Pat McIntosh - The Counterfeit Madam

‘I’ll try, mem,’ said Bess shyly. She was a pretty girl, with a quantity of fair curling hair and hazel eyes red with weeping. The sleeves of her shift and woollen kirtle were rolled up to show bare sturdy forearms, and scraps of thread clung to the folds of her skirt.

‘Tell my mistress what you were telling me the now,’ said Jennet encouragingly. ‘About the laddie at the back yett. Attie, did you cry him?’

‘Was it Attie indeed?’ said Alys, leading the way across the hall, out of earshot of the two little seamstresses.

‘It was, mem,’ said Jennet, ‘and she talked wi him till his fellow cam back for him.’

‘Let Bess tell me herself,’ said Alys, and Bess nodded.

‘That’s right, what she says, mem,’ she admitted. ‘I was talking to the laddie all the while his fellow was up the town, and then he cam back, and the two o them went away, and the next I heard was, the old dame at Canon Aiken’s was slain by one o her servants, and, and,’ she wiped at her eyes, ‘I’m fearing it was Attie, and he seemed like such a nice laddie.’

‘What was the other fellow called?’ Alys asked.

Bess paused, the new question steadying her a little.

‘Alan, I think. That’s what Attie called him.’

‘What was his errand, did you learn?’

Another pause. The girl clearly had not thought about these details before.

‘I think they said it was the ’pothecary on the High Street. That’s right,’ she said more confidently, ‘they’d a great list o messages from there, ginger and cloves and sulphur and that. Why they’d no gone to our own ’pothecary here on the Drygate they never said.’

‘What made you think it was Attie had killed their mistress?’ Alys asked gently. Bess bent her head, wiping at her eyes again, and Jennet said,

‘Och, that was what one o the other lassies tellt her. She was down the drying-shed, this other one, see, where the blankets go when they come back fro the fuller’s, right at the foot o the yard next the back gate.’ Alys nodded. It made sense for the damp fulled wool to stay where it came onto the property, rather than be carried up the slope to where it might make other items musty. ‘And she heard some folk arguing on the path, just through the wall, see, that were running away from their employ because their mistress was dead.’

‘I need to speak to that lassie myself,’ said Alys.

The second girl was a rather different proposition, something which was obvious as soon as Mistress Graham, hearing her name, announced that Alys would be very welcome to go out to the weaving-shed to speak to Ibbot. Called from her loom in the busy shed, the girl bounced over to the door, shaking back dark elf-locks and smirking at Bess in a way Alys disliked immediately.

‘Oh, aye, mem, I heard them,’ she averred. ‘Talking all kind o treason, they were, and plotting how to be rid of what they’d stole.’

‘What did you hear?’ Alys asked. ‘How many were they?’

‘Two,’ she said. ‘Oh, and a woman and all.’

‘And they spoke in Scots?’

‘What else would they speak?’ Ibbot retorted.

‘You be civil to my mistress,’ said Jennet at Alys’s elbow. ‘Tell her what they were saying, what you heard.’

‘I’m telling her, am I no? So there was two o them, and a woman, and they stopped just by the drying-shed, and I could hear as clear as day through the cracks in the planks, see, and they were arguing what they should do next. One said, Why are we running , and another said, The old witch is dead, or so she says, are you wanting the blame for it? Then he says, We must be rid o — something, and the other said, Aye and something else and all , I never learned what it was,’ she said with regret, ‘and the woman says, They’ll seek for us, where will we go? ’

The nearest weaver rested her shuttle a moment and said,

‘She’s been on about that these two days, mem, never heed her.’

‘You keep out o this, Mamie Elliott!’ retorted Ibbot. ‘Just in cause you never heard anything like.’

‘Aye, well, she’s aye making trouble, mem,’ said the weaver, and kicked at the treadle of her loom. A heddle lifted, the threads parted, and she took up her work again.

‘Did you hear any names?’ Alys asked, before Ibbot could continue the argument.

‘Oh, aye, that’s how I kent it for her sweetheart,’ said Ibbot, jerking her thumb at Bess with an unpleasant air of triumph. ‘The woman had some heathen name, Ersche or the like I dare say, and one o the men was Alan, so who would the other ha been but his fellow that she was speaking to? Attie, or whatever she cried him.’

‘You never heard his name used?’ said Alys.

‘No, but who could it ha been else?’ repeated the girl.

‘You never keeked through the cracks?’ Jennet said in faint disbelief.

‘Aye, but they must ha heard me, for they went away,’ said Ibbot. ‘I got naught but a glimp of their backs. Blue velvet livery, they wore.’

‘So you heard,’ said Alys, ‘two men in blue velvet, one called Alan, and a woman with an Ersche name, running away because their mistress was dead, and speaking of how they must be rid of something.’

‘Two things. Maybe more. One o them said these and the other one said this and all . Likely they’d stole her purse or her jewel-box.’ Ibbot smirked again. What lay between the two girls, Alys wondered.

‘Is that all you heard?’ she asked. ‘Did they say where they were going?’

‘Oh, aye. Am I no telling you? For the one man said to the woman, Here, you take that back , and she said, Where to? and he said, The potyngar away down the High Street , and she said, Where will I get you after? Then they argued a bit more, and it fell out she was to get them somewhere they said was handy for the potyngar’s, and then the other man said, We need to be rid of these first, I’m no walking through the town in it , and then they went away.’

‘Ah,’ said Alys. ‘Thank you, Ibbot.’

‘So I’m right, am I no? Him that she’s a fancy to has slain his mistress and run off, and the Serjeant’s seeking him now?’

‘No,’ said Alys. ‘Attie is still wi Maister Livingstone, who trusts him.’ I won’t say just how well, she thought, anything to wipe that smirk off this girl’s face. ‘It must be two of the other men you heard.’

Ibbot snorted, tossed the black elf-locks like a refractory pony, and flounced away. Beside Alys, Bess put out a hand to grasp the doorpost and said faintly,

‘Oh, is that true, mem? Is he really safe?’

‘Aye it’s true!’ said Jennet stoutly. ‘If my mistress says it, you can be sure it’s right.’ She lent a sturdy arm as the other girl swayed, and helped her to the nearest weaver’s stool, hurriedly vacated, as work halted and whispers spread across the shed.

‘There, lass,’ said the woman whose seat she occupied, seizing a limp hand to chafe it with sympathy, ‘all’s well after all, you were right to be sure o him. You’ll see your laddie again, never doubt it.’

‘And what you’ve told me will help indeed,’ Alys said. ‘Thank you, Bess.’

‘More questions, is it?’ said Forveleth, staring through the shadows of the cell.

‘More questions,’ said Alys. ‘And some food. I think you may not have eaten today.’

‘That’s a true word.’ The woman laughed rather bitterly. ‘At least they fed me last night at the Castle. This great lump of a man would be sparing no food for his prisoners, I think.’

Alys made no reply, but drew the loaf and the meat pasty from her basket and set them on Forveleth’s folded plaid. She had pursued the woman from the Castle to the Tolbooth with some misgivings, knowing that the Serjeant would be far less likely to allow her to speak to the prisoner than either the Provost or his captain, and had hit on this as a means of access. To her surprise it had worked.