Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

‘Oh,’ said Gil, his mind racing. ‘Oh, I’ve heard of that. It’s caused by excess of cold moist food, isn’t it?’

‘So the doctors say,’ agreed Alys drily. ‘I’m less certain. You would think every man who drank more ale than is good for him would catch it, if so.’

‘But why not tell him? He needs to know — to set his life in order, make a will if he has aught to leave.’

‘Mistress Lithgo says she tried, when she first recognized it, but he wouldn’t listen. She thinks perhaps that’s where his thoughts of witchcraft have come from — that he’s decided she was threatening him rather than warning him of his death.’

‘That would make sense,’ Gil said, still thinking hard.

‘But Phemie admitted,’ she hesitated, then went on, ‘that he became familiar with her and with Bel. Pawing at them, attempting to kiss them. This was last autumn, when he was teaching them Latin.’ She smiled. ‘Phemie and the little Morison girl would get on well. She told me she reckoned she could deal with him herself, but when he started on her sister she went to their grandam about it, and the lessons ended.’

‘Ah!’ Gil looked at the light through the golden wine in his glass, and grinned, thinking of his sister Kate and her younger stepdaughter. ‘And yet he consulted their mother about his ills this spring.’

‘Many men take it for granted they can behave like that.’

‘Murray seems to have done the same.’

‘No, I think not,’ she said seriously. ‘He was courting Phemie, until they all learned how Joanna would be placed in Mistress Weir’s will, I think I told you that.’ He nodded. ‘But I cannot learn that he did other than kiss her on the lips. I asked Kate Paterson about him, too, when I told her that her brothers are well. She seemed unconcerned about them, but she told me that Murray jokes — joked a lot with the lassies in the miners’ row, but no more than talk, and pinching cheeks, and the like, whereas they warn one another not to be alone with David Fleming. It seems his father was the same, by what one of the older women said.’

‘Jamesie Meikle said much the same about Murray — that the women say he’s free with his hands. That would make sense, as a defence of sorts.’

‘A defence? Putting up a false face, you mean? To prevent anyone suspecting he was — Italian in his preferences.’ He nodded again, and she went on, ‘You know, Gil, I find that extraordinary. I have known — I have seen men in Paris, who were said to be like that, but that was in a great city. How would someone out here in the countryside learn such practices?’

‘It isn’t like that,’ said Gil awkwardly. It was not a subject he found easy to discuss with his wife; he suddenly understood why the songmen of the cathedral took refuge in coarse jokes about it. ‘Anywhere young men are gathered together, it happens between some of them.’ She glanced sharply at him, but said nothing. ‘Most grow out of it, but a few. .’

‘I see,’ she said after a moment. ‘I still find it strange. And he managed to conceal it well. Joanna, who was wedded to him, seems to have had no idea of it. He was her second man, after all, she must have known what to expect of him, and today I managed to lead the talk to — to how people are expected to go with child within weeks of the wedding. We found we think alike on the subject, and, and …’ She paused, apparently having difficulty completing the sentence.

‘And you’d think,’ he supplied, ‘that if he wasn’t doing his part she might have let on.’

‘Between the two of us like that, yes,’ she agreed gratefully. ‘And I repeated something one of the women in Carluke kirk said to me about the same thing, and she agreed with it.’

‘Alys, have a care,’ he warned her. ‘I believe someone poisoned Thomas Murray, of deliberate malice, and until we know who — ’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I am very careful what I say to any of them. But we may still learn something from one or another, and I keep hoping for a look at the accounts. It could tell us a lot about the business, and I think that may be important.’

‘There’s more than that, sweetheart. Remember I have still to go back and question them all. Justice doesn’t allow for friendships.’

‘I know,’ she said again. ‘I can be dispassionate too, Gil.’

He smiled down at the top of her head where the candlelight shone on her hair, and sipped his wine. It was dry, with a sharp taste of flowers about it, a surprising thing in the middle of the night.

‘But has she admitted she feared Murray? Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to gossip about her own affairs. I believe some women don’t.’

‘No,’ she said, and was silent for a little. He sat still, relishing the feel of her against his flank, drank some more wine and considered what she had just said. He had warned her against getting involved with the Crombie women on a protective reflex, but if she could discuss such a subject, one which she found difficult herself, and analyse Joanna’s part in the conversation like this, then she was quite right, she could be dispassionate too.

‘Did you learn anything else?’ he asked after a space.

‘I talked with Phemie for a while, about how coal is hewn. Gil, it is astonishing. One puts coal on the fire and never thinks of how it’s won, of the difficulties working under the ground in the dark, and the dangers, and the way the coal behaves. Sometimes it simply vanishes, thins down and disappears into the rock, and other times it starts small and suddenly becomes thick enough for a man to stand up in the working. And she showed me — did you know they find fishes and shells in it? And pieces of tree-trunk, and flattened leaves, all wrought in coal?’

‘I’ve heard of that too. Surely they’re not real? The colliers make them in their spare time to show to the credulous.’

‘She showed me one,’ Alys said, ‘a little fish, with all its fins and scales, and a man who could work anything like that, so fine and exact, should be earning more than a collier gets. No, truly I think it is God’s own handiwork, set in the coal. I asked if I might have one to keep, and she said she would speak to the colliers.’ She stretched, and set her wineglass down on the stool by the bed. ‘And we talked of Murray and how he ran the heugh. It seems as if he has been an honest grieve enough, Gil, though with a knack for angering folk.’

‘Did you encounter young Crombie?’

‘He rode out while I was talking to Mistress Lithgo. He came in to take leave, and was civil, but I had no conversation with him. I think from what they said to one another he had been trying to persuade his grandam to let him leave the college and run the place instead of Murray.’

‘Instead of Murray? Do you think they knew already he was dead?’

‘Oh!’ She turned to look at him, considering. ‘I need to think about that. It might only be the young man snatching his opportunity. He seems like that sort to me.’

‘A chancer,’ said Gil in Scots.

She nodded. ‘What will you do tomorrow?’

‘Michael spoke to the Provost today, but I had best have a word with him before the quest on the two men, which I suppose means spending at least the morning in Lanark. He has to know about the — the circumstances in which we found the — ’

‘Yes.’ She looked anxiously at him, and he managed a reassuring smile.

‘I’m fine now. And then I must go up to the coaltown and ask more questions. Yesterday was not the best time for that, though I will say I learned a lot. What will you do while I’m in Lanark? You could come down with me and look at the market. There are some fine warehouses, since it’s so close to Edinburgh.’ He reached for another of the little cakes. The coverlet slid down his back and he hitched it up and drew it closer round the two of them.