The Stolen Voice (19 page)

‘If Alys observed it,’ said Gil, ‘we will.’

He was still anxious for Alys, though the cord which had drawn him here so relentlessly seemed to have slackened, but he was also aware that he should make the most of the chance which had thrown Drummond into his hands, and had made certain he rode beside the man as the party moved off.

‘I’m sorry for this new loss,’ he went on now. ‘It must ha been a great shock to you when David gave you the word.’

‘No,’ said Drummond, ‘for I kent it already.’

The man was by far less fey than he had been at that first meeting in his own garden, but this remark was startling. Then, with sudden insight, Gil said, ‘Was it a dream fetched you here? Or a – a feeling that –’

‘Aye.’ Drummond nudged his horse round a boulder. ‘I dreamed the dead summoned me. She stood at my bedside in this day’s dawn, in her good red gown, and the brat Iain at her side, and bid me come home to Dalriach and untangle matters.’

‘Did she so?’ Gil said without inflection. Drummond shot him a wary look. ‘What is there to untangle? This business of your brother reappeared?’

‘Aye, likely.’

‘You don’t accept that fellow in the kirk as your brother, do you?’

‘David,’ said Andrew Drummond, reining in to look at Gil, ‘was three year younger than me. He’s a – if he lives,’ he corrected himself, ‘he’s a man grown, no a laddie wi an alto voice.’

The man behind them pushed his horse past, and Gil checked his own beast as it threatened to kick.

‘You don’t believe he was lifted away by the fairies, then?’

‘You’re a man of learning,’ Drummond stated harshly. ‘Do you?’

‘So what did happen to him?’

‘A better question is, Who’s that yonder in St Angus’ Kirk? I’d accept him as kin, now I’ve set my een on him,’ admitted Drummond, spurring his horse on, ‘but he’s no my brother Davie.’

‘If he’s not your brother, who might he be?’ Gil asked levelly.

‘I’ve never a notion,’ said the other man. ‘Unless my father had bastards we were not knowing of, you understand, and my mother never gave him the opportunity for that.’

‘I’m told he knows the glen and the farm as if he was born there.’

‘That can be taught,’ said Drummond grimly.

‘And the songs your father made? How would he learn those?’

This got a frowning look. ‘Do you say so? That’s harder to guess, but I suppose he could be taught those as well.’

‘But what benefit is there?’ Gil asked. ‘Suppose that laddie has been sent by someone who taught him that way, what would they gain by it?’

‘That’s what’s eating at me!’ burst out Drummond. One or two of the group ahead of them turned at his words. ‘Why is he here? There’s naught to gain but the tenancy o the land, that the
cailleach
still held, and David had – has little claim on that, as the youngest. It depends on Sir William, I suppose, but most like it will go to Jamie Beag as tenant in chief now, seeing his father is dead that was the oldest of us, and likely Patrick as occupier.’

‘Did Mistress Drummond have any savings?’ Gil asked. ‘Any valuables to leave?’

Drummond snorted.

‘Why do you think I went for the kirk?’ he said. ‘We’re over the Highland line here, maister. Folk eat well enough, in a good year, and dress well enough in their own web and spinning, but goods and furnishings costs siller, and siller’s gey scarce in this country, scarcer than elsewhere in Scotland.’

‘What, barely forty mile from Perth?’

‘It could as well be four hundred. My mother would have little enough to leave. Her gowns to her daughter and good-daughters, likely, her linen to the granddaughters, maybe her spindle and the beams of her own loom, my grandsire’s St James badge to one of us –’

‘St James? If your grandsire went so far as Spain could the laddie be his get?’

‘No,’ said Drummond briefly, then expanded, ‘We all take our hair, that marks us as Drummonds of Dalriach, from my grandam that was an Englishwoman. My grandsire looked like any other fellow in Balquhidder. I mind him well enough.’

Alys had said that, Gil recalled.

‘What did happen to David, thirty year ago?’ he asked a second time. Drummond’s horse stumbled, pecked, nearly dislodged him, and he spent the length of a Paternoster steadying the beast and settling himself in the saddle again. Finally he looked at Gil.

‘How would I ken better than those that were here?’ he retorted. ‘I was at Dunblane. All I kent was that he never turned up when he was expected.’

‘Did you miss him?’

‘No at the time,’ said Drummond oddly.

‘But later you did?’

‘Aye.’ Drummond looked at the rest of the party, which was some way in front of them, and urged his horse forward. ‘We will be left behind.’

They rode on in silence for a short space; then Gil said, ‘When you were in Perth two weeks since, you spoke with James Stirling.’

Drummond turned to stare at him again.

‘I did,’ he agreed.

‘What was it you learned from him?’

Another silence.

‘I canny be telling you,’ said Drummond at length. ‘It was confession.’

The priest’s escape clause, thought Gil, and I can hardly press him on it.

‘That’s unfortunate,’ he said. ‘Have you heard the man is dead?’

Drummond’s head came round sharply at that. ‘Dead? Last I heard they were asking at Chapter had anyone word o him. Georgie Brown seemed to think he’d gone off somewhere. What’s come to him?’

So he took that much in at Chapter, thought Gil.

‘It looks very much as if you were the last to speak wi him,’ he said carefully.

‘I was? He was hale when I left him.’

‘And when was that? How much can you tell me?’

Drummond halted his steed and stared up through the trees at the rest of the group nearing the skyline; his face was shadowed under his straw hat.

‘I met him by chance,’ he said, ‘the last day I was in Perth. To begin, he was offering sympathy for the death – the death of my friend –’ Gil made an understanding noise. ‘And then he was talking of another matter, and then he asked if I would hear his confession.’

‘But when did you leave him? Where was he?’

Drummond glanced sideways, and pursed his lips.

‘Not as late as seven of the clock,’ he said at length. ‘We had walked and talked on the open ground by the Blackfriars’ convent, maybe you know it if you’ve been in Perth, and I left him there. I had an errand to see to in the suburb near the tanyards.’

‘Was that with William Doig?’

‘Doig?’ repeated Drummond sharply. ‘No, not – I had a servant to dismiss, that was all. Nothing to do wi Doig.’

‘Did you see Stirling again? What did you do after your errand by the tanyards?’

‘I did not,’ said Drummond firmly. ‘I went on into the town to my supper. I returned to the Blackfriars just as they came from Compline.’

‘Where did you eat your supper?’

‘In the town. But tell me what came to him, man? How can he be dead, and so soon after I saw him hale?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ said Gil grimly. ‘The more you can tell me, maister, the sooner I’ll find his killer.’

‘His
killer
?’ repeated Drummond. ‘I took it he’d fallen ill, or – or – Who can have killed him? Why would –’ He broke off, and crossed himself. ‘Christ be praised that we –’ He stopped again, and shook his head.

‘What did you discuss?’

‘A matter relating to what we – to his confession.’

That trail was blocked, it was obvious. Gil thought for a space, and then said, ‘Did you see anyone else while you were with Stirling?’

‘Och, yes indeed.’ The man’s Ersche accent seemed to be strengthening with every word he spoke. ‘Let me see,’ he said slowly, ‘there was the woman who breeds dogs. Mistress Doig. It was in her yard we met. There was passers-by on the road to the Blackfriars’ meadow. There was folk on the path by the Ditch. And of course there was my man and his.’

‘Your men?’ repeated Gil, startled. ‘I had thought he was alone!’

‘No,’ said Drummond.

‘Who was it with him?’

Drummond shrugged. ‘It was just an indoor servant in Georgie Brown’s livery. I was never speaking with the man. You could ask at my Benet, the two of them was sitting under a tree the whole time we was talking on the meadow.’

‘I will,’ said Gil, trying to fit this to the information he already had. It did not seem to connect well. ‘Canon, how much are you able to tell me without breaking the seal of confession? Is there anything else he said that might help?’ Drummond turned an unreadable stare on him. ‘James Stirling was killed, and his death hidden,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m charged wi finding his killer, and any wee sign that might point me to him would be of value.’

‘Aye, well, I’ll consider of it,’ said the other after a moment. ‘If I mind he said anything not connected with his confession, I’ll write it down. But at this time, maister, my chiefest concern is to come to my home and offer prayers over my mother’s body.’

‘Then we ride on,’ said Gil. ‘We –’

There was sudden shouting ahead. One of Sir William’s men came crashing back through the woodland, calling to Gil, pointing up the slope. Heart hammering, he urged his stout pony onward, and as he came level with him the man exclaimed:

‘Is your lady, sir. She safe!’

His heart leapt, but went on hammering. He could scarcely breathe. The pony, having decided to run, thundered on up the hill and out from under the trees, into the open green space of Glenbuckie, though he did not see that nor Murdo feeling his son all over as if he was another pony, because twenty yards away Alys was at the centre of a knot of riders, sitting on a weary beast, clad in a ruined kirtle, her hair loose down her back. She saw him at the same moment, and broke free of the group to ride towards him, Socrates bounding forward at her side.

In front of such an audience they neither kissed nor embraced. Instead, as their ponies halted nose to tail, they reached out in silence and gripped one another’s hands as tightly as if drowning. And he could almost have drowned in her eyes, he thought, seeing his relief reflected in her face as she absorbed the fact of his presence. The dog danced round them, pawing at his knee, and his mount tossed its head uneasily, but he ignored them.

‘I’m safe,’ she said in French after a while, answering what he had no need to say. ‘Are you? What – why are you –’

‘I’m safe,’ he agreed. ‘Nothing touched me. But you –’ He took in her dishevelment, and groped for something to lighten the moment. ‘
Goying in a queynt array With wind blowing upon hir tresse
– If you’re going to make a habit of riding about Scotland in your kirtle, wife, you’ll be a deal cheaper to gown than I feared.’

She giggled, though tears sprang to her eyes.

‘Steenie is hurt, he has a burn to his ear and face. But Gil – there is so much I need to tell you, so much to – Davie has fled to the kirk, he –’

‘We spoke to him.’

‘So you know –’ Her mouth trembled.

‘We know.’ He finally broke his grasp of one of her hands, to pat his importunate dog. She reached across with the freed hand to caress the animal’s ears, saying shakily:

‘And Socrates has been a very good dog.’

‘Best to get these folk home to Stronvar,’ said Sir William briskly beside them. ‘Your wife needs her bed, Cunningham, and your man needs something for that burn. As for young Murdo here –’ He clapped the steward’s son on the shoulder. ‘He’s earned your favour the day, I can tell you.’

‘Indeed, Gil, he has,’ agreed Alys earnestly.

‘It was no more than my duty,’ said Murdo Dubh, the dark lashes sweeping his cheek as he looked down, his father beside him trying to look impassive at the compliments.

‘Will you come wi us, Cunningham, or see your wife down the road?’

Her hand clung to his, but her eyes had a different message.

‘I must talk to you,’ she said in French, ‘but later. You need to see what –’ She looked hard at him. ‘Talk to Jamie Beag, Gil, and try to get a sight of the dead.’ She put up her other hand and ran it around the back of her head, fingers against her skull. Gil understood the gesture. One of the deaths at least was suspect; she wished him to inspect the bodies closely.

The smell of the burnt thatch met them fully a mile downwind of the farm. Drummond’s face darkened at the first tang, and he spurred his bay gelding forward more urgently.

‘Is it just my mother’s house that has burned,’ he demanded, ‘or is it the whole farm?’

‘Just the house, my son was saying,’ said Murdo the steward.

‘I don’t like this business of accusing the laddie of arson,’ said Sir William. ‘Bad enough the woman making the accusation, folk make mistakes in the heat of the moment, but to uphold it against your man’s evidence, that’s a worry. Either she’s right sure or it’s a malicious charge, and I’d as soon not get mixed up in either. How trustworthy is the man?’

‘Steenie? He’s a good fellow, and I’ve aye known him truthful.’ Gil called up what Alys had reported while the dazed groom was helped on to a horse fit to carry two. ‘He said he had seen someone set the flame and run away across the yard, and when he hammered on the house door to raise the alarm, Davie Drummond answered him from within.’

‘Aye, that’s it,’ agreed Sir William. ‘And here’s Caterin Campbell saying she saw the laddie set the fire himself.’

‘He swears he has done no such thing,’ said Gil. ‘Kneeling by the altar as he said it.’

‘Aye,’ said Sir William sceptically.

They came over the flank of the hill to see the township laid out below them, the blackened rafters and walls of the burnt house nearest to them and beyond that the yard busy with neighbours, peat-smoke rising blue from the two stone-built houses at either side, more people coming and going from the smaller habitations further down the slope.

‘Christ aid!’ said Sir William. ‘It’s going like a bees’ byke!’

‘We’re expected,’ observed one of his men.

This was clearly true. Gil, armed with all Alys had told him of her first visit, identified the little group waiting in the centre of the yard to receive them readily enough. The foremost must be Patrick, big and broad-shouldered, his fair skin reddened by outside work; next to him stood his nephew. Both wore velvet bonnets and their clean shirts were half-hidden by layers of carefully pleated wool, Patrick with a silver-mounted belt and pouch restraining the chequered folds. Behind them was a much older man in a mended plaid and blue woollen bonnet, whom Gil could not place, and off to one side were the women, plaids drawn modestly over their faces, the two weaving sisters-in-law and the oldest granddaughter distinguishable nevertheless.

As their landlord entered the yard the two Drummond men swept off their bonnets and bowed with a grace one might barely see equalled in Edinburgh. The oldest granddaughter stepped forward with a lugged bowl in her hands, to offer refreshment to the guests, and amid Sir William’s bluntly expressed sympathies and the general dismounting, Gil thought he was the only person to notice Andrew Drummond’s expression as he stared at the black ribcage of his mother’s house. He moved to the man’s side and said quietly:

‘She got out of it, man. She breathed clean air afore she died.’

Drummond nodded, without looking round, and turned away to greet his brother with a curt nod and a word in Ersche. Gil went closer to the ruin, gazing in at the doorway. The thatch, he supposed, would have burned most completely at the point where it first caught fire. If the fire had been set, presumably that would be at the eaves somewhere, within reach of the person responsible, whereas if it had begun from a spark flying up from the peat fire the higher parts of the roof would have burned first. Or would a firesetter have thrown a burning brand up on to the roof? No, Steenie had talked as if the eaves caught first. The collapsed layer of ash and bracken leaves draped over the internal structures of the house told him nothing useful, and the smell of damp ashes was overwhelming. He stepped back, and found the younger Drummond at his elbow, velvet bonnet in hand.

‘I am thinking,’ said the young man, ‘you are Maister Cunningham, that is Mistress Alys’s man.’ Gil admitted this. ‘I tell you, maister, she is our heart-friend so long as she lives for last night’s work. She and your man Steenie carried water the night long and she helped to dress burns and wash the dead.’ He turned his face away briefly, then went on, ‘Can you tell me where is – where is Davie?’ he ended in a rush, going scarlet.

‘He’s in St Angus’ Kirk,’ said Gil. Jamie sighed in relief, and crossed himself, the bright colour fading already. ‘Sir Duncan sent his clerk to say he can stay there.’

‘Then there is things we would like to tell you.’

‘My wife bade me talk to you,’ Gil said, nodding.

The dead, it seemed, were laid out in Patrick’s house, on the southern side of the yard, and the most of the visitors were there or in the yard itself. Seated by the hearth in the other longhouse, his back to the tall loom with its half-worked web of bright checks, Gil listened to Jamie’s account of the fire and the death of his grandmother while one of the younger granddaughters offered him usquebae and oatcakes, and the other watched at the door.

‘But it was the fire itself killed her,’ he said as the tale ended, ‘not a direct injury?’

‘That is so,’ agreed Jamie. ‘The
cailleach
had no injury, thanks be to Mary mild and Angus.’ Gil waited. ‘My cousin Iain,’ Jamie said at last. ‘He is dead, poor laddie, when the beasts ran over him out of the fold.’ He pointed, out and across the yard, at the lower end of the other house. ‘He was a changeling, poor bairn, he neither walked nor spoke, it’s a mystery how he got there when his mother says she was putting him safe by the wall away from the flames.’

‘Could he crawl?’ Gil asked.

‘He might have crawled so far,’ admitted the prettier of the girls.

‘What are his injuries?’

‘Dreadful to see,’ said the other girl, who seemed a little younger. ‘There is bruises all over him, and a great gash here,’ she drew a hand across below her ribs, ‘and not a mark on his face. I was there when they washed him.’ Her cousin made a small distressed sound, and she put her arm round her, murmuring in Ersche.

‘Do you know where he was found?’ Gil asked.

‘It was his mother picked him up,’ said Jamie, ‘and bore him up into the yard. Will I be asking her?’

‘Not yet,’ said Gil. ‘May I see him? I’d want to look close.’

‘Aye, you would,’ said Jamie darkly.

The younger girl left her cousin and slipped out, to return in a moment saying, ‘There is nobody there just now but Ailidh. If the gentleman were to be quick it would be good.’

Across the busy yard with its subdued conversations, the other house was similar in size and shape to the weaver’s, as if the two had been built at the same time, but it was furnished differently, and the chill smell of death overlaid that of the dried plants hung in the roof and the brews in the row of dyepots by the wall. Directly before the door Mistress Drummond was laid out in her shroud on several planks set across two barrels; at the foot of the makeshift bier stood a cradle, draped in clean linen, with the dead child reposing in it as if he slept. The oldest granddaughter was kneeling by his head, her beads in her hand, but her lips were still, her eyes distant. She looked up as they entered. The two younger girls stayed outside.

‘Maister Cunningham wishes to see the harm that came to the boy,’ said Jamie quietly.

‘Harm enough,’ said the girl, rising. She bobbed to Gil, and bent to draw back the linen. ‘But it was only the beasts, surely? No blame to them, poor creatures, they were terrified. Or else the – Those Ones, that took him home again. No blame in either case.’

‘No blame,’ agreed Gil, kneeling in his turn.

‘Then why must you be disturbing him?’

Why indeed? Gil wondered. ‘Because,’ he said, feeling carefully along the spindly limbs, ‘Davie Drummond is accused of this death as well as the fire, and –’

‘Och, her!’ said Ailidh. Her brother spoke sharply in Ersche, and she made an equally sharp retort and went on in Scots, ‘She was outside herself, with the fire and my grandmother’s death already, and then Iain, the poor soul. No need to pay her any mind, surely?’

‘I think Sir William will want to ask questions,’ said Gil absently. The wound on the belly might have caused the child’s death, but none of the others seemed severe enough. He touched the little pale face gently, ran his palm behind the curve of the head, fingers pressing gently at the scalp under the pale frizz of hair, and stopped.

‘What is it?’ demanded Jamie. ‘What have you found?’

‘Jamie!’ said one of the girls urgently from the yard.

‘I think,’ Gil began, ‘his skull –’

‘What are you doing?’ demanded a shrill voice in the doorway. ‘Leave my boy alone, whoever you are, have you no notion of respect for the dead? Under his own roof, at that?’

Gil and Jamie tried to speak at once, both stopped to let the other continue, and Caterin took full advantage of the hesitation and stormed into the house, pulling at her nephew’s arm, haranguing him in Ersche. Gil might not understand the words, but her meaning was clear. He apologized, drew the linen back over the small corpse and withdrew in good order to the yard, where several of the neighbours were coming to see what the trouble was, exclaiming and shaking their heads with shocked murmurs as Caterin explained in a rising torrent of Ersche. The two younger girls had vanished.

‘Ailidh is right,’ said Jamie in some embarrassment, drawing Gil down the slope from the door. ‘She is outside herself still. What had you found? Is his skull broke?’

‘I think so,’ said Gil. ‘Skull and scalp both, I believe, though I’d want longer to make certain of it.’

‘Will I get my uncle to make her allow it?’

‘Show me the fold and the gate first.’

The fold below the byre, at the lower end of the longhouse, was a substantial walled structure of field stones, with a hurdle gate standing open, the bar which would hold it in place lying at the wall’s foot. The enclosure was trampled and spattered with animal dung, as was the gateway. The younger girls had taken refuge down here, out of sight from the door of the house.

Gil studied the area carefully. Now he had seen the corpse it was not hard to pick out the place where the child’s body had lain, the imprint of thin shoulders and legs, the marks of his mother’s bare feet where she had bent to lift him.

‘Who penned the beasts last night?’ he asked. The cousins looked at one another.

‘My father, it would be,’ said the pretty girl.

‘Does he go shod?’

‘
Brogainn
,’ said Jamie, ‘like mine.’ He held out one foot in its soft deerskin shoe, laced up his ankle with scarlet braid.

‘Only his is laced with leather,’ said the plainer girl.

‘Husha, Nannie! Why do you ask it, maister?’

Gil bent to look closer at the prints which interested him.

‘See this,’ he said, pointing. ‘There is a bare foot there, and another, and the cattle have gone over the top of it. Someone was down by this gate before the beasts were let out.’

‘Maybe it was whoever left them out,’ suggested the girl addressed as Nannie. That must be Agnes, Gil, recalled, and her cousin must be Elizabeth, sister of the dead boy.

‘No, for that was old Tormod,’ said Jamie. ‘I called to him, and he went – aye, here is his print.’ He bent to a spot by the wooden bar at the wall’s foot. ‘See, maister, he goes shod, but his feet is twisted with the joint-ill, his track is easy known.’

‘We was all down here,’ said Agnes. ‘We came down to find buckets and the like, for the water.’

‘Not here,’ said the other girl. ‘We went that way, to the stackyard and the burn beyond it. No need to go by the wall here.’

‘Someone did,’ said Jamie. He returned to stare down at the marks Gil had pointed out, then at the prints close by the marks of the body, where the boy’s mother had lifted him. His mouth tightened.

‘But there was no need,’ objected Elizabeth again. ‘Why come by here, into the shadows, when the stackyard is yonder, and the path lit up bright as day by the – the flames from the house –’ Her face crumpled again, and she turned away. Jamie, who had wandered off along the wall, looked up and spoke to his sister in Ersche. As Ailidh had done, she argued in the same language, but led her cousin off towards the house where they had sat before. Jamie watched them out of sight, and said quietly to Gil:

‘See this, maister.’

‘What have you found?’ Gil went to his side, and found him looking at one of the dark grey field stones.

‘That is skin,’ said Jamie. He lifted the stone, and turned it to the light. It was small in his big hand, but big enough for its purpose. It might have fallen off the top of the dyke, though if so it was not lying immediately below its place of origin, for the grass where it had lain was green rather than white. On one ragged corner of the stone something was clinging. ‘Skin, a little blood, white hair.’

‘Likely one of the beasts hurted itself on the stones,’ said another voice. Gil turned, and found the other daughter-in-law, the widowed Mòr, standing by the corner of the fold watching them. ‘Jamie, what are you doing down here, upsetting your cousin, poor lass?’

‘Is any of the beasts lame?’ Jamie challenged her. She shrugged, and moved forward with an uneven step. ‘Mammy, it’s not the hair of a beast. Look here – it’s as fine as any of ours, and curls the way Iain’s does.’

‘Or yours, or your sisters’.’

‘My sisters and I do not have a broken head. Is this what broke Iain’s skull, do you think, Maister Cunningham?’

‘Yes,’ said Gil deliberately. ‘I think it could be.’

‘Is the bairn’s skull broke?’ said Mòr with a show of indifference. ‘That would be when Those Ones were taking him back. Leave it, Jamie, we’ll not be meddling with their business.’

‘Mammy, look!’ Jamie held it out to her, pointing out the stains along its sharp edge. She took it in her hand, turned it over, looking impassively at the marks, and suddenly sent it spinning off into the rough ground between them and the nearest of the cottages. Jamie exclaimed, but she repeated, with emphasis, ‘No need to be meddling in that. Maister Cunningham, Sir William is asking for you, and my good-brother Patrick would be glad of a word before you are leaving.’