He brought the yellow lantern closer to the hawthorn tree, and placed his hand against the trunk. It came off wet, and clean.
Hew was woken by a bursar, shortly after five. He had spent the night in college, in a vaulted chamber accessed through the cloisters, next door to the chapel, on the eastern side. The room was simply furnished, with a shelf for books, a writing desk and chair, a settle made of oak that opened to a bed, a towel pin and a peg, for hanging up his clothes. A window in the corner glanced out on the North Street, with a cushion on the sill, and in front of it a sitting chair, upholstered in green silk, caught the morning light, and was kept for guests.
The bursar brought warm water and an urgent message. ‘Master Andro Melville waits to see you, sir.’
‘Andrew? At this hour?’ Hew splashed his face with the water from the bowl, scrubbing at it blearily with the linen towel.
‘He is outside in the cloisters. Shall I send him in?’ The bursar was a pauper student, in his second year. His role it was to wake the college, in return for board and lodging, fetching water, fire and light. With an expert hand, he closed the settle bedstead, and stowed Hew’s sheets and blankets in the locker underneath.
Hew answered with a groan. ‘Tell him, I will come to him, as soon as I am dressed.’
He combed his hair quickly and put on his coat, his doctor’s cap, tippet and gown.
The day had dawned cooler and fresh, the sun advancing warily through heavy flanks of cloud. Melville prowled the cloister, scowling at the wind. He greeted Hew tersely, ‘Where is Giles Locke?’
‘We shall meet him at his house, which is on our way. Though I cannot promise he will be awake.’
‘Then he must be woken. There is no time to lose.’
St Salvator’s college backed on to the Swallow Gait, which led directly to the castle on the cliff, and to Giles’ house. But Andrew insisted that they go out to the North Street, turning at the Fisher Gait, avoiding Patrick’s soldiers at the Swallow Port, for Patrick, he insisted, must not be forewarned. Hew judged it wise to humour him. His impatience had attracted notice in the quad, and it would not be long before Professor Groat was up, winding his old bones into his fur-lined cloak, snuffling and inquisitive. Bartie’s probing questions would delay them half an hour. He hurried Andrew Melville back out to the street. ‘I have something to tell you. We have solved the riddle of the hawthorn tree. Or at least, in part, worked out how it was done.’
‘Aye, and how was that?’ Andrew seemed distracted still, and less enthusiastic than Hew would have liked. In the waking morning light, he looked paler than before, sickly green and frail. Hew judged, accurately, that he had not slept.
‘A waggish pranking trick, that a boy might boast of,’ he explained. ‘The scrap of skin we found turned out to be vesica – the bladder of a calf, or perhaps a sheep.’
Andrew prompted, ‘And?’
‘Did you never, as a bairn, play with bladders on a stick, or filled one at the burn, to chase and soak a friend?’ From Andrew’s look of bafflement, it seemed that he had not. ‘Then this is how tis done; the blether of a lamb is washed out, soaked and dried, blown out full with air, and made into a ball. Someone filled a bladder up with blood, and tied it to the tree. When the time was ripe, they came along and burst it – at some remove, I doubt, else they would run the risk of being drenched with blood – but to ken how it was done, we must ask Bartie Groat.’
‘Then you suspect Professor Groat?’ Andrew Melville frowned; his quick mind lagged a little, due to his distraction, or to lack of sleep.
‘Not for one moment,’ Hew assured him. ‘I believe the bladder was pierced by a sharp stone, thrown at it by force, for vesica is tough, and would be hard to burst. Perhaps it was a sling or some other kind of weapon. Several shots were fired, and frightened off the birds. There were stones of different shapes in the courtyard by the tree, and we should not have noticed them, except that one had a hole in it, and that was out of place. It put us in a heightened state of fear. Perhaps the perpetrator tried with different sorts of stone, brought there for the purpose, not knowing which might work. Or perhaps he left the seeing stone, to trouble and perplex us, put us off our scent. We may suppose he had no time to gather in his pellets, wherefore they were chosen, cunningly and carefully; to that end, he dared not shoot an arrow, which would penetrate more cleanly, but which might be found.’
‘But what,’ Andrew frowned, ‘can this have to do with Professor Groat?’
‘Little at all, but that I hope by his geometry he may chance to tell us where the shot was fired. Whether, in particular, from up on the wall, or even from some vantage place on the other side.’
‘Then you think it may be possible it came in from outside?’
‘I hope it may be possible. Bartie may ken more.’
Melville said, ‘I thank you, then, for that assurance.’ But he looked grave and doubtful, scarcely reassured. Hew felt his grand discovery had fallen somewhat flat. The menace was at large still, he was forced to tell himself. ‘What you need,’ he proposed, ‘is a wholesome breakfast, to fire you in your cause. Giles Locke is the man for it.’
Andrew Melville stared, as though Hew’s straggling wits had finally deserted him. ‘Do you not apprehend, there is no time for breakfast, Hew? To find the tulchan out, we maun surprise him suddenly. And now the sun is up, we have no time to waste.’
They had turned into the Fisher Gait, leading to the cliff, where the rigs and gardens struggled in the wind, bare blown and exposed before the cold north sea. Since it was low tide, the fisher wives were still indoors, skillets on the flame, waiting for their men folk to return home with their nets, when they would hurry to the shore with bucketfuls of salt, to ply wet writhing haddocks at the Fisher Cross. They would sit out in the sun, to gossip and tie hooks, and feed their men afresh, before the evening tides. The cottages were quiet now. A solitary child sat huddled on a step, where rarely for this quarter, the shutters were still drawn. The child hugged close her mantle, and did not look up.
They found Giles at his breakfast, in the nether hall. Matthew Locke was tethered in his father’s lap, battling in the folds of an enormous napkin, which engulfed them both. Meg was baking bannocks on a girdle at the fire. On the board were butter, and a loaf of day-old bread, which Doctor Locke was crumbling in a wooden bowl. The doctor had strong views on early infant nourishment: white things as a supplement, while the teeth were cut, for milk was white and teeth were white; white meats, minced and pulped, white fish, boiled or baked; white bread, sops and soddins, soaked into a pap, almond milks and bisket, albumen of egg. Once all the teeth were cut, the infant could progress. Green foods were the devil’s own; apples, salats, spinach, pears, brought on worm and colic, soured the wam for life.
Giles fed Matthew pap. Matthew opened up and closed his mouth again, like a baby bird. On the third attempt, he spat the mouthful out, and grappled for the spoon.
Andrew Melville stared, openly alarmed.
‘No one bakes a bannock better than my sister.’ Hew pulled up a chair.
‘You are welcome, Master Andro,’ Meg said with a smile. ‘Canny Bett is cooking eggs. How do you take yours?’
Melville found his voice. ‘Later in the day,’ he replied ungraciously. ‘At our college, we begin the day with prayer, and half a morning’s work, before we break our fast, wherefore we come upon it with a glad and grateful appetite, not slow and soft and slovenly, fleshly plump from sleep.’
Meg’s mouth opened, closed again, for the moment lost for words, like her little son.
Giles Locke said, ‘Indeed?’ He removed a table knife from Matthew’s grasping fist and passed it back to Hew. ‘The best eggs,’ he remarked, ‘are but lightly poached in broth, those are most digestible. Buttered, on a hot thick toast, with pepper and a dust of salt, were almost as acceptable. Or seething in a pan.’
‘When we were boys at college,’ collaborated Hew, ‘we would roast them in their shells in the embers of the
fire, where by degrees they darkened to a deep rich honeyed gold, that was creamy like a cheese. We picked the shells with pins, or else they would burst.’
Giles tutted, ‘That is a method that I do not recommend. Tis almost impossible to rare roast a hen’s egg. Without which you will find them hard and indigestible, binding to the stomachs of bairns and young boys. It perhaps explains a certain flaw of stubbornness, which I have sometimes marked in you.’
It was Meg who put an end to their subtle game of flyting, moved by the confusion she could see in Andrew’s face. ‘You must excuse them, sir, for when they are at rest, they fool and mow like bairns. Perhaps you are the same, when you share a play day with your nephew James? Hew tells me you are close.’
Melville answered stiffly, ‘I assure you, not. Sir,’ he turned to Giles, ‘this talk is vain and frivolous, and not what I expect from you. Our business is most pressing. We must leave at once.’
‘Stuff,’ retorted Giles. ‘There is no business can be settled before we have breakfasted, and no task that was not bettered by beginning in an egg. Sit down awhile, and eat with us. The day will still be waiting, after we are done.’
‘My husband will not tell you,’ mediated Meg, ‘why he wants his breakfast, for he is not vain or frivolous, as you have supposed. He has been up all night at the bedside of a woman who departed from this world a little while ago. It is for that poor wife’s bairns that Canny cooks the eggs.’
Hew asked, ‘Was it one of the fisherwives?’ He remembered the small daughter, crouching in the vennel, five or six years old.
‘Nan Reekie,’ Meg confirmed. ‘Do you mind her, Master Melville? She came often to your kirk.’
Melville, for his sins, had the grace to blush. ‘I did not ken that she was sick. Nor, indeed, that she had means to call for a physician.’
‘Doubtless, she did not.’ Hew felt almost sorry for him. ‘Andrew,’ he encouraged, ‘come and sit you down, Giles has been up all night, and he must have his breakfast. Your cause will not be lost, if you have an egg. The archbishop will be abed still, after we are done.’
Melville bowed his head. ‘Your pardon, mistress,’ he apologised to Meg, ‘for I apprehend that I have judged too hastily, and that is a fault. A little small ale, if ye have it, would be welcome, and suffice.’
He sat down on the bench, as remote as possible and furthest from the child, whose presence at the table worried and perplexed him. Canny brought the eggs, and was sent back for the ale. Meg helped Hew to cheese. ‘Did Giles tell you,’ she remarked, ‘we are laying conduits in the laich house, to carry off our waste? It is a clever scheme of his.’
‘I do believe he mentioned it,’ Hew said with a smile.
‘A sink is an anathema,’ Andrew Melville warned. Though he had little practice in domestic small talk, it did not deter him from putting forth his views. ‘At the college, we are plagued with the offence of our latrines. We are waiting for the draucht-raker to come and dig them out; yet we have no idea when he will come. I would advise you strongly not to put one in your house, for it cannot be healthsome or wholesome.’
‘The purpose of the conduit pipes,’ Giles corrected quickly, ‘is to flush the waste away, so there need not be a sink.’
‘Indeed? Then I confess, I had not heard of that.’
‘The conduits take the waste out to the sea, by means of a small pump. It is my own invention.’
‘Did you say,’ Hew interrupted, ‘you were waiting for the draucht-raker?’
‘We have been waiting for some while.’
‘Tis likely,’ muttered Giles, ‘he is somewhere deep in shit. Which is what the conduits were intended to prevent.’
He was giving up his pipe dream, out of love for Meg, while Meg let him pursue it, out of love for him. But Hew’s thoughts were elsewhere. ‘The raker comes at night. How then, when he comes, is he let in to the college?’
‘The door to the garden is left open. He leaves his cart outside, and takes the muck in barrows,’ Andrew answered. ‘Ah,’ the reasoning dawned on him, ‘now I understand.’
‘You did not mention that, when we looked round the college.’
‘For then the door was locked. But if it were then possible that someone came by night . . .’
‘Then it is more than possible, the bladders filled with blood were hidden in the tree by someone from outside. Perhaps the night before,’ concluded Hew. ‘Or perhaps when you were absent still, at the kirk assembly, for I think your chamber overlooks the tree.’
Melville answered quietly, ‘It does.’
‘A vesica is heavy,’ Giles remarked, ‘when it is filled with blood. And would be hard to shift. And yet a little blood may travel a good distance, and may look like a good deal. And among the leaves and blossom, it could easily be hid.’
‘If I were you,’ said Hew, ‘I would lock the door at night; or better, set a watch on it, and you may catch your devil, if he comes again.’
Melville struggled with his answer. ‘Aye,’ he spoke at last. ‘I am beholden to you, both, for you begin to lift a shadow from my mind, that I confess has haunted me, in making plain to me the source of this attack. I have not been sleeping well. And I began to fear there was some evil deep within the college; last night, I saw a spirit, moving round the tree.’
‘What sort of spirit?’ questioned Hew.
‘I almost am ashamed to say, a green and ghostly light. I went out in my nightshirt to it. It had gone, of course. I fancied it had left behind the faintest whiff of brimstane.’ Andrew forced a smile. ‘This wickedness has worked its magic on my fearful mind.’
‘A light like that,’ reflected Meg, ‘may have a natural cause.’
‘I assure you, madam, there was nothing natural in the light I saw.’ Melville was not used to women in the house, much less those who spoke to him, to offer up opinions, which differed from his own. Giles acknowledged softly, ‘You should listen to her, Andro. Meg kens more than most.’
‘There is a light that comes from the bark of a tree, or from a piece of bone, beginning to decay. A lucent, ghostly lour of luminescent green that has the scent of sulphur. Could that be what you saw?’ persisted Meg.
‘Aye, madam,’ Andrew scowled at her, ‘if dead bones and trees picked up their stumps and walked. The light that I saw was moving, steadily and stealthily.’
‘Then did it not occur to you, that someone might have carried it?’
‘Fish heads!’ broke in Hew. ‘I have seen it too, at the pit at Dysart, where the earth boils black. The miners make their lamps of scales and bones of fish, to shine a ghostly light upon the darkness there, that dare not be attempted with a naked flame, and crawl up from the molten earth as it were hell itself. And had I known no better of it, so I should believe. You never saw a place on earth more dreadful nor more desolate. Those imps of hell are children, sir. And sometimes, it seems there is no clear mark to be drawn, between what we call natural, or unnatural.’
‘Or,’ Giles added, ‘supernatural.’
Melville cleared his throat, ‘My thanks to you all, for your explanations. That mark is a line that I would fain were drawn. It must be drawn, by faith, if not yet by your science. It is by God’s will, doubtless, I am shown these things.’
All credit then to God, thought Hew, and none of it to Meg. ‘If I were you,’ he said again, ‘I would set a watch.’
‘Aye, and so I shall, when we are finished with the tulchan.’
At last, Giles took the hint. He wiped his face and Matthew’s, handing Meg the child. ‘Since ye are both in cap and cope, I will go and dress. It would not do to brave the bishop in our slops and slippers.’ He left them with a wink.
Meg settled Matthew on her hip. ‘What is a tulchan, sir?’ she asked.
Though Hew sensed she was up to mischief, Melville’s guard was down. ‘A tulchan is a bishop in name only,’ he informed her, ‘as is Patrick Adamson. He is a siphon, by which the kirk’s ain revenues are leached off to the lairds.’
Meg said, ‘Oh. I did not know. Master Andro, I am richt glad you are come to breakfast with us. There are certain questions I have longed to ask you, since I heard your lessons sometime at the kirk.’
Now Hew knew for certain she was up to something. His sister had no love or fervour for reform, brought up in the shelter of her father’s land. Matthew had remained a Papist to the last. And yet he had set Hew upon a different course, sending him to school where he was raised a Protestant, a legacy that Hew found hard to understand. For though it had ensured his safe path through the world, it had kept him distant from his father’s heart. And he had felt that gulf. Raised up in a kirk which made a plain clear sense to him, he found no turning back, the gap in faith and trust was difficult to reconcile, affecting still his closeness to and sympathy with Meg. She was baiting Andrew Melville, that much he could tell.
Melville read no hint of challenge in her tone. ‘By all means,’ he encouraged, ‘if ye are inquiring on a matter of the faith. Though if you are in doubt, you might look for guidance to your ain guid husband or – perhaps more properly – to your brother Hew, who was brought up in the faith. He likely will explain what you do not understand, and will seek to reassure you, when you cannot understand, which, as you must know, is to be expected.’
Hew could not help but smile at that. But Meg insisted, meekly, ‘Yet Hew is not well studied in the doctrines of the kirk, and on its most exacting points, he may not be relied on. And I have, sir, a singular question, which requires a particular answer. Our father, you may know, was no believer in Reform. He lived and died a Catholick, stubborn to the last. He would not have his corpus buried in St Leonard’s kirk, because he felt that place had lost its sacred holiness, and chose a place outside of it, resting in its shade. My question to you is, was our father damned?’
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