Pat McIntosh - St Mungo's Robin

‘Sissie,’ said Millar, bending over her. ‘Sissie, will you see to the supper?’

She shook her head, still rocking over the body.

‘Leave her,’ recommended Maistre Pierre. ‘Surely the kitchen can serve it out by themselves? The old men must eat.’

‘Eat? Surely not! I don’t think I could,’ said Millar.

‘When you get to be our age, Andro,’ said Maister Veitch in the house doorway, ‘you see these things different. We’ll hae our supper, and I’ll say Grace if you’ve no mind to.’

‘Aye, do that, Frankie,’ said Millar gratefully, and turned to speak to Gil just as heavy footsteps sounded in the passageway in the main building. Millar swung back, wearing the expression of a man who has reached the end of his endurance, and two muddy men in jacks and steel helmets tramped across the garden carrying lanterns. The badge painted on their worn leathers was clearly visible, the Douglas heart on a white ground.

‘Christ and his saints preserve us, I thought Sir James was to be here the morn’s morn,’ said Millar faintly.

‘He set out early, a cause of the weather,’ said the first man-at-arms. ‘He’ll be at the door in a quarter hour or so. Is the lodging open, maister? We’ve a couple pack-loads of hangings and such out in the street.’

‘I feel guilty,’ said Gil with some compunction, ‘leaving Millar in such a hideous case, but I do not feel I can face my godfather just now.’

‘Difficult, is he?’ said Maistre Pierre.

They were in a tavern at the top of the Drygate, where they had taken brief refuge from the cold wind after stopping at the chapel of St Nicholas’ bedehouse. The house was packed with other people who had the same idea, but they had managed to get two seats, and a harassed girl had brought them a jug of ale and two beakers. Gil poured for both of them, and said in French, above the noise of the place,

‘Quite apart from what’s just happened at St Serf’s, he’ll be full of questions about the marriage and doubtful jokes. Did you hear the one about the bridegroom and the turnip, that kind of thing. I was at his daughter Janet’s wedding. Neither bride nor groom knew where to look at one point.’

‘We all have kin like that. Mine are in France, I thank God. What do you make of what has just happened at St Serf’s?’

‘A sorry thing. What do you?’

Maistre Pierre shook his head. ‘It might have been suicide.’

‘No note, as old Veitch said.’

‘The man was deranged. He might not have seen the need for a note.’

‘He was priested, and what’s more, he recalled it this morning.’

‘I have known priests take their own life before now. Lives,’ the mason corrected carefully.

‘There was no stool near where he was hanging, that he might have stepped off.’

‘That is a stronger argument. And his fingers had bled.’

‘He bit his nails badly,’ Gil observed. ‘They had bled before.’

Maistre Pierre finished his ale, and reached for the jug. ‘So the only sign is the absence of a stool.’

‘Perhaps Sissie kicked it out of the way when she went into the house.’

‘I saw none closer than the hearth.’

‘We can hardly expect to get sense out of Sissie tonight.’

‘True. Let us leave the question for now. What else have you found today?’

Gil leaned forward, to avoid having to shout, and described his afternoon: Marion Veitch’s demeanour, his encounter with Hob, and what he had learned from Mistress Dodd and the Widow Napier. Maistre Pierre listened, frowning, and tapping his beaker on his knee.

‘So Veitch lied,’ he said. ‘I wonder what he was doing. Do you think he was hiding from the Watch, or was he here in the Chanonry stabbing the man Naismith?’

‘One or the other,’ said Gil, ‘though if he was truly hiding from the Watch I do not know why he lied to me. When I saw him, he had not the look of a man who had spent the evening drinking.’

‘Sailors are hard-headed.’

‘True.’

‘Could he have done it?’

‘I would have said so. Moreover, there is a path along the riverbank which would bring him home without going through the burgh. Provided he knew the ground,’ Gil qualified.

‘Leaving his sister to be the extra worshipper at Mass in the morning.’

‘Aye.’ Gil pulled a face, peered into the jug, found it empty, and put his beaker down beside it. ‘We had best go home. I need to wash before I bring Dorothea down to supper.’

‘Before we go,’ said Maistre Pierre, ‘what is the one about the bridegroom and the turnip?’

‘And he gave us his blessing, only this morning,’ said Alys. ‘That was a grace, that he remembered his calling before he died.’

Dorothea nodded and crossed herself, murmuring Amen , and Maistre Pierre did likewise.

The supper was long since cleared away; the household had retired to the kitchen to exchange new tales with Agnes the lay sister, and family and guests were seated round the brazier in the hall of the mason’s big stone house. The three women were together on the high-backed settle, Alys’s honey-coloured locks gleaming in the candlelight between Dorothea’s black veil and Catherine’s black flowerpot cap and embroidered gauze. In the shadows at the edge of the group, Herbert the secretary murmured softly over his beads.

Gil moved his feet from under Socrates, and said, ‘I wish I was certain of what had happened.’

‘You think,’ said his sister, ‘that it might not have been his own action?’

‘It was one or the other,’ said Gil. ‘Either he hanged himself, from grief or remorse or the realization that he was mad, or someone did it for him.’

‘How easy would that be?’ speculated Alys. ‘I thought you said Humphrey nearly had the better of it this morning. Could one of the old men have the strength? If it was his brother — ’

‘Has anyone else a reason to kill him?’ asked Dorothea.

‘Not that I can see, and I can’t see why his brother would kill him either,’ admitted Gil. ‘He’s been — he was well supported and well cared for there in the bedehouse, no need to worry about him.’

‘- then surely,’ Alys persisted, ‘after this morning’s fight, his brother would find it the more difficult to get the better of him and hang him. His hands were not bound, were they?’

‘What, like an execution? No, and his fingers had bled recently, though that’s no proof.’

‘Was the rope marked with his blood?’

‘What rope was it?’ asked Dorothea. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘I asked,’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘It was the length they use to keep the yett open when needful. It hangs on the back of the yett mostly. It was wet with the rain,’ he added, ‘there were no marks to see on it.’

‘On the back of the yett,’ repeated Alys. ‘Out at the street? How did Humphrey come by that? Mistress Mudie would never have let him go out across the yard.’

‘He might have slipped out without her seeing,’ said Gil. ‘After all, Agnew got in without her seeing him twice today.’

‘So either,’ said Alys, ‘Maister Agnew went in, with the rope, and got the better of a man who nearly killed him this morning — ’

‘- who left him still badly shaken when Pierre and I met him this evening,’ Gil added. She nodded acknowledgement.

‘- or some mysterious other got in very quickly and did the same between Agnew leaving the bedehouse and Mistress Mudie finding him and then left unseen, or else Humphrey went out to the gate after his brother left and got the rope, and — and — ’ She covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh, the poor man. And poor Mistress Mudie.’

Catherine nodded and reached for her beads. Dorothea put her hand over Alys’s other one and said, ‘None of these seems very likely, and none of them has a reason. Do you suppose it’s connected to the death of the Deacon, Gil?’