Pat McIntosh - The Counterfeit Madam

‘Aye, well, if you’d let me put him on a rope you’d ha no need to worry,’ retorted Sempill, and clattered off into the night towards Rottenrow, his men behind him. Lowrie watched him go, lit by the lanterns on successive house-corners, and said to Philip, ‘Likely we’ll deal better without him, but we might need his witness about the property and the silver mine.’

‘He might prefer not to give it,’ said Alys. Philip made no comment. ‘Luke, leave your horse with Tam and go on home, and you can tell them where we are.’

‘What, here on the Stablegreen?’ said Luke blankly, and she realized the boy was nearly asleep, and Berthold was completely comatose in Tam’s grasp.

‘We’ll be at the Castle,’ she said. ‘Go on now, and tell them in the kitchen to put some food aside for me.’

Andrew Otterburn, roused from a domestic evening by his own fireside, was at first startled to be presented with a half-naked prisoner, but when he grasped who the man might be he was delighted.

‘We’ll get someone to identify him,’ he said, as Miller was manhandled away across the courtyard, struggling as fiercely as he had done outside St Machan’s. ‘The trouble the Clerk’s Land folk have caused me the day, it’s no pain to me to get one o them out to put a name to this fellow. Walter, see to it, will you, and see these beasts baited. And find someone that speaks High Dutch and all, maybe speir at the College if there’s none o the men.’

‘Or send to my father,’ suggested Alys. Walter nodded and hurried off.

‘And who’s the laddie, anyway?’ asked the Provost.

‘It’s a long tale,’ said Lowrie. ‘May we sit down? And might we beg a bite to eat? The laddie’s likely fasting since this morning, and the rest of us, well, it’s long while since dinner.’

‘Aye, come up, come up to my chamber and we’ll see to it,’ said Otterburn, but Alys was not listening. Socrates had pricked his ears and rushed away across the courtyard. Light shifted under the arch of the gatehouse, hasty feet echoed, and a tall figure with a lantern emerged into the torchlight, paused to look about, and made straight for where she stood, the dog dancing round him. Gil had come for her.

Neither of them spoke. A quick smile, a searching look exchanged in the torchlight, and they turned to follow Otterburn, hands brushing lightly back to back. But suddenly she felt she could go on for as long again.

The tale took a while. Food appeared, bread and cold meat and the remains of an onion tart, with a huge jug of ale; she ate, the jug went round, and Lowrie embarked on a competent and precise account of what had passed that day. Otterburn listened well, she thought. He asked a few pertinent questions, called Frank in to explain his part. That was when she realized that she and Gil, Lowrie and Philip Sempill, were the only ones in the Provost’s chamber; the servants and the boy Berthold had been left in the antechamber.

‘Have the men something to eat?’ she asked, interrupting Frank’s account of the capture of their prisoner. A grin spread across his face.

‘Our Lady love you, mistress, aye, we have. Much what you have here,’ he nodded at the laden tray, ‘so long as that greedy Sim hasny finished it afore I’m done here.’

‘Get on wi your tale, then,’ said the Provost, ‘and you’ll catch up wi him the sooner.’

‘Aye well, it’s soon ended,’ admitted Frank, ‘for that’s about all. Save for the man getting loose again, and Mistress Mason here capturing him. And then-’

‘I did not!’ she protested. Gil leaned away to look down at her, concern in his face. Socrates, sprawled across their feet, raised his head, then went back to sleep. ‘It was all of you took and bound him.’

‘Aye, once you’d fell on him and winded him,’ said Frank admiringly. ‘A neat trick that, mistress, I’d like to ken who taught you it.’

‘The drop-dead trick,’ she explained to Gil. He nodded, and she saw she would not get to sleep tonight without giving him a complete tale.

‘Then we stripped the man Miller, while he was in his swound,’ said Lowrie, ‘and while Sempill of Muirend set to questioning him I made an inventory of his goods, and found this in his spoirean .’ He drew the blue velvet purse from the breast of his doublet, and leaned to set it on the desk before Otterburn. The Provost looked at it gloomily for a long moment.

‘Well, well,’ he said finally to Gil. ‘Here’s us searching Glasgow and the Gallowgate, putting a watch on the ports, crying the fellow at the Cross, and your lassie falls on him out the sky and fetches him home.’

Gil’s arm was round her again. ‘I’d expect no less.’

Otterburn looked at them both with the hint of a smile, but all he said was,

‘And John Sempill questioned him, did he? What did he learn fro the man?’

‘Little,’ said Lowrie. ‘He denies all, or answers nothing.’

‘It’s a great pity John isny here to tell us himself,’ observed Gil.

‘He went home,’ said Alys. ‘I thought,’ she said slowly, assembling her recollections, ‘I thought he knew the man. When he asked his name, the man said, You’re asking me? As if he was surprised. And even before that, Sempill was very determined to hang him out of hand. He was very angry when we insisted on bringing him here to justice.’

Otterburn’s gaze went from her to Gil, and then to Philip Sempill, while Lowrie said,

‘You could be right at that, mistress.’

Philip said nothing, but his face darkened in the candlelight under Otterburn’s steady stare. After a moment the Provost said, raising his voice a little,

‘Right, Walter, how’re you getting on wi those tasks I set you?’

His clerk stepped in from the antechamber, looking smug.

‘It’s the man Miller right enough, maister,’ he said, ‘named afore witnesses and writ down on oath. As for what he swore he’d do to the woman that named him, well, it’s as well her Scots isny that good.’

‘She understood what she swore to?’ said Gil sharply.

‘I’m no caring,’ said Otterburn over Walter’s assurances. ‘She’s sworn and that’s that. And the interpreter?’

The interpreter proved to be one of the men-at-arms, a sturdy fairish man introduced as Lappy, which surely must be a nickname. He claimed he had spent time at the wars in High Germany and learned some of the language. Alys had doubts about the man’s vocabulary, but Berthold, roused and brought through, understood the first questions put to him clearly enough. The boy seemed so stunned by the events of the day that he did not react with surprise, but nor did he answer. A spate of words tumbled out, clearly a question of his own, and another.

‘Haud on!’ said the interpreter. ‘I’m no that fast.’ He paused, putting the words into Scots. ‘He’s asking, maister, what o his faither and his uncle, when are they to be buried, will he can get to the burial? Is that right, they’re dead?’

‘Tell him,’ said Otterburn, before Alys could speak, ‘if he answers my questions, I’ll see about it. Then ask him again why he’s in Scotland and what they were doing.’

The boy’s eyes turned to Otterburn, then to Alys. He spoke to Lappy, sounding surprised.

‘He says, did the other man no tell you? It was him called them here, he thinks, and him that gave them orders.’

‘Other man,’ said Otterburn flatly. ‘Does he mean the man Miller? The prisoner?’

‘ Nein, nein! ’ said Berthold as Lappy translated. ‘ Der böse Mann! ’ He pulled an angry, sulky face.

‘John Sempill!’ said Alys and Lowrie together.

‘I’m feart he’s right,’ said Philip.