The Rough Collier (25 page)

‘Confessed to poisoning Murray?’ she repeated. ‘I canny believe it. It goes against everything I ever heard of her.’

‘I heard her confess and all, mistress,’ Alan assured her.

‘She asked me to lock her in,’ Alys said, ‘but would you wish her to lie in the steward’s chamber? Certainly it is warm and dry and we can give her a pallet and a blanket, but –’

‘Aye, that’s the best plan. You’ll see to that, Alan. And no point in trying to find Gil till the morning.’ Lady Egidia frowned. ‘Will he come home, I wonder? If he’s really gone so far as Elsrickle, it must be fifteen or sixteen mile from here, he may go straight to Lanark for the quest. Well, no sense in fretting over that just now.’ She waved at the door. ‘Go and see Mistress Lithgo comfortable, Alan, and maybe you would let the dog run in the yard a bit, and then you can get to your own rest.’ She delivered a brisk blessing, and her steward departed reluctantly, towing an equally reluctant Socrates. ‘A good man, Alan,’ she said as their footfalls diminished down the stairs, ‘but his ears are by far too long, and everything he hears gets to Eppie. Sit down, my dear, and we’ll see if we can work this out between us.’

‘My head is all in a whirl,’ Alys confessed, obeying. ‘I can make no sense of it. Why would Beatrice do such a thing? She is the one everyone calls a good woman.‘

‘A good healer,’ agreed Lady Egidia. ‘A wise woman, in all senses of the word. So if we assume there is some reason for her action, we’ll get on better.’

‘I can think of only one reason for such an action,’ acknowledged Alys.

‘But who? Who is she protecting?’

‘Someone she loves? Someone important to her?’

‘You’ve spent time with her lately. Who would you say is important enough for her to go willingly to execution for that person?’

Alys considered this, turning over her conversations with Beatrice Lithgo in her mind, but nothing seemed to offer itself. She shook her head.

‘She is a woman of great reserve. Her daughters, of course, and her son if he was suspected, though I don’t think Gil has even considered him –’

‘He was in Glasgow at the time, I believe,’ agreed her mother-in-law.

‘– but as for Joanna and the old woman, I should say she was very fond of Joanna but held Mistress Weir in . . . in . . .’ She paused, searching for a suitable word. ‘Respect, I suppose, as one ought.’ Their eyes met, and she saw amused acknowledgement of this in her mother-in-law’s expression. ‘No more than that. I’ve seen no sign that she dislikes her, but there is no liking.’

‘I wonder why she stays there,’ said Lady Egidia. ‘Has she nowhere else to go?’

‘If her portion is tied up in the business, it will be impossible for her to leave without unpleasantness,’ said Alys. ‘And the same must apply to Joanna, I suppose.’

‘So we think Mistress Lithgo is protecting her daughters, or possibly Joanna. Do you suppose she thinks one of them poisoned Murray, or simply that one of them is suspected? I wonder what the younger girl wanted to confess?’

‘Gil suspects all of them, including Mistress Lithgo herself,’ observed Alys. ‘I suppose he must have given away that much when he was last there.’

She drew her tablets out of her purse, and smoothed a list of dry stores off the second leaf, burnishing the last marks with the back of her fingernail. Socrates returned midway through this process, and had to be reassured and ordered to lie down. That dealt with, she made a neat list of the five names, and after a moment’s deliberation added Raffie at the end. Incising several columns beside the list, she said thoughtfully, ‘We know some of them have the knowledge of simples and poisons, but how much knowledge does it take?’

‘It has to be something which can be given in liquid,’ supplied Lady Egidia, ‘with a taste that can at least be disguised.’

‘And a single dose must suffice.’ She looked at her list. ‘Much as I like her, I could not credit Joanna with so much sense, any more than a spring lamb, but perhaps I misjudge her. All the others could know that much from either Arbella or Beatrice.’ She made a mark beside each name in the first column.

‘What next?’ asked Lady Egidia. Alys glanced up sharply at her enthralled tone, wary of mockery, but the older woman’s expression matched her voice. ‘Opportunity, or a reason for ministering poison?’

‘Opportunity,’ said Alys firmly. She tried to recall the several conversations about the silver flask, piecing them together as they came to her mind. ‘Mistress Weir gave the flask to Bel to take to Murray before he and Joanna left their apartment. By Joanna’s account, she put it straight in his scrip under his eye.’

‘So Arbella and her granddaughter had the chance, but not Joanna. Raffie was in Glasgow, I suppose. What of the other two?’

‘Phemie told us they all broke their fast together in the other chamber, all of them except Joanna and Murray. You know, Raffie could have given the stuff to one of his sisters to minister, perhaps without saying what it was.’ She made a note at the foot of the leaf. ‘I must ask Phemie, before she knows where her mother is and why she came here.’

‘Ask her what?’

Alys looked up with an apologetic smile, realizing she had not finished the sentence.

‘Whether she or her mother went out into the hall after Joanna came through, but before they all went to see the travellers off.’ She looked at her list, and marked two names off in the second column.

‘And we come to the reason,’ said Lady Egidia. ‘If there can be said to be a reason for killing another Christian.’ Or anyone else, thought Alys, but did not say so. ‘Did you tell me the lassie Brownlie was afraid of her man?’

‘I thought she was,’ agreed Alys. ‘Beatrice thought she was. Joanna herself will say nothing against him.’

‘Hmm. A well-reared lassie. And the younger girls?’

‘Murray made fun of Bel and her lack of speech. He had slighted Phemie, who thought he would have married her until Joanna’s portion became known –’

‘Aye, Joanna’s portion. That’s a strange matter. Why – no, we must think this through first. What about the older women?’

‘Mistress Weir and Murray were at odds over the running of the business.’ Alys looked down at her list again. ‘She only said that she was disappointed in him, but Phemie told me, and her brother told Gil, that the man had ideas of his own which did not suit the old lady. There was shouting, Phemie said.’

‘That might be enough. Money does strange things to people. As for our penitent down in Alan’s chamber, did she give a reason, or were you to work that out as well?’

‘She said Murray was annoying her lassies, and Joanna.’

‘No,’ said Lady Egidia after a moment. ‘She is a rational woman, and a healer. That makes no sense.’

‘No. I think we are agreed, Beatrice Lithgo may have confessed, but she is probably not the poisoner.’

‘So who is she protecting?’

‘We come back to that,’ agreed Alys.

‘And today,’ said her mother-in-law, with an abrupt change of direction, ‘you went to Dalserf. What’s your interest in Joanna Brownlie?’

‘I heard a lot about the family,’ Alys said. ‘Particularly about her father’s deathbed. And his will was very interesting.’

‘What, you think the man Brownlie was poisoned and all?’

‘Well, I wonder,’ she said earnestly. ‘His death was different from Murray’s, but it sounds very like the way Matt Crombie died.’

Lady Egidia studied her for a time, her long-chinned face solemn in the candlelight.

‘How many?’ she said eventually.

‘Four of the family, I think,’ said Alys. ‘And also Joanna’s father. Five all told, I suppose, though not all by poison.’ Her mother-in-law counted on her fingers, frowning, and finally nodded. ‘But what worries me is why there has been an extra death this year.’

Lady Egidia looked at her, pursed up her long mouth, and finally said, ‘And then there is this errand that has taken Gil to Elsrickle. It’s a long ride for something that won’t prove anything whatever the answer might be.’

‘It won’t prove it, but it adds to the picture,’ Alys began, and was interrupted. Socrates raised his head, and suddenly scrabbled to his feet, claws scraping on the tiled floor, and rushed out into the hall. There was a furious hiss, a flurry of movement, a yelp from the dog almost drowned by the clatter and crash of pewter dishes, and a long-drawn-out yowling.

The two women collided in the doorway, the streaming flame from the branch of candles just missing Alys’s velvet hood. Out in the hall, the light growing as Lady Egidia hurried the length of the chamber, they found the dog abased below the plate-cupboard amid the debris of the display, while the grey cat, all standing fur and round furious eyes, swore at him from the top shelf, tail lashing.

‘Socrates!’ exclaimed Alys. ‘What a bad dog!’

‘Silky has been teasing him,’ said Lady Egidia, magnanimous in her pet’s victory. ‘I dare say she taunted him from out here just now. Has she clawed him?’

‘He seems unhurt. Oh, no, here is a scratch on his nose.’ Alys dabbed at it with her handkerchief, while the dog rolled his eyes at her and at the cat. ‘Bad dog. Look at all the dishes you have brought down!’

She lifted the nearest, and stacked them up on the shelves. Lady Egidia set down the candles and joined her in the task, remarking, ‘I’m surprised they aren’t up from the kitchen to see what the noise was. It sounded like the clap of Doom. What’s this? Oh, that piece of stone Gil had in his purse. Will you take it? If you’re going up to the coal-heugh tomorrow you could give it back to the lassie.’ She retrieved a round dish which had rolled into the hearth, and blew the ashes from it. ‘And take both Steenie and Henry with you, my dear. Silky, you are a naughty cat.’

Chapter Thirteen

‘I’ve no recollection,’ said Phemie. ‘You’ll no tell me, Alys, that you rode all the way up here, and two of your good-mother’s men at your back, just to ask me did anyone go into the hall alone that day?’

They were seated in the room she called the window-chamber, before the great glass window, Phemie and her sister side by side on the cushioned bench and Alys on one of the backstools with Socrates’ head on her lap while he watched the girls intently.

‘No, no,’ said Alys hastily, ‘I have more reason than that. But Phemie, you must see, the quest will most likely find that someone here gave the poison to Thomas Murray, and you need to be ready with the right answers when they come to ask them.’

‘Oh.’ Phemie glowered at her, lower lip stuck out, in an expression which reminded Alys again of the younger Morison girl. Apparently she had not thought about this until now. ‘I’ve no recollection,’ she said again. ‘I was here, eating my porridge. What about you, Bel? You were here too, were you no?’

Her sister nodded, and pointed emphatically at the floor of the chamber where they sat.

‘And the others? Joanna, your mother?’ asked Alys innocently. ‘Where is Joanna just now? How is she today?’

‘My mother’s been called out, I suppose, or she could tell you herself and Joanna’s laid down on her bed again. I’ll go to her directly. No, she never came through till Murray did.’ Phemie’s tone was still disparaging when she referred to the man. ‘My mother was in here dishing out the porridge. The kitchen brings it in and sets it up there,’ she indicated the pale oak court-cupboard, ‘and we serve ourselves. Or my mother sees to it.’

‘And you all stayed in here till you went out to see them off.’

‘That’s right. What does it matter, anyway?’

‘We need to find out all we can about how the man died,’ Alys supplied. Bel turned wide blue eyes on her, considering her carefully, but gave no other sign. ‘I should like to look in your mother’s herbal, that she keeps in the stillroom. I wondered, too, if you would let me look at the great account book, the one your grandam showed me the first day we were here.’

‘It’s in her chamber,’ said Phemie. ‘Why? What will that tell you, just columns of numbers and names like that?’

Oh, my dear girl, thought Alys, and you a merchant’s daughter too. Aloud she said only, ‘It will tell me if Murray was an honest workman, as everyone says he was. If he was stealing from the business,’ she amplified, in answer to Phemie’s puzzled look, ‘it should show in the accounts, though it might be far to seek. How long was he here?’

‘Five year, maybe. If he was stealing coin, Arbella would notice,’ said Phemie. ‘Have you not seen yet that nothing happens up here by the Pow Burn that she doesny know of, one way or another?’

And that was not what you said before, thought Alys.

Bel stood up abruptly, gestured for Alys to follow, and led her out into the hall. Socrates’ claws clicked on the flagstones as they went the length of the wide space and through a doorway at the back, into another pair of chambers. This was, quite plainly, Arbella’s apartment. Alys looked about her curiously.

The chamber nearest the hall was panelled and painted, with several figures of saints on the wall by the fireplace and a garland of flowers round under the rafters. A curtained bed took up most of the floor, with a clothes-kist at its foot. There was a musty smell which made Alys wrinkle her nose. Socrates, pressed close against her thigh, raised his head, sniffing, and the hair lifted on his narrow back. Bel glanced at the bed, with its neatly bagged-up curtains of verdure tapestry, almost as if she expected to see it occupied, but went round it to the further door and opened that.

The inner chamber was small and gloomy. A bench at one end held a fortune in glassware, the delicate blown shapes reflecting light from the high tiny window. Alys identified flasks, two alembics and several curving tubes whose use she could only imagine. There was red wax to stop the joints with, and a stand below which one could place a small charcoal burner. This was more than a stillroom, she thought, recalling Mère Isabelle’s working quarters.

The musty smell was stronger here, with a foxy overtone which made her gag, and a definite recollection of a mews she had once been shown. She was unsurprised when Bel pulled open one of the drawers beneath the bench to see it crammed with rustling linen bags, each neatly labelled in the same beautiful hand as in the account book. Arbella’s herb collection also rivalled Mère Isabelle’s.

‘Did you gather all these?’ she asked, bending to look at the labels, but Bel gave her a pitying look, closed the drawer by bumping it with her hip and reached to open another. Over their heads feathers ruffled, and both girls looked up; following Bel’s gaze Alys found she was being watched by round pale eyes, peering from the shadows above the window. ‘An owl?’ she exclaimed. ‘Can it be an owl, here in the house?’

Bel nodded, glowered at the creature, and with some ingenuity extracted something large and rectangular from the drawer she had touched, using her skirt to shield it from – yes, certainly from the owl’s gaze.

‘They are everywhere,’ Alys said. Bel nodded again, clutching her prize under the folds of blue wool, and jerked her head to summon Alys into the outer room. Kicking the door shut behind them, she set the great account book carefully on a little prayer-desk by the head of the bed, then smoothed down her skirt and mimed someone holding a bird, stroking its feathers, simpering with affection. ‘It’s your grandam’s pet?’ Alys guessed. Bel nodded, but turned to the book. Opening the leather-bound boards, she leafed through the pages until she found the most recent entries, and stood back in triumph.

The accounts were very clear, and gradually drew Alys’s thoughts away from the presence of the owl. The movement of coin, in and out of the coaltown, was meticulously itemized. The coal was tracked with equal precision. The numbers added up, marching down the pages, each line a distillation of some man’s labour in the dirty, sweaty dark of the mine. I am fanciful, Alys told herself, turning back leaf by clearly inscribed leaf. It must be the effect of kneeling before the book like this, as if it was a prayer-book. The dog sat tall beside her, his chin on her arm, almost as if he too was reading the elegant writing.

Bel touched her hand to get her attention, and when she looked up sketched Arbella’s wired headdress and upright stance, then folded her hands as if in prayer.

‘She prays over the book?’ Alys guessed. Then she thought, how silly, it is such an illogical fancy, but Bel nodded, unsmiling. How did she guess what was in my head? she wondered.

Two years back, in ’91, a flurry of extra work was recorded. A winding-shaft and its shelter,
yhe new over
wyndhous
, was carefully accounted for, along with the wood to build the gear and a heavy hemp rope. Joanna’s dowry and inheritance being put to the good, thought Alys, and yet they don’t seem to use the shaft. There was no mention of Matt’s death. She turned further back, and became aware that the figures were changing. Comparing the Lady Day accounting year by year, when the returns on the winter’s coal would have come in, she could see that the profits were not so good in recent entries as the earlier ones. She detected no abrupt change when Murray came to the coaltown, nor when he was promoted to grieve, though both these events were noted.

She turned more pages. The death of the younger Adam Crombie, Beatrice’s husband, was signalled only by a record of the extra work needed in 1484 to clear the roof-fall. Studying the numbers which lay on the page before and after it, she came to the reluctant conclusion that business improved after his death, and then slowly deteriorated to the present figures.

Why should that be so? she wondered. Was it a question of the control of the business, or of who had a say in where the money went? What difference had it made when the younger Adam died? She heard Beatrice’s voice in her head –
My man never liked to have much to do wi’ the pit, Our
Lady succour him.
Presumably matters went better when Arbella had sole control.

She turned back through the book, considering the implications of this. But even if her suspicions were correct, there was no need to poison Thomas Murray. Unless he had uncovered the same facts that she had recognized. Murray had questioned Isa in the kirk in Carluke, she recalled. But Sir Simon at Dalserf had no knowledge of him, had presumably never met him.

‘Does anyone else look at these accounts?’ she asked Bel, who was still watching her intently. The other girl shook her head, and pointed firmly in the direction of the drawer where the book had been stowed. ‘Not Thomas, not anyone else?’ Another shake of the head. She turned a leaf, and registered the same change in the figures in March of 1477. The year Arbella’s own husband, the older Adam, had died. And what has Gil discovered? she wondered. How did the man die, sixteen miles from here, too far to bring the body home? I would bring Gil back if he died in – in – in Paris, she thought.

Bel was becoming restless. She put a hand out as if to redirect Alys’s attention to the most recent accounts, but did not touch the book.

‘I will not be long,’ Alys assured her. ‘I have seen nearly enough.’ She turned more pages back with care, one and then several together, and there it was, the information she was sure she would find, laid out on the page in complex looping letters. ‘Bel,’ she said slowly, ‘do you know whose hand this is? There’s half a year in a different writing.’

Bel shrugged, and pointed to the date: mcccclxx. Alys nodded.

‘1470. Before you were born,’ she agreed. ‘Or I. No reason you should know. I wonder where your grandam was, that she couldn’t keep the accounts herself.’ She looked closer at the slanting columns crawling down the page. ‘It was someone who could scarcely add up, whoever it was.’

Bel peered over her arm at the loops of writing, and put out a pointing finger at the same moment as Alys recognized that the curling scroll near the foot of the page was in fact a name. Under it a double line had been ruled, with a chilling finality.

‘Gulielmus,’ she made out. ‘That is William.’ Bel gave her a withering look. ‘And the surname is – is – Fleming. William Fleming. Was that David Fleming’s father, I wonder? I know he worked here.’

Bel shrugged, then turned her head sharply as voices sounded in the hall, and footsteps approached rapidly. Socrates got to his feet, head down, staring.

‘Alys? There’s a laddie out here asking for you.’ Phemie halted in the doorway. ‘Says he’s got a word from your man.’

‘From Gil?’ Alys jumped up and came round the end of the bed. ‘Is he safe? Who – is it Patey?’ Behind her Bel was closing up the book and lifting it off the prayer-desk, and a faint annoyance crossed her mind – I wanted more time at that – but word from Gil took precedence.

It was indeed Patey out in the dim hall, hung over and disgruntled at being sent on again from Belstane, ducking in a graceless bow and pushing Gil’s own set of tablets at her. The dog’s nose twitched as he identified the familiar scent.

‘Oh, he’s taken no harm,’ Patey agreed, ‘other than by sleeping snug in the kirk loft in Walston, while I lay wi’ the rats in a alehouse where I wouldny keep pigs, however good her ale might be. So he would have me ride on home and then they sent me up here to seek you, so you might as well look at what he’s sent and I hope it was worth it, mistress.’

Alys was already moving to the open door, drawing the tablets from their soft leather pouch, turning the thin wooden leaves to find the message intended for her. Here it was, in French, in his clear, neat letter-hand.

My dearest,
she read, and her stomach swooped at the words,
the man we sought died on the twentieth of March in
the year we knew of. He ate dinner with others, and drank alone
from a flask he had with him. Later he fell from his horse in a
swoon and struck his head, and died without speaking again.

She gazed at the writing, suddenly aware of two layers of thought in her head. One was competently assessing this news and concluding that it only added to their suppositions rather than confirming anything. The other was studying the salutation, over and over, while her heart sang.
My dearest
, he had written.
Ma plus chère
. She knew well that she was loved, but here it was in writing.

‘Is it a billy-doo from your man?’ asked Phemie in envy, and she realized that yes, indeed, it was a billet-doux, the first he had ever sent her.

‘In a sense,’ she said, and put the tablets away, stowing the brocade pouch in her purse and straightening her skirt over it. ‘Where did you leave Maister Gil, Patey?’

‘He went straight down to Lanark for the quest,’ said Patey resentfully, ‘which I wanted to hear and all, and I’d ha’ thought you’d be down there yourself, mistress. And the mistress has went,’ he added, ‘all in her good gown to take him the word of the woman Lithgo and her –’

‘What about my mother?’ said Phemie sharply.

Alys, suppressing annoyance, said, ‘She is at Belstane, and perfectly well. Patey, go see your horse attended to, and find out if Mistress Weir’s kitchen can give you some refreshment.’

‘Why is she at Belstane?’ demanded Phemie, as the man took himself reluctantly out of the house door. ‘When did she go there? I’ve not seen her since yestreen.’

‘She fetched up at my good-mother’s yett last night just before dark,’ said Alys guardedly.

Phemie stared at her. ‘So why’s she no come home this morning? Is she still there?’ Then, her suspicions growing, ‘It’s no a call on her healing, is it, Alys. What are you no telling us?’

‘She’s locked in the steward’s chamber at Belstane, that’s where she is,’ said Patey, still standing just outside the door.

‘Patey!’ said Alys, furious.

‘What?’ said Phemie.

‘And chained and all, they’re saying, seeing she’s confessed to slaying the man Murray wi’ strong poison.’

‘Patey!’ exclaimed Alys again, but her voice was drowned by Bel’s sudden sharp cry, and that by a heartbroken wailing from the doorway to Joanna’s chamber.