Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

Michael shrugged. ‘I’ll not ask the lads to do aught I’d not do myself. Will I …?’

‘He’s still in there, is he?’ asked one of the Cauldhope men, the back of his hand across his nose. ‘Or is the pig dead? It stinks like the Devil’s midden.’

‘No pig,’ said Gil. ‘One of the goats has died, likely while it was kidding, but that’s not the worst of it.’ Another of the men bent and threw a stone as he spoke, and something rustled off into the undergrowth at the gable of the house. ‘There are rats.’

‘Should we no raise the hue and cry?’ asked the man who had spoken already.

‘Whoever did this is long out of reach,’ said Gil. The owl in the tree screeched as if in mockery, and several of the men glanced up and crossed themselves. ‘I want a look at the scene with another witness first. We can go up to Bonnington after that.’

Michael swallowed hard and braced his shoulders.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Shall we …?’

He followed Gil across the doorsill and stepped aside to let the light in. Gil watched his face as he stared round, seeing him take in the detail he himself had noted. By the cold hearth in the centre of the room lay an iron cooking-pot, on its side and empty. Beyond the hearth a carved chair and a stool were set to a small table, on which lay empty dishes, two knives and spoons, an overturned beaker. The light gleamed on a flat silver flask. Another beaker lay on the chair as if it had rolled there, and a glazed pottery bottle was overturned on the floor beside a muddle of small bones.

‘A meal,’ said Michael. ‘For two. So has Murray been here?’

‘He came here,’ agreed Gil. ‘Where’s the food? The scraps, the food in the pot?’

‘The rats must have got it.’ Michael looked round again. ‘And everything else they could get into. Butter dish, cheese crock, the flitch over the fire. Filthy creatures.’

‘So I thought,’ agreed Gil. ‘What else can you see?’

‘Where’s our man?’ Michael peered into the shadows. ‘Is he in here? Along the end wi’ the goat?’

‘Not so far as that.’ Gil looked deliberately at the solid box of the bed which separated the living end of the house from the animals’ quarters. Michael stepped forward cautiously, and recoiled with an exclamation of horror as he made out what lay there.

‘Christ aid!’ he said, crossing himself. And then, looking closer, ‘Oh, Christ and Our Lady save us, there’s two of them.’ He turned to Gil, sudden tears glittering at his eyes in the dim light. ‘Is it Murray and his leman, dead in the one moment? Has Syme slain them and run to Edinburgh?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gil in sympathy. His first reaction had also been pity, though it had not moved him quite to tears. ‘Look closer, would you, if you can bear it.’

Michael took a hesitant step nearer, wadding his handkerchief over his nose, and studied what was visible. After a moment he drew back.

‘It needs a light of some sort,’ he said. ‘That’s Murray in at the wall, right enough, is it no? You can see the red hair still clinging to … to …’

‘Yes,’ agreed Gil. ‘I think that’s our man, right enough.’ He came to stand beside Michael and looked at the bed, the back of his hand to his nose.

Over a month had passed since the two bodies there were warm and live; what the rats, the insects, the fox and time itself had left, tattered and shrunken flesh and naked bones, was still recognizable as human, but little more than that. Two skulls with a little skin still attached, the eye sockets dark and empty, stared into the shadows. As Michael had said, one was identifiable by the hanks of red hair still attached to the taut yellow scalp, though neither Joanna nor anyone else would recognize the face. Two sets of shoulder-bones, two ribcages were tilted inwards as if the lovers had been talking, or as if, Gil thought with another surge of pity, they had realized what was happening and turned to each other for reassurance in the last moments. A linen sheet was under them, and another was drawn over them nearly to waist level, both stained beyond redemption. Brownish skin and drying sinews clung over the joints, keeping the limbs articulated, and though the rats had made off with the fingers and part of the hand, one could still make out the tenderness in the gesture with which the red-haired corpse had laid one arm over the broad shoulders of his bedfellow.

‘But this one,’ said Michael. ‘This is a man and all. The hair’s shorter than mine, look at those shoulders. It’s got no paps. It’s a man!’ He turned to Gil in astonishment and horror. ‘It’s two men. Maister Gil, is that his leman? The forester?’

‘I think it must be,’ agreed Gil.

‘You mean we’ve gone through all this for a pair of kything kitterel — ’ He broke off, still staring at Gil over the wadded handkerchief. ‘And him a married man, too!’

‘Every one of us deserves time for amendment of life,’ said Gil, noting this reaction with interest. So there’s still innocence abroad, he thought. Or did I simply learn far more in Paris than I was sent for? ‘Not to mention,’ he added, ‘that we need to work out what happened here. How do you read it, Michael?’

‘Some things there’s no amending,’ said Michael. He drew back from the bed, and gazed round again. ‘They’ve died in the same moment,’ he hazarded, ‘or near it.’

‘We canny tell that,’ said Gil. ‘Near it, I’ll allow.’

‘And which of them was the catamite?’ wondered Michael. ‘A collier and a forester — how could either one of them …?’

‘No way to tell,’ said Gil.

‘Perhaps they took it in turns,’ speculated Michael with distaste.

It was, Gil felt, a matter for the priests to worry about; there was no way to guess from the way the bodies were disposed which man had played the woman’s part, endangering his immortal soul and inviting the opprobrium which few would apply to his partner. His concern was more practical: how had the two men died?

‘Start at the beginning. Did you have time to discern aught outside, afore I dragged you in here?’

Michael paused to consider. ‘The forester’s cart’s standing there. Likely he came home from his day’s work to find this one here.’

‘So I thought,’ agreed Gil. ‘His knives are lying out there in his scrip, rusting with the rain where he dropped them.’

Michael shut his eyes, apparently to visualize something the better.

‘He came home, and his nancy was here waiting for him. They came into the house, and had a meal. They went into the bed — where’s their clothes?’ he asked, opening his eyes.

‘Yonder by the bed-foot, all in the one tangle.’ Gil nodded at the shadows. ‘I think the goats have been at them. You know the way they’ll eat linen.’

‘St Peter’s bones! Where are the brutes, anyway? I canny abide goats, the way they leer at you.’

As if on a cue, small hooves clipped on the cobbles and the leader of the little flock peered in at the open door. Michael waved his arms and shouted, and the creature gave him a look of ineffable contempt, turned and pattered away. Her companions followed her, the kid bleating anxiously for its mother.

‘Then what?’ prompted Gil.

Michael, recalled to his task, clamped his handkerchief over his nose, closed his eyes again, and offered indistinctly, ‘Then they died. Both together, or one after the other, as you please.’

‘ O lusty gallands gay,’ Gil quoted, ‘ full laichly thus sall ly thy lusty held. But why? Why would two grown men fall dead in an afternoon?’

‘Afternoon?’

‘I’d say they bedded well before nightfall,’ Gil observed. ‘If it was near dark Syme would have seen to his beasts, surely, milked the goats and shut the hens in, rather than have to rise and fetch them in later.’