The boy conceded, nor would he.
‘Then we are agreed on that,’ said Hew. ‘Give up your sword, and make your peace. Know if you offend again, then I will send you home.’
‘I think you are quite wrong,’ the student grumbled, setting down his sword, ‘to take away our arms. What happens if the college is besieged?’
‘When that happens,’ Hew said dryly, ‘you may have them back.’
‘What is that?’ the boy demanded, pointing at the foot. Hew had left it in full view, in the hope it might make an impression on the students. Some had been impressed, though not quite in the way that he had hoped.
‘It is a human foot, belonging to Professor Locke.’
‘That’s braw!’ admired the boy.
‘In Latin,’ Hew reminded him.
‘Bene, then! Where did he get it?’
‘From the last malefactor,’ Hew replied severely, ‘that came here with a sword.’
‘S’trewth!’ The boy let out a long, low whistle. ‘Do you think he’ll let me have it, when he’s done?’
Once the student was dismissed, on promise of reform, the morning’s confiscations were complete. The arms had made a mountain in the centre of the floor: six cuirasses, eight swords, four rapiers and an axe, with twelve assorted helmets and a buckled sheet of plate, of which the owner could not give a good account. Hew settled down to read a grammar of the sea. He was no further than the first few pages in – the duties of the shipmaster in making safe his freight – when he was interrupted by a rapping at the door. Groaning, he put on his sternest voice. ‘Veni!’ he called loudly. There was a moment’s silence, and then the knock again, if anything more tentative. Exasperated, Hew leapt to the door, and threw it open fiercely. ‘I said veni! Come!’ He imagined some delinquent, cowering on the stair, too fearful (as he hoped) or dull (as he supposed) to make the right response. Instead he found a grave young woman, of the gentle class, who gazed at him through curious blue eyes.
‘Your pardon, sir, it seems that I disturb you. You are Doctor Locke.’
‘Ah, no, not at all,’ Hew stammered. ‘That is, you have not disturbed me, and I am not Doctor Locke. I am Hew Cullan, his depute. Giles is on leave, at present. Can I be of help?’
‘I do not know,’ the woman seemed uncertain, and Hew felt himself grow hot. She was, he judged, no older than his sister Meg, and yet so poised and serious she had him blushing like a boy. She was immaculately dressed, in light grey watered silk, set off with little pearls.
‘You are the second master here?’ she asked.
He recovered his composure as he made his bow, answering, ‘I am.’
‘Forgive me; you seem young. No matter,’ said the woman, ‘I am grateful for your help. My brother is a student here, just recently enrolled. He left his Latin grammar at my house. I thought to leave it for him at the college gate, but was turned away precipitate. The man would not allow me to explain. And so I brought it here, to Doctor Locke.’
‘The servant is officious here,’ Hew groaned. ‘The truth is, in his rudeness, he obeys a rule. He may not let a woman pass beyond the gate. Our porters are not used to converse with the gentle sex. It is our excuse, though scarcely a defence. I beg your pardon, humbly, if we have offended you.’
‘There is no offence. In truth, I only meant to leave the book.’
‘Come inside a moment,’ offered Hew. He could hear the college servants on the stair below.
She said, a little hesitant, ‘Would that be allowed?’
‘Madam, I am quite sure it is not allowed,’ he smiled, ‘and yet I would not have you standing on the stair. I pray you, take a seat.’ He ushered her inside, plumping up the cushions on the doctor’s favourite chair.
She sat down with perfect poise, smoothing out her dress. ‘What a strange chamber this is,’ she remarked, looking round.
‘Yes. It is Doctor Locke’s study. He uses it for . . . studying.’
‘How extraordinary! What are those?’ She pointed to the pile of weapons on the floor.
‘That is the college armoury,’ Hew improvised. ‘In case of war. Not that we expect a war,’ he added, sensing her alarm. ‘Yet if there is a war, it were well to be prepared.’
‘Indeed. And the armoury is kept in the professor’s lodging house?’
‘It is the safest place,’ he assured her.
‘I see. And what is that?’ She pointed at the foot.
‘That . . . that is a model of a foot,’ he draped it quickly with a cloth, ‘that Doctor Locke employs, in teaching of anatomy.’
‘Tis very true to life,’ the woman said politely. ‘I will not keep you long. My brother’s name is George Buchanan.’
‘I know him!’ Hew exclaimed, astonished and relieved, that it was not the boy that he had recently rebuked.
‘Do you, sir?’ she brightened.
‘That is . . . I saw him take his oath,’ he replied more honestly, ‘and took a little notice of the name.’
She gave a little sigh, and owned, ‘Ah, yes. It is a trial to him.’
‘I will be glad,’ Hew offered, ‘to pass on the book.’ He noticed that she held the grammar in her hand, and yet did not relinquish it.
‘I suppose I had some hope of seeing George,’ she confessed. ‘You will think me foolish, as I know my husband does, but I cannot help but fear for him. My brother is not strong, and has never been a scholar. He is willing, but is not a subtle boy.’
The mention of a husband disappointed Hew, for reasons he could not have given, were he to be asked. It had been plain from the beginning she was someone else’s wife; her manner and her clothes, the way she wore her hair, all gave the clear impression of the married state. His heart slumped further when he heard what she said next. ‘I fear, sir, that you will be hard on him. He is a timid boy.’
The plea, he knew, was meant for him. ‘Why would you fear that?’ he asked.
‘I thought perhaps I sensed it at the door. A certain want of sympathy.’
‘Mistress, I assure you . . .’ Hew was lost for words. For how had she construed him, to think he could be cruel?
‘I do not blame you,’ she said quickly, ‘for I know the life is rigorous, and that you must be strict. You will think my poor brother is petted and spoiled. He is not strong, in spirit or in health. Yet he is not overindulged. I fear that what I say will turn your mind against him. I do not explain it well.’
‘Madam,’ he assured her, ‘you have put his case most gently, and in no way is he disadvantaged by your coming here. You leave him in the safest hands. His regent is a conscientious man, who takes great care and interest in the students’ education, and will set your brother kindly on the straightest path. And, if he falls sick, our principal Giles Locke is a most excellent physician, and the best of men. Besides, he has a young son of his own.’
She responded warmly. ‘That is good to know, then. How old is his son?’
‘He has lately ventured on his second day,’ admitted Hew.
‘That is young,’ she acknowledged gravely, with the shadow of a smile.
‘As for myself, I know not what to say, in my defence. You caught me off my guard, and found me cross, and yet you are mistaken if you think I am severe. In truth, I have the least authority, and am the last man that the students may have cause to fear,’ he told her earnestly.
‘I thank you for your kindness. You have set my mind at rest.’
Hew offered, ‘If you still wish to see your brother, I can have him called.’
She hesitated. ‘Is that done?’
‘It could be done.’
‘But then,’ she said, with a rush of sensitivity, ‘I think he may not like to be called out from his friends.’
‘I think that more than likely,’ Hew agreed.
‘Then I am reassured. I will not be the cause of his embarrassment.’ She handed Hew the grammar book. ‘My husband will be waiting for me. I think you are mistaken, in that you lack authority. I think it very likely th
ey look up to you.’
Suddenly, he blurted, loath to let her go, ‘I too have a sister.’
She gazed at him a moment, astonished and amused, before she answered seriously, ‘She is fortunate, then. Good day to you, sir.’
Hew watched her from the window, and scowled at his own foolishness, muttering, ‘I too have a sister! What devil did induce me to say that?’ Too long, he decided, in the company of men. He had not even thought to ask her for her name.
He also had a sister, nonetheless, who had been foremost on his mind the last few anxious hours. He could stay away no longer, but hurried to the Swallow Gait. He was delighted to find Giles recovered and restored, larger and more cheerful than his usual self. For once, the doctor spoke without equivocation. His professional verdict was that Matthew was the fairest, fattest, strongest, bravest, boldest infant ever seen, ‘And how could it be otherwise, when he has such a mother?’
‘In truth, I am right glad to see you,’ he confided privately. ‘The place is thrang with womenfolk, and you will have to vie with them, for audience with Meg. Go to, and tell them I insist on it, if they are to remain here in my house.’
This somehow lacked the courage of the doctor’s sworn conviction, and Hew responded nervously, ‘Go into the women’s room? Alone?’
‘Why not? She is your sister, Hew. Be certain to insist on it. And I will join you presently. I want a word with Paul.’
Hew had the sense that he was sent in as the vanguard, to distract the troops. The entrance to the birthing room was gated like St Salvator’s, as if the college porters met their match in wives. The women were invincible, and would not let him pass, till Meg called out beseechingly, ‘Pray let my brother in.’ The sentries were disbanded and straggled through the hall, with a dagger-backward glance of murder towards Hew.
The room was dark and womb-like, and Hew felt a moment’s panic, starting back for Giles, until he saw his sister, sitting up in bed. She was propped up on a pillow, with Matthew in her arms. Hew stood still and stared. He felt a sudden shyness that he did not understand. Meg held out her hand to him, whispering, ‘Come see,’ as though it were her brother, and not Matthew, was the bairn. ‘Come, see Matthew Locke.’
Her voice was low and soft, and everything was closed and dark, to make a quiet cloister for the mother and her child. And the bairn himself was lapped up in his swaddling bands, a tiny human package staring stiff and strange, through two dark solemn pinpricks blinking up at Hew.
‘You made him, Meg. How clever of you,’ Hew observed at last. The lightness of his tone betrayed the tremor in his heart.
His sister smiled. ‘I had a little help. Come, will you hold him? He is firmly wrapped.’
Hew peered back at the parcel, but did not pick it up. ‘Do you think he likes it?’ he asked her, critically.
‘I had not thought,’ considered Meg. ‘For it is always done.’
‘We do not ask him what he likes,’ said Giles, appearing at the door, ‘for fear he will grow up like you, to question everything. The muscaters are mustered in the kitchen, and will presently regroup,’ he warned, ‘so we do not have long.’
‘You must not be unkind to them, when they have been so good to us,’ objected Meg.
‘It is unkindness, born of terror,’ Giles assured her, ‘and a wilful longing, to be left alone with you.’
‘Patience. You will have us for a lifetime.’
‘Amen to that,’ said Giles, turning back to Hew. ‘Paul has just informed me,’ he mentioned with a frown, ‘that there was a suspicious death, at Maude Benet’s inn.’
‘Was it the stranger?’ wondered Hew.
‘The man from the windmill,’ said Meg.
They both of them gaped at her. ‘How in the world can you know about that?’
‘You think I am confined here? Yet the women have been coming in for days. There is no scrap of gossip that I have not heard.’
‘Well, I had heard nothing, till now,’ grumbled Giles. ‘It seems I am the only person in the world who was not informed, until his servant thought it ripe to tell him, he was wanted there two days ago. We must go at once, and hope that we are not too late.’
‘We are certainly too late,’ Hew pointed out.
‘I mean, too late to verify the cause of death.’ Giles kissed his wife and child. ‘Dearest,’ he said briskly, ‘I shall not be long.’
Chapter 6
A Glass Perspective
It had made sense, Maude protested, when the bailies told it to her. It was something she could not explain.
‘Try,’ insisted Giles. ‘What happened to the corpse?’
‘It was taken out to sea.’
‘Why to the sea?’
‘It had come from the sea, and so it was returned, to the place where he had drowned,’ Maude recited, like a catechism. James Edie had instructed her and she had learned the drill. She realised now that it did not stand up to scrutiny. Though that was the way with a creed; you had it by heart, and did not question why, or else the whole world would be riven into shreds. She wondered that they did not see it.
The doctor said, ‘As you must see, that cannot be so.’
Maude appealed to Hew, ‘It was like the fish, sir. I felt his beating heart.’
‘What does she mean?’ inquired Giles.
‘The fish heart went on beating, after it was dead,’ remembered Hew.
‘That happens with a fish, but rarely with a human heart. A man is either dead, or not,’ the doctor insisted.
Hew advised her kindly, ‘No one blames you, Maude. Yet you must talk us through it once again. What happened here, exactly?’
They were standing in Maude’s bedchamber, adjacent to the kitchen. All trace of Jacob had been cleared away. The closet shared a chimney, and a fireplace, with the room next door, and the air was thick and claggy with the smell of frying fat. A recess in the wall looked out onto the yard, facing back upon the jakes, away from the direction of the sea. A blue flannel blanket lay folded on the bed, turned upon the sheets.
‘Are those the sheets he died in?’ questioned Giles.
Maude shook her head. ‘The linen was cut up, to mak’ his shroud.’
‘What happened to his clothes?’
The clothes had gone too. Yet Maude recounted clearly, every hook and thread. She remembered his long coat, of dun-coloured wool, that the sea had matted, turning into felt, his white linen shirt, with lace around the cuffs, where a careful hand had stitched, his darned black breeks and salt-scuffed shoes. His hat, she supposed, had been lost in the storm.
‘Then he was not a mariner?’ persisted Hew.
Maude agreed that Jacob had not been a mariner. Sailors wore short coats, with wide, baggy breeks, and shoes soled with rope, for gripping to the decks. Sailors dressed like banderoles, in red and white and blue.
‘Did he eat or drink, vomit, use the jakes?’
He had drunk and eaten, ale and bannock sops, and he had pissed and vomited, both into the water pot. The residue had gone into the jakes, the jakes a metal pail that emptied to the sink, the sink a narrow gutter-pipe that ran into the sea. The leakage had been washed away, with no trace left behind.
‘You say he spoke to you. What were his words?’
He had said his name was Jacob, but that he was not himself. He spoke the words in Flemish; she had understood them. ‘I am not my, he said, and I am not myself. In Flemish, Eek neet mine, Ik neet van Myzelf.’
What had she understood by that?
‘I am not myself.’
What had she understood by that?
She had not understood.
‘I am not myself,’ Hew repeated carefully. He sounded out the Dutch, and wrote it down.
‘And when he died, you say you heard a noise?’
‘It was the cat, Gib Hunter.’
The cat was in the room with them. It wound its legs round Hew’s, quivering its tail.
‘He came in from the yard, and could not escape.’
Gib Hunter gave the lie to this, by leaping up on the window ledge and out into the yard, the way he had come in.
‘Did Jacob speak again?’
He spoke out to a woman, Beatrix was her name. And he called to the devil, just before he died. She meant to say, before he died again. For he was dead already, and he brought the devil in his dreams.
‘Tell us, how that works,’ persisted Giles.
‘The surgeon came and wrote it,’ Maude reported stubbornly. ‘It was death by drowning.’
‘Is it possible, at all?’ murmured Hew to Giles, ‘That drowning was delayed? That water had collected in his lungs?’
‘Possible, indeed,’ Giles answered unequivocally. Hew had not expected him to answer straight and plain. ‘And yet I do not think,’ he added, true to form, ‘that that was how he died. Besides which, if I understand you, Jacob was a corpse, some time before he drowned. He drowned not once, but twice. Is that not correct?’
Maude agreed unhappily. ‘When I hear you say it now, it does not make much sense. But had you seen him when they brocht him from the sea, so swollen, blue and black, you might understand it, sir. The surgeon said that Jacob had been dead for days.’
‘Yet you were not afraid, Maude,’ Hew remarked astutely. ‘A dead man in your closet sat and drank and talked with you, pissing in your water pot. You had him close at hand there, when you prepared my fish.’ This was an unpleasant thought, he wished had not occurred to him. Yet he had proved his point. Maude had sheltered Jacob, and she had felt no fear.
‘Tis true,’ admitted Maude, herself surprised by this. ‘I never was afeared at him. I cannot tell you why. Yet I had quite forgotten, sir,’ she broke in suddenly, ‘that there is something here, that I have kept to show you, that will make it plain.’
‘Something left behind?’ asked Hew.
Maude Benet answered oddly, ‘Aye, sir, something left behind. It will help you understand. Tis what the surgeon saw.’ She reached up for the little box, high up on the shelf, and handed it to Giles. ‘Jacob wore a ring,’ she said. ‘And when the women came to dress the corpus, they fell to squabbling over it. They picked at him like crows, and found it firmly fixed. I took it from their grasp, and thought to keep it safe. It was the only part of him not given to the sea.’
Time and Tide Page 7