Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

‘Who is he?’ Gil asked. ‘Where may I speak to him?’

He was her grandsire, William Forrest, and he had been huntsman to Sir James’s great-grandsire, and Sir James still sent a purse every hunting season, which came in right handy, seeing the old man had all of his wits but no teeth and needed a wee bit extra to his feeding.

‘He’s where he aye is, sitting in at the fire in our house,’ said another woman beside her, thinner in the face but like enough to be her sister. ‘Minding the cradle.’

‘Would ye come by our bit the now and speak wi’ him, maister?’ asked Jeanie, bobbing again.

By the time the procession reached Jeanie’s house, a shouting horde of children had preceded them, warned Maister William, who was struggling to his feet beside the peat-fire, and woken the occupant of the cradle, who was roaring in displeasure. Jeanie snatched the baby up, sat down on a bench next the door, pulling at the laces which fastened her bodice and shift, and silenced it by thrusting a brownish, thumb-length dug into its mouth. Gil found himself thinking by comparison of Alys’s slight breasts and rosy nipples, and wondered how she was progressing at the coal-heugh. He put the distraction with difficulty from his mind, and turned to Jeanie’s grandfather, a gaunt, big-framed old fellow bundled in many layers of homespun woollen, topped by a shapeless knitted cape from which his scrawny neck emerged like a lizard’s, and a woollen bonnet with a fringe of white hair sticking out below its checked band.

‘Maister William,’ Gil said, raising his hat. The old man’s face split in a toothless grin at the courtesy, and he ducked shakily in response, groping for his own bonnet. Jeanie’s sister steadied him with a practised hand under his elbow. ‘Sit down, maister, I’ll not keep you standing at your age!’

‘Eighty-two next Lanimer Day,’ announced Maister William proudly, if indistinctly. ‘I was huntsman to Sir James Douglas, that was grandsire to this Douglas, ye ken.’

‘Great-grandsire,’ corrected Jeanie’s sister. ‘Sit down, Granda, like the gentleman says. He wants to ask you about this corp in the peat-cutting.’

‘I never heard of sic a thing!’ declared the old man, subsiding into his chair. ‘Where’s my cushion, Agnes? I’ve lost my cushion.’

‘It’s here, Granda.’ Agnes rammed a lumpy pad down at his back. ‘You sit nice and talk to the gentleman now.’

‘Aye, well, I will if you let him get a word in. And you can bid all these women stay outside, I’ve no wish to be deaved wi’ a gabble of women. Have a seat, sir, just take one of they stools, if you wait for my lassies to offer it you’ll wait all day. About the corp ye found, is it? No, I never heard of a corp in a peat-cutting afore.’

This topic had to be explored quite thoroughly, along with the question of how long the old man had served the earlier Sir James and his son and grandson (‘Seventy year, if you’ll credit that, sir! Seventy year I served the family, and no a day less,’ boasted Maister William, while his granddaughter shook her head in denial behind him) and his acquaintance with the man who had been huntsman to Gil’s father (‘Oh, I mind Billy Meikle. I mind him well. I taught him. And he taught you, did he, young sir?’) but eventually the conversation was brought back to the discovery in the peat-cuttings. Jeanie’s man Adam had described the find, but not clearly.

‘He’s no a huntsman, you ken,’ said Maister William disparagingly. ‘Tellt us how he was lying, so he did, and how his face was all flat wi’ the peat, but he never said how he died.’

‘Slain three times over, our Rab said,’ declared Lizzie from the doorway. Maister William turned his shoulder on her and looked hopefully at Gil, who obediently described his findings, to exclamations of shocked interest from the listening women. The old huntsman nodded approval of his account.

‘Aye, Billy’s taught you well,’ he pronounced. ‘You’ve observed well, young sir. And were his hands and feet bound at all?’

‘No,’ said Gil positively, ‘nor marked.’

‘So it’s been a sudden death,’ said the old man acutely. ‘Maybe even taken and slain where you found him.’

‘I would say so. Certainly there’s no sign he’s been held prisoner. Assuming sign like that would last,’ he qualified.

‘Aye, very true. A good point, young sir, a good point. And you want to know if there’s ever been anyone missing in the parish.’

‘I do, sir.’

Maister William nodded. He went on nodding for some time, staring into the smoke which rose from the smouldering peats. Gil began to wonder if the old man had fallen asleep, and then realized he was counting. The women at the door were discussing the same subject, but seemed to be more interested in a lassie that had run off from Braidwood ten years since, and turned up wedded to a saddler in Rutherglen, than in the men of the parish. He sat hugging his knees, tasting the various smells of the place, peat-smoke and damp earth, the smells of the cattle-stall at the other end of the house, the savoury odour of the three-footed cauldron simmering among the peats and a sharper overtone which emanated from either Maister William or the baby, who was still sucking happily and noisily. After a while the old huntsman raised his head.

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Aye, five in my time, or that I heard folk tell of, and that takes us back to King Robert’s day, afore Thorn cut its peats on that patch. No counting my mother’s brother Dandy, but he was barely fourteen.’

‘And who were they, maister?’ Gil asked. That must be over a hundred years, he realized. His memory and knowledge go back so far. I am in the presence of history.

‘Ah. Now you’re asking.’ The old man raised gnarled fingers and began to count. ‘There was Andra Simson, that was our Rab’s grandsire’s cousin at Kilncaigow, in James Second’s time. That’s right, write it down in your wee tablets. But he wasny a red-headed man, and he was a carpenter what’s more and had the marks on his hands to show for it. Did you no say this fellow’s hands and feet were soft?’

‘What happened to him?’ Gil asked. ‘How did he disappear?’

‘Andra? He was working down in Lanark, I think it was. Aye, Lanark. Set off for Kilncaigow one night from Eppie Watson’s alehouse there and never was seen again. Never seen again,’ he repeated. ‘They found his lantern, if I recall, on Kilncaigow Muir.’

‘The road from Lanark to Kilncaigow wouldny take him up here,’ said Gil thoughtfully.

‘No, it never would.’ Maister William champed his toothless jaws and cackled suddenly. ‘No unless he’d a woman up the Pow Burn that his wife never kent of!’

‘And did he?’

‘No that I heard tell,’ said the old man regretfully. ‘Then there was Tam Davison, twenty year since. Aye, the year this Sir James’s father died.’

With a little coaxing, he recounted the details of the remaining disappearances. None of them seemed promising, all were working men who might be assumed to bear the marks of one trade or another, and he was quite certain that none was red-headed. Moreover, it seemed that the peat-cutting had been in use for most of Maister William’s lifetime. The women listened intently, nodding sagely at each of the names, but as he reached the last one Jeanie said, from where she sat nursing the baby on the bench at the wall:

‘You’ve forgot the men up at the coal-heugh, Granda.’

‘They’ve never disappeared,’ he retorted. ‘You’ll no talk to me like that, you malapert hizzy. I don’t forget a thing.’

‘There was Davy Fleming’s father, so I’ve heard. Fell down one of their nasty holes, so my da said, and never found.’