‘Oh!’ called out Maude, ‘it is only Gib Hunter, the cat!’
Gib Hunter backed against the kitchen wall, each white-lipped orange hair shaft startled to its tip, like a ginger porcupine. Lilias gave a giggle, ‘Scaredy! Scaredy cat!’
‘Aye, it was the cat. And yet we must be wary of the devils he has seen. What is he afeared of?’ James Edie answered quietly. There was a low hush to his voice, as though he came across shy creatures in the fields, and did not want to startle them to flight. It made Maude think of night owls, fixed on little mice, their heartbeats in the darkness tiny pricks of fear. What fright had moved Gib Hunter, to his wild and frantic howls? James was staring straight at Jacob, holding up the candle he had taken from the wall, so that Jacob’s eyes were captured in the flame. Jacob was sitting bolt upright, a terror tale of torment frozen on his face. His black lips blabbered wordlessly, his black hands clutched and fumbled, helpless at the air.
‘Whisht, what is it?’ Maude came soft and soothing, holding off the ghosts. Though doubtless, there were devils in the room, she felt only pity, and was not afraid. Jacob pointed wildly and began to sob.
‘Hush, now, hush, for there is nothing there.’ She took him in her arms and rocked him like a bairn. She felt his fear aflutter, through his solid chest, like the little mouse, or like the tiny fish heart, beating in her palm, from the writhing haddock she had cooked for Hew. ‘Hush, you are safe now,’ she whispered.
‘De duivel,’ Jacob moaned.
‘There are no devils here.’
‘Ahhh.’ The wind had found its way at last, both through and out of him, as Jacob sighed. Maude felt him tense and slacken in her arms. She touched her fingers, briefly, to his lips.
‘Tis well that you have calmed him,’ Honeyman came blustering, as if the air from Jacob’s lungs had blasted into him. ‘I cannot thole they frenzied fits, that foreign folks are prone to. What do you think it was wrang wi him?’
Maude stared at him, aghast. ‘Do you not see, you futless slump? You useless, feckless, hopeless, lourden of a limmar of a man, that he is dead?’
The bailie buckled at the torrent of her words. ‘Deid?’ he replied at last. ‘In which case, since you are distressed, we are prepared to overlook . . . we will go back precipitate, and look out for the doctor,’ he concluded lamely. The brothers Boyd were quick to follow, leaving James alone with Maude and Lilias.
Maude whispered, ‘Go, my petal, find Gib Hunter. He has had a fright.’
Lilias ran gaily, calling for the cat. Maude looked helplessly at James. ‘He was well enough before, I swear it, James, in spite of what I said.’
James Edie answered sceptically, ‘Perhaps.’ He eased the dead man from Maude’s arms, and let the body drop back on the bed. ‘The corpus is decayed,’ he pointed out.
‘Tis what I said before. I swear to you, he spoke to me. He ate and drank.’
‘So it would seem.’ James was sniffing at the piss pot, looking at the tray. He picked up a piece of bannock. ‘Someone here has breakfasted on bread.’
‘So I did not give him baxter’s bread. What can that matter now?’
‘It will matter still, if Honeyman should come to hear of it. He will not let a death deflect him from the rules. It will mean a fine.’ James Edie shook his head.
‘James . . .’ Maude pleaded.
‘Do not fear.’ He threw the crust into the embers of the fire, ‘We will not tell him. Let us clear the tray, and the piss pot too, and tell them that he did not eat or drink. Then we will go and wait.’
When they came through to the tap room, Elspet had returned, with a doctor by her side, who was not Professor Locke. For that doctor could not come, as she explained to Patrick Honeyman; his wife was at that moment labouring with child. ‘His servant said, he canna come today, nor yet tomorrow, as he thinks.’
She had expected thundering, a summer storm, at least, and was surprised when Honeyman said mildly, ‘You did your best, I doubt. It is the barber-surgeon that ye brought?’
Elspet nodded, ‘Aye . . . and sir, I couldna find a man that spoke the Flemish tongue,’ she ventured timidly.
‘What? No matter, lass. He is not wanted now.’ Honeyman was thoughtful, and the bluster had gone out of him. Elspet was encouraged and astonished. She had feared his wrath, and worried what to do. And then she had remembered the barber surgeon’s boy. His name was Gilbert Blair, and one night in his cups he had told to her his trick, and it had made her smile. The boy was not a prentice, or anything as grand, but acted as a lure, for Gilbert kept a pocket full of worn and broken teeth, to be hidden in his cheeks for the surgeon to draw out. When strangers came on market day, the boy would step up first, in painless exhibition of the surgeon’s art. This small deception never failed to please, though Gilbert Blair had far more teeth than cavities, and the next brave man to follow soon saw through the fraud. This surgeon seemed to Elspet as good as any doctor, wearing his credentials spattered on his coat. And so she had resorted to his buith upon the market street, where she had had to wait while he drew out a tooth.
James Edie looked at Honeyman. ‘I suppose this man can certify the death?’
The bailie nodded, ‘Aye.’ He showed the surgeon to the closet room. James Edie followed to the rear, while John and Christie Boyd hung back, and Maude remained with Elspet, Lilias and the cat, who had come in from the kitchen, none the worse for wear. ‘Take Lilias out,’ instructed Maude.
The kitchen lass stared at her, ‘I am just back!’
‘Go and tell Mary, we will not be open today.’
‘Why won’t we open?’ Elspet asked, wide-eyed.
‘For there is a death in the house.’ Maude was clear now, and calm, which was how it should be. She did not understand why she had been so moved. For this was not the first death that had happened in her house. Or even, she reflected, in her bed.
James Edie and Patrick Honeyman stood watch over the surgeon, as he examined Jacob’s body. They were bailies of the council, and they were rightly there, as arbiters of law to represent the town. Honeyman was sweating, sickly, in his handkerchief; James Edie stood by, sombre and composed.
‘This body was recovered from the shipwreck?’ asked the surgeon.
James Edie nodded, ‘Aye, he was.’
‘Then why has he been left so long?’
‘We did not ken . . .’ said Honeyman, and paused.
‘For clearly,’ said the surgeon, ‘this man has been dead for several days.’
James Edie looked at Honeyman, but neither bailie spoke. They watched the surgeon turning Jacob’s hands, resting puffed and blackened on Maude Benet’s linen sheets.
James Edie ventured cautiously at last, ‘And why do you say that?’
‘Tis plain enough to see. This putrefaction in the limbs,’ the surgeon pointed out, ‘suggests he was long dead before he left the sea.’
‘How long dead?’ asked James.
The surgeon shrugged. ‘Four days, mebbe five. You really ought to put him in the ground.’
‘And I suppose,’ James said, ‘a man in your profession, must be used to death.’
‘More used to it than not,’ the surgeon smiled. ‘I recommend, you move him from the kitchen, for his close proximity does not promote good health.’
‘You are quite right; it shall be done at once,’ Honeyman agreed. ‘But can you signify for us the cause of death? It is not the plague?’
The surgeon shook his head. ‘It is not the plague, man! He died by drowning, sure enough.’
‘I see,’ said Patrick Honeyman. ‘Then we are much obliged to you. The burgh council will be pleased to meet your fee, if you will make a full report, and write it down. Come, now, let us show you out, and back to drawing teeth.’
They saw him quickly through the door, for fear that he might stop to take another look, and change his mind.
‘What does it mean, James?’ murmured Patrick Honeyman, once they were alone again. ‘It makes no sense at all.’
&n
bsp; ‘Some sort of witchcraft, perhaps?’
Honeyman shuddered. ‘God help us, then! What do we do?’
‘Since we have a duty to keep order in the town, there must be no talk of magic, whatever we may fear,’ James Edie warned. ‘The first thing we must do is to have the body dressed, and taken out from here. I think we must proceed with caution, for we do not know what happened to the crew. We only have his word that there is no infection. And his word cannot be trusted, since he told us that he drowned. Why, did you not tell him that he died here his morning?’
Honeyman retorted, ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘For you are the first bailie,’ James Edie smiled, ‘I defer to you.’
Honeyman evaded this, proposing, ‘Let us bury him at sea. His end in his beginning. He came here from the ocean, then let him be returned to it. For properly, he drowned. And he was dead already, when we took him from the sea.’
‘He was not in the sea,’ James reminded him. ‘He was in the windmill, which was dry inside.’
‘Yet he had been battered by the storm. Suppose then, that his lungs were filled with water. In his last gasping breath, he came to life, to drown again, as drowning men must do. It is a grasping death.’
‘Then he returned to life, to die again?’ James concluded thoughtfully.
‘Precisely,’ nodded Honeyman. ‘And since he died before, we have the clear advantage, that the ship is wrack.’
‘Maude Benet heard him speak, and will not have him drowned,’ James Edie pointed out.
‘Then you must talk to Maude. Go to it, James,’ the bailie smiled. ‘Of all of us, she likes you best.’
James found her in the kitchen, slicing neaps and onions into a bowl of broth. She had not wept, for Maude was not a woman prone to tears. James did not recall when he had seen her cry; not when her child was born, or when her man had died, though she had not been likely to have wept at that. A life with Ranald Begg had wiped the tears from Maude.
He placed a hand upon her shoulder.
‘Don’t.’
‘Some women will come soon and dress the corpse. We will take it out to sea,’ he told her. ‘You may open up again, once it is gone.’
Maude continued slicing, with quick and angry strokes. She was unsure why she should feel such rage; she blamed it half on James, though he was not the cause. ‘Is Jacob not to have a Christian burial?’ she inquired.
‘We shall say a psalm for him, perhaps. But since he died at sea, we think it right and just.’
‘He did not die at sea,’ Maude pointed out..
‘I understand that it runs contrary to sense, and yet we must believe it, Maude. The surgeon says he died before he came here.’
Maude shook her head. ‘A dead man cannot eat and drink. A dead man cannot talk,’ she countered stubbornly.
‘You said yourself, he had the semblance of a drowned man,’ James reminded her.
‘I felt him flesh and blood, his beating heart. He was not a ghost,’ insisted Maude.
‘He was a drowned man, Maude, that coming back to life by some strange quirk of nature, drowned again.’
‘He spewed into the chamber pot.’
‘Spillage of the sea. It shall be cleared away.’
He told it to her patiently, and afterwards, she thought, that when he was explaining it, it all made perfect sense, though on her own, it baffled her. Yet that did not surprise her, for so it often was, with James. He had a way with words.
The bailies sent three fisher wives to wash and dress the corpse, paying them a pittance from the common purse. They brought a clamour and a coarseness to the quiet of Maude’s room, robbing Jacob’s body of the decency of death. They broke into a tussle, fighting for a ring they had found fixed on his finger and could not pull off. At last it was dislodged, and flew across the room, where Maude came to recover it. Because it was not possible to keep it with the corpse, she placed it in a little box, high upon a shelf, and sent the thieving fishwives squabbling from her house. Left alone with Jacob now, she laid him out herself, and washed his bruised limbs tenderly in oils and scented soaps. She dressed him in his clothes that lay warming by the fire, and combed out his yellow hair, tearing up the bed sheets to serve him as a shroud and folding Jacob neatly in his winding cloths. The bailies came by presently, and took him out to sea, to the place where they had found him, somewhere far from home.
Professor Locke saw none of this, for he was on the Swallow Gait, advising his son Matthew on his entry to the world. He gave a barrage of instruction, which the midwife battled fiercely to ignore. The doctor’s presence there offended her on every front. ‘Be careful,’ he had warned her, at the cutting of the cord, ‘that the residue is not too long, and not too short. For according to the ancients, where you make your cut will determine the length of the infant’s private member, or, as some would have it, of his tongue.’
The midwife sniffed. ‘A thousand new boy babbies have I brocht into the world, and not one of them has ever made complaint I made his pizzle over lang or small.’
The nurse, who was a silly girl, remarked, ‘They say the young king James’ tongue is muckle for his mouth.’
‘My point precisely,’ nodded Giles. ‘Tis likely, in the hopes of making sure the king’s succession, he was overreached.’
‘As to that, I cannot say,’ the midwife answered sourly. ‘For I did not deliver him.’
‘Five fingers’ width,’ insisted Giles, ‘as a rule of thumb.’
The midwife placed a square of linen on the floor, and laid Matthew Locke upon it, folding up the end to form a pocket for his feet. She tucked in the sides and began to bind them straight with narrow woollen bands. Meg called over anxiously, propped up on the bed, ‘Must it be so tight?’
‘You soon will have the knack of it.’ The midwife slipped the baby’s arms into his linen waistcoat, and wound the strips of linen round, fixing fast his hands. She attached a stay, holding firm his neck, and finished with a pair of little caps, one of linen, one of wool, tied beneath his chin. So life began and ended, in a strip of cloth.
Chapter 5
Sisters in Arms
The news of Matthew’s birth was welcomed at St Salvator’s, where Hew had settled in to Giles Locke’s turret tower. The clear advantage of the tower was its location on the corner of Bow Butts, on the cusp between the college and the town. It looked out upon the North Street, and back upon the cloisters, allowing the illusion of belonging to both worlds, while it reserved the option of a quick escape. The occupants could come and go without the closer scrutiny of porters at the gate. The drawback was the inner space, where Hew now worked and slept. As Nicholas had noted, Giles kept strange collections in his rooms. He had borrowed from the fleshers’ buith a small dissecting block, on which he did experiments, made drawings, or took notes. Often, there were seed pods, or the heads of flowers, examined under glass and cut into cross-sections, copied into books with coloured inks. He had recently acquired a human foot, perfectly embalmed and smooth as wax, the outer layers of which were slit and opened back, in an exquisite piece of butchery.
For all its eccentricities, or, perhaps, because of them, the turret tower reminded Hew of Giles, and he felt quite at home. More irksome to him were the college codes of discipline, which he was now expected to follow and enforce. Giles Locke had clear authority, for reasons he would not have understood, by virtue of his arguments, baffling in complexity, and his impressive bulk. In his absence, things began to slip, and Hew was soon required to step into the breach. The entrant boys were meek and cowed, fresh faced from the grammar schools, and rarely caused offence. The boldest had begun to swagger by their second year. The tertians were the worst; lacking both the callowness of youth and the earnestness of magistrands, who realised that their college days were coming to an end. They were brash and quarrelsome, inclined to win by force, what they could not win by argument. Several were discovered with a savage range of weaponry, in flagrant violation of the college rules. Hew had spe
nt a weary morning dealing with the renegades, one of whom now glowered at him across the turret tower.
The boy stood solid in the centre of the floor, resenting him. He was fifteen, or sixteen perhaps, with a sun-flecked, freckled face and hair the colour of wet sand. Hew caught a glimpse of metal, glinting at his belt. ‘Your regent tells me you would not give up your dagger, and were uncivil to him. May I see the weapon?’ he requested.
The boy produced it sulkily. ‘It is a pocket knife, for meat.’
‘That is not a pocket knife. It is a rapier. Put it on the pile there with the rest.’
‘My father gave it to me. He wished me to be able to defend myself.’
‘Who is your father?’ questioned Hew.
‘My father is the Earl of Gowrie. Who is yours?’ the boy said rudely.
Hew said, very quietly, ‘You garner no advantage by miscourtesy to me, for I am not the one who is diminished by it. You must be Ruthven’s bastard, if you are his son; your name is entered in the roll as William Wishart, gentleman. Though gentleman is open to dispute.’
‘I said I was Lord Gowrie’s son. I did not claim he owned to it,’ returned the youth.
‘Then you dishonour both your parents, at a stroke. Lay down your sword, and make your peace, or I must write to’ – Hew glanced down at the roll – ‘Sir William Wishart, elder, at Craighall, to ask him to remove his weapon, and his son, before the end of term.’
‘You cannot do that, sir. It is a first offence,’ the boy objected.
‘Your first offence this year, yet not, I think, your first. Then let it be your last. I would not have your fault corrected, publicly, in school.’
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