Time and Tide

by Shirley McKay

  ‘Tis pertinent,’ said Giles, ‘he mentions what they ate. Yet meat and bread, I fear, are not specific.’

  ‘Do you wish for the receipt?’ Bartie Groat inquired.

  ‘If he gives it, aye.’

  ‘The wind stood fair,’ Professor Groat went on, ‘and all was well, and then the weather turned . . . no, not the weather, something turned, I know not what . . .’

  ‘A moment,’ muttered Giles, scratching with his pen, ‘You know not what, or Jacob knew not what?’

  ‘I know not . . . know not something, for the writing is ill writ,’ muttered Bartie Groat.

  ‘That does not surprise me. Aye, go on.’

  ‘By your leave, I try to. Tis very black and crabbed. It began with Frans Hanssen, the wine merchant, who suffered flux and creeping of the flesh, and burning in his limbs. He loosened all the stoppers from the wine, saying that the casks were full of blood. It ran like rivers through the hold, spoiling Eyman’s cloth, who told me that red gillyflowers had blossomed in his heart, the day before he died. Now that is quite extraordinary!’ Bartie Groat exclaimed. ‘I have not mistaken it. Tis plain poor Copin was quite mad.’

  ‘Is it, though? Let me see!’ demanded Hew.

  ‘What is it, now you ken the Flemish tongue?’ Groat retorted crossly.

  ‘I would see the hand.’

  ‘You are an expert, too, in pothooks, I presume?’

  Hew had seized the letters back from Bartie Groat and set them side by side, squinting in the candlelight.

  ‘Your young subordinate is sudden and intemperate,’ Groat complained to Giles. ‘It is a fault in him I have observed before.’

  Giles conceded cheerfully. ‘It is his finest virtue, and his worst. I find it better, on the whole, to allow him his head. Are you done, Hew? Shall we now proceed?’

  ‘I am done. Look here.’ Hew drew the lantern close, so that the sullen lamplight fell across the page. ‘Do you observe a difference in the hand?’

  ‘No, none at all. Both are thick and crabbed. Which given what we know about poor Jacob’s hands, is not to be remarked on,’ Giles reasoned.

  ‘Aye, but both the same,’ reiterated Hew. ‘And to the same degree then, the affliction, would ye say?’

  ‘I should say so, aye,’ his friend agreed.

  ‘Then written at one time. And yet the letter to his child, by your own account,’ Hew turned to Bartie Groat, ‘is proper and right reasoned. Wherefore we may suppose the other is a clear account, of events that made no sense to him. It was not want of wit, that baffled understanding.’

  ‘Ingenious,’ admitted Giles. ‘Now what more does he say?’

  Groat took up the letters with a sideways jab at Hew, ‘If I may, without fear of distraction? The schippar was a stranger . . . was most strange, he suffered from the grips. He flew into a rage and beat the cook so savagely he had to be restrained. Henryk did not recover from the fright. The schippar was mistrusting, and his manner changed to us. I feared he had suspected me, and found out my intent – what was that, I wonder? – but in his franticness he came to hate us all, accusing all alike. His eyes and nose streamed black, like molten lead. All the venturers and more than half the crew were phrensied, mad or sick. Some died shrieking in their beds. Eyman thought he was on fire, and leapt into the sea; the rest we tethered in the hold, and daily flushed them out, the dying from the dead. Our one hope was the steersman, who had kept his wits. He set our course westwards, for Kingston on Hull.

  ‘We tried to put ashore, those men who were sick, yet could we find no haven; they feared us like the plague . . .’ Groat faltered. ‘This is very bad.’

  ‘He says like the plague, he does not say the plague,’ insisted Hew. ‘Go on.’

  ‘. . . and saw us off with cannon shot. Tobias was persuaded to steer us further north. His hands were pale and mottled, and he could not peg the traverse board, yet I hoped that we might come to Scotland as I planned . . . Lucas and Tobias, myself, and young Joachim; Joachim was the strongest in heart and in limb. And in the hold we held a dozen raging men. We took them one by one. God forgive us what we did; the furies took the devil at his rest. God forgive us, but they would not let us land.’

  ‘What was it that they did?’ Meg whispered fearfully.

  Her brother shook his head. ‘Who knows? They let the sick men die . . . or worse, perhaps. No port would give them harbour, that is clear. And Jacob had a conscience to the last.’

  ‘Tis clear enough his fellows were possessed,’ Bartie Groat affirmed. ‘And Jacob was well rid of them.’

  ‘Nothing yet is clear,’ insisted Giles. ‘Are we at the end?’

  ‘The end is most affecting.’ Bartie blew his nose.

  ‘Lucas and Tobias both are gone, and Joachim, too; the fury came upon him at the last. Tobias met a stranger fate; I dare not say a quiet one.

  ‘The wind has dropped, the water now is still, and there is nothing but the sea and sky. I put my trust in God, yet find no answer in the wilderness of grey, as if the world is empty, disappeared. The stillness is a curse, but I am not afraid to die. I close my eyes and look upon your face, and I hear Lotte’s laughter in my dreams.

  ‘I fear you will not know me, for I cannot send your ring, as fixed upon my finger as your likeness on my heart. Sometimes, it grows hot, and burns me like a fire, and yet I will not mind it; tis a part of you. I do confess, it troubles me that I do not return it. How are you to know me, if I do not send the ring? But I remember then, that this will never reach you, unless the wind that took away my world takes pity on my soul and moves to seek you out.

  And how then should you know me, when I do not know myself?

  The wind is still, and I am lost.

  You will not hear.

  Your Copin.

  ‘Dear, dear,’ said Bartie Groat. He became a little agitated, fumbling through his clothes for a clutch of pocket handkerchiefs, on which he wiped his spectacles, his hands and eyes and nose. A line from one of George Buchanan’s psalms came fleeting to Hew’s mind: mens fraudis expers. Et manus innocens. Like Pontius Pilate, Bartie washed his hands, or rather, blew his nose, of knowledge and of sin. ‘Weak bairns and feckless wives would weep at such a tale,’ said Bartie, and blew his nose again. ‘Now the hour is late; the college gates will close. Tis time that this old man went homeward to his bed.’

  Giles recovered quickly. ‘I will walk with you.’

  ‘Ah, no need, indeed,’ the old man said. ‘For I shall take a turn, to contemplate the moon, before the watchman tolls. The stars are bright tonight; I sense a frost.’

  ‘Indeed, the air is cold. You must not stay out long. I will walk you home, I do insist,’ said Giles. It was plain that Bartie was now anxious to be gone. Giles trailed him as he shuffled to the door and out into the night. The lanterns in the street were lit, the faintest flare of hornbeam from the castle gate and cookshop, a narrow yellow curvature beneath the quiet moon.

  Inside the chamber, Matthew whimpered in his sleep. Meg scooped him up, and brushed her lips against his milkiness, breathing in the softness of his cheek. She brought the infant closer to the firelight, standing with her back to Hew. ‘You could send the letters, could you not?’

  Her brother answered softly. ‘We could put them in a packet to Campvere, from where they might be taken to the beguinage in Ghent. Their passage there would not be safe assured, for the low lands are at war. And yet there is a chance; it could be done.’ He pictured Beatrix, waiting, with her little daughter and wondered what a packet of this sort could mean to them, whether it were worse, or better, not to know.

  ‘I wonder how old Lotte is?’ Meg’s whisper was half buried in the blanket of her child.

  Her brother answered, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Or you could send a letter with the ring, to say the ship was wrecked and all were lost, but Jacob died a gentle death, and peaceful in his bed,’ Meg pleaded.

  ‘I could do that, indeed,’ said Hew. ‘It is not so very different from the t
ruth. But she would never know the words he wrote to her.’ Hew imagined Jacob, scratching on the paper, the pained and slow progression of the blackened finger stubs, spurred on by thoughts of Beatrix and her child. ‘If you were Beatrix, which you would prefer?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, do not ask me that!’ cried Meg.

  ‘There is no crueller kindness than the truth,’ said Hew. ‘Perhaps we may do both, and send the letters in his hand, together with assurances, that Jacob died at peace.’

  ‘That would be an answer,’ Meg accepted tearfully. ‘Tis almost as if Jacob had two different deaths.’

  ‘It is,’ allowed Hew, ‘exactly like that.’

  They were disturbed by Giles returning, with a worried frown. ‘I fear we taxed an old man, more than he could spare,’ he fretted. ‘I confess, it vexes me, for I had not expected it of Bartie Groat. He babbled on, of conjurers and ghosts, his logic disappearing in a cloud of smoke. Such terrors are contagious. Pray God he does not spread them.’

  ‘He has a small acquaintance,’ Hew said reassuringly.

  Giles was unconvinced. ‘His fellowship is serving men, laundresses and boys. He has repercussions of a most pernicious kind. I fear that we were reckless, when we set him the task. I had not bargained he would take such fright at it, bolting like Gib Hunter from the hounds of Hell. I have enjoined him, most soberly, to keep the matter secret. Let’s hope he does not prattle it.’ He broke off to remark, ‘You have been crying, Meg!’

  Meg wiped her eyes. ‘My wits are turned to water since the bairn was born,’ she excused herself.

  ‘It is not the bairn. It is this sad report, which does affect us all,’ Giles answered soberly. ‘Yet you are the one person in the world I can rely upon, when the whole wide world is lurching, from dizzy lack of sense. You are not thrawn by fears, like Bartie Groat. So set aside your tears, and look upon the matter in the harsh light of the day; be cold, and analytical; and tell me plainly, what do you make of this madness?’

  ‘That it is a sickness,’ Meg concluded.

  ‘My thoughts, precisely.’ Giles looked at his notes. ‘The symptoms are distinct, and of two sorts. The one is madness plain, frantic and delusional. The other is a putrefaction, gangrene in the limbs. The one afflicts the body, and the other one the mind.’

  ‘Jacob suffered both,’ Hew pointed out.

  ‘So it seems he did. Yet he was not deluded when he wrote the letter. The frensie came on quickly, and the rot was slow. Jacob’s mind was sound, until the last. I do not think that Jacob’s madness was the same as theirs. What causes such illusions, as Jacob has described? If we discount the devil, and the occult arts?’ mused Giles.

  ‘Something in their food or drink?’ suggested Meg.

  Giles nodded. ‘As I think most likely.’ He read out from his notes: he said the casks were full of blood . . . he told me that red gillyflowers had blossomed in his heart. I had a patient once, who thought his breast contained a flight of birds, and felt their flutter in his ribs, the scrapple of their beaks against his throat.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Hew inquired.

  ‘Unhappily, he died. We traced it, in the end, to a surfeit of nutmeg, of which he was inordinately fond. The only man I ever knew, who died of honeyed milk.’

  ‘Yet dying of a posset often is the way,’ said Hew.

  ‘At someone else’s hand,’ his friend agreed.

  ‘Then could it have been nutmeg?’ wondered Meg.

  ‘I do not think it likely,’ Giles demurred. ‘For he was most uncommon, and took it to extremes; he bought nutmeg by the pound. Among so large a crew, I cannot think a surfeit is to blame. Poison seems most likely, as it did it before, yet I can only hazard at the source.’

  ‘You have seen these things before?’ concluded Hew.

  The doctor nodded. ‘Once before, in France. The symptoms were delirium, and creeping of the flesh, sweeping through a village, like a flame. The cause was counted magic in that case, and the sickness known as ignis sacer, holy fire.

  They passed the letters on to Andrew Wood, who was not pleased to find they had been read. ‘These letters must at all costs be kept secret from the town; the terrors they report would put the fear of God into an honest man,’ he swore, ‘and scare the wits and water from a wrong one. You are quite sure the sickness here is spent?’

  ‘I have no doubt,’ the doctor said, ‘it died out on the ship. The sickness was a dry pernicious gangrene, known as holy fire, and I begin to have a notion of the cause.’

  ‘It would oblige us greatly if you found that out.’

  ‘I will explore my theory, and write to Adam Lonicer.’

  ‘Write to whom you will,’ said Andrew Wood impatiently, ‘As long as you do not spread rumour through the town. You are quite sure,’ he asked again, ‘there is no present risk?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ answered Giles.

  ‘Nor taint upon the windmill, where the man was found?’

  ‘As I have implied,’ said Giles, who rarely would commit himself to matter more direct.

  ‘And you would stake your life on it?’

  ‘My reputation, certainly,’ the doctor answered huffily.

  ‘Then that must suffice. Since Jacob was the owner of the mill, and he and all the other men are dead, I think we may declare the ship as wrack,’ the coroner declared. ‘The letters will be put before the admiral.’

  ‘Not yet returned to Beatrix, who may still have a claim?’ asked Hew.

  ‘They may, in due course, be returned. I doubt she will pursue it from a convent house in Ghent. For myself, I had far rather burn them, for they bring nought but consternation, dread and fear. Yet keep the matter close. The brightness of the windmill is a clear, beguiling lure, and the people will forget the manner of its coming, at the prospect of its staying in the town,’ decided Andrew Wood.

  And so, indeed, they might have done, Hew soon came to reflect, had it not been for the death of Gavan Lang.

  Chapter 9

  Big Fish

  The corn mills marked the southern edges of the town, built along the Kinness Burn, that split the leafy South Street from the mellow swathes of countryside beyond. Most of this land had belonged to the priory, now gradually reclaimed and squeezed into the coffers of the burgh or the Crown. Some was in the keeping of the college of St Leonard, and other parts had fallen into private hands, to local lairds and landowners, one of whom was brother to the coroner of Fife. Robert Wood owned land and waters westward of the town, on which the Newmill stood. The mill itself was feued out to the miller, Gavan Lang. Gavan was a modest, unambitious man, who took a simple pleasure in the daily grind. He liked the slow monotony and steady pace of work. He liked the flow of water, under his control, close measured to the fineness or the coarseness of the grain, carefully assessed through skill and long experience. He liked the scent of barley, roasted in the kiln, and the soft rub of the flour dust falling through his fingertips. He liked to share, particularly, these pleasures with his son. His son had already begun to acquire the broad, flattered thumb that came from rubbing flour to test it for its fineness. He also had acquired the miller’s cough, a dry and rasping husk that kept the boy awake at night. He was eight years old.

  The boy caught the flour that ran down from the millstones, and swept it into sacks. He was too small to lift the sacks of grain. When the bell rang, to alert the miller that the hoppers had run dry, he was the quickest on his feet, nipping up the ladder to refill them. This was essential, for if the stones ground dry they would be damaged, at the best, and at worst would spark a fire, that threatened to ignite the structure of the mill. The water drove the wheel, the wheel turned the stones, the hoppers fed the stones, and the stones ground the flour. Nothing pleased the miller more than to watch this happen smoothly, with Harry by his side.

  The mill house was a meeting-place, where people stopped to chatter as they waited for their flour, as fine a place for tittle as the barber shop or kirk. In general, Gavan did not mind the thrangi
ng to and fro, and collected scraps of gossip to amuse his wife at suppertime, brightening up her day. He liked those moments, when the three of them were sitting round the fire and the rush of water on the paddles had been stilled, and she looked to him expectantly, for some snippet of a tale. But he liked better still the long hours at the mill, with no one but the boy, who watched him through a solid, concentrating frown, rolling up his sleeves and pulling out his shirt, rubbing with his thumbs, just as Gavan did.

  On the day that Gavan died, his pleasure in his work was spoiled by Robert Wood, whose presence placed an obstacle between him and the boy. Robert had stood waiting for a customer to go – a baxter, who had quibbled over flour – before he gave expression to his thoughts. His close and silent scrutiny made Gavan feel uncomfortable. Finally, the baxter left, and Robert broke his silence to demand, ‘Have ye been to look at her?’

  ‘Aye,’ admitted Gavan. He could not, in honesty, pretend he had not known what Robert meant. For Robert meant the windmill, and who in the whole town had not been down to peek at her? For certain, not one of the millers. Henry Cairns had had the measure of her, with his square and rule, and had made her picture, in a little book. Gavan Lang had never used a rule, though he could draw a pattern, from memory alone. He had a hand, and he knew by that hand the scale of anything, perfectly apportioned, from the fingers to the thumb. It could not be forgotten or misplaced. And if by some misfortune he should happen to be parted from it, as had happened to a wheelwright he had known, then he had a spare one, up the other sleeve. When Harry was a little older, he would teach him too, how to take a measure by a rule of thumb. At present, he could take the boy’s whole fist, and enclose it in his own strong hand, which served to remind the miller how tenuous and small, was this one clear intimation of a perfect world.

  ‘And?’ Robert Wood was brusque, and Gavan Lang regretted this, knowing that his attitude would not be lost on Harry.

  ‘She is beautifully wrought, sir, by a skilled engineer and a craftsman, and all of her joints are made true. If she is taken apart, for to move her, she will slip back like a tongue into a groove, every piece of her slid smoothly, fitting to perfection. She was made with an exquisite skill, and more than that, with love. However, she is not complete. She is a post mill, but lacking her post. Whoever takes her will need to found her on a solid base; the best is from a living tree, cut down and sunk again into high ground. Near to the coast will serve well.’