Time and Tide

by Shirley McKay

  ‘I do not understand,’ Hew told her, when the tears were quelled at last. ‘According to the grande dame, his aunt came from Dundee.’

  ‘His aunt,’ Beatrix explained, ‘was living at that place when Clays Hansen first met her. But her brother came from Sint Andreas, and that was the place where Jacob had been born. Or so Clays Hansen said.’

  ‘Then what,’ asked Hew, ‘was Jacob’s father’s name?’

  ‘He was Jacob, too. Jacob Adams. And Jacob said, that he would change his name, once he had come to Scotland, to Jacob Jacobsen. I do not know, monsieur, what my aunt has said to you,’ she put in suddenly, ‘But I should not like to think you thought that Jacob was a bad man. For he was not a bad man, I assure you.’

  ‘Why,’ Hew asked her cautiously, ‘should your aunt have told me that he was a bad man?’

  ‘She should not. It was only that she did not think that he should go from Ghent. She thought he should be satisfied with what he had. Yet it cannot be wrong, I think, to hope to have a better life, and who can blame him, if the life he had was wrong, for he could not have known, he was not who he thought he was.’

  ‘Beatrix,’ Hew said gently, ‘though I do not believe that Jacob was a bad man, there is something that I do not understand, and have to ask. He wrote in his letter that he thought the sea-captain suspected his intent, had somehow found him out. Do you know what Jacob meant?’

  Beatrix sighed. ‘I do, monsieur, for he wrote to me from Vlissingen. He had lied to the sea-captain, and that deception had weighed heavy on his mind, for Jacob is – was – an honest man, at heart. It was the only way he could persuade the sea-captain to take him up to St Andrews, and let him build his windmill on his ship. He met the man at Vlissingen, where he was looking for a carpenter, to take aboard his boat, and Jacob was the right man for the task. And so he had free passage, well assured, but the ship was going to Hull. So Jacob struck a bargain with the man; he had a venture to build windmills in the port of Vlissingen, importing them to Scotland, where such mills are scarce.

  ‘He would build a windmill, aboard the captain’s ship, and take it to St Andrews as a sample of the wares, and then the two of them would start in business, all along the coast. Of course, it was a trick, for Jacob meant to keep his mill, and never to return, there were to be no profits, from the business back in Vlissingen.’

  ‘We have the mill,’ said Hew. ‘It was salvaged from the ship. And if you wish to sell it, then the town will gladly pay.’

  Beatrix shook her head. ‘I will not sell it, for he meant it as a gift.’

  ‘A gift?’ repeated Hew.

  ‘A present to the town. For he was not quite sure how he would be received, or whether they would welcome back a long-forgotten son. And so he thought that he would bring a gift that they could not refuse. That when they saw the windmill, and understood its art, then they would welcome him with open arms. My aunt did not approve of it. She said that it was pride.’

  Then the whole town had fought, for possession of a gift, and had tried to take by force, what was already theirs. And in the quiet convent, in the war-torn town of Ghent, Hew felt bitterly ashamed of the place that he called home.

  ‘You must keep it,’ Beatrix said, ‘for it was meant for you.’

  Before Hew left the beguinage, Beatrix brought two packages and pressed them in his hand. ‘This is Flemish lace. One is for the keeper of the haven inn, who took care of Jacob when he died, and the other is for you, to give to your wife.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I thank you. These are exquisite, and Maude will be delighted with her gift. I do not have a wife. But if I may, I will give it to my sister, who has just had a child.’

  Beatrix answered, ‘Wait,’ returning to her press. ‘This is for your sister.’ She brought out another piece. ‘For if you do not have a wife, then you will have one very soon. And all of us are sisters, are we not?’

  ‘This is too much,’ protested Hew.

  Beatrix answered through the tears. ‘I promise, you, monsieur, that it is not.’

  She walked him through the square and past the green, where the daughters of the nunnery were playing on the grass, wild as little birds, and sheltered from the gaze of prying eyes. And as she left him at the gate, she took his hand and said, ‘My aunt will tell you Jacob changed, yet I do not believe that, monsieur. For in his heart, he stayed the same, and he was always true to me; it matters not to me, if he was Jacob Molenaar, or Hansen, or Jacobsen, or Adams; he was, and he will always be, my Copin.’

  Hew discovered Robert Lachlan sprawled upon a bed in the best room of the house of the finest inn in Ghent, with an empty flagon at his side. ‘Had to start without you,’ he explained. ‘You were gone too long. A’ gone. Fetch another . . .’

  ‘You have had enough.’

  ‘Nor yet begun,’ Robert contradicted him. ‘Lay down for a nap.’

  ‘How much have you had?’

  The soldier shrugged. ‘It is on your reckoning, when you come to pay for it.’

  ‘Then far more than enough.’

  ‘What is that?’ Robert sat up, and pointed to the package in Hew’s hand.

  ‘Lace, from the begijnhof.’

  ‘Nun’s lace?’ the soldier whistled. ‘That’s worth the finest whore in town.’ He stretched out a hand.

  ‘Touch, and I will cut you to the bone,’ Hew assured him icily, his hand already placed upon his sword.

  Robert pulled back in astonishment. ‘Jesu, you are ticklish and pepper-nosed tonight. What devil has got into you?’

  ‘Desist from your profanities!’ snapped Hew.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ swore Robert. ‘Tis the nun’s curse has snared you, just as I predicted it, for so the evil spinsters weave their wicked webs!’

  Hew abandoned Robert in disgust, retreating to the street outside for air. The inn was sited near the corn wharf, where the boatman’s barge had docked, and walking further on, he found the marketplace, the wide, three-cornered square between the guild church of St Nicholas and the finest city houses of the guilds and trades. As the staple town in Flanders for French imported wheat, Ghent was home to the most furious and frank transactions Hew had ever seen, where a raging stream of wagons, carts and trucks rumbled past incessantly, and bartering went on, aggressively and noisily, in Flemish and in French. This commerce was reserved exclusively for men, and Hew felt dazed in the ferocity of masculine exchange. The heady chink of coin and loud and forceful bargaining pressed in on every side, and the speed and force with which the trade took place was frantic and bewildering. Dockers, bakers, packmen, shipmen battled forth at every turn, haggling over bolls of wheat and sacks of yellow corn. The furiousness reminded Hew of Patrick Honeyman, whom he imagined dwarfed and swept away, in this fierce flux of grain. And in his mind’s eye, he saw once again the corpse of Sandy Kintor, lying by the granary, his last breath choked and stoppered by the flood of corn, overwhelmed and drowning, at the baxters’ hands. For in his heart, he knew that it must be the baxters. For who would leave a corpse to rot inside a granary, and risk the precious grain supply, increasing the reliance on imported flour and forcing up the price of bread? And who, indeed, had access to the granary, and, since they held the key to it, had surely known about the broken lock? ‘Who profits now?’ he heard the miller bleat, the fearful form of Henry Cairns, brought weeping to his knees. It had been a baxter, beyond doubt. The baxters made their profit from the staff of life itself. They kept their secrets close behind the banner of their gild.

  Overwhelmed by the noise and the thrang, Hew fled from the market to the narrow band of streets that intersected Ghent and lay between its waterways. In the lanes around the square were rows of little stalls, with bread and books and candles, liquor and hot pies, smoked and salted fish and slabs of roasted pork. Among them he noticed a spectacle shop, whose keeper called out in thick Flemish French, ‘Opticks, monsieur; perspectives, illusions, toys of all kinds.’ Hew was enchanted. ‘Aye, why not?’ The cabinets within would
have captivated Giles, with prisms of rock crystals and pyramids of glass, each promising a new perspective on the world. Their maker wore a long grey beard and velvet doctor’s cap, a magus from a magic book, philosopher and conjurer, combining art with trickery. ‘Come see, sir,’ he beseeched, uncovering a snowstorm in the smallest speck of dust, discovering God’s pattern in the torn wing of a fly. There were glasses and lenses of all sorts and shapes, hollowed and bevelled and convex and curved, pyramids, cylinders, coloured and clear. He showed to Hew a multiplying glass, that threw the object back upon the baffled eye, making one of many, fashioning a crowd. By geometric alchemy, he mingled mathematical and magic, mystic arts. And he had pictures, too, that tricked and teased the mind, that through a glass obliquely, showed secrets or told lies. Some were pleated, set in strips, to show a split perspective – wisdom, folly, health or sickness, human virtue, human fault – when viewed from left or right. One picture had a mirror that reflected back a death’s head, from the painted canvas hidden underneath. It was the optick, realised Hew, that Giles must have alluded to, ‘in which a man might see an image not his own’. No art or magic in the glass, but the reflection of another angled picture, intended to alarm, to baffle or amuse.

  Hew saw glasses that distorted what was in plain sight, and glasses that made sense of images distorted, glasses that made one of many, others, like the multiplier, that made many out of one. A dozen small figures, arranged in a circle, viewed through a cylinder, fused into a whole. He bought the multiplier as a gift for Giles, and turned to leave the shop. And there he stopped aghast, to catch his face reflected in a common looking glass, plain and undistorted, hung above the door. In the midst of these illusions, it took him by surprise.

  ‘What is it that you see?’ the shopkeeper asked shrewdly, his last and finest trick. Hew was lost for words. What was it that he saw? A young, fair scholar’s face, a little thin and thoughtful, growing grave and pensive, showing signs of age. Who was he, after all? What was it he was doing there? He saw his own life plainly in a glass, his family, hope and friends, his training in the law, and saw it scatter in confusion, no more closely centred than he had ever been. What compulsion drove him? He was, as he assured himself, his own man to the last. And yet he had no notion what that really meant.

  Hew hurried to the inn, and finding Robert Lachlan in a stupor on the floor, he woke him with a kick. ‘Do you want to stay with me, and see this matter out?’ he demanded bluntly.

  Robert answered cautiously, ‘I might.’

  ‘Get up, then,’ Hew instructed. ‘We are going home.’

  Chapter 23

  The Flemish Miller’s Gift

  On a grey November evening as the light began to fail, Hew and Robert Lachlan came riding from the west to the clock tower of St Salvator’s, inscribed in darkening skies. St Andrews never looked so fair, thought Hew, as on arrival and departure, where wild winds swept and scattered waters from the bay and drizzled soft white spray on walls of yellow sand. Robert Lachlan, for his part, was less impressed. ‘Is this it, then? The great metropolis? Three streets?’

  Three streets, in which a world converged and bowed before the hollow, windswept arches of its old cathedral church: the broad and leafy South Street, the townhouses and colleges, the kirk of Holy Trinity and mercat with its cross; and deeper lined within, its crisscross of baxters, thieves and whores, philosophers and fisher wives, clergymen and cooks; their cloisters and courtyards, their dinner bells and boats. ‘What did you expect?’ asked Hew.

  ‘Well,’ said Robert with a sniff, ‘for sure, it isna Ghent.’

  ‘But Ghent is a huge city. You forget that this is Scotland. I think you were away too long,’ Hew smiled.

  ‘Or mebbe,’ Robert countered, ‘not long enough.’

  ‘Where is it you are from?’ his master asked.

  The soldier shrugged. ‘A wee place in the west. You would not have heard of it. I will not go back there.’

  ‘Have you no other friends?’

  ‘I had a sister once. She would not know me now.’ Robert said dismissively. ‘I will stay here for a while. Perhaps I will find work. Your man Robert Wood may want a miller still to work his mill. I could be a miller. It cannot be hard.’

  ‘I do not recommend it,’ answered Hew. ‘If you will, I could let you have land.’

  ‘And what would I dae with that? Grow neaps, and cabbage kale?’ The soldier shook his head. ‘I thank you, but I do not think so.’

  Robert proved ill-fitted for a servant in the town, for his manners at St Salvator’s were awkward and restrained; he could not wait at table, and he would not help the cook. Nor did he fare much better with the doctor on the Swallow Gait, for Meg received him sceptically, and he fell out with Paul. ‘What sort of man is that?’ asked Meg, ‘you bring home as a friend?’

  ‘An honest one,’ insisted Hew.

  ‘I fear,’ whispered Giles, ‘that your brother has acquired a new friend for Dun Scottis. Yet we must be thankful, he is back at all.’

  Robert lodged for two nights with Maude Benet at the haven inn, but on the third she told him that the house was full. ‘I do not want him here,’ she said to Hew, ‘he drinks too much,’ which seemed an odd objection, from the keeper of a tavern.

  ‘He has shown no sign of violence, as I hope?’ asked Hew.

  ‘He has not. Yet he is melancholy in his cups. He is the sort of man who drinks when he has nothing else to do, from idleness. And I have seen too many guid men thrawn by drink, to want to see another one,’ she answered enigmatically.

  And so, for want of better plan, Hew took Robert home to Kenly Green and left him there with Nicholas, who took to him with quiet grace, and did not seek to judge. Hew returned alone, to report to Andrew Wood. He found the coroner at home in the tolbuith in the mercat place, where he fulfilled his offices when he was in town.

  ‘I heard,’ Sir Andrew greeted him, ‘that you have brought a man with you from Ghent.’

  ‘Good news travels fast,’ noticed Hew.

  ‘Do you intend to keep him?’ Andrew Wood inquired.

  ‘He will go where he will, for he is not a lapdog to be kept.’

  Sir Andrew answered tetchily, ‘When are you to learn? The man is your servant, and a servant is to keep, or dismiss, as you decide. I advise you to dismiss him.’

  ‘I had a notion, once, that he might work for you,’ Hew confided.

  ‘And why should you think that?

  ‘I thought that you had set him, to spy on me.’

  Sir Andrew gave a narrow smile. ‘Regrettably, you overstate my power. I would I had such influence,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mean overseas?’ asked Hew.

  ‘I mean, over you,’ the coroner replied. ‘The man I set to spy on you was beaten to a pulp, by your servant, Robert Lachlan, at the Groote Kerk in Campvere. He wiped your bloody sword upon my servant’s coat.’

  Hew exclaimed, ‘Sweet heaven! Then he meant to kill me!’

  ‘Not at all,’ the coroner demurred. ‘His orders were to watch, and keep you safe. His error was to let things go so far. For he was on the boat with you, and saw your indiscretion with the little whore; your weakness for such women, as I feared, distracts you. My man thought you deserved your lesson; which was not a judgement he was free to make. Yet you may be assured he would not have let them kill you. What he had not foreseen was that you were so supple with your sword, or should be so savage in your own response.’

  ‘It was instinct,’ Hew excused himself, ‘and nothing more. I do regret the hurt I did the man.’

  ‘Your instinct, then, is sound and quick, and should not be a matter for regret, for it has served you well. My own man fared more badly in this matter. George Hacket found him wounded in the street, and had him hanged, precipitate, for the blood that Robert Lachlan had smeared upon his coat.’

  ‘Oh, my dear God,’ murmured Hew. ‘Then the poor wretch was hanged for my sword?’

  ‘You need not waste your tears on him.
For he had failed his task.’

  ‘Aye, but to be hanged for it . . .!’ Hew said, ashen-faced. ‘And yet,’ he countered suddenly, ‘If Hacket hanged him for it, how is it that he lived to tell the tale?’

  Sir Andrew laughed. ‘There you have caught me out. Aye, very well, Hacket did not hang the man. He kicked him up the arse and sent him home to me. And for all the use he is to me, now banished from Campvere, he may as well have hanged.’

  Hew groaned. ‘I cannot tell the falsehood from the truth!’

  ‘Indeed,’ the coroner remarked, ‘As I may sometimes think the same of you, without corroboration of a close intelligence. All such reports were thin, since you went south from Vlissingen. I heard you were in Antwerp, with the Prince of Orange; the devil only knows what you did there.’

  ‘It is the devil’s tale,’ smiled Hew, ‘that takes us somewhat crooked from our proper path.’

  ‘Then we shall hear it presently, and move on first to Ghent. Yet tell me, if you will, how you did find the prince? In spirit and in health?’

  ‘I found him quite remarkable. You know he has been shot?’

  ‘So we have lately heard,’ the coroner acknowledged. ‘So close a violation of the person of the prince has sent a tremor that reverberates throughout the crowns of Christendom, except, of course,’ he ended with a smile, ‘that of our own King James, who has not been told of it, for fear that he would piss himself.’

  Hew felt a prick of sympathy for James. ‘Yet as I understand it,’ he mentioned in defence, ‘he saw his own grandfather blasted by pistol shot, when he was a mere bairn of five, and watched the old man, in the throes of his agonies, give up his life through his bowels. Then it is less remarkable to find these terrors now awakened, in a young man of sixteen.’

  ‘Though there is truth in what you say, it is the counsel of a sad, reflective heart,’ Andrew Wood returned, ‘and such soft indulgences do not assist the king. For now the time is ripe for him to cease to be a bairn, and set aside his night terrors, and wild and frantic fears, that he may take control, and take a firmer grasp upon his crown. You are mistaken, I assure you, if you consider that I do not know his worth, or that, for all his weaknesses, I do not take his part,’ he concluded quietly. ‘No more of that; the whole town holds its breath, and waits for your report upon the windmill. Then what have you to say to us?’