The Fourth Crow (22 page)

‘But are his lands extensive?’ Alys asked. ‘Can he keep you in style? Will you have a great household to run?’

‘So my aunt says,’ said Ursula, with a show of indifference.

‘Was the match hers, then?’

‘Aye, she promoted it. He’s some kind of acquaintance o her kin at St Mungo’s, so my da said.’

‘Have you met him? Is he a well-looking man?’

‘Better than Lockhart,’ said Nicholas. ‘They both are!’

‘That’s no hard!’

The two exchanged another look, and giggled. Alys was aware of Meggot, over by the other wall, glancing at the sisters and shaking her head disapprovingly. Taking care not to meet Jennet’s eye, she said,

‘I had not realised you had kin at St Mungo’s. Who is it?’

‘Och, none of our kin,’ said Ursula dismissively. ‘Some connection o my aunt’s by her first marriage, I think she said. He’s no ill looking, but he’s a priest, all shaven and shorn, though that didny stop him putting his hand about Nick’s waist when we met him.’

‘Aye, and Ellen never checked him,’ said Nicholas, wriggling in remembered displeasure.

‘But do you recall his name?’ asked Alys.
He gropith so nyselye about my lape,
she thought, reviewing a list of the St Mungo’s clergy in her mind. There were several whom she would not wish to consult without Jennet or preferably Gil at her elbow, but not all of these were
no ill looking.

‘William?’ said Ursula.

‘William Craigie,’ her sister contributed. She nodded at sight of Alys’s expression, and went on, ‘To hear Ellen the sun shines out his bum.’

‘She wasny saying that the morn,’ observed Ursula. ‘Abusing him for a’things, she was, out there in the courtyard, for something he hadny done.’

‘What was it?’ the other girl asked avidly. Ursula shrugged.

‘Never heard. She stopped when she saw me, got at me for no finishing my seam instead.’

‘Just the same,’ said Nicholas doggedly, ‘she mostly thinks he’s a pattern o perfection, but what I heard was, he’d a major penance to perform, the way he’d done something right serious against Holy Kirk.’

‘Who tellt you that?’ demanded Ursula. Nicholas shrugged in her turn.

‘One of your man’s folk, when they all cam up to sign your betrothal papers. I forget the lad’s name. Meggot!’ she called over her shoulder.

‘Aye, lassie, what is it?’ Meggot responded, pausing with another little cake halfway to her mouth.

‘Do you mind that lad of Arthur Kennedy’s telling us about William Craigie and his penance?’

‘She does not,’ said another voice from the window. They all turned, startled, to find a grim-faced woman staring in at the wide-flung shutters. Beyond her a liveried manservant slipped off towards the stable block. ‘And what has it to do wi you, my girl, any road? I’ve brought you up better than to spend your time gossiping wi other folk’s servants, Nicholas Shaw, let alone passing on whatever slanders they’ve spoken, and I’ll thank you to keep it in mind.’

Alys, rising as good manners dictated to curtsy to the newcomer, observed the reactions in the room with interest. The sisters were annoyed by the interruption, only slightly embarrassed at being found gossiping; Meggot appeared to be frightened. Would this mean another beating, perhaps? Or did she fear something worse? What could be worse, Alys speculated, waiting for Dame Ellen to come round by the door of the guest-hall. Meggot might lose her place, or she might be sent back out to Glenbuck to wait alone for news of Annie, or her mistress might report badly of her to Sir Edward. No, she was Annie’s servant, not Dame Ellen’s, or so Gil had said; it could hardly be that.

‘Good afternoon, Aunt,’ said Ursula in a tone of faint malice as the older woman stalked into the hall. ‘I hope you had solace of your time at St Mungo’s. This is Mistress Alys Mason, that’s wedded on that man that’s seeking our Annie, come to offer us comfort in our troubles.’

‘Indeed I am sorry for all your distress,’ said Alys, curtsying again and going forward with her hands outstretched. ‘Is there still no word of your niece?’

‘No niece of mine,’ said Dame Ellen curtly, ignoring the hands. ‘No, there’s no word, though it would ease my poor brother’s passing greatly if he kent where the lassie had got to, deid or living.’

‘It is very strange,’ Alys persisted, ‘that she should have vanished away so completely. Is there nobody that might have given her shelter, can you think?’

‘Do you no think we’ve racked our brains for a clue?’ retorted the older woman, bridling. ‘Now we’ll no keep you back, mistress, kind as it was in ye to entertain these silly lassies for a bit. And your woman and all.’ Her gimlet gaze went beyond Alys, and a rustle of cloth suggested that Jennet felt similarly impelled to curtsy. ‘Good day to ye, madam.’

Out in the courtyard she encountered someone who could only be the doctor, a small man with curly dark hair, in a stained cloth gown which looked as if he regularly wore it while pounding simples or concocting remedies. She curtsied to him, under Jennet’s suspicious glower, and when he acknowledged it she introduced herself and asked after his patient. He shook his head sadly, and she noted the dark shadows under the blue eyes.

‘I think he has a difficult passage,’ she said in French, aware of watching eyes, of listening ears in the hall behind her, ‘despite the prayers of his friends.’

The doctor nodded.

‘Difficult indeed,’ he replied in the same language. ‘I can keep the pain at bay, but it is terrible to combat. There will be no poppy left in Glasgow, I suspect.’

‘How long has he got? How long do we have to find the missing lady?’

‘I think he will wait until he knows she is safe.’

Alys stepped forward and placed a hand on his sleeve.

‘What if she is no longer living?’ she said. ‘The longer it takes to find her or some trace of her, the less certain my husband is that we will find her alive.’

There was a tiny pause, and Januar said smoothly,

‘Why, if she is no longer living, then she is assuredly safe under Our Lady’s mantle.’

Alys considered him for a moment, but let that pass.

‘She seems to have no connection or acquaintance in this part of Scotland,’ she said. ‘If there was a house of nuns in Glasgow one might seek her there, but we can learn of nowhere else she could have turned to.’

‘My concern is for my patient,’ said the doctor after a moment. ‘You will excuse me, madame.’

The hostel’s little chapel was dark and quiet, though there were candles on the stand at the feet of the patron saint on her pillar to the left of the chancel arch. Jennet, at first wishing to exclaim indignantly about Dame Ellen’s behaviour, fell silent when her mistress drew out her beads, and retreated to sit near the door on the narrow wall-bench. Alys stood before St Catherine, head bent, not praying but trying to order what she had learned just now. The Shaw sisters were remarkably silly girls, as their aunt said, she thought dispassionately, but they did not seem ill intentioned, and if they knew anything about what had happened to their sister-in-law, they would be hard pressed to conceal it. Dame Ellen was another matter; the woman was certainly concealing something, but what? Was she directly involved in Annie’s disappearance, or did she know or suspect who might be involved? Why did Meggot fear her?

‘She’s aye ready wi her hands, so Meggot said,’ said Jennet as they made their way down the hill, past the high sandstone walls of the castle. ‘Showed me her bruises, she did, that the old dame gied her only for saying it wasny her own mistress that lay dead in the chapel. Is that the chapel where we were the now, mem? Small wonder if they were mistook at first, it was that dark.’

‘Did she tell you anything else?’ Alys asked, untangling this statement. ‘Does she know where her own mistress is, do you think?’

‘I’d say no,’ Jennet pronounced after a moment. ‘She seems right concerned for her, saying she’s no notion whether she’s living or where she might be. What else did she say, now?’ She clopped across the flagstones round the Girth Cross behind Alys, considering the matter. ‘It’s been a good position till now, for she’s fond o the lassie that’s missing, for all her strange ways. But what wi the young leddies about to be wedded, and the maister on his deathbed, though she says he’s been that way for months now, she’s no notion o what’s to come to her, the soul.’ She thought further. ‘Tellt me a bit about the life. I was never in a country position, see, mem, and I wouldny fancy it, by what she says. That doctor turned up a few month ago, wi his man—’

‘His man?’ Alys queried, stopping to look at the other girl. ‘Your maister never mentioned a manservant. Is he still there?’

‘No by what Meggot says,’ Jennet agreed. ‘Seems he found it too quiet and all, for he vanished away one day along wi the doctor’s purse wi ten merks in siller in it. Then there was the young leddies’ two men cam for the betrothal, wi all their folk, and went away again, and that Dame Ellen comes and goes, and apart from the cadger they spoke o that’s all the company there’s been in the place since Yule. Away too quiet for me, that would be. Oh, no, I tell a lee, there was her two nephews came calling a few times, it seems, but Meggot wasny that keen to see them, by what she said. Kind o free wi their hands, or one o them is, any road.’

‘That was well done. You learned more than I did,’ said Alys, moving on. ‘What did she tell you of her mistress’s life? Did any of these visitors call on her?’

‘Oh, aye. Aye pestering her, so Meggot says, to gie up her vow and come back into the world. That Dame Ellen telling her what a bonnie husband her nephews would make, even trying to persuade her wi ribbons and gewgaws off the cadger’s cairt. Meggot said,’ Jennet negotiated the stepping-stones of the Girth Burn behind Alys, her skirts caught up in either hand, ‘Meggot said, she’d as soon see the lassie live her life like any other, but she’d not see her forced to it. She said,’ she confided, ‘she’d ha thought those nephews had something to do wi Annie disappearing, maybe snatched her away and hid her, save that they looked as astonished as the rest o them when it turned out it was another lassie that was dead.’

‘So I thought too, by what your maister said.’

‘I hope she’s no to get a beating, only for talking to me.’ Jennet stopped, pushing back her hair, and stared about her. ‘Here, mem, where are we away to now? This is us on the High Street, no the Drygate. Are we no bound for home?’

‘We’re going to the old house. I want a word with Berthold,’ Alys said. The other girl gave her a sidelong look, but said nothing. ‘So maybe you should stay with me, rather than go off to the kitchen.’

‘Och, there’s nothing for me in that kitchen now,’ Jennet pointed out. ‘Talking away in Ersche, they are, and never a bite for a guest to eat neither. No neighbourly, I call it, no to mention the way the dust’s rising in the hall, you’d think they never knew what a besom was for. I’d just as soon attend you, mem.’

‘Ich sah nichts!’
said Berthold, his eyes rolling like a nervous horse’s.
‘Ich kann nicht – ich sah nichts!’

Alys reached along the bench and patted his hand. About them the garden of her father’s house lay in the sunshine, the scents of lavender and gillyflowers rising from the neat plots. At least her stepmother was tending that, she thought irrelevantly.

‘I know,’ she agreed, and paused, mustering the little Low Dutch she knew. It was rather different from Berthold’s High Dutch, but she had found it served to talk to him before now. She suspected the boy understood a lot more Scots than he would admit, but the answer she wanted was going to take some persuasion, and something approaching his own language would work better.
‘Ziet u de vrouw?’
she said cautiously. Berthold shrank slightly from her.
‘De dood vrouw?
The dead woman?’

The boy shuddered, and dragged his hand from her clasp. Jennet, standing by the lavender hedge, narrowed her eyes.

‘That’s worried him, mem,’ she observed unnecessarily. ‘Here, Berthold, tell the mistress all about it, whatever it is. She’ll can sort it for you, so she will.’

‘Nein, nein! Ich weiss nichts!’
said Berthold, shaking his head emphatically. Alys smiled at him, and reclaimed his hand, which was sweating and trembling.

‘Waar
?’ she asked him.
‘Waar zij is?’
Another shake of the head. ‘On the Drygate? Or on the Stablegreen?’

‘Ich sah nichts,’
Berthold almost wailed.

‘En u? Waar u was?’

‘What are you saying to him, mem?’ Jennet asked. ‘He’s in a right tirravee about it, whatever it is.’

‘I asked him where he was,’ Alys said, ‘the night he went out with Luke.’

‘What, the night afore last? The night the lassie was slain?’ Jennet looked intently at Berthold. ‘Did he see it, are you thinking? Is that why he’s feart, he thinks they’ll come and get him and all?’

Berthold, his pale blue gaze going from one face to the other, said nothing.

‘Waar u was
?’ Alys repeated. He shook his head. ‘Luke says you were not with him. Were you on the Stablegreen? By St Nicholas’ perhaps?’

‘Sankt Nikolaus
,’ said Berthold after a moment. Alys nodded, and patted the hand she still held.

‘See, that was easy,’ she said. ‘Where were all the others? The prentices? Where was the fighting?’ She mimed a punch with her free hand. ‘On the Drygate? By the Cross?’

Berthold eyed her doubtfully, and after another pause said,

‘Das Kreuz. Neben dem Kreuz.’

‘Is he saying they were by the Cross, mem?’ said Jennet. ‘For that’s right, that’s what Luke tellt us. Been a right good battle, by the sound o’t, and nobody hurt neither.’

Berthold’s gaze flicked to her at the words, and his expression changed, as if he did not agree. Alys considered him thoughtfully.

‘Berthold,’ she said. His eyes turned to her, and she let go his hand.
‘Hier ist das Kreuz.’
She drew an X on the wooden bench between them with her forefinger, and another a handspan away.
‘Hier ist Sankt Nikolaus. Hier is u.
’ She looked up at him, and he nodded. She waved her hand over the little scene she had mapped.
‘Wat u zien?
What do you see?
De dood vrouw
?’