by Pat McIntosh
He crossed the burn where it spread out gurgling into a shallow ford, and stepped on to a cobbled path which led up to the house door. More than one patch of hen-feathers on the stones spoke of the fox’s depredations, and the carrion smell was stronger here.
The forester’s gear stood around. A handcart, tilted on to its handles, with a rusting pruning-hook leaning across the flat bed. On the ground beside it a ladder and a tangle of hemp rope, a leather helmet, and a long canvas holdall, damp and red-stained. Gil moved cautiously over to look at it. The stains on the bag were dark, rust-red, smelled like rust. He unfastened the buckle and gingerly drew open the mouth of the bag, to find a set of knives and saws, the handles polished by use, the blades patched and pitted and spoiling. One of the saws had fragments of bark caught in its teeth. Andro Syme’s tools, lying out in the rain where he had dropped them when he came back from the day’s work.
He straightened up, trying to visualize the scene. The forester would have come up the cobbled way from the burn, perhaps manhandling his cart. Or had he gone out without cart and ladder that day? He had reached this point, and something had caused him to drop everything he held and . . .
And what? What had made him leave his tools and prevented him returning to them? Was it fear, surprise, joy? Had he run to meet someone, run to fetch a weapon? Not a weapon, Gil thought, looking down at the rusting blades at his feet. The man had weapons enough to hand. So not fear, then, but surprise: something or someone he had not expected to see. Or perhaps something to do with the goats – the birth of the kid he had seen, or another such crisis. But why had he left his trade here ever since, to be ruined by the rain?
Gil turned and stepped reluctantly up to the house door. Rustling and scurrying sounds greeted him, not all of them due to the goats. There was a tirling-pin set on the wooden jamb. He rattled the ring up and down its twisted iron bar, and said, ‘Is anyone at home?’
More sharp scuttlings. Inside the house, one of the goats bleated.
There was a loud, inhuman screech, horrifyingly close. He caught at the door-frame for support as something white sailed over the house roof and down, passed within a handspan of his head and soared up into the trees across the burn.
Heart still hammering, whinger in hand, he swung round to watch it as it furled pale wings, hiding the white inner coverts, and became a familiar gold-brown shape. Round eyes blinked from a shadowed hollow in the branches of the yew tree.
A screech-owl, by daylight.
The smell of carrion was stronger than ever. He waited a moment longer while his heart steadied, then pushed the door wider and stepped into the dark interior of the cottage.
When Michael and his men appeared in answer to the signal, Gil was sitting on the bench by the house door, beads in hand, watching the goats stripping the leaves on a young beech. He looked up as they rounded the turn of the valley, and Michael’s first words died on his lips.
‘What is it, man?’ he said, staring. ‘You look as if you’d been to Hell and back.’
‘Near enough,’ said Gil. He rose and stowed his beads in his purse, and the newcomers splashed across the ford, the men exclaiming in disgust as the smell reached them. ‘It’s not a bonnie sight. The most of you can wait outside, but I want someone to study it along wi’ me, in case I miss sign that might tell us what happened, for it’s not very clear. Whoever he is he’ll need a strong stomach.’
Michael shrugged. ‘I’ll not ask the lads to do aught I’d not do myself. Will I . . .?’
‘He’s still in there, is he?’ asked one of the Cauldhope men, the back of his hand across his nose. ‘Or is the pig dead? It stinks like the devil’s midden.’
‘No pig,’ said Gil. ‘One of the goats has died, likely while it was kidding, but that’s not the worst of it.’ Another of the men bent and threw a stone as he spoke, and something rustled off into the undergrowth at the gable of the house. ‘There are rats.’
‘Should we no raise the hue and cry?’ asked the man who had spoken already.
‘Whoever did this is long out of reach,’ said Gil. The owl in the tree screeched as if in mockery, and several of the men glanced up and crossed themselves. ‘I want a look at the scene with another witness first. We can go up to Bonnington after that.’
Michael swallowed hard and braced his shoulders.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Shall we . . .?’
He followed Gil across the doorsill and stepped aside to let the light in. Gil watched his face as he stared round, seeing him take in the detail he himself had noted. By the cold hearth in the centre of the room lay an iron cooking-pot, on its side and empty. Beyond the hearth a carved chair and a stool were set to a small table, on which lay empty dishes, two knives and spoons, an overturned beaker. The light gleamed on a flat silver flask. Another beaker lay on the chair as if it had rolled there, and a glazed pottery bottle was overturned on the floor beside a muddle of small bones.
‘A meal,’ said Michael. ‘For two. So has Murray been here?’
‘He came here,’ agreed Gil. ‘Where’s the food? The scraps, the food in the pot?’
‘The rats must have got it.’ Michael looked round again. ‘And everything else they could get into. Butter dish, cheese crock, the flitch over the fire. Filthy creatures.’
‘So I thought,’ agreed Gil. ‘What else can you see?’
‘Where’s our man?’ Michael peered into the shadows. ‘Is he in here? Along the end wi’ the goat?’
‘Not so far as that.’ Gil looked deliberately at the solid box of the bed which separated the living end of the house from the animals’ quarters. Michael stepped forward cautiously, and recoiled with an exclamation of horror as he made out what lay there.
‘Christ aid!’ he said, crossing himself. And then, looking closer, ‘Oh, Christ and Our Lady save us, there’s two of them.’ He turned to Gil, sudden tears glittering at his eyes in the dim light. ‘Is it Murray and his leman, dead in the one moment? Has Syme slain them and run to Edinburgh?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Gil in sympathy. His first reaction had also been pity, though it had not moved him quite to tears. ‘Look closer, would you, if you can bear it.’
Michael took a hesitant step nearer, wadding his handkerchief over his nose, and studied what was visible. After a moment he drew back.
‘It needs a light of some sort,’ he said. ‘That’s Murray in at the wall, right enough, is it no? You can see the red hair still clinging to . . . to . . .’
‘Yes,’ agreed Gil. ‘I think that’s our man, right enough.’ He came to stand beside Michael and looked at the bed, the back of his hand to his nose.
Over a month had passed since the two bodies there were warm and live; what the rats, the insects, the fox and time itself had left, tattered and shrunken flesh and naked bones, was still recognizable as human, but little more than that. Two skulls with a little skin still attached, the eye sockets dark and empty, stared into the shadows. As Michael had said, one was identifiable by the hanks of red hair still attached to the taut yellow scalp, though neither Joanna nor anyone else would recognize the face. Two sets of shoulder-bones, two ribcages were tilted inwards as if the lovers had been talking, or as if, Gil thought with another surge of pity, they had realized what was happening and turned to each other for reassurance in the last moments. A linen sheet was under them, and another was drawn over them nearly to waist level, both stained beyond redemption. Brownish skin and drying sinews clung over the joints, keeping the limbs articulated, and though the rats had made off with the fingers and part of the hand, one could still make out the tenderness in the gesture with which the red-haired corpse had laid one arm over the broad shoulders of his bedfellow.
‘But this one,’ said Michael. ‘This is a man and all. The hair’s shorter than mine, look at those shoulders. It’s got no paps. It’s a man!’ He turned to Gil in astonishment and horror. ‘It’s two men. Maister Gil, is that his leman? The forester?’
‘I think it must b
e,’ agreed Gil.
‘You mean we’ve gone through all this for a pair of kything kitterel –’ He broke off, still staring at Gil over the wadded handkerchief. ‘And him a married man, too!’
‘Every one of us deserves time for amendment of life,’ said Gil, noting this reaction with interest. So there’s still innocence abroad, he thought. Or did I simply learn far more in Paris than I was sent for? ‘Not to mention,’ he added, ‘that we need to work out what happened here. How do you read it, Michael?’
‘Some things there’s no amending,’ said Michael. He drew back from the bed, and gazed round again. ‘They’ve died in the same moment,’ he hazarded, ‘or near it.’
‘We canny tell that,’ said Gil. ‘Near it, I’ll allow.’
‘And which of them was the catamite?’ wondered Michael. ‘A collier and a forester – how could either one of them . . .?’
‘No way to tell,’ said Gil.
‘Perhaps they took it in turns,’ speculated Michael with distaste.
It was, Gil felt, a matter for the priests to worry about; there was no way to guess from the way the bodies were disposed which man had played the woman’s part, endangering his immortal soul and inviting the opprobrium which few would apply to his partner. His concern was more practical: how had the two men died?
‘Start at the beginning. Did you have time to discern aught outside, afore I dragged you in here?’
Michael paused to consider. ‘The forester’s cart’s standing there. Likely he came home from his day’s work to find this one here.’
‘So I thought,’ agreed Gil. ‘His knives are lying out there in his scrip, rusting with the rain where he dropped them.’
Michael shut his eyes, apparently to visualize something the better.
‘He came home, and his nancy was here waiting for him. They came into the house, and had a meal. They went into the bed – where’s their clothes?’ he asked, opening his eyes.
‘Yonder by the bed-foot, all in the one tangle.’ Gil nodded at the shadows. ‘I think the goats have been at them. You know the way they’ll eat linen.’
‘St Peter’s bones! Where are the brutes, anyway? I canny abide goats, the way they leer at you.’
As if on a cue, small hooves clipped on the cobbles and the leader of the little flock peered in at the open door. Michael waved his arms and shouted, and the creature gave him a look of ineffable contempt, turned and pattered away. Her companions followed her, the kid bleating anxiously for its mother.
‘Then what?’ prompted Gil.
Michael, recalled to his task, clamped his handkerchief over his nose, closed his eyes again, and offered indistinctly, ‘Then they died. Both together, or one after the other, as you please.’
‘O lusty gallands gay,’ Gil quoted, ‘full laichly thus sall ly thy lusty heid. But why? Why would two grown men fall dead in an afternoon?’
‘Afternoon?’
‘I’d say they bedded well before nightfall,’ Gil observed. ‘If it was near dark Syme would have seen to his beasts, surely, milked the goats and shut the hens in, rather than have to rise and fetch them in later.’
‘I see what you mean.’ Michael opened his eyes and looked longingly at the door. ‘Can we go outside? I canny breathe in here. You must have a right strong stomach, Maister Gil.’
‘We’ll stand by the doorway. There’s still things to learn here. Can you jalouse why two men should meet their end in the one moment?’
‘A judgement on their unnatural ways.’
‘What, to caus all men fra wicket vycis fle. Aye, possibly, but I’m no so sure it works like that,’ Gil said wryly. ‘Come on, you’re an educated man, and you learned the hunt the same as I did. What can you see, or not see?’
‘Was it maybe some sickness? Christ aid, it’s foul enough in here now to infect the Host of Scotland. I hope we’re no dead by morning ourselves.’
‘Do you see sign of sickness? Has either man’s belly been afflicted, would you say? The jordan’s there below the bed,’ he pointed into the shadows, ‘but it hadny been used.’
‘No, there’s no sign, but the rats might have got the traces.’
‘If one of them sickened first, the other would have got him to bed. I see only that they bedded together. I think when they went into the bed they were hale.’
‘It’s a judgement, then, like I said.’
‘Think, Michael. Two men, hale when they ate their supper, both dead or too far gone to rise afore it was dark. What does that suggest to you?’
‘If it’s no a judgement from Heaven, is it poison?’
‘So I think.’ Gil relaxed. ‘I think they were poisoned.’
‘Poisoned.’ Michael gazed round the sparse, shadowy interior of the cottage, as if looking for a culprit. ‘Who by, then? Was it deliberate, or was the supper bad? Is there any ill going about that would slay two men in that time? Or was it maybe a pact atween them two?’
‘What, a pact to die together? I’ll admit I never thought of that.’ Gil frowned, staring into the shadows beyond the bed. ‘If it was, it was a sudden idea, for Murray gave no sign at the coaltown or to the two sinkers that he’d not return from this trip. I suppose it could have been solely Syme’s doing, a way to keep his leman with him for ever.’
‘What a wickedness!’ said Michael through the handkerchief. ‘Though I’d believe anything of such an unnatural –’
‘Wickedness? More than the sin it involves?’
‘It’s selfish. It’s thinking more of yourself than your leman. Would you slay Alys – Mistress Mason – if you couldny dwell wi’ her as you wished?’
‘No,’ admitted Gil, ‘and I take nor would you. But the circumstances are different. I’ve no notion what I’d do if I’d stood in Murray’s place, or Syme’s.’
‘Mine are no so different,’ said Michael quietly. ‘Nobody’s like to be disgusted that Tib and I love one another, but we’re kept apart by our families, wi’ no great hopes of reunion. Just the same, I’d never look for her to die wi’ me, like folk in a silly romance.’
Gil paused for a moment to take in this statement, and gripped the younger man’s shoulder with a sympathetic hand. Michael threw him a startled, hesitant smile from behind the handkerchief, and Gil in some embarrassment returned to the subject at issue.
‘Whether it was a pact or no, we need to determine what slew them. Then we might learn whose doing it was. Can you see aught to the purpose?’
They both surveyed the scene before them. Outside the men gossiped uneasily beyond the gurgling burn, the crows croaked in the treetops, a goat bleated. Here in the shadows nothing stirred, but something seemed to nudge at Gil’s mind, a movement just out of sight, a whisper just below hearing. What was it telling him?
‘There’s the dead rats,’ Michael said suddenly. ‘What slew that pair of kitterels maybe slew the rats as well. Could that be it?’
‘The rats.’ Yes, that was it. Gil stepped carefully round the cold peats on the hearth and looked down at the scatter of little bones. There were two, no, three rat skulls, a powder of tiny teeth, some tatters of skin. ‘And the flask. I admit the flask has been worrying me. It’s a thing out of place.’
‘I’ve heard you say that sort of thing afore,’ observed Michael. ‘You think it was poison in the flask that slew the rats? Or maybe in that wee jug, where the bones are? Why is it on the floor, anyway?’
‘Circumstantial,’ said Gil, ‘but persuasive.’ Michael blinked at the long words. ‘Aye, it looks very much as if flask and bottle fell over, the bottle rolled on to the floor, and the rats drank whatever spilled. But was it that they died of, and which was it in, flask or bottle? Or was it something in the food on the table?’
‘Is there a way to find out?’ Michael asked.
Gil shrugged. ‘Prayer,’ he offered. The younger man grunted, with what Gil felt to be a healthy show of scepticism. ‘And questioning folk, I suppose. Alys might know something to the purpose.’
‘Does she
know everything?’ asked Michael, in genuine enquiry.
Gil smiled, but said only, ‘The flask must be the one Murray was given just before he left the Pow Burn.’
‘I wondered about that. It’s a valuable thing for either of these two to have owned. Who gave him it? What was in it?’
‘Mistress Weir, according to Joanna.’ Gil gazed down at the object. ‘There was cordial in it, to drink her health on her birthday, so Joanna told my wife.’
‘St Peter’s bones! So what was really in it, do you suppose? Was it the old woman who poisoned them, then?’
‘Or Joanna, who must have handled the thing, or young Bel when she brought it to Joanna, or even her sister, or certainly her grandam – it could have been any of the folk up there save young Crombie, who was in Glasgow at the time. Or, I suppose, anyone who knew the flask was there, at the places they called on the way, or at Juggling Nick’s.’
Michael whistled.
‘All the folk at the heugh had reason enough, by what we’ve learned so far,’ he admitted. ‘Could it have been a conspiracy, then? All of them plotting together?’
‘It could. There are many possibilities.’
‘Or maybe someone at Nick’s was jealous. What do you suppose they used?’
‘I’ve no notion what it was, or what it was in either.’ Gil stirred the small bones with his toe. ‘And I hope Alys can help me, for we can hardly ask the likeliest to know hereabouts.’
Michael made a questioning noise. Gil bent to lift flask and bottle, and sniffed cautiously at each. The bottle had clearly held usquebae, but on the flask there was a faint smell of old grape spirits, a bitter whiff of something like his mother’s cough syrup, a herbal smell. Had Alys mentioned elderberries? He reached for the stopper of the flask where it lay on the table, flakes of wax still clinging to it, and stowed all three items in his purse with care.