Pat McIntosh - St Mungo's Robin

‘Making notes, were ye?’ said Danny, peering into a saucepan. Bel, listening avidly, jumped and applied herself to the pastry again.

‘Did he name the legatee?’ Gil asked. ‘The person he was leaving this house to,’ he corrected himself.

‘And what’s that to you if he did?’ demanded another voice behind Gil. He turned, and found himself looking at a large man in a furred gown, standing with booted feet planted well apart and glaring at him from the other doorway. Like Eppie, Gil was in no doubt about who this was. He had changed in ten years, but his fair hair and blue eyes creased at the corners would have identified him, even before Frankie abandoned her mommet, scrambled to her feet and scurried forward exclaiming,

‘Unca John! Unca John!’

The scowl changed to a smile.

‘Where’s my best lassie?’ said John Veitch. He bent and scooped the child up, tossing her high so that she squealed with laughter. ‘Where’s your mammy, wee lass?’

‘Up,’ said Frankie, pointing to the stairs. ‘Up wi lady. I go up later.’

‘And you’re down here questioning Eppie,’ said the seaman, glowering at Gil again.

‘D’you no mind me, John? Gil Cunningham? I’m Robert Blacader’s Quaestor now,’ said Gil, wondering if he would ever get used to explaining this. ‘I’m charged wi looking into any murders in Glasgow, or wherever he sends me.’

‘What’s it to do wi Robert Blacader?’ demanded Veitch. ‘Aye, I mind you. You’re the youngest brother, aren’t you no? And there were all those sisters you had and all.’

‘That’ll be one of them up above wi the mistress the now,’ said Eppie. ‘A white nun, she is. Maister Cunningham was asking about the supper, and I was telling him when the maister left.’

‘Aye,’ said Veitch rather grimly. ‘Too busy to talk to me about my sister. Then I come up the hill the day to get a word wi him at the hour he appointed, face to face and man to man, and I hear at the gate that he’s deid. But what’s this about the supper? Surely he wasny poisoned? That canny be it, the rest o us have taken no hurt,’ he added with a sardonic look as Danny’s indignant snarl rose from the kitchen. ‘And what’s it to do wi Blacader?’

‘This is Blacader’s burgh, John,’ Gil reminded him. ‘No like where we grew up out in the Hamiltons’ lands. If Naismith’s killer can be taken, Blacader or his court will deal wi him first before he’s sent to Edinburgh. And meantime, can you tell me when you left here last night?’

‘Me?’ The sailor contemplated the ceiling briefly, then smiled at the child whom he was still holding on his arm. ‘I sang this wee one a song when she was in her cradle, didn’t I, my flower?’

‘Passy awa,’ said Frankie triumphantly.

‘That’s right, a clever lassie. Pasay I’agua, Julietta datna. And then my sister and I had a long word. She was a wee thing distressed, as you’ll understand if Eppie’s tongue’s been wagging already,’ said Veitch disapprovingly. In the kitchen Danny clattered the saucepan on the stove and swore quietly. ‘It would be, maybe, about nine o’ the clock when I came away. Is that right, Eppie?’ Eppie shrugged, and cast her spindle again. ‘I went away down the High Street to where I’m lodged wi the Widow Napier, and sat a while talking wi her and all, her man’s brother was a sailor and she likes to hear the tales, and then I gaed tae my beddie,’ he concluded.

Frankie wriggled in his arms, and he bent to set her on the ground. She ran to her mommet, still fast asleep in a shoe much the size of Gil’s, and began to sing to it. Veitch looked at her, then at Gil, and jerked his head towards the outer room. The clattering of Danny’s pans followed as the two men moved out of earshot of the child.

‘Where are you lodged?’ Gil asked, sitting down on the tapestry-covered stool Veitch indicated.

‘I tellt you. The Widow Napier.’

‘Aye, but where’s that? Where does she dwell?’

‘Oh, I see. Away down the Fishergate. St Catherine’s Wynd. It’s right handy for the shore.’

‘Why not here, with your sister?’

‘I wasny certain how she was placed.’ That sardonic look again. ‘As it turned out, I was right to be wary. The deceased was away less happy to clap his een on me than Marion herself was, poor lass.’

‘Was he, now?’ said Gil. ‘So he’d not have wished you to stay here?’

Veitch laughed shortly.

‘No,’ he said.

‘And you never saw Naismith again after he left here,’ said Gil.

‘No,’ said Veitch again. ‘He was long away and talking wi his man of law by the time I went out. Or so I suppose.’

‘Do you know who that is?’

The seaman reflected briefly staring unfocused at the well-swept floorboards. Gil took the opportunity to inspect his feet, which were encased in a pair of heavy boots, well-worn and tarry but well-cared-for and rather larger than Gil’s own.

‘Arnot? Andrews? Something like that.’ The man glanced at Gil, his mouth twisting. ‘I was more concerned wi my sister, you can believe it.’

‘I do. Did he name the alternative legatee?’

‘No,’ said Veitch, ‘but it shouldny be hard to find out who she is, if you can find the man of law.’

‘She?’

‘Aye. Did Marion no tell you? That’s what really couped her ower. Three and a half year she’s kept this house and warmed his bed for him, she’s carrying his bairn, and he picked that moment, over the suppertable wi the household listening, to tell her he was to be wed. And no to her. So can you wonder that I spent the morn hunting for a man of law that would take on her case?’

‘She told me little more than that,’ said Dorothea. ‘But what she did tell me agrees in substance.’

It had stopped raining, but neither of them wished to loiter in the raw cold, and they had taken refuge in the chapel of the bigger almshouse of St Nicholas, right by the Wyndhead. Seated on the stone bench which ran round the box-like nave, Gil had summarized what he had learned from the servants and from John Veitch.

‘What more did you get from her?’ he asked. She folded her hands in her lap and considered them for a moment in the attenuated light from the south windows. Suddenly, irrelevantly, he recognized the biggest change in her. The hunger he recalled had been fed, but there was also, under the poise and the air of command, that stillness at the centre that he had seen in one or two other great religious he had known.

‘The oldest brother, who held Kittymuir, died at Stirling Field,’ she said now, ‘the same as Father and our brothers. As Uncle David said. It’s a strange thing,’ she digressed, ‘that so few were slain on the King’s side, the late King’s side, and yet we seem to know the most of them.’

‘No,’ objected Gil, ‘none so strange surely, it tells where the fighting was thickest. So they were left without money, were they?’

‘From what she says,’ said Dorothea, recalled to her account, ‘John was at sea, which must be right, and the sleekit William was a priest by then, somewhere over in Ayrshire, and their mother died of grief that same summer. So when they couldny pay the fine in the autumn, Marion was put out of the land, and took refuge with William in the first place. Then William found she was carrying Frankie, which can’t,’ she said thoughtfully, counting on her fingers, ‘have been before Yule of that year, of ’88 , or even the next spring, and he put her out of his house and all. And John still being at sea, she accepted Naismith’s offer of shelter and she’s kept that house for him ever since. I suspect it may have been William who got Naismith the post here in Glasgow as part of the bargain.’

They looked at each other in the failing light.