Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

It took her some time, but at last she handed him the stone, with an air which made him feel what it said was very important. He studied it carefully. The wet surface was much-marked already, with earlier inscriptions partly excised, and the uneven letters were hard to make out. Her spelling was imaginative and there were no breaks in the staggering sequence, but after a moment he decided that RBEL probably meant Arbella. But what did the rest mean? It appeared to read PYSHNUW. After a moment enlightenment dawned, along with surprise that a girl from such a family would use this sort of coarseness.

‘You’re telling me Arbella dislikes me too? Holds me in contempt?’ And yet she was civil enough to my face, he thought. Bel stared at him, open-mouthed, and suddenly shook her head, snatched the slate out of his hand and stuffed it back into her purse, then turned, her back radiating fury, and marched away through the flowers.

‘Bel!’ he called after her. ‘Come back, lassie, I’ll take you home out of the rain.’

She went on, ignoring him.

‘Bel! Are you safe out here on your lone?’

She swung round, stared at him, then rotated one finger by her temple in a universal sign and continued on her way. Reluctant to pursue her across the hillside, he gathered his wits and prepared to go back up to the waiting horses. The road to Blackness beckoned.

A gleam in the grass caught his eye from where the girl had been standing. He made his way towards it, and found her slate, lodged in a clump of flowers and shining in the light. It must have missed her purse in her haste. He bent to pick it up and turned it in his hand. None of the other inscriptions was clear enough to read more than a letter or two; only the comment about Arbella stood out.

With a feeling of having missed something important, he put the object into his purse and made his way up to the track, where man and beasts waited for him, heads down against the increasing rain.

‘Can we get on now, Maister Gil?’ asked Patey ‘Just it’s ower cold to be standing about like this.’

‘We’ll go by the Pow Burn,’ said Gil, reclaiming his reins and mounting. ‘I must let them know where that lassie is. I should have left my plaid over this saddle,’ he added, as the damp leather struck cold through his hose.

‘What was she doing wi’ all the waving her arms?’ asked Patey curiously. He demonstrated, causing Gil’s horse to shy.

‘Watch what you’re about, man! That’s how she talks. She was telling me about her grandam and Murray.’

‘I see. She canny wag her tongue, so she wags her arms instead.’ Patey grinned at his own joke. ‘What did you say to her then, maister, that she lost her temper wi’ you? Maybe I can guess!’

Gil stared at him in revulsion, and he fell silent and after a moment mumbled an apology of sorts.

‘So I should think,’ Gil said. ‘If there’s another word like that out of you, I’ll be having a talk with Henry when we get back to Belstane.’ Patey muttered something else. ‘Well, hold your tongue then.’

He spurred his horse forward along the track towards the colliery, without looking back to see if the groom followed him.

The surfacemen were just breaking off for their midday bite when he came over the hillside. Eight or ten men were gathering in the shelter of the smithy, round the fire. On the path which led down from the thatched row of cottages was a procession of children, bareheaded despite the rain, each bearing a father’s or brother’s meal: a wooden bowl with a kale-leaf over it, a plate covered by a cloth, a small package wrapped in dock-leaves. The men underground must take their food in with them and eat it cold, he conjectured.

He dismounted on the cobbled area before the house and looked about, hoping to find one of the family. It seemed likely that the household would be sitting down to eat as well, and he had no wish to interrupt the meal. To his relief, Mistress Lithgo appeared at the door of her stillroom, and came to meet him.

‘Maister Cunningham,’ she said, and nodded in answer to his greeting. ‘What brings you here? Can we do aught for you? Will you stay for a bite?’

‘No, no, I won’t stay,’ he said. ‘I want to get to Blackness today. I met your daughter Bel all on her own over the hill yonder, and thought I should let you know where she was.’

‘On her own,’ she said, sounding annoyed. ‘She will go off like that on her grandam’s errands, and I canny teach her it’s no safe at her age. My thanks, sir. I’ll send her brother after her. And my thanks to your lady mother,’ she added, ‘for his bed and dole last night. He came in an hour or two since.’

‘My dear, you needny trouble about Bel,’ said Arbella’s sweet voice. Gil turned, to see her emerging from the building Phemie had identified as the mine office. ‘I sent her to gather what we need for the spring tonic. She’ll not go far, she’ll be quite safe.’ She approached, leaning on a stick and moving carefully on her high wooden pattens. Her plaid, hitched up over her wired headdress against the rain, hung down in dark folds to her knees, and under it her other hand held her petticoats up out of the grey-black mud. She looked like a mourner at a funeral. ‘But it was right kind of you to let us know,’ she added, smiling at Gil. ‘Was that all that brought you here? I hope you’ve not rid out of your way for my wee lassie?’

‘I was concerned for her,’ he explained. ‘I stopped to speak to her, and something I said annoyed her and she marched off down the burn towards the low shielings.’

Bel’s mother gave him a raking glance, then visibly relaxed.

‘Aye, times she’s like that,’ she admitted. ‘She angers easily, with not being able to say what she wants.’

‘We’d managed fine up to that. She told me clearly how you’d sent her with a gift for Murray just before he left here, madam.’

Arbella’s finely drawn eyebrows rose. ‘Did she so? You’re perceptive, Maister Cunningham, if you grasped that from her. And are you any nearer finding Thomas for us? To tell truth, since my dear Joanna’s out of hearing, I’m beginning to be a wee bit concerned that we’ve heard nothing.’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’m on my way to Blackness now, to track down your two sinkers. The word in Forth is that they’ve gone over there to their kin — ’

‘Aye, William Wood that would be,’ agreed Beatrice, nodding.

‘To Blackness?’ said Arbella. ‘In all this rain? You’re going to a deal of trouble for my household, maister. Can we do anything for you while you’re here? We’re about to sit down to dinner — will you join us?’

‘No, no, I want to get on my road, I’ll not disturb your meal,’ he assured her, and then, as a memory surfaced, ‘I’d like a look inside your chapel, if I might. Fleming said something about it.’

‘Fleming!’ Arbella said witheringly, and reached for the bunch of keys at her belt. ‘I’m greatly disappointed in that man, you know, sir. After all I did for him, to turn and accuse my good-daughter in such a way.’ She began moving towards the little wattle-and-daub building. Beatrice nodded to Gil and retreated into her stillroom again.

‘You did him a favour?’

‘I did. I knew his father well, sir, a good man and a clever, and died here, Our Lady save him.’ She crossed herself, her keys clinking. ‘And so Davy was left without sponsor. It was I persuaded Douglas to give him his uncle’s place.’ She unlocked the door of the chapel and stepped inside. ‘And well he’s repaid me for it, too, one way and another.’ She bowed stiffly to the crucified Christ on the altar, and again to a brightly painted figure of St Ninian with his broken chain, perched on a shelf behind it. ‘Forever trying to direct me in the manage of this place and my family. Would you believe, sir, he tried to tell me my grandson would never make a scholar, and I should give him charge here instead of Murray!’