by Pat McIntosh
She straightened up, pushing another handful of flowers into the linen sack, and placed one hand flat in the air, a little higher than her own height. She gestured round her face, nimble fingers describing the long ends of a linen headdress. A woman, taller than herself but shorter than her mother.
‘Joanna – Mistress Brownlie?’ he said. Bel nodded. She held up one hand, fingers opening and shutting. Someone talking? She indicated the invisible Joanna, and cowered in fear. ‘Threats to Joanna? Who threatens her? Your grandmother?’
This got him an exasperated stare. She squared her shoulders and stuck out her plump chest and her elbows. A man, and a conceited man.
‘Your brother? Murray? Murray threatens Joanna?’ Another nod. ‘It’s a man’s prerogative to chastise his wife,’ he said on a venture. ‘I’d have thought Mistress Weir would see little wrong in that.’ And that’s hypocrisy, he thought, for if I ever raised my hand to Alys I think I would cut my throat afterwards.
Whether she detected the hypocrisy or not, Bel’s expression would have parched grain. She sighed ostentatiously, established Joanna again with the same deft movements, and then straightened her back, raised her chin and outlined a wired cap on her head. He nodded, and she assumed an expression of simpering affection, and held her hands out to the invisible Joanna.
‘Mistress Weir dotes on Joanna?’
Bel confirmed this. Then she sketched a row of women to her left, and identified them: herself, her sister, her mother. When he named them aloud, she nodded again.
‘Is this how you talk to your family?’ he asked, fascinated. She threw him an irritated look and, stepping into the role of her grandmother again, swept the row of invisible figures aside with one hand while she drew the equally invisible Joanna closer with the other, still simpering with exaggerated affection.
‘So Mistress Weir would place Joanna over all the rest of you,’ he said. Bel nodded encouragingly. ‘Even your brother?’
She had not thought of that. She considered the question briefly while the rain pattered on the hawthorn leaves, then spread her hands.
‘And yet she sent you with the gift for Murray.’
She shrugged, and turned her head away, unmoving for a moment. Then, obviously coming to a decision, she began again. The wired headdress, the elegant stance: Arbella. She steadied a mortar with one hand and worked the pestle with the other, pausing to add a pinch of this and a careful drop of that, and looked expectantly at him.
‘Mistress Weir helps your mother in the stillroom,’ he offered. ‘I thought it was your sister did that.’ She frowned, shook her head, stirred the imaginary mortar again, her lips moving busily as if she was speaking. ‘Mistress Weir taught your mother.’ Bel flicked him a glance, nodded, continued to work the pestle. ‘What are you telling me, Bel?’
She sighed, abandoned the mortar, and pulled up the skirt of her gown to reach the purse that hung at her knee between gown and kirtle. From it she drew out a much-scored piece of grey slaty stone and a slate-pencil, bent to lean the slate on her knee and took a careful grasp of the pencil to write. She was no clerk: she formed each letter laboriously, with the use of elbow, tongue and head. Standing in the rain watching her, he appreciated that she would find all her dumb-show (yes, that was exactly the word) much easier than scribing anything at all.
It took her some time, but at last she handed him the stone, with an air which made him feel what it said was very important. He studied it carefully. The wet surface was much-marked already, with earlier inscriptions partly excised, and the uneven letters were hard to make out. Her spelling was imaginative and there were no breaks in the staggering sequence, but after a moment he decided that RBEL probably meant Arbella. But what did the rest mean? It appeared to read PYSHNUW. After a moment enlightenment dawned, along with surprise that a girl from such a family would use this sort of coarseness.
‘You’re telling me Arbella dislikes me too? Holds me in contempt?’ And yet she was civil enough to my face, he thought. Bel stared at him, open-mouthed, and suddenly shook her head, snatched the slate out of his hand and stuffed it back into her purse, then turned, her back radiating fury, and marched away through the flowers.
‘Bel!’ he called after her. ‘Come back, lassie, I’ll take you home out of the rain.’
She went on, ignoring him.
‘Bel! Are you safe out here on your lone?’
She swung round, stared at him, then rotated one finger by her temple in a universal sign and continued on her way. Reluctant to pursue her across the hillside, he gathered his wits and prepared to go back up to the waiting horses. The road to Blackness beckoned.
A gleam in the grass caught his eye from where the girl had been standing. He made his way towards it, and found her slate, lodged in a clump of flowers and shining in the light. It must have missed her purse in her haste. He bent to pick it up and turned it in his hand. None of the other inscriptions was clear enough to read more than a letter or two; only the comment about Arbella stood out.
With a feeling of having missed something important, he put the object into his purse and made his way up to the track, where man and beasts waited for him, heads down against the increasing rain.
‘Can we get on now, Maister Gil?’ asked Patey. ‘Just it’s ower cold to be standing about like this.’
‘We’ll go by the Pow Burn,’ said Gil, reclaiming his reins and mounting. ‘I must let them know where that lassie is. I should have left my plaid over this saddle,’ he added, as the damp leather struck cold through his hose.
‘What was she doing wi’ all the waving her arms?’ asked Patey curiously. He demonstrated, causing Gil’s horse to shy.
‘Watch what you’re about, man! That’s how she talks. She was telling me about her grandam and Murray.’
‘I see. She canny wag her tongue, so she wags her arms instead.’ Patey grinned at his own joke. ‘What did you say to her then, maister, that she lost her temper wi’ you? Maybe I can guess!’
Gil stared at him in revulsion, and he fell silent and after a moment mumbled an apology of sorts.
‘So I should think,’ Gil said. ‘If there’s another word like that out of you, I’ll be having a talk with Henry when we get back to Belstane.’ Patey muttered something else. ‘Well, hold your tongue then.’
He spurred his horse forward along the track towards the colliery, without looking back to see if the groom followed him.
The surfacemen were just breaking off for their midday bite when he came over the hillside. Eight or ten men were gathering in the shelter of the smithy, round the fire. On the path which led down from the thatched row of cottages was a procession of children, bareheaded despite the rain, each bearing a father’s or brother’s meal: a wooden bowl with a kale-leaf over it, a plate covered by a cloth, a small package wrapped in dock-leaves. The men underground must take their food in with them and eat it cold, he conjectured.
He dismounted on the cobbled area before the house and looked about, hoping to find one of the family. It seemed likely that the household would be sitting down to eat as well, and he had no wish to interrupt the meal. To his relief, Mistress Lithgo appeared at the door of her stillroom, and came to meet him.
‘Maister Cunningham,’ she said, and nodded in answer to his greeting. ‘What brings you here? Can we do aught for you? Will you stay for a bite?’
‘No, no, I won’t stay,’ he said. ‘I want to get to Blackness today. I met your daughter Bel all on her own over the hill yonder, and thought I should let you know where she was.’
‘On her own,’ she said, sounding annoyed. ‘She will go off like that on her grandam’s errands, and I canny teach her it’s no safe at her age. My thanks, sir. I’ll send her brother after her. And my thanks to your lady mother,’ she added, ‘for his bed and dole last night. He came in an hour or two since.’
‘My dear, you needny trouble about Bel,’ said Arbella’s sweet voice. Gil turned, to see her emerging from the building Phemie had identifi
ed as the mine office. ‘I sent her to gather what we need for the spring tonic. She’ll not go far, she’ll be quite safe.’ She approached, leaning on a stick and moving carefully on her high wooden pattens. Her plaid, hitched up over her wired headdress against the rain, hung down in dark folds to her knees, and under it her other hand held her petticoats up out of the grey-black mud. She looked like a mourner at a funeral. ‘But it was right kind of you to let us know,’ she added, smiling at Gil. ‘Was that all that brought you here? I hope you’ve not rid out of your way for my wee lassie?’
‘I was concerned for her,’ he explained. ‘I stopped to speak to her, and something I said annoyed her and she marched off down the burn towards the low shielings.’
Bel’s mother gave him a raking glance, then visibly relaxed.
‘Aye, times she’s like that,’ she admitted. ‘She angers easily, with not being able to say what she wants.’
‘We’d managed fine up to that. She told me clearly how you’d sent her with a gift for Murray just before he left here, madam.’
Arbella’s finely drawn eyebrows rose. ‘Did she so? You’re perceptive, Maister Cunningham, if you grasped that from her. And are you any nearer finding Thomas for us? To tell truth, since my dear Joanna’s out of hearing, I’m beginning to be a wee bit concerned that we’ve heard nothing.’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’m on my way to Blackness now, to track down your two sinkers. The word in Forth is that they’ve gone over there to their kin –’
‘Aye, William Wood that would be,’ agreed Beatrice, nodding.
‘To Blackness?’ said Arbella. ‘In all this rain? You’re going to a deal of trouble for my household, maister. Can we do anything for you while you’re here? We’re about to sit down to dinner – will you join us?’
‘No, no, I want to get on my road, I’ll not disturb your meal,’ he assured her, and then, as a memory surfaced, ‘I’d like a look inside your chapel, if I might. Fleming said something about it.’
‘Fleming!’ Arbella said witheringly, and reached for the bunch of keys at her belt. ‘I’m greatly disappointed in that man, you know, sir. After all I did for him, to turn and accuse my good-daughter in such a way.’ She began moving towards the little wattle-and-daub building. Beatrice nodded to Gil and retreated into her stillroom again.
‘You did him a favour?’
‘I did. I knew his father well, sir, a good man and a clever, and died here, Our Lady save him.’ She crossed herself, her keys clinking. ‘And so Davy was left without sponsor. It was I persuaded Douglas to give him his uncle’s place.’ She unlocked the door of the chapel and stepped inside. ‘And well he’s repaid me for it, too, one way and another.’ She bowed stiffly to the crucified Christ on the altar, and again to a brightly painted figure of St Ninian with his broken chain, perched on a shelf behind it. ‘Forever trying to direct me in the manage of this place and my family. Would you believe, sir, he tried to tell me my grandson would never make a scholar, and I should give him charge here instead of Murray!’
‘Did he?’ said Gil, in what he hoped was a sympathetic tone.
‘Indeed he did, and here’s my laddie with tales of how his teachers admire his every word. And the man canny even find me a decent relic for this kirk, to keep the colliers and their women here instead of trailing down into Carluke or Lanark wi’ their petitions.’
And how should they bring their prayers here if it’s kept locked? Gil wondered, and looked about him. The little space held only the furnished altar, an aumbry on legs for the Mass-vessels, and three benches round the walls. The altar-linen must be shut in the aumbry, and a shelf below the closed portion held an obvious candle-box, its corners gnawed by hopeful rats. A pewter holy-water stoup hung from a nail by the door. Linked ideas made him glance downward, to find the floor made of neatly fitted slabs of grey-blue stone much like Bel’s slate, which was still in his purse. No hope of returning that just now, he thought; I can hardly hand it to Arbella with that inscription, and get the lassie into trouble.
‘You keep the key?’ he asked.
‘I have all the keys, maister,’ said Arbella simply. ‘There’s another lives on a nail by the kitchen door,’ she added. ‘We keep it locked because there’s no priest here, but our folk can aye get in if they wish.’
Beyond Linlithgow, the way out to Blackness was a well-made and well-used road, with heaps of stones at intervals to fill in potholes.
‘Likely the merchants that use the port keep it up,’ said Gil when Patey commented. ‘Or it’s paid out of the port dues. There’s only the one way up from the shore.’
‘And is it the shore we’re making for, maister?’ said Patey. His chastened mood had not lasted long, and Gil had become resigned to the man’s chatter. ‘Did you say you wanted the salt-boilers? I suppose that would be them yonder where the smoke is.’
‘More than likely,’ Gil agreed, eyeing the dark column leaning downwind from the distant point, across the bay from the square outline of the castle. ‘Since it seems they burn coal. I wonder what it’s like in the castle when the wind’s in the west?’
They rode down off the low hills which separated Linlithgow from the Forth, through the settlement of Blackness itself where the smells of supper drifted on the wind, and on to the shore. Two merchant vessels were drawn up on the shingle, one loading, one unloading, and another lay at anchor out in the bay. Round the three legs of the crane a stack of barrels waited to be swung on board, several men were handling bales of wool out of a barn, and a handful of carts stood by, the carters shouting directions to the shore porters about their loads. The custumar in a long belted gown of black trimmed with squirrel bustled importantly through the activity, followed by his clerk with ink-pot and parchment at the ready.
‘Where do we lie tonight, Maister Gil?’ asked Patey, assessing the distance out to the tower of smoke.
‘Tonight? I hadn’t thought,’ Gil confessed.
‘Aye, I thought not,’ said Patey with a faint resentment, turning to look back at the way they had come. ‘Just if we’re to go back to Linlithgow to seek a bed, we’ll no need to be held up here. The light willny last, ye ken, and it’s turned cloudy again, we’ll ha’ no good of the moon.’
Accosting the custumar got them the information that there were two inns in Blackness, but they didny want to patronize the Blue Bell where all the common mariners lay, they would do better to ask at the Ship.
‘Or you might get a bed at the castle,’ offered the functionary, studying Gil’s horse and clothing, setting it against his lack of a retinue and obviously coming down on the side of his being likely kin or acquaintance of Ross of Hawkhead who held the castle for the Crown.
‘We’ll try the Ship first,’ Gil decided, at which Patey brightened noticeably.
Leaving the horses safely stabled and his man sampling the ale in the inn’s public room, Gil walked on along the curving shore and out towards the point on the western side of the bay. The scene round the salt-pans came into view as he approached, a chaos of heaps of coal, heaps of ash, wooden sheds with baskets of salt visible in their shelter. The wide pans of rust-coated iron stood in a row under a long thatched roof, the red glow of the fires beneath them, with dark figures moving to and fro in the drifting smoke and steam. Seagulls swirled screaming over their heads. It made Gil think of a vision of hell by that mad Flemish painter Bosch. Almost he expected to encounter half a dozen devils with lolling tongues and extra faces, prodding a fat bishop into the boiling seawater.
Instead, he found two weather-beaten men and a woman, armed with bleached wooden rakes and long scoops, trudging back and forward along the pans of bubbling white liquor, plying first rake and then scoop in each. Gulls swooped and mewed and pounced on what was spooned out of the pans and there was a tang of rotting fish in the smoke.
‘Aye, you get a’ things in the pans,’ agreed the eldest salt-boiler, a gnarled man with one red-rimmed eye, leaning on his rake. ‘A’ thing but coin,’ he a
dded, and laughed at his own joke. ‘Crabs, o’ course, and whelks and that. A glove or a shoe, often enough.’
‘Never in pairs, but,’ said the woman, who appeared to be his wife. ‘Are they, Wullie?’
‘I found a drowned bairn,’ said the younger man. ‘Din’t I no, Mammy, I found a –’
‘It wasny a bairn, Jock,’ said his mother repressively. ‘The gentleman doesny want to hear about it.’
‘Aye, but it was,’ said Jock. ‘It was a’ green –’
‘Jock! Get back to the pans!’
‘Can I help you, maister, or was ye just wanting to see the salt-boiling?’ asked the older man. ‘There’s many folk likes to see where their salt comes from. Ye see here,’ he said, without waiting for an answer, ‘we gather the water here wi’ the tide, in yonder tank in the rock, and lift it wi’ the bucket-gang and the auld pony, into the pans. We’ve a great system wi’ sluices to let the water run the length o’ the pans, and then we shut it off and set the fires.’
‘Two days, it takes, to come through the boil, doesn’t it no, Wullie?’ said his wife. ‘These was the first pans on the Forth to have sluices,’ she added proudly. ‘Ye’re looking at the best salt-pans in the Lothians, maister.’
‘I never knew there was so much involved,’ confessed Gil, looking round him. ‘Do you live down here on the shore? Is that your house?’
‘That? That’s no but a shelter for when the weather’s bad. We dwell up yonder.’ Wullie pointed to a cottage crouched some yards back from the shore. His wife turned back to the pans, and he continued to show Gil the process with a fluency which made it clear he was used to visitors. Gil heard him out, fascinated and appalled, peered into the shed at the straw skeps of dry salt waiting to be sold on, learned about creech and bittern and the use of bullocks’ blood to clarify the brine. ‘Swine’s blood’s no good,’ the man informed him, leaning on his rake, ‘the reason being, swine’s flesh has a natural affinity with salt, ye see, so the blood takes up the salt out the brine instead of drawing up the lees. Or so Peter Nicholson our clerk tells me. Ye need to let the blood stand till it turns rotten, o’ course, it’s no use when it’s fresh.’