Pat McIntosh - The Nicholas Feast

‘But my dear, you’ve no land, you must get a benefice or preferably two so you can live on the teinds, you must be a priest.’ She made it sound like a logical progression.

‘Pierre will dower her — ’

She straightened up and returned to the fire with another small waxed packet.

‘How can we match that? We’ve no land to spare, Gilbert!’

‘My uncle has offered — ’

‘Your uncle, your uncle! Well enough for him,’ said his mother desperately, ‘with all his benefices. Son, I have two parcels of land, you know that. I can keep myself and your sisters on the rents of one, and run the horses on the grazing of the other, and we win a living. If I give you either property for your home, how can I — ’

‘Are you feart I’d make you homeless?’ he said incredulously.

‘What else could you be planning?’

‘Mother, listen!’ He leaned forward and caught her wrist left-handed. ‘Listen to me. I don’t want to live in Avondale or Clydesdale.’

She stared at him.

‘We lost those lands. You know that,’ he said, echoing her phrase deliberately. ‘I don’t want to live where I can see the Hamiltons hunting our game and taxing our tenants.’

‘Not in Lanarkshire?’ she said. ‘But what will you live on? Where would you stay?’

‘Oh, in Lanarkshire,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll stay in the Lower Ward. If I marry Alys, we’ll settle here, in Glasgow. She has no kin but her father in Scotland, her mother is dead. How could I take her out of the place she knows? My uncle has offered two or three properties within the burgh that bring in a good rent. Pierre will dower her well, and I’ve a mind to convert at least some of that to property too. And then my uncle has some salaried post in mind, that he’s negotiating for. We wouldn’t be rich, mother, but we’d be comfortable.’

‘You’ll never make a living as a clerk outside the Kirk.’

‘There are more lay notaries than priested nowadays. They seem to do well enough.’

She stared at him a moment longer, then looked down at the pannikin.

‘Oh, your posset,’ she said. She added a pinch of sugar from the packet in her hand, and swirled the contents of the pan carefully, testing its warmth with the back of her wrist. Gil sat watching her, in a sort of daze of fatigue. The incongruity between the effort required to present an argument on such a subject and the aching familiarity of sitting at the hearth in his mother’s chamber, with the smell of her remembered herbs in his nostrils, had unbalanced him slightly. She was pouring the spiced and sweetened ale into a beaker now.

‘Drink this, Gibbie,’ she said, holding it out to him. He took it, and drank obediently.

‘And what of your sisters?’ she went on, as if he had not just made a long speech. ‘What’s to become of them when I’m not here? Are they to fast With water-kail, and to gnaw beans and peas? If you haveny an income, you canny support them, much less dower them, and whatever your uncle has in his mind,’ she hurried on, as he drew a weary breath to speak, ‘I’ll not believe it till I see the first quarter’s salary in your hand.’

‘Mother, my uncle approves. He likes Alys herself — ’

‘I told you, he’s a sentimental old man.’

‘- and he is greatly impressed by her accomplishments and her learning.’

‘She is clearly an excellent housewife,’ his mother agreed, ‘and obviously widely read as well.’

‘I think more clearly when I can talk to her.’

‘Gil, there’s my point exactly! Marriage holds a young man back — here you are already, running after her instead of working.’

‘I am working!’ he said indignantly. ‘The Principal commissioned me to find William’s murderer. And Alys has already been a great help. Listen,’ he pursued as she drew breath to speak. ‘Hughie’s bairn died with its mother, didn’t it? And Edward was no even betrothed?’

‘He was six-and-twenty,’ she said, with the wooden expression she still wore when someone else mentioned her dead sons. ‘We were just beginning to seek — Christ succour me, Gil, it’s only four years since!’ she burst out, and covered her face with one hand.

‘I know, mother,’ he said more gently. ‘But you have no Cunningham grandsons. If I marry Alys, and we — ’ He stopped, his throat tightening, as the full import of what he was saying struck him. His child and Alys’s — his own son. Alys’s son. ‘Do you not wish for my father’s name to go on?’

‘But what will you live on?’ she repeated.

‘Mother,’ he said, setting down the empty beaker, ‘I’ve heard enough.’

‘You’ll abandon the marriage?’

‘I will not,’ he said. ‘I have you deaving one ear and my uncle at the other, with argument and counterargument.’ He winced as he spread his hands. ‘When my closest kin fall out, I’m free to please myself. I’ll sign the contract as soon as I can hold a pen.’

She stared at him, her expression unreadable.

‘But you can aye be sure, mother,’ he concluded, ‘of our loving duty. And I know fine I speak for Alys in that, as well as myself.’

‘I’m glad you came by, Maister Cunningham,’ said Maister Coventry, waving him to a stool by the window of his chamber in the Arthurlie building. ‘We were wondering what success you have achieved in the matter of William’s death.’

‘Call him by his first name, for God’s sake, Patey,’ said Maister Kennedy from the other side of the chamber. ‘We’re all equals here, and he’s in minor orders at least.’

Maister Coventry raised his eyebrows at Gil, who nodded.

‘I should be honoured,’ he said. ‘As to what I have achieved in William’s matter, the answer is very little. The people with a reason to kill the boy had no opportunity, and the people with an opportunity had no reason that I can discern.’

‘Who had a reason?’ demanded Maister Kennedy.

‘Most of the Faculty, I suspect,’ said Maister Coventry before Gil could answer. ‘It’s good fortune that all were together at the critical moment.’

‘What is the critical moment, anyway? When was he killed, exactly?’

‘I think,’ said Gil carefully, ‘that he was throttled just about the time the Dean rose at the end of the play. Certainly he was dead and locked in the coalhouse by the time we all gathered in the Fore Hall again. I can’t say closer than that yet, and I may never be able to.’

‘Oh,’ said his friend. He stared out of the window at the wet tree-tops of the Arthurlie garden, his lips moving, and finally said, ‘Aye, that was it. D’ye ken, Gil, unless he spoke to whoever killed him, I must be the last to have had any converse with the boy.’

Gil, noting with interest that William was no longer that little toad, said, ‘And what did you converse about?’

‘Well, no to say converse. You mind when his tail got ripped and he marched off the stage.’ Gil nodded. ‘He stopped behind the curtains and got out of the dragon costume. Then he took up his gown — ’

‘His gown?’ Gil interrupted. ‘You mean he had taken it backstage with him?’

‘Aye.’

‘So he had planned to go snooping,’ said Patrick Coventry thoughtfully.

‘Very likely. Anyway after he had his gown on, and done up all the wee hooks and fastened his belt — ’ Maister Kennedy stopped and grimaced. ‘His belt. Aye. He set off towards the door. I got a hold of him and said something about, You’re not going, are you? He says, Yes, I am, my part’s finished. All this in whispers, of course. I said, Who the — who do you think you are? I decide when you’re finished, I said, and he shook me off and answered me back, looking down his nose that way he had, For the first time in my life I know exactly who I am. Then he went off out the door and the next time I saw him he was dead. Wasny that a strange thing to say?’