Pat McIntosh - St Mungo's Robin

‘Oh.’ She stared at him with those wide blue eyes.

‘You said he got here at supper-time. When would that be?’

‘After they said Compline at the bedehouse? They’re earlier than St Mungo’s or St Nicholas, so Sissie can get the old men to bed and get her evening to herself. It was about his usual time,’ she asserted.

‘And he left about half an hour after seven. So he was here maybe an hour and a half, and had supper.’ She nodded. ‘What did you talk about? Was he glad to see your brother here at supper?’

‘Aye, he was.’ Was that a trace of reluctance? ‘We spoke of this and that. My brother’s prospects, the voyages he’s made. The Deacon’s rents. Your marriage,’ she added, with a slight smile.

‘His rents?’ said Gil. ‘Was there any sort of problem with his finances?’

‘No that he mentioned. I think all was well there,’ she said vaguely

‘And then he went out. He didny come back?’

‘No. Why would he do that?’

‘Could he have been going on to friends? Who were his friends?’

‘He never said where he was going. Oh, he’d friends,’ she added, a faint bitter note in her voice. ‘All well-doing gentlemen of his own sort. Maister Agnew, Maister Walkinshaw, Maister — I canny mind. They’ve supped in this house, but I haveny met them.’

Gil frowned, aware of his sister looking at him in puzzlement, but decided to let that one pass meantime.

‘So he left this house about half an hour after seven,’ he said. She nodded.

‘And that was the last you saw him,’ said Dorothea. Marion nodded again, like a fairground toy. ‘Marion, will I come wi you when you witness his shrouding? You’ll want to say a farewell to him, will you no?’

‘Oh, I’ll no be there,’ said Marion. ‘I’ve nothing I want to say to Robert Naismith.’

Gil lost patience.

‘Why not?’ he demanded bluntly.

There was a pause, in which Eppie’s voice could be heard downstairs; then Marion closed her eyes and put up her hand. It covered her face, but did not conceal the way her mouth twisted, or the tears which spilled from under her dark eyelashes. Dorothea set down her own beaker and crossed to sit beside her, taking her free hand in a comforting clasp. Marion put her head down on the creamy wool shoulder, golden hair tumbling loose to shine in the candlelight as her cap slipped sideways, and a great wail escaped her.

Dorothea caught Gil’s eye and deliberately indicated the stair.

Following the voices, Gil found Eppie in the inner room downstairs, leaning against the frame of the kitchen doorway, her spindle in her hand. The child sat at her feet, crooning quietly to a wooden mommet. They both looked round as he crossed the room, but the voice grumbling in the kitchen continued.

‘Who she thinks she is I’d like to ken, it’s all ower the town she hasny a penny to call her own but what the man Naismith gave her, but there she goes, setting herself above honest working folk — ’

‘Danny,’ said Eppie warningly. The voice was silenced, and its owner stepped into view, a small man with a belligerent expression and receding ginger hair. He was wrapped in an apron even more enveloping than the one which protected the child, but the sleeves of his jerkin were mottled with stains and white blotches and he clutched a wooden spoon in a menacing way in one broad hand. This was clearly the cook. Beyond him another young woman was rolling pastry at the big table.

Gil glanced quickly at the man’s soft deerskin house shoes. The spreading folds of hide made it difficult to judge the size of the feet within, but they seemed to be large.

‘You’re Maister Cunningham that dwells in Rottenrow, aren’t you?’ said Eppie, and cast her spindle. ‘It’s you that’s getting wedded next week, isn’t it no?’ she went on, drawing out the thread from the roll of carded wool in her other hand. ‘No that many gets wed in the Upper Town.’

‘That’s so,’ Gil admitted.

She nodded, watching the spindle twirl and swing. ‘I thought that. We’ve the plans all laid for the rough music,’ she assured him, and caught the spindle at the moment before it stopped turning.

Gil managed a smile, but Danny said, ‘No wi my cooking pots you’re no, Eppie Dunlop.’

The girl with the rolling pin giggled, and Eppie threw him a look.

‘Oh, you,’ she said. ‘We’ll use others, then, and you’ll no get any of the sweetmeats when we’re done.’

Another thing to remember, thought Gil in dismay. The night before the wedding at the groom’s house, the wedding night at the bride’s house: a serenade of bawdy songs accompanied by the beating of pots and pan-lids and any musical instruments whose players could be persuaded to join in, a piper, maybe, or one of the shawms from the burgh band, something good and loud like that. They would expect to be rewarded with sweetmeats and strong drink. Maybe Maggie would have that in hand.

‘Were you all three here in the house yestreen?’ he asked.

‘Aye, we were,’ said Eppie, winding-on her new thread, ‘though Bel went home after her supper. Danny and I both live in,’ she added, and cast the spindle again. ‘I sleep up-by, wi the bairn, and my brother has his bed in the kitchen where it’s warm.’

‘Brother?’ said Gil, startled, looking from one to the other.

‘Oh, aye,’ said Eppie, laughing. ‘We’re no like, are we? He takes after our faither, the wee baldy man he was, and I’m the spit image of our mother when she was young. Or so my auntie tells us. Maister Naismith hired us thegither.’

‘So will that be you all wi no place now?’ Gil asked in sympathetic tones.

Bel shrugged, and Danny snarled something, and turned back to a pot on the charcoal stove. Eppie said more philosophically, ‘Maybe, maybe no. She’s no notion what was in the maister’s will.’

‘He won’t have had the time to make one, surely,’ said Gil.

‘Oh, aye,’ said Eppie. ‘Did she no say? That’s what they were talking about over their supper, her and the maister and her brother John Veitch.’

‘Eppie,’ said Danny in the same warning tone she had used.

‘Well, we were all in here at the table thegither,’ said Eppie. ‘That’s a bonnie man, her brother,’ she added. ‘I never saw him afore, but the moment I clapped my een on him, there on the doorsill, I kent who he must be.’ She sighed, and the girl with the rolling-pin sighed in sympathy. ‘And the bonnie things he’s brought the mistress, too.’

‘What did he have to say about the will?’ Gil asked.

‘Oh, aye. Well, the maister said,’ she recounted, ‘that he was wanting to make a new will, and he’d be going on to see his man of law after his supper to get it drawn up.’

‘Draw?’ said Frankie in a little piping voice at her feet. ‘Frankie draw?’

‘No the now, my poppet. Go and put Annabella to bed in Danny’s shoe, see, over there. And John Veitch asked him,’ she continued, the spindle idle in her hand, ‘since the mistress said nothing, what he was looking to alter in it. Then he said he’d made other plans for the future, and he’d be wanting to leave his property elsewhere because of them. Then I think maybe the mistress kicked her brother under the board, for he fell silent, but after we drew the cloth and turned the board up, they went above stairs and there was a roaring tulzie, you could ha heard it in St Mungo’s.’

‘I certainly heard it down here,’ said Danny sourly.

‘What was it about?’ Gil asked.

‘All about the will, a course. He never said what the other plans were,’ said Eppie in some regret, ‘or no that I heard, but he was saying he’d leave this house and some other property to someone else, and if the bairn she’s carrying should be a son he said he’d leave my mistress a house he owns down off the Gallowgait and if no then she was to be out of here when her forty days was up, and — ’