Pat McIntosh - St Mungo's Robin

Gil Cunningham worked out later that at the moment when the dead man was found in the almshouse garden, he himself was eating porridge, salted by a furious altercation with his youngest sister.

He had come down in the dark after Prime annoyed with himself for sleeping late, to find her in the hall of their uncle’s house, bright in a fine scarlet gown, the neck and sleeves of her shift embroidered to match it. She had found a taper and was lighting all the stumps of last night’s candles.

‘Tib!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you were staying down the town with Kate.’

‘Not another hour,’ said Lady Isobel, setting the taper to the last wick on a pricket-stand, her vivid little face pettish in the blaze of light.

‘How ever not?’

She shrugged. ‘Kate spews if you so much as mention food, and you’d think nobody else ever went with child, the way Augie Morison behaves around her. And those brats of his, a body couldny stand to live with,’ she added.

‘The wee one was rude to you, was she?’ said Gil shrewdly. She threw him a dark look and lit another candle. Gil lifted the snuffer and began to extinguish the guttering lights along the wall, saying, ‘So you’ve come here instead. Does Maggie ken you’re in the house?’

‘I let her in at the kitchen door the now, Maister Gil.’ Maggie Hamilton stepped into the hall from the turnpike stair, a laden tray in her big red hands. ‘And her kist is still in the yard in the rain where that Andy set it down. I wish he’d stayed till I saw him, I’d ha gied him a word for Lady Kate. Here’s your porridge, the pair of ye, and just a wee bit butter to it, for it’s to last. It’s maybe only the two weeks to Advent, but the house’ll be full of wedding guests by Monday night, and where you’re to sleep, Lady Tib, I’ve no idea. And when did you last comb your hair, I’d like to ken?’

‘Yestreen, most like,’ said Tib in a vague tone which Gil decided was intended to be irritating.

‘She could lie at the castle, with Dorothea,’ he suggested.

‘Dorothea? Is she coming? You’ve never invited her to your wedding!’ said Tib scornfully. ‘She’ll cast a gloom over everything, with her long face and her veil.’ She cast up her eyes and clasped her hands in brief mimicry, and the taper went dangerously near the tangled curls.

‘You’ll no speak that way about your eldest sister, Lady Tib,’ ordered Maggie. ‘Lady Dawtie was truly called before ever you were born, and none of this running wild like a wee Saracen the way you’ve been let. Comb your hair and eat your porridge, and then you can come down to my kitchen and gie me a hand, for I’ve baking and brewing to see to, and a new receipt for cannel-cakes that Jennet Clark gave me last night. I hope you’ve another gown in your kist,’ she added, ‘for you’re not setting bread in that one. Is it no the one you’re wearing to your brother’s marriage? The idea, wearing it to go about Glasgow at this hour of the day!’

She set the tray down on a convenient stool, and turned and stumped out of the hall. Tib shrugged, blew out the taper, and slid a sideways glance at her brother.

‘Eat your porridge,’ he suggested. ‘You’ll be in a better mood.’

‘So’ll you,’ she said pertly, but took the wooden dish and horn spoon from the tray. ‘Where’s the old man? And that dog of yours?’

‘Socrates came down earlier,’ said Gil, stirring the small portion of butter into his porridge, ‘likely Maggie let him out, and our uncle has a case to hear after Sext and — ’

‘Oh, he’ll be over in St Mungo’s tower by now,’ agreed Tib, ‘among all his dusty old papers. Does the dog sleep with you? Alys is going to love that. He’ll want to make a threesome with you between the sheets. I hope she’ll ken who’s embracing her.’

Gil restrained himself with difficulty, and studied his sister. She was eight years his junior; he remembered her best from before he went away to school and university, when she had been a stout screaming toddler, furious with a world in which she was simply not old enough to do everything her siblings did. Fourth in line himself, he had sympathized with that, though not with the screaming. Now, at eighteen, she was a pretty young woman, but he thought again, looking at her, that she could almost be a changeling. In a family of tall, long-chinned, grey-eyed people, only Tib and the second brother Edward had inherited their paternal grandmother’s small neat frame, heart-shaped face and hazel eyes. And Edward was dead at the battle of Stirling Field along with their father, their eldest brother, and James, third King of Scots of that name. In Tib’s case her temper had also been part of the legacy, Gil reflected, eating porridge.

‘When will Mother get here?’ she asked now. ‘And is Margaret coming? Kate never said, but I suppose if you’ve asked Dorothea you must want all your sisters at your marriage. We’ve not been all together,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘since Margaret was wed. Near six year.’

‘They’ll both be here the morn, by what Dorothea wrote to me.’ Tib pulled a face, and Gil said mildly, ‘What have you against Dorothea? What’s she done to you?’

Before she could answer him, the door at the top of the kitchen stair was flung wide, to reveal only Socrates the young wolfhound. Spying his master, the dog sprang forward, singing with delight, so that the rebounding door missed his tail by some inches. Gil transferred his spoon to his bowl and held both high with one hand, the better to repel his pet’s passionate greeting with the other. ‘Good dog. Sit!’ he said firmly. ‘ Sit! ’ The dog sat down obligingly, still singing, his stringy tail thumping on the floorboards. ‘I must teach you to shut doors,’ he added.

Tib, watching, said as if she had not been interrupted, ‘Just, you heard Maggie. Dorothea’s a pattern of perfection, and I’ve to take her as my style-book. I was six when she left home, all I mind is her trying to teach me to say a rosary. Then she came back before she was clothed, and prayed over me, which was worse.’

‘Tib, that was twelve years since,’ said Gil. ‘She was younger than you are now. So I suppose you’ll not be a nun, then.’

‘No, I will not!’ she said explosively. ‘Don’t you start at that! Besides, what kind of a house would take me without a tocher of some sort?’

‘What can you do, then?’ he asked. ‘Live with Mother until we can amass a tocher for you? It could take a while, Tib. Or will you go to Margaret or Kate? We need to settle you somewhere.’

‘Spare me from either! Margaret can talk of nothing but the contents of her newest brat’s tail-clouts, and Kate will be the same in another six months, no to mention Augie Morison’s two wee jewels,’ said Tib, with a brief simper in which he recognized, with some amusement, the older of his third sister’s stepdaughters. ‘Give your Alys her due, she doesny go on about that bairn her father’s fostered.’

‘Our Boyd cousins move with the court,’ he suggested as Socrates, dignity recovered, paced over to push his nose under her hand. ‘Maybe if Mother wrote to her kin, they might find a place for you.’

‘Oh, aye,’ she said, looking up from the dog, the acid in her voice again. ‘I’ll be waiting-woman to Marion Boyd, will I, and hope to catch the King’s eye when he tires of her?’

‘We need to do something with you,’ Gil began again.

‘I’m not in your tutelage, Gil!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nor I’ll not be sent about the countryside like a package because nobody will take a mind to me!’

‘But you are,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m head of the family, Tib, like it or no, and I’ll not have you wander about the countryside like a hen laying away, either. We’ll need to find you a life you can tolerate — ’