Queen & Country

by Shirley McKay

  Looking over all, quiet and impassive on its scaffold still, with its back to the door and its eye upon the set, was the king’s turning picture, mindful, as always, of what it meant to die.

  He heard Giles say, ‘We must leave this scene untouched, to wait for Andrew Wood, if he is in town.’

  His own voice answered then, reluctantly, absurd. ‘We have no want of him.’

  The doctor reasoned, calm, ‘Ah, I think we do. We need the king’s man, to help us deal with this. So will he do, efficiently and quietly. If what appears is true – and I do not say it is, before we ken the facts – but going by appearances, we have a man here who is murdered, and a man who murdered him, and has killed himself, which is a sin against nature, and God.’

  And that, considered Hew, was what the speaking picture seemed to want to say, what his mind perceived, and Giles put into words. It seemed that the painter had murdered his boy, and then murdered himself, in a fit of remorse. As to what had happened first in the sequence of events, in the damage to the portrait, the hanging of the painting and the killing of the boy, the picture did not say. Nor was there a clue to what drove him to the act. One thing though was clear. All of this took place before the painter hanged himself, and so the painter ended this unhappy chain, wherever it did start. Or so it must have been, if what appeared was true, for without certain proof, Hew could not swear it was. The painting had been staged, the painter in its frame. Cold reason must dictate, that there was no one else. Yet he had placed himself at the centre of his painting, where Art and Nature turned, and cast their gaze on him, and they could not discount the disturbing possibility, that the painter was compelled by some other, stranger force, to commit a crime that seemed quite inexplicable.

  ‘I cannot understand it,’ Giles Locke said. ‘For in the hours I spent with them, sitting for my picture, I never saw a cross or an uncanny look between them. So close and sympathetic was the understanding there, they moved and worked as one.’

  ‘Perhaps that does explain the strength of a remorse, that drives a man to hang himself,’ said Hew.

  ‘Remorse, aye, but not this show of violence. This painter was, I never thought, a violent sort of man. He was not a man, that had that passion in him,’ Giles Locke answered sadly. ‘This is a terrible thing. But we cannot let our horror at it blur the practicalities, or deflect us from our duty in this case. The provost must be told, and this man’s kin informed. I have a college full of students, who must be protected here, and this is not a thing we can handle on our own. It is too much for us. Andrew Wood must witness this, before we cut him down. This picture must be firm imprinted on our minds, before it is disturbed.’

  It was imprinted now, on Hew, who thought he never would again accept an invitation to a dinner in that hall. The scene though, was disturbed, before the crownar Andrew Wood had had the chance to look at it. For it was broken up by Roger Cunningham. Roger had slipped in unseen, unnoticed and undaunted by the gruesome scene. He did not stand to gawp, but put his practised science into good effect, by lifting up the head of the broken painter’s boy. He interrupted, urgently, ‘Sir. Professor Locke. This man has a fractured skull. But he is not dead.’

  They carried the boy, between them, to Bartie’s room, which had lain vacant since his death. The room had been stripped bare and scrubbed, but Giles found from somewhere a folding camp bed, of the sort that soldiers used, and in this sling of canvas they set down the boy. And Hew was thankful to depart from the garish dinner hall.

  Giles said, ‘I have sent for the surgeon. But I will tell you now, this boy will not live.’

  The boy’s skull was dented, hollowed on one side, cracked upon itself like the splintered eggshell of a soft boiled egg. A little fluid dribbled on a napkin underneath, as though the egg had not been left long in the fire.

  ‘We should shave his head,’ Roger said.

  ‘Leave it, for the surgeon. You should not be here,’ said Giles. So dull and heavy were his words they lost in transit all their force, and Roger paid no heed to them. Instead, he fetched a razor, water, towels and soap, and shivered off the boy’s black hair until a narrow bracelet circumscribed the dint in it, where the white bone dipped, and sunk upon itself. The boy was still, unconscious all the while.

  The surgeon came at last. But there was very little that the man could do. ‘There are fragments of bone depressed upon the brain. It requires an instrument to lift them out, of a particular kind, and I do not have that instrument,’ he said.

  The surgeon drew teeth, and let blood. He detached limbs, that were withered or gangrenous, and sometimes he sold those limbs, for purpose of dissection, to Professor Locke, who was a skilled anatomist. But he had never probed before into a living brain. He had not seen a wound like this on anyone alive.

  Roger said, ‘Professor Locke has an instrument like that.’

  ‘I? You are mistaken.’ Giles replied, perplexed.

  ‘Aye, sir, you do. It is the tower, among the other instruments.’

  ‘In truth . . . it may be possible,’ Giles conceded slowly. ‘There is something there. But it is not for use.’

  ‘Not for use?’ The surgeon challenged him, direct. ‘Why should ye have such a thing, and it were not for use?’ Why should you have, he intended, such a tool at all, which belongs to my profession, not to yours.

  ‘I am an anatomist, sir, as well as a physician, and I have a collection of some objects to do with cadavers. I have an interest, explicitly, in skulls. And, it is possible, that among the items that are there accumulated, there may be something similar to what you have described.’

  ‘May I fetch it, sir?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Aye, perhaps you should.’

  The instrument with which the boy returned made the last sour dregs in Hew’s raw stomach churn, just to look at it. It was a kind of clamp, that fitted on the head, through which there passed a screw that could be lowered down to elevate the parts impacted on the brain, rotated and pressed down to screw into the bone.

  The surgeon hesitated. ‘This is hard to do, without causing damage to the membranes of the brain. And I have not tried it before. I cannot do this well alone. Someone must assist.’

  ‘I am willing to advise. But I cannot put my hand in it,’ said Giles.

  ‘Aye, God forbid,’ the surgeon answered bitterly, ‘that ever a physician soiled his hands.’

  ‘Come, you know full well, that I have not been trained to it. And you would be the first to complain of the trespass.’

  ‘It is your instrument.’

  ‘It is your profession.’

  Roger urged, ‘Please, will you not try?’

  ‘There is no help for him, son. For he is certain to die,’ the surgeon explained.

  ‘Then what can be lost, in the practice? If you will not, then I will.’

  Hew did not stay to help. But he could not turn his back upon the horror there, for the porter had returned with the crownar Andrew Wood, having chanced to find him at his brother’s house. Hew was obliged to take him to the dining hall, in the absence of Giles, and revisit the scene they had found there. Here Andrew Wood came uncannily into his own, for he was little moved to look upon a hanged man, having hanged enough of them himself. He cut the painter down, and laid his body out upon a trestle board, with an efficiency that was, oddly, reassuring, as though it were the matter of an ordinary day, and nothing untoward. And though his handling of the corpse was brisk, and businesslike, it did not want for courtesy, or for the respect, deserving to the dead. He covered up the painter with a cloth. And Hew felt grateful to him, calmed by his authority.

  ‘Giles Locke must make what arrangements he can to dispose of this body, for, if he died at his own hand, as the evidence suggests, he cannot have the solace of a Christian burial. Sometimes, in such cases, it is a kindness to keep it from the Kirk. Where is the other victim? Is he dead?’ the crownar said.

  ‘He is not dead.’ Giles Locke had joined them, white-faced, wiping his hands on a c
loth, in defiance of the charge that he did not get them dirty. ‘Yet. The operation was, to some extent, a success.’

  ‘Then you found the way to turn the implement?’ Hew asked.

  ‘Roger did. He is with the boy now, and refuses to leave him. The surgeon has left. And what happens next must lie in God’s hands.’

  ‘We must hope that he recovers, and can tell us what has happened here,’ Sir Andrew said.

  ‘He will not do that. For even if his brain can heal intact, he cannot speak,’ said Giles.

  The crownar rubbed his beard. ‘Then I must leave you to work out, whatever way you can, to determine what might move a man to such a dreadful act. For my part, I will go to Edinburgh, and inform this man’s family of his death in Fife.’

  As he left, he saw the pleated picture on its scaffold still, and picked it up. ‘What is this?’

  Giles said, ‘It is a perspective picture, belonging to the king. He has given it to Hew, in hope to find its origin.’

  ‘The king believes that it may be bewitched,’ said Hew.

  The crownar placed the picture quickly back. He wiped his fingers on his coat, the fingers that had lately lifted down the corpse, and set it on the board without a qualm, and retreated nervously. ‘The signs are clear enough,’ he said, ‘that the king was right.’

  He left behind a silence in that room, which Hew was first to break. ‘But we do not believe that.’

  ‘No.’ Giles did not sound sure. But then, he was distracted by the horror that had happened in the college, by the practicalities of dealing with a corpse, and a mortal causality, without disruption to the students who were in his care. He was distracted also, by this senseless loss of life. He did not believe, could not have believed, that the picture of a death’s head, who might have been a queen, had any kind of magic in it, over and above the painter’s craft.

  Hew looked round the room. ‘The answer must be here. It must, in truth, be here.’

  He knew it must be there. But, for all the world, he could not find it there.

  The horror of the painter’s death, for the college of St Salvator, was not the death itself, but that fact that he had died at his own unhappy hand. The corpse was taken out by night, when the college was asleep. The porter had insisted it be taken through the window, since a person who died at his own hand would infect a whole house, if he departed there using the door. In practice, this did not prove practical, and a compromise was reached, in using the back channel out from the latrines, which opened to the Swallow Gate, avoiding both the chapel and the college gate. It was buried in the dark, in unconsecrated land, far beyond the comfort of a hostile kirk. And if the doctor knelt, and said a private prayer, then no one was offended there but God.

  ‘If there is a chance,’ Hew said, ‘this painter did not die by his own unaided hand, howsoever small, then for his family’s sake, we ought now to search for it.’ Doctor Locke agreed. He could however, find no clue, nothing in that place appearing untoward. It was, if anything too neat, too tidy for the work the painter had produced in it. Hew remembered Vanson’s shop, and Vanson’s training of his own apprentices, which, it seemed to him, was nothing like this boy’s. He looked among the brushes and the pots of paint, which were small, and few.

  ‘Where did the painter mix his paints?’ he asked, and was told there was a workshop somewhere in the town, but no one there could tell him where it was.

  Roger looked after the boy, for ten more days through which he drifted in and out of consciousness, by the grace of God, blissfully asleep, and in his waking moments, Roger fed him milk and pottage from a spoon. The spittle on the spoon, when Roger pulled it out, was often flecked with blood. From time to time, the surgeon called. The Easter disputations were put back till June, and Giles Locke did his best to dissipate the gloom which darkened the whole college, and to quell the superstitions of the fearful boys. Self-slaughter in a college was a rare event, and a perverse and strange one. The dinner hall was locked. The turning picture was removed to Giles Locke’s room, and covered with a cloth. It filled Hew with a deep unease, not because he feared it was the devil’s work, but for the power he knew it held in it, to move a troubled mind. He hoped and prayed that Andrew Wood would not relate this horror to the king, before he had an answer to the riddle there.

  Andrew Wood returned, and brought with him some news that troubled even more. He had broken the news of the death to the Workman family, with his usual brusqueness. This had not been well received by John Workman’s mother, the more so since her son was at that moment up a ladder, patching up the plaster in the Edinburgh tolbuith. When his brother was despatched, to inform him of his death, he almost fell from it. It did not take Andrew long to establish unequivocally that the Workman men were every one accounted for, and that there was no member of the mason’s gild who ever had a prentice who was deaf and dumb. It turned out Vanson’s scepticism had a solid core.

  Chapter 20

  The Doctrine of Signatures

  The provost, who had engaged the painter, could furnish no clue as to his identity. His provenance was vague. He had surfaced in Cupar, in the first wave of peste in 1585. There, a man was charged with painting the lids of the burgh coffins black. After several months he succumbed to the plague, and among the painters in the masons’ gild, none had shown a keenness to replace him. Workman had turned up, fortuitous and out of the blue, offering his services. He had claimed to be a member of the long-established family living still at Edinburgh, though the provost had been hazy quite what the relation was. He had a boy with him, who was deaf and dumb, and who the provost took to be a younger brother. Under those extraordinary circumstances, and on demonstrating in his work a modicum of competence, the contract was drawn up, and no one dared dispute the painter’s title to it. In the year of the plague, the strict laws of the gilds were far more lax and fluid. People were displaced, there were vacant posts, requiring to be filled, and for anyone who wished to reinvent themselves, there were opportunities. At the end of the year, the provost had employed the painter in his own house at Dairsie, on works both plain and decorative. The painter had presented him a picture of his wife. And the provost was impressed with the result. Ars naturam adiuvans, thought Hew. Or, as the goldsmith had said, it was an unco ill wind.

  On the eleventh day following the painter’s death, the college of St Salvator was shaken from its sleep by an unearthly wailing sound. It echoed through the cloisters and billowed through the court, plaintive, keen and melancholy. The students who were woken by it fell upon their knees, all but Roger Cunningham, who slipped out from his bed and to the little chamber that was Bartie Groat’s, where he found the painter’s boy at long last awake, and lowing like a bull-calf in this disparate world, in which he had no sense of any sound he made. Roger soothed him then, by taking in his lap the great lolling head, with its fluff and stubble, cavities and shafts, and stroking with his hands the wet slabs of his cheeks, that were crazed with tears, until the noise diminished to a burn-like babble, bubbling from his throat.

  The painter’s boy was locked, imprisoned in a glass, where he could be seen and heard, but could not be reached. Roger had amended this, as far as was possible, through the sense of touch, revealing in his hands a sympathetic power. Later in the day, when Giles and Hew arrived, and came in to examine him, Giles found his state of health was not at all discouraging; less certain, more concerning, was that of his mind.

  ‘Poor man. There is no way to tell what damage has been done to his unfettered brain.’

  Roger disagreed. ‘I do not believe it has been harmed at all. His distress is not derangement. It is his frustration, that he cannot find a way to make his feelings kent. He has lost the man who was his window on the world. And I think it probable he does not ken it yet. It does not seem very likely that he was conscious still, when the painter died.’

  If what they had supposed was so, that the painter hanged himself, remorseful for the death blow he had dealt the boy, then that wa
s no doubt true. ‘Perhaps he does not ken what happened there at all? We could take him to the hall, and see if it revives in him the glimmer of a memory,’ suggested Hew.

  ‘We cannot,’ Roger said. ‘For what he might remember there would drive a man to madness, if he had no way to make it understood, or to have explained to him the questions in his mind.’

  Doctor Locke agreed with him, impressed by this display of passion and sound reason, which justified his trust. ‘Yet how can we know, that he is not mad now?’

  Roger gave an answer that was unexpected. ‘Because he has his language still.’ He demonstrated to them, that the twitching of the hands, which were loose and agitated, rarely ever still, were attempts to speak. ‘I have been watching him, now, for a while. I watched him when he was in conference with the painter. I have not got far. But these are the signs he makes for brush, and paper, this for bread, and meat, and this for the pot, when he wants to piss. He is hungry, now.’

  ‘That is quite remarkable,’ said Giles. ‘He shall have at once, something from the buttery. Anything he likes. Can he tell you what?’

  ‘I expect he can, though my kenning of the signs is not yet so refined. I only began on it, properly, this morning. And, you understand, he does not have a grammar. Something soft, I doubt. He finds it hard to eat. His teeth are somewhat loose, and some are rattled out.’

  ‘Really?’ tutted Giles. ‘Let me take a look.’

  Roger coaxed the painter’s boy to open up his mouth, and Doctor Locke probed gingerly among the cracks and cavities. ‘Has the surgeon seen this? What does he say?’