A Pig of Cold Poison (18 page)

‘So you’d best wait and speak to my faither,’ he suggested, and bit into the sweetmeat.

The smile vanished. With an expression of horror he spat the morsel into his hand, stared at it, stared at Gil.

‘Pyson!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m pysont!’

Appalled, Gil sprang to the door that led into the house, flung it open and shouted into the hall beyond it, ‘Help here! Help in the shop, and quickly!’ He turned back, glancing about the shop for water to rinse out Robert’s mouth, and found the young man grinning triumphantly.

‘Hunt the gowk!’ he said, beginning to laugh, slapping his thigh with his other hand. ‘Your face, man! Your face when I said pyson!’ He put the broken sweetmeat into his mouth, still laughing, wiped at his eyes, chewed, and assumed the same horrified expression. Gil stood watching impassively as he spat the chewed mess out again, while hurrying feet approached through the house.

‘What’s amiss?’ demanded Grace Gordon, appearing in the doorway, looking from Gil to her brother-in-law. ‘Who called for help?’

‘I did,’ said Gil, ‘but it was a false alarm. Robert was playing the fool.’

‘No, I’m pysont,’ said Robert faintly. He was still standing, looking horrified, staring at the pulped stuff on his palm. The smell of almonds reached Gil. ‘I’m pysont, Grace. It was in the cherry.’

‘The cherry?’ she repeated, looking back and forth between the two men.

‘The marchpane cherry he ate a moment since,’ said Gil.

‘What’s ado here? Is this a joke or no, Robert?’

‘He claimed he’d been poisoned,’ Gil said, ‘and then fell about laughing.’

‘Robert, you’re a fool! It’s no a subject for joking on.’

‘I’m no joking now,’ he said, and sat down shakily on the stool beside him. ‘I’m done for, Grace. Who’s pysont me, in Christ’s name? Call a priest, quickly.’

‘Are you serious?’ She stared at him.

‘Aye, I’m serious. I’m a deid man, Grace, like Danny Gibson, and the same way.’

‘I think maybe he is serious,’ said Gil, in chill realization.

‘But what –?’ She stepped round the counter to Robert, touched his face and hands, sniffed at his mouth. ‘Oh, Body of Christ, he is serious. How did it happen?’

‘It’s truth, right enough.’ Robert grasped her wrist. ‘It was in the cherry, I tellt you. I can taste it, burning my tongue. It’s –’

‘Rinse it out with this,’ said Gil, handing him a beaker of water from the bucket behind the inner door. ‘Quickly, now.’

Robert took the beaker, rinsed his mouth and spat, but said, ‘Too late, away too late. If it slew Danny with just a drop, that he never swallowed –’ He was breathing heavily now, his face reddening. ‘Grace, Meg’s bairn can have all I have to leave. Will you see to it? And – and my soul to Almighty God, is that what I should say?’

Grace crossed herself, and said, ‘We need to get you within, my laddie, maybe to your bed. Maister Cunningham, would you step out and summon a priest to him? Or no – go through the house and shout again, I’ll need a hand.’

She looked anxiously down at her brother-in-law, who was wilting visibly, his breathing harsh and rapid. A shudder shook him as they watched. Gil turned to obey, just as the shop door opened with its cheerful jingle of little bells and first Maister Renfrew entered and then James Syme and his wife.

‘What are you at now, Robert?’ demanded Renfrew, glaring across the counter at his son. ‘Get on your feet and serve the – oh, it’s you, is it? And Grace, I want you –’

‘No the now, sir,’ said Grace, on an odd warning note. At the same moment Robert raised his head and said gasping:

‘Faither, I’m pysont. I – I canny –’

He slid from the stool, and Grace caught him and lowered him to the floor. Renfrew exclaimed in alarm, Syme hurried past him to help Grace, and Eleanor uttered a short scream.

‘Pysont? How – who? Who’d pyson you, Robert?’

‘He is took very bad, Frankie,’ said Syme, looking up, ‘and I fear it’s the same as poor Gibson.’

‘The same as – What have you done?’ demanded Renfrew, seizing the front of Gil’s gown. ‘What did you give him? Why my laddie?’

Gil stepped back, catching Renfrew’s wrist to hold him off, saying stiffly, ‘See to your son, maister, he needs your help. I’m away out to call a priest to him.’

‘No, you’ll stay here where I can –’

‘Who’d pyson our Robert?’ demanded Eleanor again. She began to giggle wildly. ‘It canny be Nanty Bothwell this time, he’s still locked away. There’s someone going about Glasgow poisoning laddies.’

‘Aye, Maister Cunningham, a priest as quick’s you like,’ said Grace, helping Syme to lift Robert. ‘Frankie, if you’ll leave that and take his feet, we can get him ben the house to his own bed, or at least more comfortable than this.’

Blackfriars Kirk was closest, and one of the Dominicans easily summoned. Returning on the heels of Father James, Gil found the Renfrew household swirling with fright like a spilled beehive. Several maidservants were weeping in a huddle in the shop, while Renfrew and his partner ran to and fro arguing over treatment, and in a room that looked on the dreary November garden Grace knelt by the stricken Robert, tilting tiny sips of almond milk into his mouth with encouraging words. Eleanor stood beside her with a hand over her mouth, still gulping and giggling in that uncontrolled way, and as Gil followed the priest through from the hall Agnes appeared at a further door, saying:

‘Meg wants to know what –’ She broke off, and stared. ‘What’s going on,’ she finished, her eyes fixed on her brother. ‘Is Robert –’

‘Robert’s been poisoned,’ said Grace, rising to let Father James take her place. ‘Eleanor, stop that noise.’ She shook the other woman by the shoulders, and when that had no effect dealt her a sharp slap. Eleanor swayed back, gasping, and Agnes clapped her hands and said brightly:

‘Robert? So it can’t have been Nanty on Hallowe’en, after all!’

‘The cataplasm never helped last time,’ said Syme, speaking over his shoulder as he returned from the shop. ‘Better something cold and moist like this, Frankie, if he’ll swallow it.’

‘Agnes!’ said Eleanor, apparently recovering her wits. ‘Robert’s like to die! Is that how you hear the news?’

‘Serve him right,’ said Agnes. She turned away, vanishing into the house, and Father James began the familiar quick murmur of the final questions, the prompts to the dying to confess sins and profess belief. Gil, watching, thought the young man stretched on the bench, his doublet unlaced, his head pillowed on his own short gown, was beyond hearing the priest’s voice, but the form of the questions assumed the answers, and absolution would be delivered, which must comfort the family. Eleanor had retired to a stool on the other side of the chamber and was watching, dry-eyed, her face pinched and white. Syme, a beaker in his hand, was looking at his wife, deep compassion in his face; Renfrew appeared from the shop with a heavy step and stood numbly glowering at the scene with an expression of dull rage. Gil suddenly recognized that his own dominant emotion was a matching rage, tempered by guilt; the boy had been murdered before his eyes, like Danny Gibson, and he had been able to do nothing to prevent it.

‘What did he take?’ Grace asked quietly. ‘What was it?’

‘As he said,’ Gil answered. ‘When I came into the shop he was eating a marchpane cherry from under the counter. We spoke, and then he took another one.’ He grimaced. ‘He bit into it, and pretended it was poisoned, so I called for help, and he laughed and ate the thing. And then he said it really was poisoned.’ He considered Robert’s scarlet, unconscious face. ‘If we’d believed him straight way, would it have made a difference?’

‘No,’ she said promptly. ‘If a few drops on his skin slew the other man, then swallowing it would kill this time, no matter what antidote –’ She bit her lip and turned away.

‘I wonder why he never noticed it at the first bite,’ said Gil thoughtfully.

Father James withdrew his fingers from the pulse in Robert’s throat, bent his head, crossed himself, and began the prayers for the dead. Eleanor and her husband both knelt to join in. Maister Renfrew muttered briefly, signed himself, and crossed the room to demand of Grace in a furious undertone, ‘Where’s that daftheid Nicol?’

‘In his bed,’ she said, looking directly at him. ‘As you should ken, sir. He’s hardly moved this day. You’ll not blame him for this.’

‘Have I said I did?’ he said jeeringly. ‘And you, Gil Cunningham, wi your daft notions about my family. Did you pyson my laddie to prove your point?’

‘If you say that again,’ Gil said levelly, ‘I’ll have you for slander. I watched Robert eat the sweetmeat, I called for help when he said it was poisoned, he admitted he was joking and then found it truly was poisoned. I’ll swear that on anything you like to name, and Mistress Grace here will bear me out so far as she heard it.’

‘He said,
I’m no joking now
,’ she recalled. ‘Poor laddie. Frankie, I’m right sorry for this. He was a likely boy, and a – a – He was a likely boy,’ she said again.

Renfrew grunted, and said to Gil, ‘And what brought you here anyway? I can do without you underfoot now, I’ll tell you.’

Gil dragged the reason for his presence with difficulty from the back of his mind, opened his mouth, and closed it again.

‘I still need a word with your daughter Agnes,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’ve found a bit more evidence, and I need her story about it.’

‘Evidence of what?’ demanded Renfrew. ‘If you’re still at this tale of my lassie helping young Bothwell to pyson his rival, you can put it out your head, I’ll not hear a word of it.’

‘I think it was an accident,’ said Gil patiently, ‘and I want her version of what I’ve learned. It’s more important now than ever –’

‘What, d’ye think she’s pysont her brother and all?’

‘Agnes?’ said Grace sharply, and then, ‘Maister Cunningham, this is surely no the time for yon kind of questions –’

‘No, and it’ll never be the time,’ said Renfrew, ‘and you can just leave my house afore I put you out myself.’

‘My son, this is not the way to conduct yourself before the dead,’ said Father James, getting to his feet. He was nearly as tall as Gil, with shaggy dark hair which he pushed out of his eyes now to peer round the group. ‘What came to the poor boy? He was far gone when I reached him. Are you saying he was poisoned?’

‘Aye, pysont,’ said Renfrew angrily, and dashed tears from his eyes. ‘My bonnie laddie lost to me, and I’m left wi that daftheid above stairs, wi his cantrips and excesses and his names for everything, and if I catch the one that did it –’

‘Have you raised the hue and cry?’ prompted the Dominican. ‘Has the Serjeant been sent for? I know you, maister,’ he bowed to Gil, who acknowledged this, ‘you’re Chancellor Blacader’s quaestor, can you set matters in motion?’

‘Maister Renfrew won’t have it,’ said Gil, with faint malice. Across the room a shadow moved, as if someone had passed the doorway.

‘I’ll go for the Serjeant,’ said Syme. He met his partner’s eye. ‘He must be told, Frankie. Unless it’s an accident, it must be murder, and how would strong pyson get into a marchpane cherry by accident?’

‘Syme,’ said Eleanor through tears, and put her hand out. ‘Don’t – don’t leave me –’

He turned to her, took the hand and patted it reassuringly.

‘I’ll not be long,’ he promised her. ‘Stay with our good-sister the now, mistress.’

He strode out of the open door. His footsteps did not check; whoever had cast that shadow must have moved on. For a moment everyone in the chamber stood as if turned to stone; then Father James said, ‘Not for us to question the ways of Heaven, my son. If this poor boy was poisoned, and deliberately, the miscreant must be found, but your chief duty to your son now is to pray for the remission of his sins, to shorten his time in Purgatory.’

‘No, it’s to find who sent him there and see them hang for it,’ said Renfrew. He jerked his head at his older daughter, who was now sitting weeping quietly. ‘I’ve no doubt she could do wi your comfort the now, though why she’s bubbling like that, when she never had a civil word for the laddie when he was alive, is more than I can tell you. As for you,’ he said angrily to Gil, ‘come and show me these cherries you say slew my boy.’

The three maidservants were still in the shop, staring nervously about them. The oldest bobbed a curtsy as her master entered, saying, ‘Is he – is the laddie –?’

‘Dead,’ said Renfrew curtly, at which they all crossed themselves and one began weeping again. Renfrew snarled and ordered them out, then stopped them to ask whether they had touched anything.

‘No likely,’ said the third one, sniffing dolefully, ‘if something in here slew the poor laddie, that knew what was here, we’d no ken what was pyson and what wasny.’

‘Mind your tongue, Jess,’ said her master, ‘and get back to your duties, the whole parcel of ye. Now, maister, where was these cherries?’

‘Cherries?’ The weeping girl stopped in the doorway, looking back. ‘Was it cherries that slew the poor laddie?’

‘So it’s claimed,’ said Renfrew, peering under the counter. ‘Was it these?’ He lifted a small box, the kind of woven chip box commonly used to hold sweetmeats. Gil took it from him. It was more than half empty, holding five marchpane cherries and a scattering of the sugar they had been rolled in before they were boxed up.

‘They look no different from the usual,’ said Renfrew. He looked up. ‘Here, Babtie, what are you standing about for? Get to your duties.’

‘Was the cherries pysont?’ asked Babtie faintly. ‘Oh, maister, never say so!’

‘Did you eat one?’ asked Gil.

‘We all did,’ she confessed, twisting her hands in her apron. ‘We thought no – we thought – cherries is cherries, no like all the other things in the shop –’

‘Well, that’ll learn you no to steal from your maister,’ said Renfrew. ‘And Jess saying you’d touched nothing, I canny believe a word you women say.’

‘Robert ate one without harm,’ Gil said. ‘It was the second one which killed him. They may not all be poisoned.’

‘But they might be,’ said Babtie. ‘Oh, maister – oh, what will I do –’

‘You’ll go and get on wi your duties,’ said Renfrew, ‘for if the one you stole was pysont you’d be on the floor by now. Get away with you, lassie! What a tirravee about nothing, and my laddie lying there dead!’