Pat McIntosh - The Harper's Quine

‘Little enough,’ admitted Gil. ‘I have another sighting of Davie and his girl, but no description. I have learned that Bess Stewart had property on Bute, and spoke Ersche, and that the gallowglass promised to see her home.’ He ticked the points off as he spoke. ‘We know that Sempill is after the baby. And I had a long word with that musician.’

‘Who was he?’

‘He calls himself Balthasar of Liege, but I suspect Leith is nearer it.’

The flamboyant man with the lute had approached Gil in the courtyard of the mason’s house. The long trestle table was laden with food, and maids hurried about with wicker dishes containing more food; avoiding a girl with a handful of empty beakers, the man had said, ‘Poor Bess. And poor Angus. She’s a great loss. Didn’t I see you at their lodgings last night? Had you known her long?’

‘I never met her,’ Gil said. ‘I found her dead.’

‘Stabbed, so Ealasaidh tells me. By the husband.’

‘There is no proof of that,’ Gil said firmly. ‘Tell me about Bess — how did you know her?’

‘I’ve known Angus for years — you meet folk, on the circuit. Then he turned up with this new singer. More than one of us envied him — I’d have been happy to lift her away from him,’ he admitted frankly, ‘but she’d none of any of us. Angus it was for her.’

‘I heard her sing, on May Day. She’d a bonnie voice.’

‘And a rare hand with the wee harp.’ The lutenist’s own hand shot out and seized a pasty from a passing tray. ‘And always a greeting and a friendly word for Angus’s friends, for all she was stolen away from her own castle. A good woman and a good musician, and few enough of either come from baronial stock. I saw her on the High Street on May Day evening,’ he said abruptly.

‘You don’t say?’ said Gil. ‘On May Day evening?’

‘I do. I’m in Glasgow for the dancing, see,’ he said, indicating the lute, ‘and I picked up enough to go drinking. So I was sizing up the howffs on the Bell o’ the Brae when she came up the hill with a good-looking young fellow. I’m about to say something tactless when I catch what they’re saying, and he’s addressing her as Mistress Bess, and it’s dear they know one another.’

‘They knew one another?’ Gil repeated.

‘By what I heard, aye. In Bute it was, from the sound of it.’

‘What language were they speaking?’ Gil asked.

‘Oh, Ersche, of course.’ The lutenist eyed Gil. He had one blue eye and one brown, a most distracting attribute. ‘Are you thinking I don’t speak Ersche? You’re right, of course, but I can sing in it, and I understand it when I hear it. She knew his name, and she sounded like a woman speaking to a trusted servant.’

‘I see,’ said Gil, digesting this. ‘And then what? Did you speak to her?’

‘Aye, briefly, and she bade me goodnight, and told me where they were living, and went on up the brae, rattling away in Ersche with the young fellow. And when I went round there yesterday, looking for a crack with the three of them, this was the word that met me.’ He gestured largely round the yard and bit into the pasty. ‘What a waste.’

‘What a waste, indeed,’ said Maistre Pierre, pushing open the gate into St Mungo’s yard. ‘So the gallowglass knew her already. Should we speak to him again, think you?’

‘We must,’ said Gil. ‘And I wonder about going down to Bute.1

‘Is it far?’

‘You take a ship from Dumbarton, or maybe Irvine.’

‘I have contacts in Irvine,’ said the mason thoughtfully. ‘Alys can manage for a day or two without me.’

‘Alys can manage anything, I think,’ said Gil. ‘Did she organize that by herself this afternoon? As well as fetching the child and its nurse home.’

‘She did,’ agreed Maistre Pierre, completely failing to conceal his pride. ‘When I suggested it to her it was already in hand. And all without a cross word in the kitchen, so Catherine tells me, although Bridie Miller never came to help.’

‘Her mother is dead? Who was she?’

‘Yes, in ‘88, just before we came to Scotland, poor Marie. Who was she? She was the niece — well, he said she was his niece — of a parish priest, poor as a grasshopper in all but his learning, in a God-forsaken place inland from Nantes. Claimed to be of the same family as Peter Abelard, if you’ll believe it. He dropped dead an hour after he handed me the patron’s money for the new east window, so I married the girl and took her back to Nantes with me, and never regretted it in fifteen years.’

‘And just the one child?’

‘Just the one. She has run my household for four years now. I suppose I should find her a husband, if only to be rid of Robert Walkinshaw, whom she does not affect, but what would I do without her, Maister Cunningham?’

‘I find it extraordinary,’ said Gil, ‘that you and the demoiselle should have been in Glasgow since before I came home, and our paths never crossed. I’ve been mewed up in the Chanonry, I suppose, learning to be a notary, and seen little enough of the town.’

‘And before that you were in Paris, as we were. You were recalled after Stirling field?’

‘There was no more money,’ said Gil frankly. ‘I had studied long enough to determine — to graduate Bachelor of Laws — in ‘89, but there was no chance of a doctorate. And my father and both my brothers died on Sauchie moor, most of the land was forfeit, my mother needed things sorted out. I had to come home as soon as I was granted my degree.’

He was silent, recalling the scene in the Scots College when the news of the battle arrived, the strong young men weeping in the courtyard, and the unlikely sympathy of the English students who had experienced the same shock three years earlier when Welsh Henry took Bosworth field.

The Cunninghams were not the only family to have been affected, when the young Prince of Scotland and his advisers took up arms against his father, the third King James, and met on a moor near Stirling in a tiresome affray which ended in the mysterious death of the elder James. There had been some strange alliances and enmities forged in that battle and in the troubled weeks which followed it.

‘Well,’ said Maistre Pierre, ‘we grow melancholy again. Come and look at this.’

He led Gil down the slope, past the thatch of the lodge, across the path that led to the crypt door, into the dump of trees where they had found Davie.

‘The boy was here, no?’ he said, gesturing. “The mark is still to be seen where he lay. Now look at this.’

He indicated the branch of a sturdy beech which leaned above the recovering grasses and green plants where the boy had huddled. The branch was perhaps chest-high to either of them, and on its western side, about three feet from the trunk, was a scraping bruise in the bark.

‘Interesting.’ Gil bent closer. The bark was damaged and split, and the powdery green stuff which coated trunk and branches had been rubbed away. ‘What has happened here?’

‘Has whoever struck the boy hit the branch as well?’

‘Why should one do that?’

‘By accident, naturally. On the way down, or on the back-swing. Or — what do golfers call it? — when the swing continues after you have hit the ball?’

‘We never thought of a golf-club as a weapon.’

‘Whatever he used, it is not here,’ said Maistre Pierre firmly, wiping his hands on his jerkin. ‘I will swear to that. We have searched every ell of this kirkyard, from the gates up yonder down to the Molendinar, and Luke spent this morning guddling in the burn itself.’

‘Very strange,’ said Gil. ‘I wish the boy would waken. Has Alys learned anything about the girl? If we could find her — ‘

‘Ah!’ The mason dug in his pouch. ‘Alys was much concerned with our guests, she had not time to speak, with having less help than she had depended on, but she gave me this.’ He unfolded a slip of paper. ‘Annie Thomson, in Maggie Bell’s ale-house at the Brigend,’ he read carefully, and showed it to Gil.