirlijack, a perfect wooden windmill, braced against the foremast, high up on the deck. It was painted blue and white, and cross-sailed like the saltire on a summer’s day. And flanking both its sides were ropes and stiff machinery. The town had summoned all its arts in salvaging this toy, bright above the wreckage in St Andrews Bay.

  Chapter 2

  The Hidden Catch

  The crowds receding from the ship had settled in the harbour inn, trailing sand and silt. Some took their dinner with them out onto the pier, which overlooked the wreck, to gossip over bowls of soup and sops. Others crammed round trestle tables in the common hall. The air was sweet with onions, melting into broth, and bitter with the fog of candle light. A tapster lassie flitted to and fro with tankers full of ale, batting back the banter of the drinkers at the bar. Lilias clung tightly to Hew’s hand. ‘Mammie will gie us dennar, ben the hinner house,’ she promised, tugging past the drinkers, through a narrow door.

  They came out in the kitchen, where a girl of about fifteen stood squinting at the pottage in a vast iron pot, furrowing the surface with a wooden spoon. The boards were lined with rows of bannocks, yellow slabs of bacon fat and collops of salt beef. An offal pie stood centrepiece, spilling out its gizzards in a scattering of mace. The paunch and udder filling had acquired a greenish tinge.

  The young pot stirrer started at the sight of Hew. ‘Where have you been, wee lurdan?’ she confronted Lilias. ‘A’body’s gang speiring for you.’

  ‘Where’s my Mammie?’ Lilias answered blithely.

  ‘Doun the ladder.’ The girl retreated to a little hatch, open to the wine cellar. ‘Lillie is come hame,’ she shouted through the floor.

  ‘Aye, I hear you, Elspet,’ wafted from the vaults. ‘There is no sense in flyting with her, for she does not understand you.’

  ‘Likely,’ muttered Elspet, ‘she will understand a skelp.’

  ‘I heard that too,’ the cellar warned. ‘And you ken well enough what I will answer, if I hear you speak it once again. Send Archie down, to help me lug the cask, and gie the bairn her dinner.’

  ‘Archie isnae up here,’ Elspet called back down.

  ‘Where is he, then? The louns will drink us dry. I cannot shift they barrels on my own.’

  ‘He has not come back,’ Elspet replied. ‘But Lilias has fetched up with a paramour.’

  Lilias gave an unexpected show of wit, in poking out her tongue at her. Hew removed his cap and gown, and set them neatly on a stool, before rolling up his sleeves.

  ‘God save us, sir, what are you doing?’ Elspet shrieked.

  He answered with a wink, ‘Helping with the cask.’

  ‘Take it!’ cried the voice. The head and shoulders of a flask of wine emerged above the hatch. Hew knelt down to catch it, and dragged the flagon up onto the earthen floor.

  Lilias announced, ‘Tis Mammie!’ as Maude herself appeared, dusting down her skirts, to gaze at Hew appraisingly. ‘I thank you, sir, but who are you?’

  ‘He is Master Hew!’ Lilias clapped her hands. ‘Come here for his dennar.’

  ‘I am Hew Cullan, master at St Salvator’s. I brought your daughter home,’ Hew explained. ‘I found her on the cliff beside my sister’s house. My sister is married to Gi
les Locke.’

  ‘The doctor? Aye, they are good people,’ Maude approved. ‘Your sister has been kind to her, and Lilias does not forget. She is like the little bird that comes back for its crumbs. Where she takes a liking, she is quickly tamed, and that is rare enough.’

  Maude Benet had the look of Lilias, withering with age. Her lightness and fragility had fused to wiry strength, the froth of blonde hair grizzled and grown coarse, the pale skin weathered to a motley red. After years of flyting sailors from their drunken fights, there was little shy or subtle left in Maude. And yet she spoke more gently than the common tapster wife. She had an air of comeliness, and simple commonsense. ‘I thank you for it, sir. She is a silly bairn, that has no understanding. I hope she has not caused you trouble?’ she went on.

  ‘None at all,’ said Hew. ‘She has been showing me the windmill.’

  ‘That is some sight, is it no!’ marvelled Maude. ‘The whole town is astuned at it, and it was in the hubble that the lass gave us the slip. It will take something to shift it, right enough.’

  Lilias tugged her skirt. ‘Mammie, we are come for dennar!’ she repeated patiently.

  Her mother smiled. ‘It is a thing when we must ken our manners from a silly child. Come sir, what will you eat?’

  ‘Madam, you are kind.’ Hew shook his head emphatically, and moved a little downwind of the udder pie, gently warmed and pungent in the close heat of the fire.

  ‘I ken what you are thinking, sir,’ intercepted Maude.

  He muttered indistinctly, ‘Truly, I hope not.’

  ‘We will not keep you long,’ Maude went on, oblivious. ‘What is that you do there at the university?’

  ‘I am a professor,’ Hew admitted, ‘in the civil laws.’

  ‘You do not say?’ She looked impressed. ‘Yet even a professor must have his dinner hour. Let go the gudeman’s hand,’ – this latter was to Lilias – ‘and he shall have a fish.’

  ‘I thank you mistress, but I must be gone.’

  ‘I do not hear you. Elspet, gie the bairn her broth,’ instructed Maude.

  Elspet ladled pottage in a bowl, and placed a piece of buttered bannock on the side. Lilias began to cram the bread into her mouth, broth and barley seeping down her chin, while Elspet rolled her eyes, reaching for a cloth.