The Rough Collier (7 page)

‘Aye, or abandon that working and start again elsewhere. Murray wants to do that. Arbella wouldny hear of it.’

‘I can see that she would be angry,’ agreed Alys. ‘Tell me, has the man any friends about the coal-heugh? Is there anyone he would talk to?’

‘What, him?’ said Phemie, startled. ‘I’ve no notion. I think maybe no, but if you ask Jamesie Meikle likely he could tell you. He’s a good man, wi’ an eye for what’s going on. Joanna should have taken him.’

‘I suppose he is working just now. Where do you think Murray has gone?’

‘I hope he’s run off. I hope we never see him again. Or if he’s stolen the takings, we can put him to the horn for that and then get him hanged for thieving.’ Phemie grinned, without humour. ‘I can picture it well, the Sheriff’s officer blowing the horn at Lanark Cross and reading him out a wanted man.’

‘Why do you dislike him so much, Phemie?’

‘He’s a toad,’ said Phemie roundly.

Alys studied her expression. ‘Was he courting you?’

The girl looked down, and then away. Her fair hair blew across her face, and she shook her head angrily, trying to dislodge it.

‘Was he?’ Alys persisted, recalling Michael’s comment at supper. ‘Or was it your sister he liked?’

‘What, Bel? She’s a bairn yet!’ objected Phemie. Alys waited. ‘Aye, if you have to ken. He was courting me last spring. Full of plans to wed me, he was, and build a house over yonder, across the burn from the workings.’ She tugged savagely at a tussock of grass by her side, and scattered the torn stems on the wind. Socrates bounded back to snatch at the nearest, white teeth snapping in his long narrow jaws. ‘Then he saw how Joanna was placed, and went after her hell-for-leather.’

‘How Joanna was placed?’

‘Oh, aye.’ Phemie turned to meet her eye. ‘She’s Matt’s widow, right? Arbella has said she’s to have Matt’s share. Even though he wed her out of hand wi’ no contract or agreement drawn up, even though he died afore he’d bairned her, when the old witch goes –’ Alys saw the girl’s expression flicker as she heard her own words, but the angry voice plunged on. ‘When the old witch goes, Joanna gets half the business, and the other half goes to my mother and the three of us. No wonder the wonderful Thomas fancied Joanna to his bed.’

‘He ill treats her,’ said Alys softly. ‘He holds her in contempt.’

‘Aye.’ Phemie tore at another handful of grass. ‘I tellt Arbella of it, the last time he went for Joanna. She wouldny believe me.’ She turned her head away, but her next words were just audible: ‘He would never ha’ treated me like that.’

‘Forgive me, mistress,’ said Joanna, dabbing at her eyes with the end of her kerchief. ‘When I heard you at the outside door the now I thought for one moment – That’s the door Thomas aye uses, rather than come through the house in his muddy boots.’

‘It must be very hard for you,’ said Alys with a rush of genuine sympathy, ‘worrying about your man when nobody else seems concerned.’

‘It’s that,’ agreed Joanna, and turned to the other door of the room. ‘Will you come ben, mistress, and be seated? A wee cup of cordial, maybe, if Phemie’s had you up the hill in this wind?’

‘That would be welcome,’ Alys admitted, following her into a neat inner chamber with a high curtained bed against one wall. ‘The view is interesting, from so high up, but I admit I prefer to be more sheltered.’

‘I found the same, when I moved up here.’ Joanna drew a new-fashioned spinning machine, a well-made item with turned legs and a narrow-rimmed wheel, into a corner away from the window and set a backstool for Alys. ‘The wind never ceases.’

‘You are not from hereabouts, then?’ Alys sat down on the padded leather and shook her skirts round her.

‘I was raised on the other side of the Clyde. My father was William Brownlie, and held Auldton, by Ashgill. It paid a good rent. And it’s nowhere near so high up as this.’

‘My father is a mason,’ Alys countered. ‘He has charge of the Archbishop’s new build at the cathedral in Glasgow.’

‘And your man is some kind of a man of law,’ Joanna offered. She handed Alys a little glass of something brownish and sticky, and sat down herself. ‘Your good health, mistress. It’s made wi’ elderberries – well, mostly elderberries. The colour was no so good last year, but we put the good spirits to it.’

‘And yours.’ Alys raised her glass, and sipped cautiously. The cordial was bitter, despite a generous inclusion of honey, but the base was indeed strong spirits. She identified the elderberries, and several distinct herbs, and perhaps ginger.

‘Mistress Weir seems not to be concerned at all about Maister Thomas,’ she observed.

‘No,’ Joanna agreed, and looked away, turning her own glass in her fingers.

‘Has she said why? It is a long time to be overdue on such a journey.’ Joanna shook her head, and Alys went on, with some sympathy, ‘I think she governs her household firmly.’

‘She’s aye been kind to me,’ said Joanna. ‘Since ever poor Matt brought me across the threshold, two year since.’ She took another sip of cordial.

‘I heard about that – a sad tale. He came to your father’s house, did he? And you loved each other at sight? Tell me about it.’

That appeared to be the gist of it. Alys sat and watched while the girl opposite, brave in her dark red wool and snow-white linen kerchief, described the relentless refashioning of her life in the past two years. Joanna’s mother was dead (‘Mine too,’ said Alys) and her brothers, much older, married and settled; Matt Crombie had appeared at the gate one day, hoping to extend his round, and though he had taken no orders for coal he had given his heart to Joanna on sight. He had spent an evening closeted with her father, and the next day they had sent for the priest from Dalserf and she had packed up her clothes and the gold jewel her mother left her.

‘We rode up here, new-wed and happy, in such hopes,’ she said bleakly. ‘I mind how we halted before the house door,’ she gestured at the cobbled area under the window where they sat, ‘and Phemie and Bel went in all haste for their grandam, and Beattie came running round from the stillroom, only I never knew it was the stillroom then, you understand.’ Alys nodded. ‘And they fetched the maidservants, and when Matt lifted me over the threshold they all clapped their hands and cheered, just as Arbella came into the hall and caught sight of us, she was walking much better in those days, and the noise gave her such a turn that she dropped the tray she was carrying on to that stone floor and broke three of the good glasses.’ She sighed. ‘He took ill within the week, my poor laddie. And d’you ken, Arbella’s never so much as mentioned those glasses to me.’

‘Oh, that’s forbearing,’ agreed Alys, and took another sip from her glass.

‘And then when – when I wedded Thomas, she would have us dwell here in the house, instead of up in the row with the colliers. To tell truth I was glad of it at first,’ she admitted, ‘for bare walls and an earthen floor’s no what I was ever used to.’ Alys made noises of sympathy. ‘But she and Thomas make such an argy-bargy of the least wee thing, shouting and disagreeing over whether black’s white, times there’s no bearing it, Mistress Mason, if you’ll believe me.’

‘Does she dislike him, then?’

‘No, no, she doesny dislike him! Just, they don’t get on,’ Joanna said earnestly. Alys nodded encouragingly. ‘Thomas aye feels he should know more than she tells him, I think. She said to me when she would have me consent, he was a good bargain, and since Matt had respected him as a cunning pitman –’ She bit her lip, and paused a moment. ‘No, she gave him a gift as they left that morn, so how could she dislike him? Bel brought it here to him as I was packing his scrip. A wee flask of silver,’ she held her hand out flat, fingers together, ‘the size of that, but flat, to fit inside your doublet for travelling, and a drop of something in it to drink Arbella’s health on her birthday, that’s three days after St Patrick, seeing he would be away then. We aye mark folks’ birthdays up here,’ she confided, ‘maybe something good to eat or a new garment for them or the like. It’s a friendly notion. So I put it right in his scrip, and no delay.’

Alys, whose father had always marked her birthday, smiled in agreement. Joanna looked down at her empty glass.

‘Will you take a drop more, mistress?’ She rose and fetched the yellow stoneware pipkin from the cupboard-top. ‘It’s warming stuff, this. Refreshes the heart.’

‘It does indeed,’ said Alys. ‘Perhaps a drop. Have you any thought of what might have delayed your man?’

Joanna topped up Alys’s glass, refilled her own, and sat down again, the little jar by her feet.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ she admitted, looking unseeing at the brown sticky liquid in her glass. ‘I canny think that it’s anything good, by now. He could ha’ taken ill, or met wi’ some accident, but we’d surely ha’ heard by now, would we no? Or he could ha’ heard of a new order someone wanted to give us, though I’m not so certain we could fill it just now. But that would never ha’ taken three weeks to deal wi’. I just – I just don’t know.’

‘Would he have any reason to leave here?’ Alys asked gently.

‘Oh, no. No that I can see.’ Joanna’s eyes focused on the glass of cordial, and she raised it. ‘It’s right kind of you to take such an interest,’ she said innocently. ‘Here’s to your good fortune, Mistress Mason.’

‘I never heard such a sad tale,’ said Alys, accepting this, ‘and every word of it true. What does your father think of your second marriage?’

Joanna looked away again, and crossed herself.

‘He died two months after Matt,’ she whispered. Alys, dismayed, moved her backstool beside Joanna’s, and sat down again, taking the other girl’s hand. ‘He came up here once a week all that summer, while my poor lad was dying, and then I saw he’d begun to sicken of the same thing himself, and then he took to his bed and died.’

‘Oh, my poor lass. That was hard for you.’ Alys patted the hand she held. ‘Did he make a peaceful end?’

‘Oh, aye, just as Matt did, wi’ Sir Simon to shrive him, that wedded Matt and me, and take down his will, and my brothers present, and all.’ Joanna crossed herself again. ‘Christ assoil him, he was concerned for me on his deathbed, that Arbella should have an eye to me.
Mistress
Weir
, he said, over and over,
Mistress Weir, care
.’

‘And I’ve had a care to you ever since, my pet, have I no?’ said Arbella’s sweet voice. Alys looked round, and saw the older woman standing in the doorway which led into the rest of the house, steadying herself with one twisted hand against the doorpost, Bel’s round sullen face visible over her shoulder.

‘Madam,’ she said, and rose to curtsy. I must have been engrossed in Joanna’s story, she thought, not to have heard her come in.

‘Mistress Mason.’ Arbella returned the curtsy, and moved forward into the room. Alys gestured at the backstool she had just vacated, and Arbella smiled, her expressive blue eyes softening. ‘You are kind, my dear. And what brings you back to brighten our day?’ she asked, seating herself with Bel’s help.

To brighten an old woman’s day
, thought Alys. That was Gil’s mother, yesterday evening. Distracted, she accepted a lower seat on the bench Bel drew forward, and gave the first answer that came to her.

‘I was curious about the coal-heugh, madam. Phemie has told me a great deal, and I’ve talked of herbs with Mistress Lithgo as well. I’ve spent a most interesting time.’

‘Have you now?’ The old woman was wearing a plainer gown today, of tawny worsted faded almost to the colour of the peaches Alys recalled in the garden in Paris, and a wired headdress of black linen over a white indoor cap; now her exquisite eyebrows rose nearly to the lowest fold where it dipped over her brow. ‘And are you herb-wise, too, my dear?’

‘Beattie was saying –’ began Joanna, and was checked by Arbella’s uplifted hand. Alys waited a moment, then answered:

‘I have run my father’s house these six years. One learns to deal with kitchen-ills.’

‘Very true. But you’re no Scotswoman, by your speech, I thought that yesterday. Where are you from? From France, you say? Our Lady save us! And how did a Frenchwoman come to be wedded to Lady Cunningham’s son?’

The inquisition ranged wide, over the marriage settlement, the contract, the size of her father’s household, the nature of his business and Gil’s. It was customary, of course, to put a new bride to the question, and Alys had witnessed other girls being subjected to the process as well as having had five months of it herself in Glasgow, but she had never been asked such intrusive questions by a relative stranger before. Parrying with all the politeness she had been taught, she gave away as little as necessary, but it was almost a relief when Joanna said shyly:

‘Mother, I’m certain Mistress Mason would rather tell us what a bonnie man she’s wedded on than how he earns his bread.’

‘Aye, he’s a bonnie man,’ agreed Arbella, ‘and I’ll wager he can play the man’s part well enough when the candles are out, am I right, my dear?’

‘I’ve no complaints,’ said Alys, smiling. It was the reply she had found most useful in the circumstance.

‘I’ll believe that.’ Arbella chuckled knowingly, then paused to study Alys. ‘But he’s no finished his task yet, has he?’

‘Time enough, Mother, surely,’ said Joanna.

‘Not yet,’ said Alys, aware of her face burning.

‘No, I thought not. You’ve not the look.’ The expressive blue gaze flicked from her face to her waistline and back. ‘As you say, Joanna my pet, there’s time enough. I’ve said the same to you a time or two.’

Chapter Four

Gil was finding the women of Thorn a different proposition from the men.

He knew the little settlement slightly, a small fermtoun like so many others where four or five families held a piece of land and worked it in common. The houses in the midst of the four striped fields were low and long, the animals bedded at one end and the people at the other, the thatch supported by the cruck timbers which were the property of the tenant not the landlord.

When he got there the men were all out in the furthest field, visible in a morose group round a heap of stones, but he was welcomed by the women in committee. They gathered from kailyard and drying-green and seated him in state on the bench by the door of Annie Douglas’s cottage, nearest the track. A beaker of Maidie Paton’s ale, as being the best the township could produce, was put in his hand, and all the women crowded round to stare and talk and listen, their children peering round their skirts giggling. Hens wandered through and round the discussion, with a puppy trying to herd them.

‘You’ve no brought your bride to see us,’ complained Mistress Douglas. She was a big brawny woman, widow of a man called Meikle whom Gil recalled as another of his mother’s stable-hands. The two brothers with the cart must be her sons, he realized. ‘You’ll just need to come back another time and bring her. And how’s your lady mother? And your sisters? Did I hear good news o’ Lady Kate? When’s her bairn due?’

These questions and others having been addressed, Gil raised the subject which had brought him. At the mention of the corpse in the peat-cutting, there was a general chorus of disapproval and excitement.

‘The men tellt us when they came home,’ said Rab Simson’s wife, broad red hands on her bony hips. ‘What a thing to find in the peat! Killt three times over, was he no? And never a stitch on him? And you cut him up in your mother’s cart-shed, is that right?’

‘Mind your tongue, Lizzie!’ ordered another woman, very like her in build and face. ‘Or were you looking for ways to deal wi’ your Rab?’ They all laughed at this. ‘Mind you, he’d got a sore fright when he found the corp, Rab did, by the look of him.’

‘Aye, Maggie, he’d got a fright,’ said Lizzie sourly. ‘He’d need of a drink of usquebae to steady him, and then another to wash that away, and then another, till he was that steady he couldny find his way to his bed.’

‘At least he’d more sense than go and take Beattie Lithgo up for a witch,’ said Mistress Douglas, ‘the way my boys did. I skelped them for that when I heard it, I can tell you. The idea!’

‘Beattie’s a good woman,’ agreed Lizzie. ‘It was her cured my boy’s sore eyes, and your wean’s rotten ear, Maidie, you mind.’

‘She is, she’s a good woman,’ said another voice. ‘No like –’

‘Let alone she’s more sense than bury him in our peat digging,’ said someone else from the background. ‘If it was Thomas Murray.’

‘Aye, but it wasny,’ said the woman called Maggie. ‘Our Wat tellt me your nephew Jamesie said it wasny him, Annie.’

‘So he did, and Jamesie has more wit than my two put together,’ agreed Mistress Douglas.

‘It was Davy Fleming told them to go and get her,’ said another voice. ‘Our Adam’s no more wit than do as the clerk bid him, neither.’

‘No more did our Eck,’ said Lizzie. ‘Taking that wee fornicator’s word for it, and all.’

‘Aye, well,’ said Mistress Douglas. ‘They’ll none of them make that mistake again soon. And did ye discern yet what man it is, Maister Gil?’

Here was his opening.

‘I did not,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not Thomas Murray, you’re right about that, but it seems to me he’s been dead a long time, with the peat growing over him.’

‘Peat doesny grow!’ objected one woman, as the men had done. ‘It’s aye been!’

‘No, for there’s trees at the bottom of it,’ another reminded her. ‘From Noy’s Flood, our William says. Was this maybe a man from Noy’s time, sir?’

‘I think not so long ago as that,’ Gil said. ‘What I wondered was if he was maybe from our grandsires’ time, or a bit before. Do any of you mind any tales of a man missing on the moor?’

‘What, slain and buried wi’ no a stitch on him?’ said Maggie. ‘I never heard such a tale.’

There was a general agreement. Gil shook his head, and drained the beaker in his hand.

‘He was slain and buried in secret,’ he pointed out, wiping his mouth. ‘The tale of that would never get out. What’s more, though I agree wool and leather would last if they’d been there, he might not have been naked. If he was wearing linen shirt and breeks when he was buried, they would rot down in the peat, I would think, like the other growing stuff. Say he was robbed of his outer clothes and anything else on him, and left in a mire, nobody would know of it. Till now.’

Mistress Douglas folded brawny arms across her bosom and considered this.

‘Aye,’ she said after a moment. ‘So what you want is whether there’s any tale of a tinker or a cadger gone missing, or the like. Or maybe,’ she said slowly, ‘a man from here or further down the hill, in the auld times. For if he was buried in the digging to be secret, it must ha’ been afore we dug peat there, or whoever slain him would know he’d be found soon or late.’

Gil nodded agreement.

‘We’ve cut peats there since my grandam’s day,’ said one of the younger women.

‘What about your auld fellow, Jeanie?’ said another voice. ‘He’s sharp enough, would he mind o’ such a thing?’

The group shuffled about, and a round-faced woman in a faded blue kirtle was pushed forward and identified as Jeanie Forrest, wife to Adam Livingstone. Bobbing nervously, she admitted that her auld fellow, who claimed he was eighty-one, might well know if such a tale existed.

‘Who is he?’ Gil asked. ‘Where may I speak to him?’

He was her grandsire, William Forrest, and he had been huntsman to Sir James’s great-grandsire, and Sir James still sent a purse every hunting season, which came in right handy, seeing the old man had all of his wits but no teeth and needed a wee bit extra to his feeding.

‘He’s where he aye is, sitting in at the fire in our house,’ said another woman beside her, thinner in the face but like enough to be her sister. ‘Minding the cradle.’

‘Would ye come by our bit the now and speak wi’ him, maister?’ asked Jeanie, bobbing again.

By the time the procession reached Jeanie’s house, a shouting horde of children had preceded them, warned Maister William, who was struggling to his feet beside the peat-fire, and woken the occupant of the cradle, who was roaring in displeasure. Jeanie snatched the baby up, sat down on a bench next the door, pulling at the laces which fastened her bodice and shift, and silenced it by thrusting a brownish, thumb-length dug into its mouth. Gil found himself thinking by comparison of Alys’s slight breasts and rosy nipples, and wondered how she was progressing at the coal-heugh. He put the distraction with difficulty from his mind, and turned to Jeanie’s grandfather, a gaunt, big-framed old fellow bundled in many layers of homespun woollen, topped by a shapeless knitted cape from which his scrawny neck emerged like a lizard’s, and a woollen bonnet with a fringe of white hair sticking out below its checked band.

‘Maister William,’ Gil said, raising his hat. The old man’s face split in a toothless grin at the courtesy, and he ducked shakily in response, groping for his own bonnet. Jeanie’s sister steadied him with a practised hand under his elbow. ‘Sit down, maister, I’ll not keep you standing at your age!’

‘Eighty-two next Lanimer Day,’ announced Maister William proudly, if indistinctly. ‘I was huntsman to Sir James Douglas, that was grandsire to this Douglas, ye ken.’

‘Great-grandsire,’ corrected Jeanie’s sister. ‘Sit down, Granda, like the gentleman says. He wants to ask you about this corp in the peat-cutting.’

‘I never heard of sic a thing!’ declared the old man, subsiding into his chair. ‘Where’s my cushion, Agnes? I’ve lost my cushion.’

‘It’s here, Granda.’ Agnes rammed a lumpy pad down at his back. ‘You sit nice and talk to the gentleman now.’

‘Aye, well, I will if you let him get a word in. And you can bid all these women stay outside, I’ve no wish to be deaved wi’ a gabble of women. Have a seat, sir, just take one of they stools, if you wait for my lassies to offer it you’ll wait all day. About the corp ye found, is it? No, I never heard of a corp in a peat-cutting afore.’

This topic had to be explored quite thoroughly, along with the question of how long the old man had served the earlier Sir James and his son and grandson (‘Seventy year, if you’ll credit that, sir! Seventy year I served the family, and no a day less,’ boasted Maister William, while his granddaughter shook her head in denial behind him) and his acquaintance with the man who had been huntsman to Gil’s father (‘Oh, I mind Billy Meikle. I mind him well. I taught him. And he taught you, did he, young sir?’) but eventually the conversation was brought back to the discovery in the peat-cuttings. Jeanie’s man Adam had described the find, but not clearly.

‘He’s no a huntsman, you ken,’ said Maister William disparagingly. ‘Tellt us how he was lying, so he did, and how his face was all flat wi’ the peat, but he never said how he died.’

‘Slain three times over, our Rab said,’ declared Lizzie from the doorway. Maister William turned his shoulder on her and looked hopefully at Gil, who obediently described his findings, to exclamations of shocked interest from the listening women. The old huntsman nodded approval of his account.

‘Aye, Billy’s taught you well,’ he pronounced. ‘You’ve observed well, young sir. And were his hands and feet bound at all?’

‘No,’ said Gil positively, ‘nor marked.’

‘So it’s been a sudden death,’ said the old man acutely. ‘Maybe even taken and slain where you found him.’

‘I would say so. Certainly there’s no sign he’s been held prisoner. Assuming sign like that would last,’ he qualified.

‘Aye, very true. A good point, young sir, a good point. And you want to know if there’s ever been anyone missing in the parish.’

‘I do, sir.’

Maister William nodded. He went on nodding for some time, staring into the smoke which rose from the smoul-dering peats. Gil began to wonder if the old man had fallen asleep, and then realized he was counting. The women at the door were discussing the same subject, but seemed to be more interested in a lassie that had run off from Braidwood ten years since, and turned up wedded to a saddler in Rutherglen, than in the men of the parish. He sat hugging his knees, tasting the various smells of the place, peat-smoke and damp earth, the smells of the cattle-stall at the other end of the house, the savoury odour of the three-footed cauldron simmering among the peats and a sharper overtone which emanated from either Maister William or the baby, who was still sucking happily and noisily. After a while the old huntsman raised his head.

‘Five,’ he said. ‘Aye, five in my time, or that I heard folk tell of, and that takes us back to King Robert’s day, afore Thorn cut its peats on that patch. No counting my mother’s brother Dandy, but he was barely fourteen.’

‘And who were they, maister?’ Gil asked. That must be over a hundred years, he realized. His memory and knowledge go back so far. I am in the presence of history.

‘Ah. Now you’re asking.’ The old man raised gnarled fingers and began to count. ‘There was Andra Simson, that was our Rab’s grandsire’s cousin at Kilncaigow, in James Second’s time. That’s right, write it down in your wee tablets. But he wasny a red-headed man, and he was a carpenter what’s more and had the marks on his hands to show for it. Did you no say this fellow’s hands and feet were soft?’

‘What happened to him?’ Gil asked. ‘How did he disappear?’

‘Andra? He was working down in Lanark, I think it was. Aye, Lanark. Set off for Kilncaigow one night from Eppie Watson’s alehouse there and never was seen again. Never seen again,’ he repeated. ‘They found his lantern, if I recall, on Kilncaigow Muir.’

‘The road from Lanark to Kilncaigow wouldny take him up here,’ said Gil thoughtfully.

‘No, it never would.’ Maister William champed his toothless jaws and cackled suddenly. ‘No unless he’d a woman up the Pow Burn that his wife never kent of!’

‘And did he?’

‘No that I heard tell,’ said the old man regretfully. ‘Then there was Tam Davison, twenty year since. Aye, the year this Sir James’s father died.’

With a little coaxing, he recounted the details of the remaining disappearances. None of them seemed promising, all were working men who might be assumed to bear the marks of one trade or another, and he was quite certain that none was red-headed. Moreover, it seemed that the peat-cutting had been in use for most of Maister William’s lifetime. The women listened intently, nodding sagely at each of the names, but as he reached the last one Jeanie said, from where she sat nursing the baby on the bench at the wall:

‘You’ve forgot the men up at the coal-heugh, Granda.’

‘They’ve never disappeared,’ he retorted. ‘You’ll no talk to me like that, you malapert hizzy. I don’t forget a thing.’

‘There was Davy Fleming’s father, so I’ve heard. Fell down one of their nasty holes, so my da said, and never found.’

‘Aye, he was,’ objected the old man. ‘They found him a week later, I mind hearing o’t as if it was yesterday. They tracked him by the stink –’

‘And then Mistress Weir’s man disappeared,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He went off and died and never came home.’

‘Aye, but she kent where he was buried,’ countered the old man.

‘Aye, so they say. And Beattie Lithgo’s man and all,’ she persisted. ‘Geordie says Jamesie says they never got him out to bury him decent, just closed up that bit of the working, because the roof wasny safe.’

‘Aye, and he walks,’ said someone else. ‘That’s why they’ll no work by night.’

‘Geordie’s talking nonsense, for I was at the burial,’ declared Maister William. ‘I could never walk so far now, you’ll understand, sir, but I still had my strength then. Adam Crombie the elder died away at Elsrickle, Will Fleming fell down a shaft, Adam the younger died under a roof-fall. That’s no disappearing. Any road, Beattie would never ha’ slain them and hid them in the peat, no like – she’d a great liking for her man, Beattie did. She tellt me that, one time she was here wi’ a wee pot of grease for my rheumatics. And I’ll tell you,’ a gnarled finger jabbed at Gil’s doublet, ‘whatever she’d put in it, it shifted the pains in my knees. I’m needing a bit more, Agnes, mind that, you’d best get me another wee pot.’