‘You know me, and my horse, who is averse to risks,’ Hew smiled.
‘I’m serious, Hew. Yet promise me, that you will take great care.’
‘You have my word,’ said Hew, ‘whatever that is worth.’
There was nothing more to say. Hew’s mind was fixed upon the college and the town, his thoughts and prayers with Giles and Meg. And Nicholas, he knew, would end his days in solitude, fading out in quietness, alone among the books at Kenly Green. There was little, after all, that Hew could have to offer him. He rose before the dawn and saddled up his horse, setting out at daybreak for the town.
Maude preferred the quiet hours, before the town was properly awake. She opened up the windows, allowing pink-streaked sunlight to warm the polished wood, and sweeping the stale rushes out into the street. The wind, fresh and light, gave no hint of storm. The fishing boats had already put to sea at the first pale trace of dawn, and the cobles still remaining in the dock were beached; the tide had reached its lowest point, and turned, creeping back to lick against the pier. Across the bay, Maude could see an early party setting out to secure the windmill, horses, carts and ropes trawled across the sands, trailing slow and blearily into the morning light. She returned to the house and began to make her bread, baked upon a skillet on the tap room fire. The serving girl, Elspet, appeared, sleepy-eyed and fumbling with her cap. She shared a bed with Lilias, in the lassies’ sleeping loft, accessed by a ladder in the common drinking hall.
‘A braw fine day,’ her mistress said, ‘for scrubbing of the floors.’
‘Aye?’ the girl replied, distracted. She had wandered to the door, absorbed in the commotion.
‘Come away,’ scolded Maude.
‘They’re fetchin’ aff the windmill. It looks unco heavy.’
‘And so it will be. Come away. When the men are finished, they will have a thirst on them.’
Maude removed the bannock from the flames, breaking off a piece of it. She set the morsel on a tray, with a pat of yellow butter and a foaming cup of ale. ‘Take this to our guest.’
‘I will not,’ said the girl, with unexpected spirit.
Maude glowered at her. ‘What do you mean, you will not? You will do as you are telt.’
‘I cannot!’ and, to Maude’s astonishment, the lass began to cry. ‘There’s sickness in that room,’ she sobbed, ‘and more, for Mary says the ship has had a curse on it.’
‘Then Mary is a lurdan,’ Maude informed her grimly. ‘And you are not much better, if you gie her heed.’
‘Ye manna mak me do it,’ Elspet wept.
Maude sighed, ‘Aye, very well. Look to Lilias.’
Her daughter had appeared, bare shod in a linen shift, pink like a bairn in the flush of sleep. She giggled as her mother kissed her. ‘Bide awhile wi’ Elspet! Do not let her stray,’ Maude advised the serving girl, ‘or else . . .’ The threat died away. Maude was never cruel, for all her cross complaints. She had been a victim far too long herself, for conscience to permit her to resort to that. A lassie should not have to live in fear.
Maude took up the tray and went back through the house. Her guests were lodged upon the second floor, accessed by a turnpike at the rear. There were two spare rooms, the larger of which slept as many men as it could hold, and was let for sixpence, without bed or board. A pallet, sheets and blankets could be had at extra cost. The small and dearer room was furnished with a standing bed and graced from time to time by a stout and sweaty kirkman from Dundee, who for a while had rented Mary too, till Maude had put a stop to it. Maude had bought the bed after her man had died, burning the old mattress in a bonfire in the yard, a conflagration visible for miles. She had thrown on Ranald’s clothes and his possessions, one by one. Her husband’s shoes had been the last to burn, the molten leather curling like a sneer.
The sailor had been put to rest in Maude’s own feather bed, in a closet off the kitchen that stank of kale and slops. Though on this night there were no other guests, he had been too sick to climb the stairs. The closet room was dark and cramped, the only other furniture a stool and pissing pot, with a peg upon the door for hanging clothes. There was one small window, opening to the back. It looked over empty barrels and a rusted metal can, which served as the latrine, behind a wooden pale. Maude gave the door a warning tap, for fear her guest made water or was kneeling at his prayers, before she pushed it open with her foot. The man lay still in bed, and did not sit up. Elspet had been right, there was sickness in the room; not the usual sourness she was used to in the bar but a thickly sweet decay that made her stomach turn. Maude set down the tray and opened up the shutters, letting in the light and the savour of the sink-hole in the yard. She turned to see the stranger gazing back at her.
‘Oh! You are waking, are you? You were sleeping like the dead. Half a day and a night you have slept. Look there! They are lifting out your windmill. You will have to pay a fee to have it back,’ she greeted him.
The stranger answered, ‘Beatrix.’
‘Not Beatrix, Maude.’ Maude picked up the tray again and approached the bed. ‘I have brought you breakfast, though you must not expect it. As soon as you are well enough, then you will have to speir for it, and shift up to the lodging house. The board and beer costs tuppence, and a sixpence for the bed, with a penalty of fourpence, if we have to wash the sheets.’ This was wishful thinking, right enough, for Maude had little hope of being paid. The stranger, she could see, followed her intently. She also was aware that he had barely understood. Yet this did not deter her; she was used to Lilias, and knew that comfort could be had from kindness in a voice.
‘Ik niet mijn,’ the stranger pleaded.
Maude had learned some Flemish from the sailors at the bar, bad words, in the main. She tried hard to make sense of this. ‘That will not do. I do not understand you. I am not my . . . You are not your what?’ She made her voice sound firm, for that was commonsense. Maude was seldom daunted by a foreign tongue.
‘Ik niet mijn eigen ben.’
Maude puzzled at this, trying, ‘You are not your eyes?’
Perhaps it was his eyes, for now the stranger closed them, whispering, ‘Niet mijn.’
‘Not my,’ repeated Maude. ‘Then do you mean that you are not yourself? Eek neet myself?’ she guessed.
‘Niet van mijzelf, mijn ben.’
‘Who are you, then?’ protested Maude, ‘if you are not yourself?’
‘Beatrix.’
‘For sure, you are not Beatrix,’ Maude replied indignantly. ‘Beatrix is a lassie’s name.’ She pointed to herself. ‘Naam. My naam is Maude. What is your naam?’
‘Jacob . . . Ik ben . . . Jacob.’
‘Yacob? That is a good name. It is the same as James,’ Maude approved. She set the tray beside him on the bed. ‘Eat.’
She could tell the man was famished. Yet he had trouble with his hands, and could not lift the cup. In the end, she had to feed him. She crumbled up the bread, and soaked it in the ale for him. He took it gratefully.
She judged him in his early twenties, not much older than her bairn, and strong enough, at least, to have survived the storm. The men who had brought him from the shore had stripped him to his shirt; his other clothes were draped upon the stool, still sopping wet, while Maude had lit a fire for fear he’d catch his death. The smoky embers filled the sunlit room. He was not a sailor, for he did not have the breeks. Nor was he a merchant, for his coat was plain and workmanlike. Maude sensed that he had once been clean and tidy, before he had been ravaged by the sea. Most alarming were his hands. His limbs were bruised and black, and he could not flex his fingers, his body like a drowned man’s Maude had once seen on the beach, sluiced and puffed and blackened by the sea. To her dismay, Maude saw that he was crying; a rush of silent tears that soaked and streaked his face. She wiped them with her apron skirt. ‘You manna greet,’ she told him. ‘You maun be a man.’ Since Jacob did not answer her, she left him to his prayers.
Chapter 4
The Drowned Man
The baxters we
re like gulls, returning with the fishermen to scavenge for the catch, and Maude was not surprised to hear them chapping at her door. The windmill had been taken off the strand and trundled, inch by inch, towards the customs house, while the baxters trailed behind like birds around a boat. All fetched up together, at the harbour inn. Maude said, ‘We are closed.’
‘We are not come to drink,’ said Patrick Honeyman.
‘I think you do mistake us, then. This is an inn,’ Maude pointed out.
‘Do not be obstructive. Ye ken why we are here. Tis business of the council,’ asserted Patrick Honeyman.
‘Then pursue it at the tolbuith. This is not the council hall.’
‘A brief word with yon mariner will see us on our way. If it is convenient,’ Honeyman said heavily. Maude tried to stand her ground. ‘It is not convenient. And he is asleep.’
‘How now, asleep, still asleep?’ said James Edie with a smile. James was one to watch, thought Maude, for he was not so easily put off. To prove the point, he added, ‘Tis no matter, we can wait. The beauty of the baxters, Maude, is that we bake by night, which leaves us free to barter in the day.’
‘Ye’ll find no bargains here,’ retorted Maude. ‘We’re closed.’
‘But not to us,’ said Honeyman. There was a touch of menace in his voice that Maude could not ignore. They were the burgh council after all. She conceded, ‘Please yoursel’, though it may little profit ye, who do not ken the Dutch. For he has not a word of Scots.’
‘Then you have spoken with him, and he is awake,’ James Edie said astutely. As always, he was sharp, and once again, too quick for her, thought Maude. He tempted her with friendship, breaking through her guard. And still, of all the baxters, she trusted him the most. I will look out for you, Maude. And he had, had he not, in his way?
‘He was awake a while,’ Maude admitted grudgingly, ‘and now has gone to sleep again. He isna feeling well.’
‘And whit is wrang with him?’
The baxter bully boys had somehow found their way into the common hall, more by insinuation than by force. Elspet was mopping down the trestles and the floor, while Lilias sat playing with the dice and knucklebones, kept in little boxes underneath the bar. The morning air had not yet cleared the chamber of its fug, the weary aftertaste of sour ale, sweat and soot.
‘In truth, I cannot say,’ shrugged Maude. ‘Perhaps it is the plague.’ It was a clever after shot, that scored a pleasing hit on bailie Honeyman, for all his bluff and bluster a coward through and through. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ!’ he swore. The rumour gathered force with Christie Boyd, who pointed out, ‘There were no other bodies there, and that would seem to fit. For so the grievous sick are set adrift in ships, with neither port nor quarter, till the plague is spent.’
His brother echoed grimly, ‘It is a ship of ghosts.’
James Edie quashed the rumour with a grin. ‘Maude is sporting wi’ us. She does not for a moment think it is the plague, or she would not have him in her bed. She’d turn away a man, wi’ colick or the cauld, for fear of him infecting Lilias.’
‘Lilias is prone to maladies of chokes,’ Maude replied defensively. She had fallen, for a second time, into the baxter’s trap. There was a little truth in what James Edie said, and Maude found herself surprised that she had not considered it. Somehow, in her pity, she had left it overlooked: she must be growing soft. ‘I do not think,’ she owned at last, ‘that Jacob has the plague, only that you must allow, it is a possibility.’
‘Jacob is it, now? Then you are quite close friends,’ James Edie said, relentlessly.
She did not rise to it. ‘Yet I can assure you, sir, that he is sick and frail. His hands and face are black; he cannot sit or stand.’
James Edie turned to Honeyman. ‘I think it would be best,’ he mused, ‘to have the doctor called, and free ourselves from all fear of infection.’
Honeyman conceded, ‘Aye, then, fair enough. The girl,’ he waved at Elspet, ‘can go for Doctor Locke, and likewise find a man that kens the Flemish tongue. And you can bring us breakfast, Maude,’ he added, generously.
‘And you can wait outside, and whistle for your breakfasts. This is not a cookshop. We are closed,’ said Maude.
‘You will be closed, right enough, if you dinna mind the bailies,’ Honeyman declared.
‘What do you mean? You cannot close us down!’ Maude replied indignantly.
‘For sickness in the house? You can have no doubt of it.’
Maude knew when she was beaten. ‘You may sit up at the bar and sup a stoup of ale, and let that be your breakfast, for I offer nothing more.’
Elspet tugged her apron, anxious to set off. ‘Where do I find a man, that speaks the Flemish tongue?’
James Edie pressed a penny in her hand. ‘Try the customs master,’ he advised. ‘And for the doctor, you must fetch Professor Locke. You will find him at the college or his house upon the Swallow Gait. Ask for him by name.’
‘Then will I fetch the minister, from the kirk of Holy Trinity?’ Elspet wondered eagerly, warming to her task.
James Edie frowned. ‘The minister? Why him?’
‘For he can say a prayer,’ the girl explained. ‘Because the ship is cursed.’
‘Dear God!’ erupted Honeyman. ‘I thought it was your daughter was the daftie, Maude? Tis we that have been cursed, with a witless shiftless villain of a wench! Away with you! Be gone!’
James Edie said, more reasonably, ‘Elspet, you are young, and you have not worked here long, yet you must surely ken, that the minister is never wanted in this house.’ Maude Benet glared and glowered at them, but chose to hold her tongue, pouring out the ale as Elspet scurried off. The baxters settled warily on stools around the bar, to wait for her return. Only James Edie appeared at his ease. When Maude slipped to the back room to attend her cooking pots he took the chance to follow her, begging for some bread. Maude resisted with a scowl. ‘We have none. Since ye all are baxters, go and bake your ain,’ she told him crossly.
‘Ah, sweet Maude!’ he pottered round her kitchen, peering into pans. ‘Has anybody telt ye that your pottages are rank?’
‘Feel free to take your leave of them, at any time you like,’ Maude sniffed.
‘If I had not been marrit, Maude, I swear . . .’
‘What do you swear, James Edie? Aye, then, what?’ She rounded on him.
Laughing, the baxter held up his hands. ‘Peace, little bear, for I do not come to bait thee. Tell me why you do it, Maude?
‘Why do I do what?’
‘Go out of your way to flyt with Patrick Honeyman, when you know he has the power to shut you down? Why do you walk the hardest path, when you could take the gentle one?’
‘I do not ken, James. Why do you? And why are you intent on coming to my kitchen? Are you not afeared of plague?’ she answered scornfully.
James Edie shook his head. ‘I do not for a moment think it is the plague. Confess it, Maude, he is not sick. Why won’t you let us see him?’
‘Because he is not well,’ insisted Maude, ‘and because . . . I ken that you will cheat him, James, and fleece him like a lamb. I could not bear to see him bullied by the bailies into giving up his mill. Tis like shining torchlight at the bandage of the blind, or like my wee lass Lilias, baffled by the kirk. There is an innocence, a tenderness in him.’
‘Do you think that he has lost his wits?’ James Edie pondered seriously.
‘Not lost his wits. But he is somehow . . . lost,’ said Maude. ‘He is so very far from home.’
James Edie smiled at her. ‘You are like a crab, Maude, soft and sweet inside, and on the outside . . . crabbit! You must know that we do not mean to put him to the test. We hope to have his windmill, that is all. And if he will not give it, so be it. Come,’ he held out his hand to her. ‘You know me, Maude. Though I am keen, I am not cruel. Then let us go and wait upon the doctor, whose proper care and counsel shall set your mind at rest.’
Maude nodded, and went back with him, leaving Jacob safel
y to his rest. She made a show of polishing the wood, and counting out for Lilias the bone and wooden dice; she did not trust the baxters, when her back was turned. Once or twice she opened up the door, but saw no sign of Elspet coming down the hill. The baxters were implacable, and seemed to her quite stubbornly entrenched, when a strange sound from the kitchen stopped them in their cups. It began as a low keening, rising to a howl that set Maude’s teeth on edge. Lilias gave a little shriek, and dropped her knucklebones.
Jacob understood that men would come for him. He knew, when Maude had left him, that the time was near. He was not surprised. Tobias, Joachim and the rest had not died quietly, and would not lie quiet at the bottom of the sea. He took some consolation in the things around him, visible reflections of the commonplace: the stale scent of cooking fat, the scraping of the barrels in the cellar down below, whistling on the stairs. From the small shuttered window, he could see the sun, and told himself the time, as he had once been taught. He heard the pot boy clatter in the yard outside, a long, seamless pissing, streaming in the pail. He watched the ginger tomcat, arching from the window ledge, insinuate itself around the corners of the room, and settle on a patch of sunlight, filtered through the slats. The cat had greenish-yellow eyes, like the liquid centre of a wound. Although the room was stifling hot, he knew that he was lucid still. He listened to Maude talking to the man outside, and understood their purpose, though he did not know the words. He was aware they were not speaking Dutch. Yet all of these sensations were recovered thick and curved, as though he saw and heard them in a glass. They did not dull the pricking in his skin, the creeping of his flesh that began to spread, insidious, throughout. A dry fire had consumed him. His belly could not calm the swell of sops and ale, and Jacob vomited. Joachim and Tobias swam like fishes through his dreams, reflected in the water pot; Jacob heard a howling, and the tomcat’s hackles rose.
Jacob knew that he would have to die. He had not known that it would hurt so much.
The baxters stood outside the door. They had gathered at the first unearthly note, but none of them had wanted to go in. The cry had pierced the stillness in the bar, and Christie Boyd had spilled his drink over the minute book, blotting out the record of the previous day. It was not a human sound. Now they stood and listened to the keening, perspiring in the close heat of the kitchen fire. It was Maude, in the end, who pushed open the door, James Edie the first man behind her.
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