Pat McIntosh - A Pig of Cold Poison

He turned to her, took the hand and patted it reassuringly.

‘I’ll not be long,’ he promised her. ‘Stay with our good-sister the now, mistress.’

He strode out of the open door. His footsteps did not check; whoever had cast that shadow must have moved on. For a moment everyone in the chamber stood as if turned to stone; then Father James said, ‘Not for us to question the ways of Heaven, my son. If this poor boy was poisoned, and deliberately, the miscreant must be found, but your chief duty to your son now is to pray for the remission of his sins, to shorten his time in Purgatory.’

‘No, it’s to find who sent him there and see them hang for it,’ said Renfrew. He jerked his head at his older daughter, who was now sitting weeping quietly. ‘I’ve no doubt she could do wi your comfort the now, though why she’s bubbling like that, when she never had a civil word for the laddie when he was alive, is more than I can tell you. As for you,’ he said angrily to Gil, ‘come and show me these cherries you say slew my boy.’

The three maidservants were still in the shop, staring nervously about them. The oldest bobbed a curtsy as her master entered, saying, ‘Is he — is the laddie —?’

‘Dead,’ said Renfrew curtly, at which they all crossed themselves and one began weeping again. Renfrew snarled and ordered them out, then stopped them to ask whether they had touched anything.

‘No likely,’ said the third one, sniffing dolefully, ‘if something in here slew the poor laddie, that knew what was here, we’d no ken what was pyson and what wasny.’

‘Mind your tongue, Jess,’ said her master, ‘and get back to your duties, the whole parcel of ye. Now, maister, where was these cherries?’

‘Cherries?’ The weeping girl stopped in the doorway, looking back. ‘Was it cherries that slew the poor laddie?’

‘So it’s claimed,’ said Renfrew, peering under the counter. ‘Was it these?’ He lifted a small box, the kind of woven chip box commonly used to hold sweetmeats. Gil took it from him. It was more than half empty, holding five marchpane cherries and a scattering of the sugar they had been rolled in before they were boxed up.

‘They look no different from the usual,’ said Renfrew. He looked up. ‘Here, Babtie, what are you standing about for? Get to your duties.’

‘Was the cherries pysont?’ asked Babtie faintly. ‘Oh, maister, never say so!’

‘Did you eat one?’ asked Gil.

‘We all did,’ she confessed, twisting her hands in her apron. ‘We thought no — we thought — cherries is cherries, no like all the other things in the shop — ’

‘Well, that’ll learn you no to steal from your maister,’ said Renfrew. ‘And Jess saying you’d touched nothing, I canny believe a word you women say.’

‘Robert ate one without harm,’ Gil said. ‘It was the second one which killed him. They may not all be poisoned.’

‘But they might be,’ said Babtie. ‘Oh, maister — oh, what will I do — ’

‘You’ll go and get on wi your duties,’ said Renfrew, ‘for if the one you stole was pysont you’d be on the floor by now. Get away with you, lassie! What a tirravee about nothing, and my laddie lying there dead!’

The woman turned away, moving like a sleepwalker, and disappeared into the depths of the house. Renfrew snorted.

‘She’s frightened,’ Gil said.

‘She’s a fool, and a thief,’ said Renfrew.

Gil looked down at the cherries, tightening his mouth on a comment. ‘How are these things made?’ he asked instead.

‘My daughters make them. Dried cherries, I suppose, crystallized, and then stuffed with marchpane.’

‘Yes.’ Gil tilted the box so that the cherries rolled around. ‘Look at this. These four are the same as one another, but this one — ’ He looked round. ‘I’d rather not touch it. Is there a stick, or something?’

‘Here.’ Renfrew led him into the workroom. Searching briefly in a jar of instruments on the bench by the window, he handed Gil a small pair of tongs and a copper rod. ‘What have you spied? They all come out different, you’ll realize, for that all cherries is different and takes a different quantity of marchpane to fill them.’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Gil. ‘See this.’ He turned the sweetmeat, gripped it carefully with the tongs, and pointed. ‘The marchpane in the others is smooth, this one looks as if it’s been …’ He paused, searching for a word. ‘Reworked,’ he finished. ‘As if the marchpane has been broken open and mended again. Or perhaps …’ He paused again, and Renfrew snorted.

‘Or there’s been mice at it, or a cockatrice has laid an egg in it,’ he said sourly.

‘Not a cockatrice,’ said Gil thoughtfully, ‘but — may I have a wee fine knife, maister, and a dish of some sort?’

‘What are you after?’ demanded Renfrew. ‘I’ve matters to see to, maister. I can’t be standing about here watching you learn yoursel potyngary.’

Gil ignored this, accepted the implements the older man handed him, transferred the suspect sweetmeat to the pottery dish, and sliced it carefully in two. The halves fell apart, mirror images, the dark flesh of the cherry cupping the round ball of marchpane with the small, milky, oozing patch at its centre. The apothecary stared grimly at it.

‘Not a cockatrice,’ said Gil again, ‘but a rod like this one, I’d say, used to make a hole in the marchpane, then a drop of the poison placed into the hole and the marchpane mended over the top of it. That would be how Robert could take one bite with no harm,’ he realized. ‘The poison must have been in the other half of the marchpane. Do you see?’

‘Aye,’ said Maister Renfrew after a moment. ‘I see.’ He moved away from Gil and sat down on a stool at the end of the workbench. ‘I see plenty,’ he said. ‘Which of them can it have been? And was it meant for my laddie indeed? He’d a right sweet tooth, a box of those things left open under the bench wouldny be safe from him. No that he’d have taken a fresh box from the stock,’ he added defensively. Gil nodded, in complete disbelief of the encomium. ‘Aye, I’ll accept this as evidence, maister. It tells me clear enough, there’s someone in my household willing to use pyson on another.’ He turned his face away.

‘One of your household,’ said Gil with considerable sympathy, ‘and aimed at your son. Who dislikes him that much?’

‘You expect me to answer that?’

‘And what was the poison, do you suppose?’Gil persisted. Renfrew shook his head without looking round. ‘Maister Syme said it looked to be the same as what killed Danny Gibson. Wat Forrest thinks that might be something made from almonds, but he doesn’t know any more than that.’

‘Almonds?’ The other man visibly pulled himself together, to attend to the conversation. ‘And here was Grace giving the laddie almond milk? Well, he’d got his death long before we bore him through to the house. I never heard of a pyson made wi almonds.’

‘So everyone says,’ Gil commented. He looked at the evidence on the bench, and then at Renfrew’s back, still resolutely turned.

‘Well, well.’ A loud voice, a loud tread. Serjeant Anderson, entering by the house door, stepping into the shop and across to the workroom. ‘Aye, Maister Renfrew. I hear there’s been a murder. More pyson, is it? And you couldny save your own neither? Well, man, I’m sorry to hear it, sorry for your loss,’ he added more civilly. ‘And you again, Maister Cunningham. I suppose it’s no wonder I’m aye finding you where there’s been a murder, but you’d have to admit it doesny look good.’

‘Serjeant.’ Renfrew got to his feet. He seemed to have aged by twenty years since he had returned from hearing Mass. ‘He’s ben the house. Come and see him.’