Pat McIntosh - The Fourth Crow

She was quite certainly dead.

Without realising it, he had taken a great leap backwards, away from that hideous face where it lay at the edge of the shadows. Now he stood as if his feet had taken root, staring at the moonlit horror. A great trembling overtook him.

Nothing else seemed to move in the night. A cloud slid over the moon, shrouding all in darkness, and then passed, and with the returning light it was as if she raised her head a little to look at him. With a muffled yelp of terror he turned and fled, down the hill, towards safety.

‘There’s someone bound to St Mungo’s Cross,’ observed Gil Cunningham’s new assistant as they rode back into Glasgow through the August evening, rounding the high red sandstone walls of the Archbishop’s castle.

‘Now what would anyone be doing that for?’ wondered Euan Campbell, from behind them. ‘Surely somebody would set them free?’

Gil turned in the saddle to look at his two very dissimilar henchmen. Lowrie Livingstone, aged nineteen, recent graduate of the University here in Glasgow, was fair and good-looking, with an easy cultured charm which would stand him in good stead in any occupation, particularly that of notary in which Gil had contracted to train him, although just now, with his face, his broad straw hat and the narrow sleeves of his blue woollen gown powdered with reddish dust from the roads, he looked nearly as disreputable as the gallowglass at his back. Euan on the other hand, dark haired and black browed with the crooked Campbell mouth in a long narrow face, simply looked what he was: a man who hired his sword arm for a living.

They had all three spent the August day out in Strathblane, attempting to straighten out the ownership of two portions of land on the flanks of the Campsie hills. It had been a pleasant day for the task, warm and serene, with birdsong in the thickets and a clear view out over the Clyde valley and down into Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire, but talking to witnesses, many of whom spoke Ersche rather than Scots and required Euan’s unreliable help as a translator to make their statements, had proved wearisome, and he was glad to be nearing home.

Young Maister Livingstone had observed correctly: away to their left, just inside the low wall of the kirkyard, Gil could see the tall stone cross which stood by the Girth Burn, the most important of the several crosses which marked the boundaries of the sanctuary area. There was certainly someone bound to the massive upright, writhing and shrieking and securely roped, surrounded by a crowd of grinning spectators. Small boys ran in and out, throwing handfuls of water from the burn at the prisoner and anyone else who was not quick enough to get out of the way.

‘They bringis mad men on fuit and horss,’ he quoted, ‘and bindis them to Sanct Mungos Corss. Did you never see it before?’

‘Oh, that!’ said Lowrie. ‘No, I never saw it, but I heard of it a few times. How often does it happen?’

‘Maybe once in a quarter, perhaps more often in the summer months. You’d not leave even a dog outside without shelter over a winter’s night, after all. It’s a great entertainment for the multitude, you can see that.’

‘And does it cure them, to be spending a night tied to the cross like that?’ asked Euan, staring at the crowd. ‘More like to send them even further mad, I would be thinking.’

‘I’ve never heard.’ Gil heeled his horse onward. ‘The dinner will be waiting.’

‘I wonder who he is.’ Lowrie followed his master past the kirkyard gates and into the vennel which led to the Drygate. ‘Poor devil. Likely Madame Catherine will know.’

‘Indeed it is likely,’ agreed Euan. ‘Madame Catherine is knowing everything, and her not having a word of Scots, neither.’

Seated over a late dinner in the house called the Mermaiden, Gil reflected on the recent changes in his circumstances. In the last few months he had acquired a house of his own, a household, an assistant, and, more particularly, the means to support all these. He felt slightly dizzy with the speed at which it had all happened, and he was not looking forward to the next quarter’s bills, but he relished the feeling it gave him to look down the long board from his chair at its head. On his right, his young wife Alys showed her pleasure in his return from a day’s journey into Stirlingshire; on his left, Alys’s aged duenna Catherine consumed sops-in-wine with toothless dignity; at his feet his wolfhound Socrates lay hoping for crusts and crumbs. Beyond Catherine, Lowrie was just reaching for the ale-jug, Euan had returned from stabling the horses and was addressing his supper with eagerness, and further down the table the maidservants who had followed Alys one by one from her father’s house, Jennet, Kittock, Annis, and his small ward’s nurse Nancy, were chattering companionably. We need to find a serving-man or two, he reflected; I need a body-servant, and Euan is not my first choice for the task. Or even my second.

‘Mais non,’ Catherine was saying in French, ‘I had not heard of another poor soul at the Cross.’

‘They were saying at Vespers at St Nicholas’ it’s a lassie,’ offered Jennet, overhearing Lowrie’s question. ‘Out of Ayrshire, so I heard, maister, though I never got her name.’

‘A lassie!’ said Alys. ‘Oh, poor soul indeed. I wonder if she knows where she is? Does anyone watch, Gil, while someone is tied up like that? It must be terrifying, to be exposed the whole night alone.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he admitted.

‘Likely St Mungo himsel oversees all, mem, seeing it’s his cross,’ suggested Jennet. ‘I’ve aye heard it’s the custom just to tie up the poor madman and go off to St Nicholas’ chapel for the night, his friends I mean, to keep out the night air.’

Alys’s father, the French master-mason, paying a late call after the supper was cleared, agreed in part with this.

‘I had to chase both my laddies away from her,’ he said with disapproval. ‘Her friends were present, but they kept apart from the crowd once she was bound. Surely they would have done better to wait until it grew dark and the town was quiet before they put her there. She is quite young, no more than five-and-twenty, too young for such treatment.’

‘Did you speak to them?’ Alys asked. ‘Who is she? What form does her madness take?’

‘She is an Ayrshire lady named Annie Gibb,’ said her father, accepting the glass of wine which Lowrie handed to him. They had repaired to the solar at the back of the house; the sun had struck the two windows of the little chamber for most of the day, and it was still pleasantly warm. Maistre Pierre stretched his feet out comfortably and added, ‘Her servants would say little more, not even what part of Ayrshire she is come from, but I should say she is melancholy-mad. Much of her raving was of how she wished to be let die.’

‘Ah, poor soul,’ said Alys, as she had done before.

‘Gibb,’ said Gil reflectively. ‘Likely from Kyle, then, at least by origin. Well, no doubt we’ll hear in the morning. And how does our good-mother, Pierre?’

‘Ah.’ Maistre Pierre looked sideways at his daughter, and Gil braced himself inwardly. Another of the changes of the last few months was about to confront them. Two women could never agree under one roof, that was widely known; it looked as if Alys and her new stepmother would never agree in one burgh. He should not have asked the question, and yet civility required that he did.

They had first met Angus MacIain the harper and his sister Ealasaidh two years since, when the harper’s mistress, the mother of his son, had been murdered in the building site at the side of the Cathedral. By the time her killer was uncovered Gil and Alys were betrothed and the baby was Gil’s ward, but it was only this spring that Pierre and Ealasaidh had come to an understanding. It was now two months since their marriage, and it did not seem to Gil as if Alys was any closer to accepting the idea than she had been when it was first mentioned.