The Rough Collier

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘Time enough, Mother, surely,’ said Joanna.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Alys, aware of her face burning.

  ‘No, I thought not. You’ve not the look.’ The expressive blue gaze flicked from her face to her waistline and back. ‘As you say, Joanna my pet, there’s time enough. I’ve said the same to you a time or two.’

  Chapter Four

  Gil was finding the women of Thorn a different proposition from the men.

  He knew the little settlement slightly, a small fermtoun like so many others where four or five families held a piece of land and worked it in common. The houses in the midst of the four striped fields were low and long, the animals bedded at one end and the people at the other, the thatch supported by the cruck timbers which were the property of the tenant not the landlord.

  When he got there the men were all out in the furthest field, visible in a morose group round a heap of stones, but he was welcomed by the women in committee. They gathered from kailyard and drying-green and seated him in state on the bench by the door of Annie Douglas’s cottage, nearest the track. A beaker of Maidie Paton’s ale, as being the best the township could produce, was put in his hand, and all the women crowded round to stare and talk and listen, their children peering round their skirts giggling. Hens wandered through and round the discussion, with a puppy trying to herd them.

  ‘You’ve no brought your bride to see us,’ complained Mistress Douglas. She was a big brawny woman, widow of a man called Meikle whom Gil recalled as another of his mother’s stable-hands. The two brothers with the cart must be her sons, he realized. ‘You’ll just need to come back another time and bring her. And how’s your lady mother? And your sisters? Did I hear good news o’ Lady Kate? When’s her bairn due?’

  These questions and others having been addressed, Gil raised the subject which had brought him. At the mention of the corpse in the peat-cutting, there was a general chorus of disapproval and excitement.

  ‘The men tellt us when they came home,’ said Rab Simson’s wife, broad red hands on her bony hips. ‘What a thing to find in the peat! Killt three times over, was he no? And never a stitch on him? And you cut him up in your mother’s cart-shed, is that right?’

  ‘Mind your tongue, Lizzie!’ ordered another woman, very like her in build and face. ‘Or were you looking for ways to deal wi’ your Rab?’ They all laughed at this. ‘Mind you, he’d got a sore fright when he found the corp, Rab did, by the look of him.’

  ‘Aye, Maggie, he’d got a fright,’ said Lizzie sourly. ‘He’d need of a drink of usquebae to steady him, and then another to wash that away, and then another, till he was that steady he couldny find his way to his bed.’

  ‘At least he’d more sense than go and take Beattie Lithgo up for a witch,’ said Mistress Douglas, ‘the way my boys did. I skelped them for that when I heard it, I can tell you. The idea!’

  ‘Beattie’s a good woman,’ agreed Lizzie. ‘It was her cured my boy’s sore eyes, and your wean’s rotten ear, Maidie, you mind.’

  ‘She is, she’s a good woman,’ said another voice. ‘No like –’

  ‘Let alone she’s more sense than bury him in our peat digging,’ said someone else from the background. ‘If it was Thomas Murray.’

  ‘Aye, but it wasny,’ said the woman called Maggie. ‘Our Wat tellt me your nephew Jamesie said it wasny him, Annie.’

  ‘So he did, and Jamesie has more wit than my two put together,’ agreed Mistress Douglas.

  ‘It was Davy Fleming told them to go and get her,’ said another voice. ‘Our Adam’s no more wit than do as the clerk bid him, neither.’

  ‘No more did our Eck,’ said Lizzie. ‘Taking that wee fornicator’s word for it, and all.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ said Mistress Douglas. ‘They’ll none of them make that mistake again soon. And did ye discern yet what man it is, Maister Gil?’

  Here was his opening.

  ‘I did not,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not Thomas Murray, you’re right about that, but it seems to me he’s been dead a long time, with the peat growing over him.’

  ‘Peat doesny grow!’ objected one woman, as the men had done. ‘It’s aye been!’

  ‘No, for there’s trees at the bottom of it,’ another reminded her. ‘From Noy’s Flood, our William says. Was this maybe a man from Noy’s time, sir?’

  ‘I think not so long ago as that,’ Gil said. ‘What I wondered was if he was maybe from our grandsires’ time, or a bit before. Do any of you mind any tales of a man missing on the moor?’

  ‘What, slain and buried wi’ no a stitch on him?’ said Maggie. ‘I never heard such a tale.’

  There was a general agreement. Gil shook his head, and drained the beaker in his hand.

  ‘He was slain and buried in secret,’ he pointed out, wiping his mouth. ‘The tale of that would never get out. What’s more, though I agree wool and leather would last if they’d been there, he might not have been naked. If he was wearing linen shirt and breeks when he was buried, they would rot down in the peat, I would think, like the other growing stuff. Say he was robbed of his outer clothes and anything else on him, and left in a mire, nobody would know of it. Till now.’

  Mistress Douglas folded brawny arms across her bosom and considered this.

  ‘Aye,’ she said after a moment. ‘So what you want is whether there’s any tale of a tinker or a cadger gone missing, or the like. Or maybe,’ she said slowly, ‘a man from here or further down the hill, in the auld times. For if he was buried in the digging to be secret, it must ha’ been afore we dug peat there, or whoever slain him would know he’d be found soon or late.’

  Gil nodded agreement.

  ‘We’ve cut peats there since my grandam’s day,’ said one of the younger women.

  ‘What about your auld fellow, Jeanie?’ said another voice. ‘He’s sharp enough, would he mind o’ such a thing?’

  The group shuffled about, and a round-faced woman in a faded blue kirtle was pushed forward and identified as Jeanie Forrest, wife to Adam Livingstone. Bobbing nervously, she admitted that her auld fellow, who claimed he was eighty-one, might well know if such a tale existed.

  ‘Who is he?’ Gil asked. ‘Where may I speak to him?’

  He was her grandsire, William Forrest, and he had been huntsman to Sir James’s great-grandsire, and Sir James still sent a purse every hunting season, which came in right handy, seeing the old man had all of his wits but no teeth and needed a wee bit extra to his feeding.

  ‘He’s where he aye is, sitting in at the fire in our house,’ said another woman beside her, thinner in the face but like enough to be her sister. ‘Minding the cradle.’

  ‘Would ye come by our bit the now and speak wi’ him, maister?’ asked Jeanie, bobbing again.

  By the time the procession reached Jeanie’s house, a shouting horde of children had preceded them, warned Maister William, who was struggling to his feet beside the peat-fire, and woken the occupant of the cradle, who was roaring in displeasure. Jeanie snatched the baby up, sat down on a bench next the door, pulling at the laces which fastened her bodice and shift, and silenced it by thrusting a brownish, thumb-length dug into its mouth. Gil found himself thinking by comparison of Alys’s slight breasts and rosy nipples, and wondered how she was progressing at the coal-heugh. He put the distraction with difficulty from his mind, and turned to Jeanie’s grandfather, a gaunt, big-framed old fellow bundled in many layers of homespun woollen, topped by a shapeless knitted cape from which his scrawny neck emerged like a lizard’s, and a woollen bonnet with a fringe of white hair sticking out below its checked band.

  ‘Maister William,’ Gil said, raising his hat. The old man’s face split in a toothless grin at the courtesy, and he ducked shakily in response, groping for his own bonnet. Jeanie’s sister steadied him with a practised hand under his elbow. ‘Sit down, maister, I’ll not keep you standing at your age!’

  ‘Eighty-two next Lanimer Day,’ announced Maister William proudly, if indistinctly. ‘I was huntsman t
o Sir James Douglas, that was grandsire to this Douglas, ye ken.’

  ‘Great-grandsire,’ corrected Jeanie’s sister. ‘Sit down, Granda, like the gentleman says. He wants to ask you about this corp in the peat-cutting.’

  ‘I never heard of sic a thing!’ declared the old man, subsiding into his chair. ‘Where’s my cushion, Agnes? I’ve lost my cushion.’

  ‘It’s here, Granda.’ Agnes rammed a lumpy pad down at his back. ‘You sit nice and talk to the gentleman now.’

  ‘Aye, well, I will if you let him get a word in. And you can bid all these women stay outside, I’ve no wish to be deaved wi’ a gabble of women. Have a seat, sir, just take one of they stools, if you wait for my lassies to offer it you’ll wait all day. About the corp ye found, is it? No, I never heard of a corp in a peat-cutting afore.’

  This topic had to be explored quite thoroughly, along with the question of how long the old man had served the earlier Sir James and his son and grandson (‘Seventy year, if you’ll credit that, sir! Seventy year I served the family, and no a day less,’ boasted Maister William, while his granddaughter shook her head in denial behind him) and his acquaintance with the man who had been huntsman to Gil’s father (‘Oh, I mind Billy Meikle. I mind him well. I taught him. And he taught you, did he, young sir?’) but eventually the conversation was brought back to the discovery in the peat-cuttings. Jeanie’s man Adam had described the find, but not clearly.

  ‘He’s no a huntsman, you ken,’ said Maister William disparagingly. ‘Tellt us how he was lying, so he did, and how his face was all flat wi’ the peat, but he never said how he died.’

  ‘Slain three times over, our Rab said,’ declared Lizzie from the doorway. Maister William turned his shoulder on her and looked hopefully at Gil, who obediently described his findings, to exclamations of shocked interest from the listening women. The old huntsman nodded approval of his account.

  ‘Aye, Billy’s taught you well,’ he pronounced. ‘You’ve observed well, young sir. And were his hands and feet bound at all?’

  ‘No,’ said Gil positively, ‘nor marked.’

  ‘So it’s been a sudden death,’ said the old man acutely. ‘Maybe even taken and slain where you found him.’

  ‘I would say so. Certainly there’s no sign he’s been held prisoner. Assuming sign like that would last,’ he qualified.

  ‘Aye, very true. A good point, young sir, a good point. And you want to know if there’s ever been anyone missing in the parish.’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  Maister William nodded. He went on nodding for some time, staring into the smoke which rose from the smoul-dering peats. Gil began to wonder if the old man had fallen asleep, and then realized he was counting. The women at the door were discussing the same subject, but seemed to be more interested in a lassie that had run off from Braidwood ten years since, and turned up wedded to a saddler in Rutherglen, than in the men of the parish. He sat hugging his knees, tasting the various smells of the place, peat-smoke and damp earth, the smells of the cattle-stall at the other end of the house, the savoury odour of the three-footed cauldron simmering among the peats and a sharper overtone which emanated from either Maister William or the baby, who was still sucking happily and noisily. After a while the old huntsman raised his head.

  ‘Five,’ he said. ‘Aye, five in my time, or that I heard folk tell of, and that takes us back to King Robert’s day, afore Thorn cut its peats on that patch. No counting my mother’s brother Dandy, but he was barely fourteen.’

  ‘And who were they, maister?’ Gil asked. That must be over a hundred years, he realized. His memory and knowledge go back so far. I am in the presence of history.

  ‘Ah. Now you’re asking.’ The old man raised gnarled fingers and began to count. ‘There was Andra Simson, that was our Rab’s grandsire’s cousin at Kilncaigow, in James Second’s time. That’s right, write it down in your wee tablets. But he wasny a red-headed man, and he was a carpenter what’s more and had the marks on his hands to show for it. Did you no say this fellow’s hands and feet were soft?’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Gil asked. ‘How did he disappear?’

  ‘Andra? He was working down in Lanark, I think it was. Aye, Lanark. Set off for Kilncaigow one night from Eppie Watson’s alehouse there and never was seen again. Never seen again,’ he repeated. ‘They found his lantern, if I recall, on Kilncaigow Muir.’

  ‘The road from Lanark to Kilncaigow wouldny take him up here,’ said Gil thoughtfully.

  ‘No, it never would.’ Maister William champed his toothless jaws and cackled suddenly. ‘No unless he’d a woman up the Pow Burn that his wife never kent of!’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No that I heard tell,’ said the old man regretfully. ‘Then there was Tam Davison, twenty year since. Aye, the year this Sir James’s father died.’

  With a little coaxing, he recounted the details of the remaining disappearances. None of them seemed promising, all were working men who might be assumed to bear the marks of one trade or another, and he was quite certain that none was red-headed. Moreover, it seemed that the peat-cutting had been in use for most of Maister William’s lifetime. The women listened intently, nodding sagely at each of the names, but as he reached the last one Jeanie said, from where she sat nursing the baby on the bench at the wall:

  ‘You’ve forgot the men up at the coal-heugh, Granda.’

  ‘They’ve never disappeared,’ he retorted. ‘You’ll no talk to me like that, you malapert hizzy. I don’t forget a thing.’

  ‘There was Davy Fleming’s father, so I’ve heard. Fell down one of their nasty holes, so my da said, and never found.’

  ‘Aye, he was,’ objected the old man. ‘They found him a week later, I mind hearing o’t as if it was yesterday. They tracked him by the stink –’

  ‘And then Mistress Weir’s man disappeared,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He went off and died and never came home.’

  ‘Aye, but she kent where he was buried,’ countered the old man.

  ‘Aye, so they say. And Beattie Lithgo’s man and all,’ she persisted. ‘Geordie says Jamesie says they never got him out to bury him decent, just closed up that bit of the working, because the roof wasny safe.’

  ‘Aye, and he walks,’ said someone else. ‘That’s why they’ll no work by night.’

  ‘Geordie’s talking nonsense, for I was at the burial,’ declared Maister William. ‘I could never walk so far now, you’ll understand, sir, but I still had my strength then. Adam Crombie the elder died away at Elsrickle, Will Fleming fell down a shaft, Adam the younger died under a roof-fall. That’s no disappearing. Any road, Beattie would never ha’ slain them and hid them in the peat, no like – she’d a great liking for her man, Beattie did. She tellt me that, one time she was here wi’ a wee pot of grease for my rheumatics. And I’ll tell you,’ a gnarled finger jabbed at Gil’s doublet, ‘whatever she’d put in it, it shifted the pains in my knees. I’m needing a bit more, Agnes, mind that, you’d best get me another wee pot.’

  ‘Best be quick about it, and all,’ said one of the women, ‘afore David Fleming gets his way and she’s hanged for a witch.’

  ‘Hah!’ said Maister William witheringly. ‘Davy Fleming, indeed! I kent his grandsire from he was the age of Jeanie’s wee one here, and he was just the same, all ower the countryside, and none of his get had the sense of a puddock. Whatever Davy’s took into his head, maister, you can wager he’s as wrong as he can be about it.’

  Leaving Thorn, Gil strode down the track in the spring sunshine, deep in thought. He was still in hopes of giving the corpse from the peat-digging a name, and kin who could pray for him, but it began to seem likely he was not a local man. Perhaps down in Lanark, he thought, or eastward in Carnwath, someone might recall a tale like old Forrest’s. He could ride out that way tomorrow, and perhaps Alys would go too. The dog could come with them; he had sent him with Alys and Henry today as some protection, and it seemed strange to be out in the open without the lithe grey f
orm loping round him.

  Cheered by the idea, he made his way down the hillside, crossed the burn at its foot and climbed the other slope to pick up the way to Cauldhope. He had always felt Sir James’s dwelling was well named. It was a draughty and inconvenient tower-house at the back of Kilncaigow Hill, surrounded by considerable outbuildings, stables and barn and storehouses and a huddle of cottages like the ones at Thorn. A straggle of wind-blasted beeches made a sort of shelter to the east, but Gil had chilly memories of formal winter dining there as a boy, waiting on his parents and Michael’s and serving out congealing sauces with numb fingers while the candle flames streamed sideways. Today in the sunlight it looked more welcoming, and one of the household had obviously recognized him approaching, for Fleming was waiting at the gate, bowing obsequiously as he came up the track between the low houses.

  ‘Maister Gil! Come away in, come in! You’ll take a drop of ale to settle the dust? Bring that ale, Simmie, can you no see Maister Cunningham’s thirsty! And how can I help you, Maister Gil? They’re all from home, I’m sorry to tell you, Maister Michael rode out this morning, never tellt me where he –’

  ‘Never worry about that,’ said Gil, accepting the ale. ‘It was yourself I wanted a word with, Sir David.’

  ‘Wi’ me?’ The plump priest looked alarmed, but bowed again. ‘At your service, maister. Ask away, whatever you want to know. Come in, come in out this wind, and get a seat.’

  The fire in the hall had burned low, but Fleming bustled into a small chamber behind the screen, where a brazier kept the chill at bay. Two big aumbries and a rack of document-shelves stuffed with papers made the room’s purpose obvious. The man Simmie set down the tray with jug and beaker and left reluctantly, and Fleming drew the steward’s own chair forward for Gil and lifted the jug.

  ‘Take a seat, maister, take a seat, and ha’ some more of that ale. And what’s your business wi’ me? If it’s a matter of my maister’s affairs I might no be able to answer, you understand, I’m privy to a lot that’s in close confidence –’