Pat McIntosh - The Merchant's Mark

‘Alys is fine,’ Kate assured him. ‘Come into the house, till I tell you what’s been going on here.’

‘You are getting more and more like Mother,’ he said, setting foot on the house stair. ‘Where is Alys? Catherine’s anxious, and — and Pierre has been hurt. I need to tell her.’

‘Her father hurt? Oh, Gil. And she feels guilty about what happened,’ said Kate, turning in the doorway so that he could enter the house, ‘but the fault was mine, really it was. You won’t be angry at her, will you?’

‘Kate, what is this about?’ he asked. ‘How do I know whether I’ll be angry till you tell me what you’re on about? Why would I be angry with Alys anyway?’

‘The inbreak,’ said Kate. ‘Not last night, but the night before. Thursday. We had an inbreak. A thief in the house.’

‘Catherine told me.’

‘Did she tell you there were two?’

‘What, two inbreaks?’ He stared at her. She turned again on her crutches to look at him, and nodded. Then, along the length of the house, from the vapour-bathed doorway beyond the kitchen, the screaming started.

Gil leapt from the fore-stair and set off running. As he was drawing his sword it dawned on him that it was not an adult screaming. It was a child, terrified.

Kate’s voice followed him: ‘Gil! Gil, come back, it’s all right!’

He kept running.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Gil, without a great deal of hope. ‘You had two intruders in the place on Thursday night, you caught the first one opening Augie’s plate-kist, the second one chopped the first one into pieces, and you feel you owe me an apology.’

‘Not really,’ said his sister drily, ‘but I thought you might expect one.’

Alys said nothing. Gil gave her an anxious glance. He could not work out whether she was embarrassed, angry, offended or frightened for her father, and his head was still reeling with the sight which had met him earlier.

Reaching the door of the — bathhouse, laundryhouse, whatever it was, he had halted, staring, whinger in hand, unable to see the source of the screams. Amid clouds of lantern-lit vapour and a smell of soap, what seemed like a great number of women appeared and disappeared, sleeves rolled up, muscular forearms wet, around a tent of suspended linen, from which came splashing. Then, as the steam dissipated at one side of the chamber, he recognized Alys standing in a pool of water, her hair knotted up on top of her head, bending over a screaming, dripping child. A second child spoke, happily, inside the tent of linen.

‘Maister Gil!’ said someone out of the clouds. Alys straightened up with an exclamation, and he realized she was wearing only a very wet shift, in which she might as well have been naked. And she was standing next to a lantern.

He had backed away, stammering an apology, sheathing his sword, but he could not get the image out of his mind, of the fine wet linen clinging to her slender curves, of the way the light shone on shoulder, breast and thigh.

And now Alys, fully dressed, slightly damp and rather pink, was sitting upright and formal on a back-stool opposite him. She had failed to respond to his embrace of greeting, and though she had listened anxiously to his account of her father’s injuries and accepted his reassurances, she now would not meet his eye. Candlelight gilded her hair and skimmed the blue linen which covered the glories he had glimpsed. Beside him on the long settle his sister surveyed him with a sardonic expression.

‘Tell me it from the beginning,’ he said, collecting his mind with an effort.

‘Two days since,’ Kate began. ‘St Peter’s bones, was it only Thursday? Andy gave Billy Walker his room, but I managed to speak to the man first.’

As her account of the time since he left Glasgow unfolded, he listened in mounting alarm, visualizing the events she described so tersely.

‘What a thing for the two of you to get entangled in!’ he exclaimed.

‘Alys was out of the worst of it,’ she assured him, looking from one to the other. Alys stared resolutely at the jug of flowers in the fireplace.

‘I wish you had been too,’ he said. ‘The man with the axe is dead — it must be the same man — ’

‘Dead?’ she exclaimed. ‘When? How could he be? He was in Glasgow yesterday morning.’

‘He was in Roslin last night. If he left Glasgow when the gates opened,’ Gil calculated, ‘he could have got to Linlithgow in time to gather his friends and follow us from there. He likely got ahead of us,’ he speculated, sidetracked, ‘when we were up the hillside about the dead pig. But Kate, even so, Augie’s right, you should be out of this house — ’

‘Not till the bairns are safe,’ she stated. ‘Andy’s been too taigled here at the yard to go up for orders the way Maister Morison wished — ’

‘What, since yesterday morning? And whose doing was that?’ Gil asked shrewdly. She gave him another wry smile. ‘And Kate, how is it keeping the bairns safe to wash them — ’ he checked, glanced at Alys, swallowed, and went on — ‘to wash them at this hour, with the bathhouse door open and the yard gate unbarred?’

‘And five grown women in the bathhouse along wi them,’ she pointed out. ‘It would be a bold man who took on Babb and Nan Thomson together. They began in daylight, but it took near an hour to get the older child into the water, poor wee mite. Oh, Nan says she kens you, Gil. Matt brought her in from Dumbarton to mind the bairns.’

‘From Dumbarton?’ he said, diverted again. ‘Oh, I ken who that is. Matt drew her daughter’s rotten tooth last May. I think he’s been courting her ever since, he’d jump at the chance to get her settled in Glasgow.’ He returned to the point. ‘Kate, you should all be out of the house. Can you not take the bairns somewhere else till all’s settled, if you’re troubled for them?’

‘Likely I could,’ she said dismissively, ‘but hardly at this hour of night. Now tell us how the Axeman comes to be dead, Gil. Have you found a name for that poor man in the barrel? What did the King say? How did Maister Mason come to be hurt?’

‘I have the King’s thanks, and the reward for the hoard money,’ he said. ‘Augie can discuss that with Andy. And we’ve a name for the dead man, and I think it was this Axeman killed him. It was certainly him that injured Pierre. But I’ve still no more than a suspicion of who’s behind this.’

There were steps on the fore-stair, and Babb appeared, carrying a linen-swathed child. She crossed the hall to set her burden down at the door to the stair.

‘Stand nice now,’ she admonished, with a pat to its rear, and turned to speak quietly to her mistress. The child, ignoring the instruction, pattered over to stand directly in front of Gil. It had a cloud of short, fluffy fair curls, and a penetrating grey stare, and with some surprise he recognized Morison’s younger daughter.

‘Why are you in our house again?’ she demanded. ‘My da’s no here.’

‘I’m here to talk to the ladies,’ he answered her.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m going to marry one of them, and the other is my sister.’

She looked speculatively from Alys to Kate, then put a possessive small hand on Kate’s knee. ‘Can’t have this one.’

‘She’s my sister,’ said Gil. ‘So I can’t marry her.’ Kate’s face was unreadable. The child nodded, and pointed at Alys with the other hand. Some of her linen wrappings fell away, revealing a thin bare shoulder. Alys smiled at her, but got a scowl in return.

‘You can marry that one. She put Wynliane in the bath.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘That’s the one I want. She is gentle and also wise; of all other she beareth the prize. And when I’ve married her, I’ll be the most fortunate man in Glasgow.’