A Pig of Cold Poison (27 page)

‘Planned to poison him.’ The words were almost inaudible.

The sail flapped.
Cuthbert
checked, lurched, rushed onward. Water gurgled very near her waist. Away to her left, on the Dunbartonshire shore, there were hoofbeats, several horses. A sliver of moon had risen, and slid out of the clouds occasionally.

‘He’d sweetened it with sugar,’ Grace said suddenly, softly, ‘and put galangal and cloves and all sorts to it, to disguise the taste. If it hadny been for that I’d have recognized what he was about. I’ll never be able to face cloves again.’

‘I can see that.’ Alys put her other arm about Grace under the cloak. They leaned together, sharing warmth. ‘And then Agnes found the stuff you had prepared.’

‘I thought I’d hidden it. She’s always been one for prying and spying, though not as bad as her brother.’ She checked. ‘I always forget that my husband is her brother too. Not as bad as her brother Robert. She took the first batch I made, not knowing it for what it was I suppose, and gave it to the man Bothwell. I replaced it the next day.’

‘The apple-cheese –’

‘Yes. She must have borrowed what she needed, just the day after. I thought the flask had been moved, I thought I’d made more than there was left in it, but the past few days have been such a turmoil I wasn’t certain. Then the boy – Robert – died, and I knew I was right.’

‘Where was the flask when Gil searched the house?’

‘In my purse, while I hoped the stopper was fast.’

‘Where are we the now?’ demanded Nicol suddenly from beyond the piled-up baggage.

‘Kilpatrick’s yonder,’ said the boatman. ‘And Bowling ayont it. We’ll be at Dumbarton in a hauf an hour or so, and you’ll can gie me the extra two groats afore I set you ashore.’

‘One groat,’ said Nicol.

‘Aye, well, that was afore you mentioned insurance,’ said the boatman. ‘Did you never think to ask if I spoke the French tongue? There’s most mariners can manage a few words. I canny afford to insure my boatie, but I can get extra off you if you’re taking me into danger, my lad. Two groats it is, or I’ll not set you ashore.’

‘We’re no wanting to go ashore anyway,’ said Nicol cheerfully. ‘We’re bound aboard the Dutchman that’s lying off Dumbarton,
Sankt Nikolaas
.’

‘Wherever I set you,’ repeated the boatman doggedly, ‘that’s another two groats.’

‘D’you reckon?’ said Nicol.

There was a sudden movement aft of the pile of luggage. The boat rocked, Alys exclaimed in fright, the boatman cried out. There was a huge splash, and the boat lurched and sped on, lighter in the water. Someone shouted.

‘Nicol!’ exclaimed Grace, leaning forward as if she would rise. She recollected herself in time, and Nicol said lazily:

‘Never fear, lass, I’m here.’

‘Hi! Come about there!’ floated after them, and more splashing. Nicol laughed.

‘I’m no sailor,’ he said, but hardly loud enough for the man to hear. ‘I canny turn your wee boat.’

‘Nicol!’ said Grace on a note of panic. ‘Fit deein, loon? What – what have you done?’ she corrected herself in Scots.

‘He’ll no drown,’ said Nicol. ‘It’s chest deep, no more. He can walk to Bowling.’

‘But how do we – Nicol, we canny sail this boatie! How do we steer it? We’ll run aground, we’ll sink –’

The splashing and shouting was diminishing beyond him. Alys, rigid with fright, stared as Nicol, faintly outlined by the lantern, settled himself at the stern of the boat.

‘It’s the tiller steers it,’ he remarked. The boat lurched, the sail flapped, and was corrected. ‘Aye, like that. And what wi the tide still running downriver, we’ll likely no go aground afore we can see the
Sankt Nikolaas
. And how’s our wee token doing,’ he asked suddenly, ‘our safe pass out o Scotland?’

‘She’s well enough,’ said Grace. Alys could feel the effort it took for her to sound so calm. ‘Nicol, how do we go aboard? We’ll never – we canny –’

‘Ach, Gerrit will send a boat to bring us in,’ said Nicol easily.
Akrasia
, thought Alys, still staring at him, and began to recognize a real chance that she might not see Gil again.

The boatman had said it was half an hour to Dumbarton. It might have been a year, by the number of prayers Alys contrived to cram into the time. She sat tensely in the bow, not daring to draw out her beads, dredging her mind for all the travellers’ supplications she could recall. Grace had scrambled over the baggage and was baling as Nicol had been, though there seemed to be less water coming aboard now. The lantern at the masthead flickered, but the river had widened, there were no banks or bushes to show up in the tiny light, only an endless running of water and the occasional ripple of a sandbank. Nicol failed to run them aground; the sliver of moon slid in and out of the clouds.

Blessed St Christopher, pray for us, she thought, send that we may not drown. Was that a voice across the water? She tilted her head to listen, and a seabird called, was answered, set up a whole flight of high anxious peep-peep-peepings which soared above their heads in the darkness. What had disturbed them?

That was certainly a voice. It seemed to be behind them. Who else could be out on the river in the midnight like this? Long after midnight, her rational mind answered. Sunrise was after seven o’clock just now, there was no sign of the dawn, but surely it must be getting on for Prime. Please God let the dawn come soon, I don’t wish to drown in the dark – like the boatman, maybe. Did he find his way ashore?

‘There’s a light yonder,’ said Grace. She twisted to look, and saw one, two, a handful of lights, some higher than others. Some of them rocked gently, and one low down was fixed and seemed bigger, as if it was a lit window rather than a lantern like the one at their mast. Beside it, behind it, a huge black bulk loomed against the stars: Dumbarton’s great cloven rock, which guarded the Clyde.

‘It’s all the vessels in the roads off Dumbarton,’ said Nicol happily, ‘each one wi a star at its top. And yonder, I’d say, the baker getting the oven hot for the day’s bread. The folk o Dumbarton’ll no go hungry.’ He shifted the tiller experimentally, and the boat rocked. ‘I’m no wanting the sail now, I think.’

‘He said low tide was about four of the clock,’ said Grace doubtfully. ‘Will we not run aground at low tide? We’ll need the sail to take us to where the vessels are. We canny – we canny just go ashore and ask for aid. What if the boatman’s reached the town ahead of us?’

What if he never came ashore? thought Alys.

‘We’re no going ashore,’ Nicol said sweepingly. ‘We’ll find Gerrit, never fret, lass, and catch the day’s tide.
At morn, when it is daylight, we’ll do us into the wild flood
.’
Floris and Blanchflour
again, Alys recognized. Nicol laid a hand on one of the ropes beside him, and tugged at it. The sail shifted, spilled wind, the boat danced a little sideways.

‘You’ll have us aground,’ said Grace on a high note. Alys realized the other girl was as frightened as she was. And beyond Nicol, was that a movement in the darkness? A flicker of light, something catching the starlight or the exiguous moon, a splash of oars? She stared into the night, heart hammering, half-certain she had imagined it. Could it be Gil?

Nicol suddenly tipped his head back and let out a great halloo which rebounded off the Rock and echoed across the river. There was a huge flapping and screaming, and Alys cried out in fear, cowering down in the boat, until she saw that it was a flock of seabirds startled by the noise, lifting up off the water. As the birds vanished into the night a spark flared under the nearest of the riding-lights, and a surly voice demanded who called, in almost unintelligible Scots.

‘
Cherche le Sankt Nikolaas
,’ Nicol shouted.

‘
Pas ici!
’ retorted the surly voice. The light was extinguished.

‘That’s no very friendly,’ said Nicol reproachfully. He must have tugged at the rope again, for the sail cracked, spilled wind, and the boat slipped sideways once more. There was a rasping from under the bottom, then a shuddering jolt and they stopped moving.

‘We’re aground!’ said Grace.

‘It wasny meant to do that,’ said Nicol, and giggled. He put his head back and hallooed again, the sound echoing round them from the Rock.

‘
Tais-toi!
’ roared the near vessel. ‘
Faut dormir!
’

‘Gerrit!’ yelled Nicol.

Behind him, two boats appeared in the circle of their lantern. Alys stared as they slid closer, the men in them reaching for
Cuthbert
’s strakes. Grace turned her head and screamed, pointing, but one of the boats bumped alongside where there was still water under the stern, and two men scrambled over into a sudden fierce tangle with Nicol, and when Grace would have struck one over the head with the baler a third man seized her wrist.

Terrified, despising herself, Alys slid down into the bottom of the boat again, and was taken by surprise when a man climbed in over the prow, standing heavily on her wrist as he went. She managed not to cry out, and he trampled aft over the luggage to join in the fight. Waiting for the sea to come in and swamp everything, waiting to drown, Alys realized that
Cuthbert
no longer rocked on the water, must be well aground, that there must be sand or –

With the thought itself she had uncurled and was over the side, hauling wet skirts up out of her way, her feet in inches of lapping water, the sand under them firm enough to walk on. She looked about, located the light of the baker’s window, crossed herself, seized her skirts again and set off away from the struggle.

There were other voices, other boats out on the water. Oars splashed rhythmically, lights showed and were concealed. She waded on, hoping that the water was not really deeper, hoping the sandbank ran to the shore or at least that no deep channel cut her off, hoping they had not noticed she was gone –

‘Gerrit!
Par là! Attrape-elle!
’

She stumbled in a hollow in the sand, righted herself, waded further. The water was certainly deeper, and oars – no, feet, a bigger body than hers splashing through the shallows, came after her. She threw a glance over her shoulders, but could make out only bobbing lights in the dark. The baker’s window seemed to be no nearer, and the sounds behind her were approaching fast –

She screamed as a hand fell on her shoulder, and another grabbed her arm in a punishing grip. A huge shape loomed over her, smelling of ships and stale spirits.

‘
Waar komms du, ma fille?
’ asked a deep cheerful voice. ‘
Dies ist niet goed
.
Par-là ist Tod.
Live is dis way
. Votr’ mari ist hier
.’

Riding through the dark, as fast as one might with the lanterns held low, with two good men beside him and the horses shying at shadows and owls, Gil found his thoughts churning round and round in the events of the night.

He had been surprised, returning to the house with his father-in-law, not to find Alys waiting to hear what they had observed. (Though that was little enough, commented a small part of his mind now.) Seeing their lodging in darkness, he had assumed she must be abed already. He and Pierre had sat down to discuss the evening over a jug of ale without reaching any new conclusions, and he had made his way through the drawing-loft to join his wife, only to find the bed cold and empty, and an apologetic dog trying to explain that his mistress had gone out without him, and he needed to go down to the courtyard urgently.

Pierre and the maidservants had been as astonished as Gil. They had searched anxiously for Alys through the sprawling house, half-certain she had fallen on one of the stairs or fainted in a deserted storeroom; they had checked the garden, the bathhouse, the privy. Catherine, finally disturbed at her prayers, had not seen Alys since shortly after he and Pierre had left the house, but suggested that she might have gone to see Kate.

‘She gains great comfort from talking to your sister,
maistre
,’ she said formally to Gil. ‘She may not have noticed how late it is. Or perhaps,’ she added, ‘she had more questions for the women at the apothecary’s house.’

‘But to go out alone!’ worried Maistre Pierre. ‘She never does so, not this late!’

‘I’ll step round to Kate’s house now,’ said Gil, ‘and then try the Renfrew house. Though I’d have thought their woman would have said if she was there before we left.’

The dog at his heels, he made his way down the dark street. The torches on the house corners were burning low, but there was enough light to see by; at Morison’s Yard he found the double gates barred, and scrambled up long enough to crane over them and check that the house was in darkness. It must be past eleven o’clock, small wonder they were all abed. Alys could not be here.

There were still lights in the Renfrew house. He banged on the shop door with the hilt of his dagger, and after a while a shutter opened overhead and Syme’s voice said warily, ‘Who’s that at the door?’

‘It’s me, Gil Cunningham,’ he said, stepping back to see the man as a dark shape leaning from the window. ‘Has my wife been here?’

‘Your
wife
?’ Syme repeated. ‘No that I ever – bide there and I’ll ask.’

Gil stood on the doorstep, fidgeting, wondering where to seek next if there was no trace here. After a surprising length of time he heard the house door unbarred, and a streak of light fell out. He took one long step into the pend and found himself face to tearstained face with Eleanor Renfrew, fully clothed and holding a candle.

‘She’s not here,’ she said. ‘But nor is my fool of a brother nor his wife.’

‘It’s true,’ agreed Syme behind her. ‘Nicol and Mistress Grace are gone, and taken all their gear wi them. And afore the funeral, too! I can see no sign that Mistress Mason was here the day.’

‘No sign,’ Gil said blankly. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure enough,’ said Eleanor. She peered at him over the candle, then stood back. ‘Is she not at home? You’d best come in out the cold and make certain yoursel.’

‘My wife has been here all day,’ said Syme, putting a possessive hand on her shoulder, ‘but maybe Mistress Mason wouldny disturb her if she was resting. I’ve not seen her myself.’

‘Have you asked the servants if they saw her?’ Gil demanded abruptly. ‘Or Mistress Baillie? Or Mistress Grace?’ At Grace’s name the sense of Syme’s first remark finally reached him. ‘Grace and Nicol? Did you say they’ve left the house?’

‘Taken their gear and gone, and my faither no buried yet,’ Eleanor said, nodding. She looked like someone who had taken one blow too many to the head. ‘It’s like the bairns’ rhyme, first one goes and then another. There’s just me and wee Marion left of the family.’ She giggled faintly, sounding very like her brother, and turned away to light the candles on the pricket-stand. The shadows retreated into the corners of the hall, and Syme said gently:

‘And your good-mother, and me, lass. And your own bairn soon.’

‘Alys has been here,’ said Gil with certainty. Both Eleanor and her husband turned to look at him. He nodded at the plate-cupboard, where a candle-box and two wooden candlestocks stood waiting for whoever needed them. Next to them was a lantern, a square copper object with real glass windows and a trailing chain. ‘That’s our lantern. I know it well. Pierre has four like that which he brought from France.’

In the chamber which Nicol and his wife had occupied the hangings were still on the bed, the furnishings still in place, but kist and shelf were empty, no clothes hung on the pegs behind the door, a cavernous space under the bed spoke of items removed.

‘You see?’ said Eleanor triumphantly. ‘I was right, they’ve left, and taken all wi them.’ She stepped past him, holding her candle high, and the shadows bobbed as she crossed the room to open a further door. ‘Even her workroom stripped bare, though gie her her due, she’s left Frankie’s glassware.’

‘Workroom?’ repeated Gil, following her, the dog’s claws clicking at his heels. Andro had never mentioned a workroom; had he even searched it? ‘This was Mistress Grace’s workroom?’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Eleanor. ‘See, Agnes and me lodged here afore I was wedded, and made use of the workroom for making of sweetmeats and the like, so we wereny under Frankie’s feet. Which suited us just fine, I can tell you,’ she added with a flicker of her usual manner. ‘So Agnes being lodged in the main house, in the end chamber under Frankie’s eye ever since I left, Meg put Nicol and Grace in here when they came home.’

Never say that
, Nicol had said. Gil did not comment, but looked round the small closet in the candlelight. Bulbous glass gleamed, jars of glazed pottery caught the light, a microcosm of the workroom behind the shop. The brazier was cold. There was a lingering smell of –

Yes, of apples.

‘Their passage was booked from Dumbarton,’ he said over the sudden thumping of his heart. ‘Do you know what vessel? How would they get there?’

‘Surely by boat,’ said Syme from the doorway. ‘They had such a quantity of baggage, it would take two days to reach Dumbarton on a cart at this time of year.’

‘They came upriver by boat in May,’ said Eleanor, and giggled again. Socrates emerged from the workroom and cast about the main chamber, pausing at the bench with his long nose jammed against the cushion. He padded back to Gil’s side and nudged his hand, whining faintly.

Syme, consigning his wife to the care of a weary Mistress Baillie, had accompanied him to the riverbank. They had gained little there; the fisher community, its hours dictated by the tides as much as by the daylight, was awake and stirring but the best information Gil could extract was of a great stushie two or three hours since, when Stockfish Tam’s passengers, bound for Dumbarton, had turned up wi a great load of boxes and barrels on a handcart and an extra –

‘An extra passenger?’ he repeated, heart thumping again. ‘Who was it, do you ken?’

His informant spat inaccurately in the direction of the river. ‘Naw. Just I heard what he was telling them. More boxes than they’d tellt him, an extra chiel to carry, lucky if the boatie reached Partick. Mind, there was only the two of them standing there arguing,’ he added.

‘Did they –’ Gil swallowed – ‘did all go in the boat in the end?’

‘There’s the handcart yonder, standing empty. Once they’d agreed the extra groat,’ said the man, grinning in the light of Gil’s lantern, ‘it all packed in right enough. They’ll be past Renfrew by now, wi this wind, seeing they left just afore the top o the tide.’

‘You never saw the extra passenger?’

‘Naw.’ The man turned away towards his own boat, leaving Gil staring after him.

‘If Mistress Mason was unwilling to go along wi them,’ said Syme diffidently at his elbow, ‘they might dose her wi Nicol’s drops till she couldny stand upright.’ He put a sympathetic hand on Gil’s arm. ‘If they’ve taken her wi them, she’s no harmed, maister.’

That was true, he recognized, standing there in the midnight with Glasgow whirling round him. They would scarcely take so much trouble if they had – if she was –

‘I must ha been right,’ continued Syme, ‘though it’s no pleasure to think it. Frankie’s death was never natural, if Nicol’s up and run like this, and taken Mistress Mason for a hostage.’

‘Land or water?’ Gil said aloud, hardly hearing him. ‘I must catch them.’

‘Ye’ll be faster by land,’ said the man he had spoken to, looking up from whatever he was doing. ‘There’s no a boatie on the Clyde can out-sail Stockfish Tam’s
Cuthbert
, even wi a burthen like yon. You’ll be at Dumbarton afore them, on a good horse, and you’ll ha what’s left of the moon in a few hours and all.’

‘I’ll ride wi you,’ said Syme.

Now, with Syme and the mason’s youngest man Luke, he pressed on through the night, plaid wound firmly against the wind, dimly grateful for the absence of rain, his mind churning with hideous visions of Alys bound, injured, terrified. And why had she ventured out to the Renfrew house alone? What had taken her –

She must have thought matters through, and come to some conclusion. And then what? Had she gone to ask for some final scrap of information, and alerted Grace or Nicol to her suspicions? That could surely have waited till the morning, and in any case she had more sense than risk an encounter with someone they thought guilty, after the time out in Lanarkshire.

He pulled his plaid tighter and settled down in the saddle, following Luke’s piebald horse through the dark, the lantern held down at the lad’s stirrup showing them the next few steps of the road. What had altered since suppertime? What new information had reached them, to prompt Alys to action? The letter from the apothecary in Edinburgh, of course, with the information about the poison. Apple pips. The fragments Adam Forrest showed him must have been apple pips, not almonds, and the workroom had smelled of apples.

But an apple pip was a small thing. What quantity must one need to make up a flask of poison such as came into Bothwell’s hand on Hallowe’en? There were five or ten at most in one apple, so how many apples must one slice open to get a cupful? Enough to make one very ill, or to make a very large dish of applemoy, or perhaps some sweetmeat or other. It kept coming back to sweetmeats, he thought, and suddenly recalled Frankie Renfrew complaining about apple-cheese. Robert had said,
We’ve apple-cheese in plenty
, and later his father had remarked sourly that Grace was a great one for making the stuff. Grace, who had stripped the room where her father-in-law died. Who had expressed what seemed like genuine regret at Robert’s death. As well she might, thought Gil, if she had brewed the poison that slew him.

Grace, he recalled with a chill down his back, who had saved John’s life. We owe her a debt for life, Alys had said. A debt which was more than enough to prompt Alys to warn her that she must be suspected. That must be why she had gone to the Renfrew house. He wondered why he was not angry at the idea, and found he was more angry with Nicol and with Grace, for repaying her in this way. He knew some of his wife’s ideas on justice, and felt they were probably nearer to God’s justice than to canon law. The question of explaining things to his master the Archbishop or even to the Provost could be dealt with later, after he had Alys safe, after –

‘Maister?’ Ahead of him, Luke checked. ‘There’s a fellow on the track, maister.’

‘Who’s there?’ A voice from the darkness in front of them, a moving shadow which made Luke’s horse stamp uneasily. ‘Who’s there at this hour?’

‘Who’s abroad i the night like this?’ said Syme nervously behind Gil. ‘Is it thieves?’

‘I’d ask you the same. Who are you?’ Gil reined in beside Luke. ‘We’re bound for Dumbarton. Are you afoot? Alone?’

‘Aye.’ The man came closer, his footsteps squelching. ‘Could I beg yez for a lift to Dumbarton? Would any of yir beasts take a second man aboard?’

‘You’re wet, man,’ said Luke, holding the lantern higher to see the stranger’s face.

‘Aye, I’m wet,’ the man agreed, through chattering teeth. ‘Piracy on the river, freens, my boatie stole from me and sailed on out my sight, and me left to make my way ashore as best’s I can. But I’ve freens at Dumbarton will sort him for me, him and his extra passenger!’

‘Ah,’ said Gil. ‘Stockfish Tam, is it?’

With the boatman perched behind Luke and wrapped in Syme’s great cloak, which he gave up with creditable willingness, they put a fresh candle in Luke’s lantern and pressed on through the dark towards Dumbarton, accompanied by a monologue on the subject of piracy and a debt of two groats. Questions about the extra passenger established that she had been alive, conscious and talking to the pirate’s wife, though Tam had not heard their conversation, and after that Gil shut his ears to the man’s grumbles and thought about Grace Gordon and a poison brewed from apple pips, and about what they would find at Dumbarton. The
Sankt Nikolaas
, if she was big enough to traverse the Irish Sea, the English Channel, the German Sea, was likely to be moored out in the roads off the port, rather than run up on to the shore. Could Nicol sail Tam’s boat well enough to find her? Could he sail a boat at all? What if they failed to meet up with the Dutchman and drifted on down the river with the tide?

Most of Dumbarton was still asleep, though as they rounded the town heading for the shore a few lights showed and the smell of rising bread floated on the wind. Stockfish Tam directed them to where the Leven rippled quietly down to join the bigger river, and along the shore where Gil and Pierre had once found a fisherman willing to sail them to Rothesay in a boat of willow and skins. There were a couple of fires showing, with dark shapes squatting round them, waiting for the dawn, waiting for returning fishing-boats.

‘Bide here,’ said Tam, and slid down from Luke’s horse. The animal sighed in relief, and he crunched off along the shore, hailing the nearest fire.