They were in the turret tower, Doctor Locke’s consulting room at St Salvator’s college, where Hew had brought the news. He had passed on Melville’s message, which had not been well received.
‘He asks only,’ Hew persisted, ‘that you make a true report of what you see and find. And he has assured me he will take your word on it. He wants justice for the kirk, without prejudice to Patrick. You cannot fault him, surely, for a careful mind?’
‘Rather I should marvel at it,’ Giles said with a snort. ‘Aye, then, very well. I agree to make the visit, so long as you come too, to explain things to your friend – for he and I, assuredly, will find no common ground – and so long as Adamson is willing to consent to it. Which I do not think is likely; he has not consulted me. What sort of sickness is it?’
‘Melville says a fedity. Foeditas is foulness, in the Latin,’ Hew reflected. ‘Corruption of the body, or else of his spirit. Melville knows not which.’
‘The two are not so disparate, as some men would believe. ‘A fedity,’ repeated Giles, cheering up immensely. ‘Then I shall look forward to it. We shall go tomorrow, first thing after breakfast.’
Giles was a practitioner of peculiar tastes. The turret tower was filled with rows of curiosities, which lined each nook and cranny of its arching shelves; unguents, oils and pickling spices, astrolabes and clocks. In the recess by the window, to make best use of the light, Giles kept his dissecting table, an old flesher’s block. Hew approached it cautiously, since he was never certain quite what he would find: a poppy head or pomegranate, spilling out its seeds, or the matrix of a rabbit, with its kittens still intact. Once, Giles had a human foot, peeled back to the bone, and once the pipes and ventricles that mapped the human heart.
This time, Hew found nothing but a box of leaves, which Giles had covered over with a sheet of glass. ‘What kind of plant is that?’
‘Camomile,’ said Giles. ‘But that is not the point. The leaf is but a mask, the method of disguise. What do you see below?’
‘Some sort of bulb or grub?’ Coming from the box, Hew heard a rattling sound. ‘A gerslouper?’ he guessed.
‘It is a pupa, of some sort. I wait for it to hatch.’
‘What will it hatch into?’
‘I have no idea. That is the experiment.’ The doctor beamed at him. Hew knew no one better who could answer to his needs. He reached into his pocket for the bloody handkerchief and scraped the crusted contents out on to the slab. ‘Tell me, what is that?’
It was typical of Giles that he did not reply at once, that it was plain to any onlooker it was a clot of blood. Giles was not a ly-by, and would offer no opinion without careful probing. Now he poked and prodded, sampled, stroked and sniffed, and looked closely at the specimen through a piece of glass. He dropped a part of it into a flask of water, warmed upon the fire, and stirred till it dissolved, to turn the liquid pink. With pincers he detached a small fragment of skin, washed clean of its sediment, and placed it on the block. Eventually he asked, ‘Is this some sort of trick? For clearly it is blood.’
Hew acknowledged, ‘I think it very likely it may be a trick. But my intent and hope was not to trick with you, but to ask you to consider, with a searching mind, whether it could be the life sap of a tree, or any substance other than it seems to be.’
‘Assuredly,’ said Giles, ‘It is what it appears. It looks and feels and smells, congeals and dissolves, as though it were blood. And were I ever pressed, and forced to stake my life on it, then I might be prepared to swear that it was blood.’
‘Aye, then, very good,’ Hew grinned. ‘What sort of blood?’
‘The sort,’ said Giles, ‘that comes from cutting flesh, from fowl or fish or animal, not from any plant.’
‘Not human,’ Hew assumed.
‘Did I say that?’ Giles retorted. ‘Tis like you, to go leaping at conclusions, when the proper path has not been circumscribed. When was man not animal?’
‘All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of man, and another flesh of beasts,’ Hew pointed out.
Giles responded, ‘Pah! You have spent too long in the company of kirkmen.’
‘Then it is human blood?’
‘Did I say so, Hew?’ The doctor fixed his colleague with a baleful stare. There were moments, after all, when his thoroughness exasperated and Hew felt more inclined to cut through to the chase. ‘Is there a way to tell?’
Giles would not be rushed. ‘When we were in Paris, at the Rue des Fosses, there was a phlebotomer – a man called de la Peine – who could tell a man his nation from the colour of his blood, as our vintars can distinguish French and Rhenish wines. His patients would sit quietly till he had drawn a draucht of it, then he would sniff and say, Hispanyee, or Almanie, Flemish, Scots, or Dutch. He made a fortune from it.’
‘That might be of some interest, if you kent how twas done.’
‘That part I am coming to. He did it by the hats,’ said Giles.
‘The hats?’ repeated Hew.
‘He was a man of fashion; so too were his customers. The height and shape of hat differs from place to place. The differences were subtle, but his instincts were refined. They failed him only once.’
‘Then all that you are saying,’ Hew summed with a sigh, ‘is that you cannot tell.’
‘That may well depend, on what you want to ken. My father was a man with an uncommon love of sausages, and he could tell you at a glance what offal they consisted of, but I have not that faculty. From the depth of colour, I would hazard it were ox blood, though there is too little of it to confirm its source. There is no telling what or where it may come from, but for this piece of skin.’ Giles had placed the membrane underneath his glass. Washed clean of its blood, it had a bluish tinge. ‘From the coarseness and the strength, I should say that this was vesica. What plain men call a bladder.’
‘Vesica.’ Hew broke into a smile. The world made perfect sense to him. For he saw in a moment how the trick was done. ‘Giles, you are ingenious!’
Giles, though slightly baffled, took this as his due. ‘I think that I may have a piece with which to make compare. Which serves now to remind me, I have something new to show you.’
He lifted down a key from its wooden hook, and unlocked the door that led in to his closet. Here he kept his notebooks, papers and anatomies, and one or two rare artefacts, too strange to be exposed. And here it was that Meg had come, to nurse and care for Nicholas, through that first grave sickness that had brought him down, falling for the doctor who had saved his life. That was four years past, and Nicholas, though frail and wan, was safe and living still.
The little feather bed where Nicholas had slept was rolled up out of sight, and in its place a box stood, four foot tall by five, filled with little shotills made of polished oak, with plates of hammered brass. Giles lit the lamp, for it was dark inside the closet, peering at the letters. ‘Somewhere here is vesica.’
Hew looked in a drawer, which sticking for a moment, shot out in his fingers, showering him with dust. ‘This stuff is old and dry.’
‘So I dare to hope,’ Giles grumbled. ‘I would thank you not to waste it. You are like a bairn, that cannot keep its fingers out.’ He held up the light, so that Hew could glimpse the label.
‘Mumia,’ read Hew, and wiped his fingers hurriedly, to leave an ashen streak across the grey silk of his breeks. ‘Egyptian mummy? Surely not.’
‘Doubtless not,’ Giles sighed. ‘I bought it from a pothecar, who was had for fraud.’
‘Then the grassus hominis . . .?’
‘Is common cooking fat. The vesica is real enough, and must be somewhere here . . . now do not force the shotills so, or ye will spoil the box. It is a gift for Meg.’
Hew sniffed at his fingertips. ‘She may not like it much.’
‘Piffle, she will love it, once the rubble is cleaned out, and the simples are replaced by her own dried herbs and flowers. I will have new lattons made’ – Giles gestured to the metal plates – ‘but you m
ust not tell her. It is a surprise. For it is all a part of my much grander ordinance.’
‘What ordinance is that?’ Hew asked with a smile
The doctor said simply, ‘To make your sister happy, Hew. She thinks I do not notice it. And she will not admit to it. But she has been forlorn and quiet since her bairn was born. The infant, and her falling sickness, keep her close confined. Her heart belongs out on the land, and I have closed it in, and forced it to the town; I watch her pale face drain of life, as she brings light to mine.’
‘You and Matthew are her world, she would not change that,’ Hew objected. But in the corner of his mind, he saw his sister standing in the physick garden, barefoot in the leaves, and wondered, for a moment, whether it was true.
‘So she will contend,’ Giles reflected, sadly, ‘while she struggles like a reed that searches for the sunlight and is planted in the shade. When she went out on May morning I was half afraid that she would not come back. Then, when she returned, she came back with a bloom I have not seen for months, her colour and her spirit equally restored, and yet a deeper restlessness, a deeper sadness too. She misses Kenly Green. And while I cannot replicate the physick garden there, here is something lacking that I may amend. Meg shall have a still house and dispensary, built into the cellars of our home. I have hired a master of the works. The masons start next week. But not a word to Meg. She thinks I am installing conduits in the laich house.’
‘Conduits?’ echoed Hew.
‘It was an idea I had, to carry our foul water out into the sea, which under other circumstances, I should like to implement,’ his friend explained. ‘Meg’s happiness comes first. She has approved the project, for she counts it dear to me, and she will never guess that it is but a subterfuge. I have drawn a draft, with the approval of an architectour.’ From a shelf above he took down a roll of paper, bound with leather straps, and set it on the floor. Slowly he unbuckled it, spreading out the plans.
‘Here is our kitchen,’ he pointed to the place, ‘and this the nether hall, both on the lower floor. Between them is the trance, which is this little passage down to the front door. The trap down to the laich house is in the kitchen, here. The laich house runs below the kitchen underneath the trance, but stops short of the nether hall, where it meets a wall. We mean to take this out, and extend the cellar here, the full length of the house, giving twice the space. On the west side, where the wall is built upon the Fisher Gait, we will drop the floor, and build in a window, to allow the light; and here to the south, where it backs upon the rig, there will be a vent, and a lum for the distillery. Back up in the nether hall, Meg shall have her kist, and a closet for consulting, partitioned off. So that when folk come to see her, she may treat them undisturbed.’
‘You seem,’ reflected Hew, ‘to have it well drawn out.’
‘Will it please her, think you?’
Hew said, ‘She will love it.’ But his thoughts had strayed elsewhere. ‘Do many people come to her?’ he ventured.
Giles rolled up the paper and returned it to its shelf. ‘More than she can help. And it vexes her when she must send them to the pothecar, for lack of some sweet herb, or pocketful of powder, they can ill afford.’
‘Does Clare Buchanan come?’ Hew asked out aloud, without guile or subtlety. For so he had once seen her, coming from Meg’s counsel, on the brink of tears.
Giles said sympathetically, ‘You know I cannot tell you that.’
‘Which tells me that she does.’
The doctor sighed. ‘I know you will not like what I am going to say to you . . .’
‘But you will say it anyway.’
‘As I feel I must. As your friend and brother, if not as your principal. I know you have feelings for Clare. And I know she comes to visit, when my back is turned.’
‘She comes,’ defended Hew, ‘to see her brother George.’
No woman under fifty was permitted in the college, whether as a wife, a servant or a friend; and even Meg herself had not crossed its bounds, or been admitted further past the turret tower. For Clare Buchanan, Giles had fought for an exception, since her brother George was injured in an accident, for which, to some extent, the doctor blamed himself. George, a fledgling student there, had struggled from the start. Since Clare began to visit, once or twice a month, Hew had taken up a private room in college, the significance of which had not escaped his friend.
‘Which you are aware,’ said Giles, ‘is quite against the rule. And though I did allow it, after George’s accident, her brother is recovered now. She has no cause to come. You know that she is married, Hew.’
‘We both know she is married,’ Hew met his friend’s gaze. ‘And to what kind of a man. But you need not trouble, Giles. Since George has recovered, and he thinks her visits shameful, Clare has not called in weeks.’
‘Indeed.’ Giles considered. ‘When did you last see her?’
‘Sometime back in March. Has Meg seen her since?’
Giles did not reply to this, but changed the subject briskly. ‘But we had quite forgotten what we came for. A vesica, or bladder, burnt into a powder, is used to treat the diabete, or water pouring out, curing like with like. Sadly ineffective. Here, as I supposed, we have one still intact. Let us take it back with us, and see it in the light.’ The doctor closed the door upon his box of tricks, and, to Hew’s regret, all further talk of Clare.
Close scrutiny confirmed that the membranes were alike; the substance was the same.
‘Now I know what was done, or at least the part of it.’ Since Bartie Groat had kept his word, and Giles was in the dark, Hew told him the whole story, ending with the samples taken from the tree.
‘Ingenious,’ said Giles at last. ‘So that was how twas done.’
‘Not how, but what,’ corrected Hew. ‘We now know what was done, but not the how, or who.’
‘Nor yet the why,’ said Giles.
‘The why is to dismay, and make Andrew Melville doubt. To some extent, it worked. I fear it is a part with the other moves against him. Someone pinned a psalm upon his door at night that worked to prick his conscience, and to strengthen his resolve, to make an honest case in his dealings with the bishops. He took it as a sign. I read it as a threat.’
‘Why should it be a threat?’
‘Because it was the 109th psalm, the most vengeful and disturbing, filled with bitter curses, and the curses underlined. He thinks a student left it, and he does not take it seriously. It is a curious gift, and I can scarcely think that it was kindly meant.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Giles agreed. ‘I suppose you have not heard him preach upon that text, since you do not pay observance at the Holy Trinity. But I remember once – it stayed long in my mind – Lermont of Balcomie left a placard at his gate, condemning his reforms. Melville cursed him from the pulpit, that he “never should enjoy the fruits of marriage, or have the joy of a succession of an honest birth”. And if he were an old wife, rather than a preacher, then his kirk would have her wrung out for a witch. Perhaps it is this Lermont casts the preacher’s curses back into his face.’
‘Yet Lermont kens no Hebrew,’ Hew objected, ‘and his placards were attached to the outside of the gates. Whoever left this message, must be lodged within. Or else it were a miracle.’
‘The miracle,’ said Giles, ‘is that whoever left it there has opened up the conscience of a man so fiercely resolute he will not give a pause to simple, honest doubt. Which gives hope to us all. Well then, we shall wait and see what the morrow brings. I will send word back to Melville, to arrange when we shall meet. As for this bleeding hawthorn, Hew, I wish you would be careful with it.’
Hew protested. ‘Ha, you sound like Bartie Groat! When I have taken pains to be so analytical. I thought ye would approve of it.’
‘It is not your methods that I fear. But someone took great pains to perpetrate this mischief. They have drawn you in. I have not seen you so engaged since you returned from Ghent. It almost seems as though this trick were somehow meant for you.
’
‘It was meant for Andrew Melville,’ Hew assured him, cheerfully, ‘and is a part of an attempt to unsettle and disgrace him. It is all to do with him, and naught to do with me.’
He could not deny that the riddle pleased him. He looked forward to discovering the author of this crime, which for its ingenuity, was worthy of applause.
Chapter 7
A Rare Roast Egg
Andrew Melville could not tell what it was had woken him, or when it was he woke. He had read until the light gave out, and then a little afterwards, though not so very long, for he was sparing with his candle, mindful of the cost. After blowing out the candle, he had knelt to speak with God. That conversation had occupied him for some while, so that when it was concluded he found the fire gone out, the room had grown quite dark, one knee bore the print of the rush mat on the floor and both knees locked and buckled, stiff and white with cold. He crept into his blankets then, where sleep came slow and fitfully, for though the conversation had been free and frank, it had not cleared his mind. God listened, but had not said much. Then Andrew knew that he must find the answer in his heart, and spent some sore hours searching for it. At last he drifted off. He woke up with a start from a slough of shifting dreams and opened up the shutters that looked out upon the square. A fine grey drizzle smudged the stars, blurring the distinction between light and dark. The rain did not fall hard enough to rattle at the windowpanes, and brought with it no wind, but a creeping, breathless hush that stilled the shrill night predators and blotted out the moon. The lantern at the gatehouse shone out to the street; there were no lamps lit in college or the porter’s lodge, and at first he could see nothing but the muffled shadows of the dull night sky.
But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and began to fathom different shades and shapes, Andrew Melville saw, or thought he saw, a narrow strip of light that crept across the courtyard about four feet from the ground. The light was greenish grey. It did not gutter like a candle, but moved softly through the shadows like a green-eyed cat. It left behind a faintly luminescent haze. Andrew closed his eyes and opened them again. The light had come to rest, settling on the hawthorn tree. Andrew put on gown and slippers over his bare shirt, and made his way outside. He swung a yellow horn lamp clear around the square, into nooks and crevices, shining high and low, but found no trace of green. The soft rain had begun to seep into the stonework, running to the grass. From the pale face of the moon, emerging from its cloud, Andrew put the hour at close to three o’clock.
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