Pat McIntosh: The Nicholas Feast

‘The same William? The lanky redhead who hinted about peculation and heresy? The one with the striking alto voice?’

‘The Dean,’ remarked the man on the end of the table, ‘asked us to put these painful ideas from our minds for the sake of the feast.’

‘The same,’ agreed Nick, ignoring this.

‘He greeted me when I arrived,’ Gil said thoughtfully. ‘He was very civil until he found I was a Cunningham.’

‘Oh, very likely. St Peter be praised, Bernard has a better ear than I for a tune. We’ve split the entertainment between us — I did the play, he did the music — and it meant neither of us had to deal with William the whole time.’ He turned his head. ‘Oh, God, talk of the devil. They’re going to sing for us. That’s Bernard giving out the beat. His mother’s a cousin of the Lennox Stewarts and his father was one of the French branch of the family. Been here two years, I think, or maybe it’s three. You know how they move around, all the friars, from one house to another.’

‘A learned man,’ said the man at the end of the table. ‘He does most of the teaching in Theology.’

Gil twisted round to look. The gangling William was at the centre of the hall, flanked by the fair-haired boy whose speech he had interrupted, and the boy for whom he had just earned a scolding by distracting him. Two more students joined the group, and under the intense direction of the Dominican chaplain the five young voices rose in praise of music.

‘That’s David Ross,’ said Nick in Gil’s ear, ‘the treble. He and his brother lodge with the Principal. They’re far too young really, but we have to keep the Rosses sweet after what happened to whatsisname. You know he’s teaching in the Sentences here? There he is at the other table.’

Gil nodded. The story of Robert Ross, blinded in one eye by a flung cabbage stalk, and the resulting parental wrath, was known to most graduates of the college.

‘And the second alto is a Montgomery,’ continued Nick, ‘in case you were thinking of being civil to him.’

‘Oh, is that his trouble? We’re supposed to be at peace,’ Gil rejoined. ‘It must be six months at least since there was any difficulty. William isn’t an ensemble singer, is he?’

Nick winced as the mellifluous tones floated high in the climax of the piece, twining round the treble, making it sound slightly flat.

‘You wouldn’t expect him to be,’ he pointed out. William, ignoring the spatter of applause, strolled away from the group and out of the hall. Gil glanced at the high table and found that David Gray was staring with dislike after the narrow departing back in its blue gown. The subcharge of the service is bot sair , he thought. There was a man who was not enjoying the feast.

The remaining singers rearranged themselves, and the Dominican gave out a new beat.

‘When’s the harper?’ asked the man who had taught in Paris. ‘I missed a good Scots harper in France. The style is quite different.’

‘What harper is it?’ Gil asked.

‘The man that stays in the Fishergait will come in after the play,’ Nick said. ‘Now what? Oh, bloody Machaut. I really would as soon not eat my dinner to Machaut. I’m going to see if the players are dressed yet. Bernard lectures in the Theology Schule two hours after noon, so if we overrun we’ll have to finish the music without him. Will you risk the second course, Gil, or will you give me a hand? We’re dressing in the Bachelors’ Schule.’

The smaller lecture-room was occupied by a panicky, half-dressed group, jostling for a sight of the mirror and shouting in bad Latin about costumes and properties. Nick was promptly besieged by several people at once. Gil waited quietly, looking about him. A heap of canvas painted with scales lay on a bench, and beside it a bundle of brocade and gauze suggested women’s costumes. Across the room the westward windows showed the near houses on the High Street, with the roof of the Greyfriars church beyond, and dark clouds still piling up above them. It seemed likely that the May sunshine would shortly give way to yet another vicious May shower.

Over by the lecturer’s pulpit, William was apparently hearing the lines of a younger boy whose shaggy hair had probably last been cut by his mother when she saw him in September. As Gil watched, William shook his own well-barbered head and with a superior smile clouted the other boy round the ear, wadded up his script and reached up to put it on top of the soundboard of the pulpit. Ignoring his victim’s despairing pleas, he walked away across the room, taking something from his purse as he went. Maister Kennedy, looking about him, caught sight of the younger boy standing by the pulpit.

‘Gil! You were in the entertainment in our time. Can you take Richie through his part for me? And see him costumed?’

‘What, now?’ said Gil in astonishment.

‘Aye, now! He needs a last run-through. William was just hearing him, but he has to go and sing again. Richie, come here, you imbecile. Why I cast you as a Scholar I’ll never know. Get along with Maister Cunningham. Where’s your script? And your book?’

‘William put them up yonder, Maister Kennedy,’ said Richie, almost weeping with anxiety. ‘I canny reach them!’

‘Speak Latin, fool! Maister Cunningham can reach them, I’ve no doubt.’

Gil crossed to the pulpit, and put a hand up on to the soundboard to bring down a bundle of papers.

‘Is it all here?’ he asked Richie, brushing clumps of dust off the creased margins.

The boy nodded, gulping with relief. ‘That’s my script, maister. But there’s still the brown book. It’s what I tak to show I’m a student.’

He pushed dark hair out of his eyes in a nervous gesture, and peered hopefully up at the soundboard. Gil put a toe on the seat of the lecturer’s bench and swung himself up to look. There were not one but two books up there, bright on top of decades of dust. He reached for them and jumped down, handing them to Richie.

‘This one’s mine, maister. I dinna ken that wee red one, it’s maybe someone else’s.’

‘Nick? Is this yours?’ Gil held the book out.

‘I don’t know whose it is.’ Maister Kennedy gave the book a brief glance, tucked it in the breast of his cassock and turned away. ‘Michael, how can you be a daughter of anybody with a face like that? Scrub it off and try again.’

Gil took his pupil into a corner, sorted out the bundle of papers and gave the boy his first prompt. It soon became apparent why Richie was worried; he was nowhere near word-perfect in the badly rhymed Latin couplets and had only the vaguest of ideas about his cues. Gil stared at him in bafflement.

‘Why haven’t you learned it?’ he asked. ‘In my day it was an honour to be in the play, and earned favours from the Dean. I was let off two disputations for my last part, it had so many lines.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Richie, reddening. ‘I thought it would be easy. I mean …’ He fell silent.

Gil, in some sympathy, said, ‘Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Why don’t you carry the script in your book and read it, as if you’re reading Aristotle or Euclid?’

Richie gaped at him as if experiencing an epiphany.

‘D’you think Maister Kennedy would let me?’

‘I should think he’d let you do anything that saved the play,’ Gil assured him.

‘Richie! Are you costumed yet!’ shouted Nick across the room. ‘The singing’s finished, we’re on next. Now have you all got that clear? We’re cutting the scene with Frivolity and going straight to where Idleness enters. Yes, I know, Henry, but you’ve only yourself to blame, you know even less of your lines than Richie here. Walter and Andrew, you will get that padding out or I will personally remove it and stuff it up — ’