The Nicholas Feast (21 page)

Below, in the hall, the mason could be heard clearly, greeting his guests. The chaplain answered him with the friars’ customary Latin blessing, spoken in his deep musical voice. At Gil’s feet the wolfhound stirred, and raised its head.

‘But certainly,’ said Maister Mason. ‘He is above stairs. Come up, come up. Some refreshment, surely? My daughter will –’

‘Not for me, I thank you.’ Father Bernard’s Scots was accented like the mason’s. ‘But I’m sure Michael here would be glad of something.’

Michael’s voice, muffled, assented to this. The wolfhound rose slowly to its feet. Gil stroked it and was startled to find its rangy frame rigid and trembling, with the coarse grey fur standing erect. Feet sounded on the stair, and a faint growl began deep in the dog’s throat, becoming gradually louder as the feet approached.

‘Quiet,’ said Gil firmly. The animal’s tail swung against his knees, but the growl continued. Gil grasped the long muzzle, then flung his injured arm round the dog’s chest just in time, as Maistre Pierre led Father Bernard into the room, the friar paused in the doorway to pronounce his blessing and the wolfhound, with a scrabble of claws on the floorboards, tried to launch itself snarling at the intruder.

‘What ails the beast?’ asked the mason, startled into French.

‘I don’t know. Quiet!’ said Gil again. ‘Down! I’m sorry about this.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ said Father Bernard, eyeing the pup’s display of white teeth warily. ‘Dogs often dislike me. Possibly they find the robes alarming.’

‘Shall I remove him?’ offered the mason.

‘He won’t go with you in this state,’ Gil pointed out, hanging on to the sturdy collar. ‘Down! Oh, Alys! Will he go with you?’

‘Whatever is the matter?’ Alys, grasping the collar in both hands, dragged the snarling animal across the floor. ‘What has angered him?’

‘Take care,’ said Father Bernard anxiously. ‘He may bite you.’

‘I’ll feed him,’ said Alys. ‘Come, dog! Come with me! Gil, you must name him. How can we give him orders if he has no name?’ She hauled the dog bodily out on to the stairs, and the mason shut the door quickly behind her.

‘No name? Is it not your animal, then?’ asked Father Bernard.

‘It seems to have belonged to William Irvine,’ said Gil precisely. ‘Good morning to you, sir.’

‘Oh, that dog! Aye, good morning, Maister Cunningham,’ said Father Bernard in his melodious voice. He sat down on one of the tapestry backstools indicated by the mason, and put back the hood of his habit. The dark hair round his tonsure was cut short, and curled crisply; the sunken eyes in the cadaverous face regarded Gil intently. ‘I bring you greetings from Dean Elphinstone and the Principal,’ he continued. ‘Your man brought word that you were attacked in the open street. What a dreadful thing to happen in this peaceful place. But I find you on your feet and clothed. Did you take any scathe?’

‘Very little, thanks to Maister Mason.’ Gil eased his position on the window-seat. He was finding other aches and pains, and his head was throbbing.

‘God in his mercy be praised,’ said the friar, and raised his hand to make the cross.

‘Amen to that. This is very kind of you, father, to visit like this.’

‘The college was most distressed to hear of your misadventure,’ said Father Bernard largely. ‘And was it robbery? Did they make off with anything valuable?’

‘Some papers only,’ said Gil.

‘Nothing important, I hope?’

‘Nothing that cannot be replaced.’

‘Did you know them? Were they common blackguards of the burgh, or someone’s dagger-men? What could their motive have been?’

‘I never got a sight of their faces,’ said Gil.

‘They seemed expert fighters,’ remarked Maistre Pierre. ‘And used to working together, I thought, Gilbert.’

‘Aha!’ said the chaplain. ‘Maister Doby will hear that with relief, and I admit to the same.’

Maistre Pierre looked startled, but Gil said, ‘No, it was none of your flock, father. These were all older than I am, by their movements, and seasoned fighters as Maister Mason says. As to motive, I have no clear idea, but since the papers they took were connected to the matter I am investigating for the college, I assume it was related to that.’

‘Ah, yes. Poor William.
Requiescat in pace.’
Father Bernard made the sign of the cross, and Gil and the mason both murmured
Amen.
After a moment he continued, ‘His burial will be tomorrow, after Sext, and we have arranged a quodlibet disputation in Theology after dinner, to give the boys’ minds a better direction and prevent them falling into melancholy.’

So we have until noon tomorrow, Gil thought, to bring this to a conclusion.

‘Did you know the dead boy well, father?’

‘Why, no, hardly more than his fellows.’

‘There are only forty students just now,’ Gil pursued, ‘few enough to spend the whole year with. Did nothing distinguish William Irvine from the others?’

‘I could not say so. I had little contact with him, except for the music. I know the students of Theology well, of course,’ expanded Father Bernard, ‘mature individuals with well-formed minds, but the young men of the Faculty of Arts come less in my way, other than those who confess to me.’

Gil thought of some Theology students he had known, but did not comment. Instead he said, ‘Who was William’s confessor?’

‘I think perhaps Dean Elphinstone.’

‘Do you know who his parents were?’ asked the mason.

The dark eyes turned to him. ‘I can tell you nothing about his parentage.’

‘Or about his habits of extortion?’ Gil asked.

‘Extortion? Did he – It seems hard that he should be dead in such a way, poor boy, and slandered as well. I am sure he did not practise extortion. Have you discovered nothing that might tell us who killed him?’

‘So he never approached you with threats of any kind?’ Gil asked.

‘Certainly not! What could he threaten me with?’

‘None of us is blameless,’ pronounced the mason.

‘That is very true,’ agreed Father Bernard, attempting to regain control of the conversation, ‘but I hope my faults are not such that a boy of sixteen could frighten me with threats of exposure.’

‘What did he have to show you, father, yesterday in the Outer Close before the procession?’ Gil asked.

‘Yesterday? He showed me nothing,’ began Father Bernard.

‘I brought him a package from his foster-mother,’ Gil said. ‘I gave it to him before the college yett, and went into the close. William passed me, and spoke to you in the courtyard. I thought he said
This might interest you
, or some such thing. I wondered if it had anything to do with the package.’

‘Oh, now I recall.’ Father Bernard’s sunken eyes turned piously to the ceiling. ‘The poor boy. He wished to show me something, and I had not time to hear him, for I still had to arrange for the music to be carried to St Thomas’s. I promised to give him time later, perhaps after I had given the ordinary Theology lecture, but of course by then he was dead. The poor boy,’ he said again. ‘I suppose we may never know what troubled him.’

‘He is salved of all troubles now,’ Maistre Pierre pointed out. He and Father Bernard crossed themselves simultaneously.

‘And he had never threatened, for instance,’ said Gil almost at a venture, ‘to report you to the Vicar-General of your Order for heresy?’

‘For heresy?’ repeated Father Bernard harshly. ‘Why should he do that?’

‘For quoting Wycliff, perhaps,’ Gil suggested, ‘or discussing Lollardy in your ordinary lectures?’

‘One must encourage students to dispute these points, so that one may expose the fallacies on which they are grounded,’ retorted Father Bernard in Latin.

‘That alone might create trouble if one were in Paris,’ Gil observed.

The theologian snorted. ‘Paris! They’re still licking at Louis’ heels on the nominalist question. They can’t have it both ways.’

‘While Glasgow follows
Albert, the subtil clerk and wys
. The path of orthodoxy is narrow,’ said Gil, watching the friar carefully, ‘and William was industrious in detecting those who stepped from it in other segments of the University sphere. I speculated, merely, on whether he had approached you in the same way.’

‘No,’ said Father Bernard. Gil waited, while the mason looked from one to the other. ‘But I had wondered,’ said Father Bernard after a moment, reverting to French.

Gil, still waiting, was aware in the corner of his eye of movement in the courtyard. There was a knocking at the house door. Father Bernard’s expression grew troubled and portentous.

‘I thought the boy might have been gathering information,’ he admitted.

‘We know he was doing that,’ Gil agreed. Down in the courtyard Alys in her blue gown hurried out to the pend beside a groom in well-worn riding-gear. ‘Any sort of information in particular?’

‘Information to sell,’ pronounced Father Bernard. The musical voice took on a note of grief. ‘Information of value to one faction or another, the selling of which could only increase the discord with which this poor country is riven.’

‘Espionage?’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘It seems very possible. But who would he sell to, here in Glasgow?’

Gil turned his gaze away, in time to see Alys crossing the courtyard again, leading a guest in to the door in the most formal way. The hand laid on her arm belonged to a slender, graceful woman in muddy travelling-garments, her hair bound up in a coarse black cloth under a battered felt hat like a sugar-loaf with a brim.

Has she not given that hat to the poor yet? he thought in resignation, and looked back at the Dominican, who had closed his mouth over his yellow teeth with the air of one having summed up a situation.

‘Are you saying, father,’ he said, ‘that William was in truth selling information to someone? Which faction did you have in mind?’

‘I have no way of knowing,’ stated the chaplain. ‘He was kin to Lord Montgomery, which would give him an entry to Argyll and his followers.’ Gil nodded, and wished he had not. ‘And he messed with Michael Douglas, who is below in your kitchen, and his friends last year. He would have contact with the Hamiltons and Douglases through that boy.’

‘I think Michael dislikes him,’ Gil observed.

‘A false face, surely, designed to conceal the truth.’ Father Bernard looked over his shoulder as footsteps sounded in the other room. ‘You have another guest,’ he said, rising.

Alys entered the room first.

‘See who is here, father,’ she said. ‘It is Gil’s mother.’ She stepped aside to allow the woman in the sugar-loaf hat to follow her.

Most landholders, when they travelled, took time near their destination to find a sheltered spot, groom the horses and change their clothing, in order to make a good appearance by riding into burgh or castle in velvet and satin and jewels rather than stained travelling gear. This woman’s heavy woollen skirts were bedraggled and spattered, there was mud on her hat and her long-chinned, narrow face, and the gloves she drew from her hands as she stood in the doorway were dark with her horse’s sweat.

Getting to his feet, Gil was aware of a single quick, penetrating, maternal glance before her attention was turned to the mason stepping hastily forward to greet this guest. Watching her dealing expertly with Maistre Pierre’s words of welcome and of apology for not having been at the door to meet her, Gil recalled that Egidia Muirhead, Lady Cunningham, had for years occupied a senior place in the household of Margaret of Denmark, James Third’s devious and melancholy Queen, encountering the many foreign visitors who made their way through the court.

‘Et tecum,
Bernard,’ she was saying now in response to Father Bernard’s blessing. ‘How long have you been back in Scotland? You’re not teaching at the college, are you?’

‘I am indeed,’ said Father Bernard in his deep musical voice.

‘And here is your son,’ said Maistre Pierre.

Gil went down on one knee to kiss the offered hand so like his own. Her long fingers gripped his, hard and briefly, and she said in Scots, ‘I’ll have David Cunningham’s hide for cushions. He sent Tam out to meet me, to bid me have no ill-ease for you, so of course I brattled on into Glasgow with all possible haste, and here I find you at the clack with half the burgh. Get up, son, and we can all sit down.’

‘Hardly the half of Glasgow,’ Gil protested, obeying.

Her grasp on his hand tightened again as he straightened up, but all she said was, ‘Don’t argue, my dear. It’s unseemly’ She seated herself on one of the tapestry chairs, and asked kindly, ‘So when did you return to Glasgow, Bernard?’

‘Some years since,’ admitted Father Bernard. ‘And you, madam? I believe you are alone now? Is all well with you?’

‘As well as a poor widow can expect,’ said the lady of Belstane. ‘I have my dower lands. We win a living. Is your mother still alive?’

‘She died two years since at the feast of St Remy, and is buried at Irvine, said Father Bernard with precision. Lady Egidia raised her eyebrows, and he added, ‘She died as the widow of Lord Montgomery’s kinsman Robert. His grandsire’s brother, I believe.’

‘God rest her soul,’ said Lady Egidia. ‘And what are you doing at the college, Bernard?’