A Pig of Cold Poison

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘It might put some strength into her,’ Alys said. ‘How is she?’

  ‘That’s a good receipt.’ Mally Bowen materialized beside them. ‘She’s right weary since I turned the babe. I’ll try her wi some of that the now.’ She took the jug and retreated to the inner room. Mistress Baillie shook her head, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  ‘That’s kind, lass,’ she said. ‘Oh, my poor lassie. It’s no – it’s never –’

  ‘It’s hard for you to watch,’ said Alys, putting a hand on her arm. ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s to do for her. She’s – we’ve got her lying down for now, she’s that weary, and it’s no dropping as it should, even though they turned the bairn – we’ll have her back in the chair shortly, but –’ The incoherent speech broke off, and Mistress Baillie drew a deep breath and looked at her intently. ‘Did you say you were Alys Mason?’ Alys nodded. ‘Were you no at that gathering yesterday?’ She nodded again, and the other woman looked about them at the bustling room, then put a hand on Alys’s shoulder. ‘Come out here if you will, lass, till I get a word.’

  Out in the hall Robert Renfrew was still standing about, but left ostentatiously when he saw them. Ignoring him, Mistress Baillie towed Alys to one of the window spaces and said with quiet urgency, ‘Were you present at these mummers? Can you tell me what happened? Grace told me a bit, but she’ll never say aught that reflects on Renfrew and I can make no sense of Eleanor’s version, and that Agnes has barely left her chamber since they came back here. And Agnes Hamilton’s a good soul, but –’

  ‘Yes, I was there – is it worrying her?’ But surely, thought Alys, the – the pressures of bringing a baby to birth should overcome all else. Maybe not.

  ‘I think that’s what’s eating at her,’ agreed Mistress Baillie, and rubbed at her eyes again. ‘She canny give her whole mind to the task, she canny let go and let the bairn come. She’s fighting everything we do.’ She was a plump, attractive woman, not much past forty and still with most of her teeth, but her face was haggard with worry and lack of sleep, and her mouth worked as Alys looked at her. ‘Tell me what happened, lassie, will you?’

  Obediently, Alys recounted the tale of the afternoon, of the substitute flask and how the first any of them had realized that something was wrong was when the champion fell the second time. The other woman listened closely, and shook her head.

  ‘I see it,’ she said. ‘My lassie was feart it was –’ She stopped and looked at Alys. ‘She never did a thing wrong,’ she said fiercely. Alys nodded. ‘But she favoured Tammas Bowster, and her faither would take Renfrew for her, no matter that he’s older than I am, and her heart’s no been in the match.’

  ‘That is hard,’ said Alys. ‘But surely now she has the baby –?’ At least she has the baby, said a little voice in her mind. My father liked my choice, but I have no baby yet.

  ‘Aye, and it’s Renfrew’s bairn, no doubt of that, whatever he said to her when she was first howding. But Tammas was there yesterday, I take it, with the other mummers?’

  ‘He was,’ agreed Alys.

  ‘I think my Meg’s feart it was Renfrew tried to pyson Tammas Bowster and slew this Gibson by mischance.’

  Alys stared at her, aware that her mouth was dropping open. Recovering it, she said, ‘No, indeed, it could not have been, for nobody told Maister Renfrew about the mummers until he arrived at the house. He was not best pleased, my good-sister said, but there was little he could do about it by then.’

  ‘Was it not the flask Renfrew aye carries on him that pysont the man?’ asked Mistress Baillie doubtfully.

  ‘No,’ said Alys firmly, ‘for my husband saw him drink from that himself, while the mummers were acting the play. It was another flask.’

  ‘Would you tell her?’ Mistress Baillie seized Alys’s hands in a painful grip. ‘Lassie, would you tell her that? It might – she might let go if she hears it, she can stop fretting and think of the bairn instead.’

  ‘Yes, if you think it proper for me to be in the same chamber,’ Alys said diffidently. ‘I’m not – I’ve no –’

  ‘Oh, never mind that! Anything that will help my lassie,’ said Mistress Baillie. She set off towards the door, then checked as another ragged scream tore at their ears. ‘Oh, my poor Meg!’ she exclaimed, tears starting to her eyes. ‘Oh, how can I bear it?’

  ‘She’s more to bear than you have, Marion,’ said Maister Renfrew, coming into the hall from the stair. ‘How is she? Is she making any progress?’

  ‘None,’ said Mistress Baillie bluntly. ‘We’ve tried all the receipts you sent up, all the charms, all the prayers. She’s bound up in the birthing-girdle from St Thenew’s, she’s got a knife under her pillow, the jasper-stone, Lady Kate’s snakestone, that strange thing Caterin Campbell sent round, she calls it Our Lady’s sea-nut – none of them’s done her any good. If you’d unlocked your workroom when I first asked you this would never ha come about.’

  ‘Superstitious nonsense – and that room stays locked now, the way things vanish. It’s coming to it, when I’ve to lock my workroom against my own household.’

  ‘And if you’d listened to me about her dates,’ persisted Mistress Baillie, unheeding, ‘she wouldny have been at Morison’s yesterday getting frightened into this state.’

  Her tone was biting; a lesser man would have quailed, but Maister Renfrew merely said, ‘Well, it’s the lot of women. Can Grace do nothing?’

  ‘Grace gave her some of Nicol’s drops, but it’s no done much good,’ said Mistress Baillie. Behind Renfrew a maidservant entered the hall and padded past them. ‘It takes one who’s been through it to support a lass, especially her first time.’

  ‘Here, Isa,’ said Renfrew, ignoring this. ‘What are you about here, woman? There’s no word yet, there’s no call for you to be up here! Away back to the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m here to empty the close-stool,’ said the woman, ‘since it willny empty itsel, as any woman could work out.’ She bobbed without respect, and went on into the crowded room.

  Her master stared after her in exasperation, and Mistress Baillie said, ‘Oh, get away to your prayers, man, for it’s about all you can do for Meg now. You and your pine nuts!’

  Renfrew bridled at this, but said sharply, ‘We’ve got prayers being said for her at the Greyfriars, and Eleanor’s along at St Mary’s on her knees, seeing she can hardly come about the house till the bairn comes home, the way she is. So if you’ll no have me in the chamber –’

  ‘It’s Mally Bowen won’t have you in the chamber, you ken that as well as I do,’ said Mistress Baillie. ‘So you might as well get along to St Mary’s yoursel, maister.’

  She turned towards the door, then stood aside to let Grace Gordon emerge.

  ‘Grace!’ said Renfrew curtly. ‘I’ve been seeking you.’

  ‘I was away for another dose of the drops,’ Grace said quietly.

  ‘One dose is enough. She’s no needing more. Come wi me the now.’

  Alys, following Mistress Baillie, caught sight of Grace’s expression. What was it? she wondered. Resignation, apprehension, fear? She slipped past the other girl and into the hot, busy room, where the ale-cup was going round again. Mistress Hamilton was embroidering an account of a cousin’s recent delivery; Alys, who had heard parts of the tale before, moved on quickly, but Nancy Sproull caught her arm, peering up at her with those dark-fringed grey eyes not entirely focused.

  ‘Alys,’ she said solemnly. ‘Alys, you’re a sensible lassie and a good Christian soul and all.’

  ‘I try to be.’

  Mistress Sproull pulled her down to breathe ale at her. ‘Would you do me a favour, lass? Would you call by our house and get a word wi our Nell?’

  ‘With Nell?’ Alys repeated in surprise.

  Nell’s mother nodded, still with that juridical solemnity. ‘She’s right grieved by yesterday’s trouble,’ she divulged in a hoarse whisper. ‘She’ll not stop weeping. See if you can talk so
me sense into her, lassie?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised Alys, disengaging herself with some trouble.

  In the birthing chamber it was slightly less hot, and quieter between Meg’s bitter pangs. She was laid on her side on a truckle-bed, clad only in a sweat-damp shift, her hair loose and clinging to her swollen face. Bound round her, under her sagging breasts, was the birthing-girdle, a strip of parchment cut to the height of Our Lady and inscribed with grateful prayers, and charms of one kind or another were strapped to her arm or her bare thigh.

  ‘Mammy, make it stop,’ she moaned as Alys entered. ‘I don’t want a bairn, take it away!’

  Mally Bowen, wife of Serjeant Anderson, the burgh layer-out and most experienced midwife, had both hands and one ear applied to her belly, and her mother was already bending over whispering to her. Mother and daughter turned to look at Alys with identical expressions of hope.

  ‘Here, what’s this?’ said Mistress Bowen, straightening up. ‘There’s no room for you in here, my lass, you’ve none of your own –’

  ‘She’s got a word for Meg,’ said Mistress Baillie, ‘that willny wait, Mally.’ The two exchanged a significant glance, and Mistress Bowen stepped away from the bed to join a younger woman by the shaded window. Both were wrapped in linen aprons, stained with blood and – and other fluids, thought Alys. She was astonished by how alarming she found it to be here. Is it because I have no role, no responsibility? she wondered. Or is it another reason?

  ‘Alys?’ said Meg weakly, reaching out a hand to her. She drew close, and knelt down in obedience to the hand. ‘Is that right, what my mammy says? Did you see –?’

  ‘My husband saw,’ said Alys, trying to sound reassuring. ‘He saw your man drink from his own flask, while we all watched the mummers. So it was never your man’s flask that Nanty Bothwell had in his scrip. It was nothing to do with him what happened.’ And if the logic of that is not rigorous, she thought, this girl would never see it at the best of times and right now she’s incapable of thinking it out.

  ‘O-oh!’ Meg let her head fall back on the pillow, tears starting to her eyes. ‘Oh, thanks be to Our Lady!’ Her mother wiped at her brow with a damp cloth, making soothing noises. ‘I should never ha doubted –’

  She caught her breath, and clapped both hands to her belly.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Mistress Bowen, bustling forward from the window with her colleague. Alys stepped hastily back from the bed, and found herself elbowed against the wall. ‘That’s more like it, then.’

  ‘It’s no the same as it was,’ said Meg weakly. ‘It was – it was –’

  ‘Aye, it’s no the same.’ Mistress Bowen turned back the folds of the linen garment which Alys now realized was not a shift but a man’s shirt, and groped expertly between the massive, blue-veined thighs. ‘That’s a clever lass. No long now.’ She paused as another of the spasms seized her patient, and as it eased she said over her shoulder, ‘I think we’ll have her in the chair now, Eppie.’

  Alys, caught between the bed and the window, watched in alarm as the three women raised Meg and transferred her to the birthing-chair, where she lay limply, thighs spread, her head thrown back on her mother’s breast, while the two midwives inspected her privities. This was not how one had ever imagined – it was not how the birth of the Virgin or of St Nicholas was shown – they could never depict a saint in such an extremity, she realized. The priests would never believe it. And Kate has done this, been through this, she thought, horrified, and yet she loves her baby.

  Although Mistress Bowen had said it would not be long, it seemed to Alys that she stood trapped by the window for a hundred years while Meg laboured through the last stages of bringing her child to birth. She was aware of a stirring at the door to the outer chamber, of voices and exclamations as well as of Meg’s increasing cries of pain, the encouraging words of the two midwives, the reassuring murmurs from Mistress Baillie, but her attention was entirely on Meg, on this dreadful process of bringing a child into the world. She seemed to be reduced to a single point of attention, without hands or feet or body, only a pair of eyes and a mind which tried but was unable to reject what it was seeing.

  Finally – finally – Meg screamed in what seemed like a death-agony, the two women on their knees exclaimed together, there was a flurry of movement, a sudden thin high wail. The entire world and everything in it seemed to pause for a moment, and then all the women in the other chamber sighed at once. Meg exclaimed joyfully, her weakness forgotten:

  ‘Oh, let me see! Let me see! Is it a boy or a lassie?’

  ‘It’s a bonnie wee lassie, and the image o her daddy,’ said Eppie exultantly, and raised the baby up to its mother’s reaching arms, the cord trailing. ‘Gie her your titty, Mammy, till she kens you.’ Over Meg’s shoulder her eye fell on Alys, and her expression changed. ‘Here, my lass, have you been here the whole time?’

  Alys nodded dumbly. Mother and grandmother were already crooning over the scarlet, sticky, crumpled creature in Meg’s arms, counting its toes and calling it Wee Marion and Bonnie wee lass while it nuzzled for Meg’s dark nipple. Mistress Bowen, with a glance at her colleague, got stiffly to her feet and came round the end of the truckle-bed.

  ‘I’ll say this for Frankie Renfrew, he makes bonnie bairns. Come away, pet, it’s a hard thing to witness your first time,’ she said. ‘You should never ha been here.’ She put out a bloodstained, reeking hand to offer support, then withdrew it as Alys recoiled, shuddering. ‘Aye, away out and get some of the groaning-ale, lassie, that should settle your wame.’

  ‘Bide there,’ said Grace Gordon, ‘till I find you something to restore the spirits.’

  ‘I never thought of it being so – so –’ Alys subsided on to the bench Grace had indicated. ‘Should you not – there is the father to be told –’

  ‘I’ll let Eppie do that,’ said Grace, ‘seeing it’s the howdie’s right. And the gossip-ale was going like a fair without my aid, and will go better still now the bairn’s at the breast.’

  She had found Alys adrift in the house on legs which did not seem to belong to her, and taking one look in her face had steered her to her own bedchamber. The room was full of kists, most of them ranged in the space under the bed, and, despite the array of expensive clothing of good wool and fine brocade which hung on pegs round the walls and behind the door, smelled not of moth-herbs but, unaccountably, of apples. Now Grace opened a further door and vanished into a small light closet, where Alys could hear her moving things. Glass clinked, pottery tapped. After a moment she emerged with a cloth, which she used to dab at Alys’s hands and wrists. The familiar, comforting scent of lavender water rose from it.

  ‘D’you want to talk about it?’ Grace asked. ‘I take it you witnessed the birth?’ Alys nodded wearily. ‘Aye, there’s good reason they shut us out. Did Mally turn the bairn, then?’

  ‘I suppose. She said she did. Do you not wish to join the rest of –’

  ‘No, I’m well enough here.’ The cloth moved on to Alys’s temples and brow. ‘Just sit quiet. You’re no howding yoursel?’

  She shut her eyes, but managed to shake her head under the gentle attentions.

  ‘How long since you were wedded?’

  ‘Nearly a year.’

  ‘Time enough.’

  ‘And you?’ Think about something else. Make conversation as one was always taught. Good manners are earthly salvation, as Mère Isabelle once said, though Catherine would not agree.

  ‘The same. Nicol and I were wedded last Yule in Middelburgh, and came home here in May.’ Her lips tightened briefly.

  ‘And a – a sad homecoming for you, I think,’ said Alys, pulling her thoughts together. ‘You haven’t – you aren’t –?’

  ‘No.’

  Change the subject, thought Alys.

  ‘How did Nicol think, to find his father wed again?’

  Grace shook her head, smiling wryly. ‘No best pleased, I think, the more so that the letter must ha gone astray and we’d never h
eard of the marriage, though he’d heard of ours. Nicol and Frankie don’t get on, you’ll ha jaloused, and that was just another coal on the fire. Mind you he’s no quarrel wi Meg herself, poor creature.’

  She put the cloth in Alys’s hand and rose to fetch a pottery cup from the closet, stirring it as she crossed the chamber. ‘Drink this, my dear. It should help a bittie. And never fear, you’ve had a fright the now but they aye say it’s a different matter when it’s your own.’

  Alys shuddered at the thought. There, it was back in her mind again. She drank obediently from the cup, though her teeth rattled on the rim, and tried to concentrate on what was in it. Honey, and rose water, and – Not myrrh, but something resiny. What could it be?

  ‘You know apothecary work?’ she asked.

  ‘I do. That was how Nicol and I met,’ Grace admitted.

  ‘That must have been a help when you came here. Another pair of hands is always an asset.’ Particularly when they don’t have to be paid, she thought.

  ‘Aye, when they don’t need a wage,’ agreed Grace, echoing her thought. ‘I’ve found a place here. I do the most of the stillroom work, now Eleanor has her own house to run. Frankie likes to carry a good line in stillroom wares, for them that’s too lazy or busy or unskilled to make their own.’

  ‘Lavender water,’ said Alys. ‘Quince lozenges.’

  ‘Aye, those were my quince lozenges the bairnies were handing round yesterday, that I made from a barrel of quinces we got last month. A good shipment, the most of them were fit for use.’ The other girl hesitated, and Alys recognized what was coming next. ‘That was a terrible thing that happened. Your man acted well, getting the wee lassies out of the chamber afore they knew what was going on. He’s a good man.’

  ‘He’s the best in the world,’ she said firmly, and smiled a little with stiff lips at the thought of Gil.

  Grace laughed, but it was sympathetic. ‘My! But has he learned aught about how it happened? Was it Nanty Bothwell’s doing indeed, or –’

  ‘He’s still trying to find out.’ Conversation, conversation. ‘I think Agnes has taken it badly, poor girl. To have one of your sweethearts accused of poisoning the other –’