by Pat McIntosh
‘Never thought to look,’ he said innocently. ‘Why, is it damaged now?’
‘There is a hole in this seam. I’d say we’ve lost the half o the powder,’ she said, running the black grains through her fingers. ‘It’s the good corned stuff, at least, but we’ve no way to know how strong it might be.’
There was a distant rumble, and Gil looked up in time to see another flicker of lightning in the approaching clouds. The thunder which followed it was long delayed.
‘I’m not happy about the weather,’ he said. ‘We’ll all get very wet, if nothing else. It’s picked a bad time to break.’
‘Someone else is no happy, maister,’ observed Steenie from further down the bank, as two of Vary’s men emerged shouting from the narrow gate they had used. ‘I’d say we’ve been seen fro the house.’
‘I’d say you’re right,’ agreed Gil, watching the two approach. They were shouting such remarks as ‘Stop thief!’ and ‘Stand away!’ but as they neared the group by the burn they slowed, recognising the numbers they had to deal with. Finally they stopped, just within easy earshot.
‘My maister bids ye stand away from the guns,’ called one of them.
Behind them, Vary and his guests had emerged from the same gate, staring indignantly along the slope.
‘The cannons is to be tested,’ said Wooden Toe hardily. ‘Your maister wouldny sell cannons untested, surely?’
‘Hah!’ said Boyd at this, handing the fleuchter to Euan Campbell. ‘Cut another hole like this, will you, ten paces that way.’
‘Steenie, will you attend me,’ said Alys, setting down the sack of powder. ‘Let me talk to them, Gil.’
She set off towards the house, Steenie following hastily, a hand on his whinger. Nodding to the two manservants, she went on past them, and curtsied politely to the three men by the wall. Gil watched a moment longer, but the conversation seemed to remain civil, and he turned back to assist his cousin in bracing the espinyard in the hole he had cut for it, wedging the stock in with the turves.
‘What do they throw?’ he asked. ‘Are there balls or bullets or the like? I believe they have to fit exactly.’
‘I can see they might,’ said Boyd, stamping on the turf he had just placed. ‘We’ll ha to ask your bonnie wee wife, who seems to ken everything. I suppose she has no sisters? No, the best ones never do.’
Another rumble of thunder reached them, and Gil paused to study the sky. The clouds were closer and heavier, and an unpleasant colour, but there did not seem to be rain beneath them yet.
‘I found another fleuchter, your lordship,’ announced the Fox, returning along the waterside with a second peat-spade. ‘They’ve no care for their tools here, nor they have, the way they’re leaving them all about. And I can tell you where all the other folks has went to,’ he added proudly. ‘They’re all down by the Medwin at the hay, to get it in afore the rain comes.’
‘Good luck to them,’ said Boyd, moving on to where Euan was digging with more enthusiasm than accuracy. ‘No, no, man, no like that! Here, gie me the thing till I show you.’
By the time Alys returned, led ceremoniously on the arm of William Knollys, Lord of St Johns, himself, with Steenie watchful at the back of the group, five of the guns were bedded in the bank of the burn and the sixth was awaiting its turn, and the sky had darkened almost right across. The wind was tugging the grass in all directions, rustling the bushes along the bank and turning up their leaves, but no rain had fallen yet, nor was there any sign of approaching rainfall, only the relentless rumble and the distant flicker of lightning.
‘I ken not, my lord,’ said Alys with great aplomb as they approached, ‘gin you’re acquaint wi my husband, Maister Gil Cunningham, Archbishop Blacader’s quaestor.’ Gil turned as she spoke, and bowed suitably deep, aware of earth on his hands and on his hose. ‘And our kinsman, Maister Alexander Boyd.’
Boyd looked up, rose and bowed with equal formality.
‘Grandson to Boyd o Knockentiber,’ he elaborated.
Knollys, large, plump and blue-jowled, dressed for travel in crimson leather and blue linen, fat hands gloved and studded with rings, nodded in a casual way at Gil, but stared inimically from pale round eyes at Sandy Boyd. After a moment he grunted, and turned to Vary.
‘So this is your guns,’ he said. ‘They’re no very big. I suppose you’re right,’ he said to the world at large, ‘they’re as well being tested afore we conclude the bargain, till we see what they can do.’
‘They’re big enough to cause a might o damage,’ protested Vary. ‘If they’re to be carried, they canny be too big, else they’d throw the gunners flat every time they got fired. Gin O’Donnell was here he’d tell you all about them. I canny think where he’s got to, I’d expeckit him to be here. Here, you!’ he said abruptly to Gil. ‘Cunningham, or whoever you are. Have you seen O’Donnell? Thon Irish fellow wi a black beard, you met him earlier.’
‘I’ve not had that pleasure since we parted in the hall,’ responded Gil, with extreme politeness, carefully not looking at his cousin. Knollys’s companion, still irritatingly familiar, caught his eye and grimaced in curiously, and suddenly Gil knew the man. ‘De Brinay!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well met!’
‘Well met indeed, Maister Cunningham,’ agreed Raoul de Brinay, knight of the Order of St John, whom Gil had last encountered on a hillside above Linlithgow. ‘I would not have looked to find you in this affair,’ he added in French.
‘Ni moi non plus,’ returned Gil.
‘Cousin,’ said Boyd urgently, ‘do we have a charge for these guns?’
Alys murmured her excuses to Knollys and stepped down to join them by the burnside, which by now looked as if it had been ploughed. De Brinay, with a tiny jerk of his head at Gil, drifted away along the bank. When Gil joined him he asked in friendly tones, ‘May one enquire for your companion, the learned builder?’
‘He’s well,’ Gil assured him, ‘and is now my father-in-law. My wife is yonder, engaged in measuring gunpowder.’ He glanced over his shoulder, in time to see Alys apparently loading one of the guns. Where did she learn these skills, he wondered.
‘Ah!’ De Brinay’s eyes widened. ‘My felicitations. And can you tell me,’ he murmured, still in swift idiomatic French, ‘what authority our host has to dispose of this equipment?’
‘This is not clear to me,’ Gil replied, ‘but I believe little or none.’
‘I suspected as much. What can you tell me of the matter?’
Briefly, Gil recounted the tale as he knew it, of the band between Gregory Vary, Somerville and Madur, the presence of the Irishman, the involvement of the tinkers. De Brinay listened carefully.
‘This is a very different version from our host’s,’ he said when it ended.
‘You don’t surprise me.’ Gil stopped, studying the sky again. ‘Is the Order of Knights Hospitaller interested in the merchandise, or is this an enterprise of my lord’s alone?’
‘I could not say,’ said de Brinay, without expression. ‘Our host mentioned the Irishman also. Do you know where he might be?’
‘I could not say,’ Gil replied, equally without expression. He knew his cousin was capable of carrying out an execution, without benefit of accusation or trial; now he tried not to think about what he had overheard on the stair earlier or the dark smell of blood he had encountered at the entrance to the cellar. And where, it now occurred to him, was Billy Doig? He had not seen the little man since they had reached this spot. Well, he reflected briefly, Doig was well able to look after himself. No doubt he had good reason for vanishing.
Thunder grumbled again, rather nearer.
‘Perhaps we should encourage the gunners to make haste,’ said De Brinay, studying the sky in his turn. ‘I mislike this light.’
When they returned to the crowd milling about by the guns, Alys was just straightening up from the last one, and Knollys was saying angrily, ‘I canny see that it’s safe or wise to let a—’ He bit off the word he was about to use, and substituted, ‘la
dy see to the charging o the things. How does she ken what she’s about?’
‘I charged the half o them, my lord,’ observed Boyd sweetly. ‘I’ve laid my wares, a buckler broad, and I’d like to see you all withdraw now, maisters, ayont the bank, maybe twenty paces nearer the walls. In case o mishap,’ he explained, as Knollys stared at him with those round eyes, as pale as his own. ‘You’d not want to be struck by flying metal, would you now? Or by earth and mud,’ he added. This was clearly more persuasive, and when Vary added his urging the Preceptor turned reluctantly to move away.
Vary watched him go, then swung back to seize Gil’s arm. ‘That young woman,’ he began.
‘My wife,’ said Gil pleasantly, freeing his arm.
‘Aye, is she? Says my brother Ambrose has a son.’
‘That’s correct, maister.’
‘Damn him to perdition,’ said Vary, with a casual fervour which chilled. ‘And what d’ye think you’re about, any road, you and your wife,’ the tone was unpleasantly sceptical, ‘and him yonder, thieving my guns out my cellar and burying them like this? I’ll be talking to the Depute about this, I can tell you, the minute I’ve sealed the bargain wi my lord.’
‘You may have your chance sooner than that,’ observed Gil, looking along the slope. ‘I think this is Robert Hamilton now, wi half o Lanarkshire under arms. Were I you, maister, I’d away up and keep him back. It wouldny look good if he were to be slain by a misfiring gun below your walls.’
Vary, muttering curses, set off hastily after Knollys, and Gil bent to give Alys a hand up the bank. She took it, smiling up at him, and suddenly said, ‘Gil, I have just recollected, word came from the coalheugh about noon. Tib is in labour. Your mother is gone to her.’
‘That should shorten her time,’ said Gil. ‘Will you come well back from this, sweetheart? I don’t trust these constructions.’
‘Nor do I,’ she admitted. There was a sudden brilliant flicker of lightning, and she flinched as a much louder crack of thunder followed almost instantly. ‘That was too close. I wish everyone would come away, we need to get on before the rain starts.’
By the time the strip of digging along the burnside was cleared of tinkers, tinkers’ children, St John’s men and the servants who had come with Alys, the storm was upon them. There was still no rain, but the wind was wilder, and stronger, and lightning flashed and danced in the heavy clouds.
‘Confound this!’ said Sandy Boyd in Gil’s ear. ‘It will blow the slow match out!’
‘You’ll contrive,’ said Gil, cutting thumbs’ lengths of the twisted bark cord. ‘You aye do. Any idea how fast this burns?’
‘None at all.’
‘It’s a pity we don’t have the Irishman here.’
‘Isn’t it,’ agreed his cousin. ‘Here, if we light all the fuses at the once we can set them faster and get away afore the first goes up.’ He was striking flint on steel as he spoke, coaxing a little heap of tinder to a flame on top of a flat stone. ‘Come on, come on! Ah, that’s caught. See us the fuses, Gil.’
As Gil set the third fuse, fitting the unlit end firmly into the touchhole, watching to make certain that the other end was still burning, that it would not blow out, there was another, closer roar of thunder, almost on top of them, which crashed and rumbled on for ever, or so it seemed. He stepped away, looked round for his cousin, found him beckoning wildly and followed him up the bank.
‘They’d never forgive me if I let you come to harm,’ Boyd shouted over the thunder, ‘and I don’t know whether I’d fear my aunt or your bonnie wee wife the more. As for—’
A number of things seemed to happen at once. There was a loud crackling sound, and a fierce bright light suddenly illuminated the slope in front of them, the crowd of watching people, the barmekin wall and the tower beyond it. A huge hand lifted Gil up in the air and flung him flat. Astonished, he managed to cover his head with his arms, as a volley of small stuff beat down on him, pebbles and clods of grass and sharp bright things, all falling silently around him thick as hailstones. And then, most alarmingly, the ground trembled and quivered under him like a custard pudding set on a table, and he was enveloped in more dust as bigger excussa battered down on his back and arms.
Then something struck him on the head.
Chapter Fourteen
‘But why did all the cannons explode?’ asked Tib, round-eyed, cradling her swaddled daughter. ‘Had you put too much powder in them or something, Alys?’
‘I had not,’ said Alys firmly. ‘It was the lightning. It struck the espinyards, because lightning is drawn to metal things, and they all exploded, and the gunpowder that was beside them as well. It was a very great explosion,’ she said, reaching for Gil’s hand. ‘I thought— I thought Gil had been buried alive.’
‘He’s harder to dispose of than that,’ said Lady Egidia.
Two days had passed, in which a great deal had happened, and the party from Belstane had judged the time suitable to call and congratulate Tib on her safe delivery, Michael on his fatherhood. Tib had received them in full state, sitting up in the box bed with the brocade curtain elegantly drawn back, the bedclothes surmounted by the same embroidered counterpane and pillow-bere which Gil recalled both Kate and Margaret having used on like occasions. Tib herself was enveloped in a garment of velvet trimmed with braid and bunches of ribbon and the infant Gelis, a dainty bundle on a matching bearing-cloth, had been much admired, had had several gold or silver coins slipped into her miniature grasp, and was now re-wrapped and asleep, making little snuffling sounds, in the crook of her mother’s arm.
‘It must ha been, if it brought down the tower,’ said Tib, rocking the baby slightly. ‘Joanna, thank you! Set the tray down and take a seat, my brother can pour out the wine.’
‘And the cordial,’ said Joanna Brownlie, sweet-faced and soft-spoken, wife of Michael’s grieve and Tib’s chief support in the community. ‘It’s made wi apples, you mind. Well, mostly apples. It was right good this year.’ She set the tray by the bedside and curtsied to the visitors. ‘Is that right, Maister Cunningham, that the tower was brought down and all? Guns are terrible things, so they are, and so’s gunpowder. Jamesie wants to use it in the mine, he says it would do for opening up a new seam, but I canny bear the thought.’
‘Nor can I, lass,’ said Michael, moving reluctantly from his post by the bed-foot, where he was gazing admiringly at his wife and child. ‘And so I’ve told Jamesie.’
‘But is that right about the tower?’ Tib asked. As a child, Gil reflected, watching Michael pour the cordial, she had been annoyingly persistent about her questions, and it had not worn off as she got older. ‘I think it thundered and lightened here and all, but I wasny paying that much mind to the weather.’ She smiled dotingly at her infant.
‘The tower of Kersewell is fallen,’ he agreed repressively. ‘It wasny the espinyards exploding that did it, all they did was cover Sandy and me in flying turfs and divert the burn.’
‘Then what—?’ she began.
‘It was the lightning.’ Alys shivered, and looked up at Gil over her glass of cordial. He touched her other hand reassuringly and accepted his own glass from Michael.
* * *
He had roused, flat on his back with all his limbs throbbing with bruises, in one of the outhouses by the barmekin wall. At his side, Alys, with tear-tracks in the dirt on her face, had seemed unable to let go of him.
‘I thought you were—’ she said. ‘I thought—’
He struggled up onto one elbow, but she pushed him back down again, and began patting at his chest and shoulders, feeling for broken bones.
‘I’m not damaged,’ he protested. ‘Sandy—?’
‘Unharmed,’ she said, and smiled rather wryly. ‘Naturellement.’
She seemed to be speaking very faintly. About them the world was almost silent, though he was aware of movement, of people coming and going. He could feel footsteps in the ground under him, though they made no sound. This reminded him of the moments before he had l
ost consciousness, when the ground had quivered under him, and he began to get up on his elbow again.
‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘The guns— was it only the guns?’
Alys shook her head.
‘It was the lightning,’ she said, still in that diminished voice, and he realised that his ears were stopped. By earth? By the great noise? ‘The lightning set off the guns, all at once,’ she went on, ‘all six of them, and I think the barrel of gunpowder as well, so there was a very great explosion. But then,’ she swallowed, ‘but then another great fork of lightning struck the tower-house, and I think perhaps there was more gunpowder in the cellars, for it— for it— I never heard such a loud noise. We owe a candle to St Barbara, many candles. She must have been watching all we did, and protected us. Gil, the house is fallen, the whole house, fallen into a great mound of stones. They are searching now for, for any that were in there.’
‘The lightning?’ he repeated. ‘You’re sure of that?’ She nodded earnestly.
‘Many saw it strike, including the Chevalier de Brinay. The trail of gunpowder did not catch. I had made certain to break it where I could, with my foot, but it never burned anyway. And now it’s raining hard.’
‘To me is vengeance, I will repay, says the Lord,’ he quoted in the Latin. She nodded again, still holding tightly to his hand, and he returned the clasp, thinking that to a mason’s daughter the fall of a stone tower must be particularly terrible, thinking of St Barbara, who watched over towers, protected against lightning, protected gunners and those who used gunpowder. ‘I must get up.’
‘You’re still bleeding.’ She used her free hand to raise the cloth on his temple to check beneath it. ‘I think that will scar. Lie still. Maister Hamilton has taken charge, and arrested Maister Vary. The tinkers have vanished into the trees. All is well.’
‘I doubt Vary thinks so,’ he observed, and a shaky giggle escaped her. ‘I should report to Hamilton.’
‘He will come for your report when he needs it,’ she soothed him. He lay still for a little, looking up at the beams of the roof, which were hung with assorted gardeners’ tools. This was probably where the fleuchter had come from, he thought.