Pat McIntosh - The Merchant's Mark

‘A priest,’ he moaned. ‘I need a priest.’

‘You’ll tell us what you were after in this house first,’ said Andy fiercely.

‘I’m deein!’

‘Is he?’ asked Kate.

‘Probably not,’ said Alys judiciously, ‘but there are broken bones. Several ribs at the least.’ The prisoner yelped as she felt carefully at his chest. The hurdle creaked under him, and Gil caught his breath, transported for a moment to the moonlit pinnacles of Roslin. ‘And maybe some bruising to his insides also,’ Alys finished. She passed her hands cautiously round the man’s black felt coif, without eliciting a reaction, and rose to her feet.

Gil studied the man. He was wearing a sturdy leather jack, and there was a sheath at his belt for the whinger which Andy had brought in from the yard. His hair showed under the edges of the coif, dark round the collar of the jack, a white tuft sticking sweatily to his brow.

‘I’m deein, I tell ye,’ croaked the prisoner. ‘Fetch me a priest.’

‘But what was going on?’ asked Morison. ‘Why were these fellows in our yard?’ He looked down at his daughters. ‘My poppets, you must go back to your bed now. Da will still be here in the morning.’ Ysonde, her hands clamped on the facings of his gown, said something muffled into his shoulder. ‘What’s that, my honey?’

‘She said you’d get your head cut off.’

‘Well, I haveny See, it’s still fastened on.’

‘She said the man wi the axe would cut it off.’

‘The man with the axe is dead,’ said Gil firmly. The man Babb held looked round quickly, dismay in his expression, but the other prisoner closed his eyes again and the crease deepened between his brows.

‘Who said that to you, Ysonde?’ Morison asked in concern.

‘I’ll wager it was Mall,’ said Kate, breaking a long silence. ‘She said a few things I’d like to skelp her for, before she left. Wynliane, Ysonde, you must go back to bed now. Da will be here in the morning.’

‘No,’ said Wynliane. Morison looked quickly down at her, then at Kate, his eyes wide. She nodded, smiling slightly, and he swallowed and turned back to the children.

‘I have to talk, down here, poppets,’ he said. ‘I’ll come up to you once you’re in your bed.’

‘No,’ said Wynliane.

Ysonde’s grip tightened on her father’s gown. Gil thought Morison’s clasp on the girls tightened in response. His sister must have seen it too, for she said, ‘Oh, let them stay, Augie. Nan, their father will bring them up when he can.’ Nan, waiting quietly in the stair doorway, bobbed to the company and withdrew. Kate looked at Morison again. ‘Our Lady guard you, man, sit down properly, then Gil and Alys can sit down too. Andy, bring the settle forward for him — no, there.’

Andy obeyed, and Morison rose, slightly impeded by his satellites, and sat down opposite Kate. Settling the children on either side of him, he stared round the room and said, ‘Were you looking for these fellows, Andy? Were you expecting an inbreak?’

‘Aye, we were,’ said Babb happily. ‘We were looking for them to come for this treasure that’s never been here. And we were right.’

‘You set the watch as you intended, then?’ said Gil.

‘Not quite,’ admitted Kate.

‘Watch?’ said Morison. ‘I thought it was all over. What need of a watch?’

‘You can see what need. It’s not over yet,’ Kate pointed out.

Gil, seating Alys on a backstool, said, ‘Are you saying these are the two who were seen in the Hog earlier this week? Let that one go, Babb, so he can answer our questions.’

‘Aye, that’s right,’ agreed the man who had helped Alys. ‘And I’d a word wi them the night and all. Tellt them all about how the maister keeps a locked kist at the foot o the great bed in the chaumer there.’ He grinned. ‘I never tellt them about the watch in the yard, did I, you gangrel thieves.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Gil, looking closely from one to the other. ‘I last saw these two on the Pentlands yesterday sometime after noon, pelting downhill with Socrates on their heels. And before that there was a matter of a dead pig above Linlithgow. The biter’s been bit,’ he said agreeably. Most of his hearers looked blank, but the man on the hurdle closed his eyes and groaned.

‘I never!’ said the standing prisoner. ‘It wasny me. I’ve been in Glasgow the whole time. So’s he.’ He jerked his head at the man on the hurdle.

‘A pity Socrates is not here,’ said Alys. ‘Where did you leave him? We could see if he knows them.’

‘Ye’ve no need to set a great hound on us,’ said the standing prisoner apprehensively. Gil raised an eyebrow, and the man swallowed, realizing what he had given away. ‘It wasny us,’ he repeated.

‘He cutted the pig’s head off wi his sword,’ said a small voice from within Morison’s gown. He lifted his arm and looked down; Ysonde blinked back at him.

‘You were dreaming, my poppet,’ he said indulgently. ‘Go back to sleep. The man hasn’t got a sword.’

‘Does too. He had a sword this morning.’ She pointed at the standing prisoner. ‘When he looked in our gate, but Nan and me told him to go away and he went.’

‘You see!’ said Babb’s prisoner. ‘The bairn kens! We’ve been here the whole time.’

‘So you were poking round here earlier, were you?’ demanded Andy, and the man swallowed again.

‘Which of you is John Carson?’ Gil asked. Alys looked round at him. The recumbent man opened his eyes, but the other one made no move. ‘So you must be Davie Wilkie,’ he went on. The man still did not move, but Gil saw the faint stirring of his cloak as his shoulders tensed. ‘You had a hat with a feather in it yesterday,’ he said conversationally. ‘I suppose it must have fallen off, somewhere between the Pentlands and here.’

‘It could be out in the yard,’ said Morison, still trying to follow the exchange.

Gil nodded. ‘It could. And Carson there gets called Baldy,’ he went on.

‘He’s no bald,’ said the man nearest the hurdle. ‘See, he’s got more hair than Andy there. It’s all sticking out the back o his coif.’

‘You stay out o this, Ecky Soutar,’ growled Andy.

‘It’s sticking out the brow of his coif too,’ said Gil. ‘Take it off for him, Ecky, will you.’

Ecky obliged, despite the injured man’s feeble attempts to push his hands away. The coif came away, revealing damp hair flattened to the man’s skull, dark in the candlelight except for the sharp-edged streak of white hair which grew forward over his forehead.

‘And that,’ said Gil, ‘is why he’s called Baldy, like a horse. Not because he’s called Archibald, and not because he’s bald, but because he’s got a white blaze.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Morison.

‘It means we’ve made the two ends of the circle join up,’ said Gil. ‘Would you send someone to call the Watch, Augie? These fellows should be put somewhere safe for the night, what’s left of it.’

Only a royal summons would have got Gil out of his own bed in the attic in Rottenrow before Nones. As it was, despite a cold wash, a shave and a meal of bannocks still warm from the girdle, he felt as if he would rather sleep for another week than plod down to the caichpele with the long spoon-shaped racket over his shoulder to play tennis with his monarch.

It had been more than an hour after the Watch were summoned, before he could leave the lower town and head for home. He had had to explain to the Watch why these dangerous miscreants should be held in the Tolbooth rather than the castle, without letting them suspect that in the castle he feared Wilkie, at least, would find himself free as the Axeman had. Then, once the reluctant procession had left, supplemented by two of Augie’s fellows to keep the Watch safe as far as the Tolbooth, he had attempted to persuade Alys and his sister to go home.