Candlemas (2 page)

‘Only that it was a most woeful and perplexing one.'

Casualty, Hew thought, was a curious word, and no doubt one the porter had not thought up by himself. Hew's closest friend, Giles Locke, was Visitor for Fife, reporting to the Crown on unexpected deaths. Hew was accustomed often to assist him, and, in legal cases, to assume the lead. Where there was a
casualty
he felt an interest too, and a little piqued to be left behind.

‘He will be obliged to you. For he was afeart the students will revolt, and take it for a holiday. They may not have a holiday, though they will entreat for one, on account of Candlemas.'

The old tradition was, in grammar schools at Candlemas, the scholars gave their masters silver as a gift to fund the cost of lighting in the schoolroom for the year. The schoolmaster would grant them a play day in return. And college students hankered still for such small indulgences.

‘The wind is, we shall have a royal visitation, in the Whitsun term. Wherefore, says the doctor, keep them to their books. And the student Johannes Blick is keen to speak with you,' the porter went on.

Hew smiled at that. ‘No danger, I suppose, that he is pleading for a holiday?'

‘None at all, I fear.'

Johannes was the son of a Flemish merchant, in his final year. In age in advance of his fellow magistrands by a year or two, he outstripped them by a score in intellect and aptitude. And there was no doubt, when the king's commissioners came to make their inspection, Johannes would stand out among them as a shining star. Yet day to day, his brightness was a strain. When his tutor could not fathom to the bottom of his questions, he had turned his attentions devotedly to Hew, an attachment which occasioned as much mirth among the college, as it did relief. Hew had done his best. He had lent him books, and given many hours to hearing out his arguments. He liked Johannes well. Yet still there were days when he would sigh and sink to hear the fatal words, If I might for a moment, sir, intrude upon your time. Then time would run like sand, and never be enough.

‘Forewarned is forearmed. I thank you, Will, for that. Then all is well, besides? No more that I should know?'

‘Naught else, of note, except you have a visitor. I left him in the cloister, where he can do no harm. I did not care to think what Doctor Locke would say,' Will concluded cryptically.

Barely had Hew entered through the archway to the square when Johannes fell behind him, matching step for step. ‘
Salve
, Master Hew. I trust you are quite well. If I may intrude a moment on your time…' Johannes spoke in perfect Latin, well-tuned and precise. His clear pedantic sounding filled Hew with dismay.

‘
Salve
, Johannes. I am quite well. You find me in some haste.'

‘Then I shall not detain you, sir. I wanted, simply, to thank you for the help you were kind enough to give me, and to return your books.'

‘But surely,' Hew, despite himself, could not help but say, ‘you have not read them yet?'

‘I have, sir, read them all. If you have a moment, I will fetch them now. I have made some notes, of the principal matters contained in the books, and the principal questions, and objections, arising therein, which I should very much like to discuss with you.'

‘
Facile
. Of course. But, alas, not now. Speak with me after the lecture,' Hew suggested, desperately.

‘What lecture, sir, is that?'

‘Aristotle,
De caelo
, which I must give in place of Professor Locke.'

‘I have heard Professor Locke, on the movement of the spheres, and of the elements. Most illuminating. I should like to hear, indeed, your own interpretation of it.'

‘The lecture is no more than a reading of the text. Trust me, Johannes, I shall not deviate at all, from the version you have heard before from Doctor Locke.'

Johannes smiled the gentle smile that so rarely broke upon his solemn bright blue eyes, transforming his face from a paragon of seriousness. ‘Now that is a thing that I very much doubt.'

The student was disarmed, evaded for the while, and Hew came to the cloister, to confront the visitor, whose purpose had been pressing on his mind. For here was Roger Cunningham, who once had set his wits so fiercely against Hew. A student at the college, Roger had withdrawn, in a fine show of arrogance and supercilious pride, before he was expelled, and bound himself apprentice to a barber-surgeon. Giles Locke in particular was hurt by his deception, and found his dereliction hardest to forgive.

Roger faced him boldly. ‘Well, you took your time.'

Hew did not rise to this. He sensed, behind the swagger and display, a current of uneasiness. Roger was not comfortable, or brave as he appeared. In the corner of the square, and at the chapel door, a group of students gathered, pausing there to stare, at one whom they no longer counted as their friend. Roger was unnerved. And that was rare enough.

Hew saw the students off, a brusque wave of his hands, to scatter them like birds. They would not fly far. ‘What is your business here?'

‘There has been a death,' said Roger, ‘in the crackling house. John Blair the candlemaker. Please, will you come?'

There was meekness in his tone, and in his demeanour, which astonished Hew. ‘Did Doctor Locke send you to fetch me?'

‘No, sir, he did not.
I
am asking you. My master is suspected as complicit in his death. Occasion and the circumstances do inform against him. I wish you to defend him,' Roger answered simply. ‘For it is not true.' What did it cost him, to put such a case?

‘Why would you ask me?'

‘I know of no one else.'

That much was honest, thought Hew. ‘Suppose that it
is
true?' he asked Roger softly.

‘Then, I suppose, you will find it out.'

‘Understand, I make no promise. I will come and see.'

Johannes saw them pass, and called out in astonishment. ‘Are you going out, now? Will there be no lecture? What about the students, waiting in the hall?'

Roger grinned at him. ‘Tell them it is Candlemas, and they have a holiday. They never liked you half as much, as they will like you now. Close your mouth, Johannes, it is dropping to the floor.'

Johannes said, reprovingly, ‘I know this Roger, sir, that was a student here. I cannot find in him an honest heart or pure. I pray to God you do not place your trust in him.'

‘Before the year of plague, there were three or four candlemakers working at the crackling house. John Blair was the last,' Roger had explained. ‘He leaves behind a wife and a prentice boy. At Martinmas, at slaughter time, he took on extra hands. But for the most part, he worked on his own. He liked it like that. His journeyman Tam Cruik, when he had served his time, found work as a straggler, travelling to the manors and the country farms to make their candle for them when they kill their lambs. Perhaps he comes to yours.'

Hew did not reply. They had come upon the place. And his answer had been swallowed, stifled by the smell. The stench of the tallow had the curious effect of dulling down the image that appeared before his eyes, stripping it of force, as though the strength of the assault on that most sensitive of senses dampened down the rest.

The crackling house was narrow, eight foot wide at most. A window on a working day opened to the street, a counter folding down to hold a small display of the candlemaker's wares, for any who were stout enough to seek them out at source. Most would be content to wait till market day, when the candlemaker's boy would go forth with his creel to cry them by the cross. The shutters now were closed, the counter folded in. In the chimney a large pot of fat hung suspended, cloaked in a sooty black smoke. Someone had dampened the flames of the fire, in time to save the house from burning to a crisp, the tallow having caught a little as the pan boiled dry. The silt that smouldered still explained the acrid smell. On a board beside were several moulds of copper and a metal trough, where melted grease was poured, and the candles dipped, while a rusting pail oozed tallow fat unrinded, marbled and veined with pale pink and blue, to which the rank rumour of sheep flesh had stuck. Two small windows, barred, looked out on a yard, to allow the smoke a pitiful retreat, and in this yard, come fair or foul, the candlemaker rendered down the raw slabs of the tallow, polluting the fresh air for a mile around.

Hew allowed his eyes to rest a moment on these things, to fix them in his mind. The gross slab of sheep fat left so much of an impression there, it came back to him when he next closed his eyes; and when he fell asleep, it merged, indistinct and irresistible, with the vision of the candlemaker – which he turned to next – and they became so blurred, his waking mind could scarcely tell the two apart. The figure of the man dissolved into the tallow, sallow, slick and bloodless, sundered from the flesh.

The candlemaker sat, or somehow had been stuffed, stiff among the cushions of a single settle seat; so broad was his beam he filled its girth completely, packed close as a candle poured into its mould, with no gap for air. It would take a timmerman to prise his carcase out. He was stripped down to his shirt, a loose tent of flax flowing over his breeks. His points were undone, and his sleeves were rolled up. Both palms lay open, slack, in his lap, his elbows constrained by the sides of the chair. From his forearm to the right, a little past the joint, a bandage had been pushed, loosened from its place and very lightly flecked. The arm below was drenched with rivulets of blood, that streaming from the place they first had found a pulse had coursed the long way down through woollen breek and hose and pooled upon the floor, coming to a close at the candlemaker's shoe, where they had discoloured to a sympathetic brown. A second stream had cupped in the candlemaker's hand, thick and darkly red.

Standing on each side, attendant on the corpse, were, to its right, Sam Sturrock the surgeon, and to the left the physician Giles Locke. Between them a lad, of eighteen or twenty, fiddled with his cap and hopped from foot to foot, the one small anomalous flutter of life.

Giles was first to speak. His presence in a crisis, circumspect and steady, always reassured. But Hew could read no comfort in the voice that said, ‘What brings you, Hew? Is there something amiss at the college?'

‘Nothing is amiss. Roger came to call for me, and brought me here to help.'

‘Then, as I suppose, there will be no lecture,' Giles concluded bleakly, more resigned than vexed. ‘And it is hard to fathom how you hope to help. Still, since you are here, you must now bear witness to this sad affair.'

Hew understood, at once, that he should not have come, that Giles Locke had a purpose, in trying to ensure that he was otherwise engaged. As witness, he was bound to give evidence in court. And if he were to be called to serve upon the jury – since jury members always had an interest in the case – he could not be allowed to speak for the defence. The white face of the surgeon, whose misery was plain, who looked as sick at heart as the candlemaker's corpse, convinced Hew a defence was soon to be required. But since he had quite wittingly intruded on the fact, it was now too late to offer to withdraw. He had made himself a witness, willingly or not. In which case, someone else would have to speak for Sam.

‘The defunct is John Blair,' Giles went on. ‘You knew him, perhaps. His friends called him Jock. He was sometime the beadle, at the town kirk.'

Naming him had humanised the carcase in the chair, assigning it a pathos Hew did not like to admit. The candlemaker's head had fallen to one side, slipping from its pillow as its owner fell asleep, and – Hew thanked the Lord – the eyes were closed. He forced himself to look upon the candlemaker's
face, and forced himself to see, though the features slipped and shrank upon the bone, as though the lifeless flesh had melted in the fire, that there was something there he dimly recognised. He remembered one John Blair, beadle in the kirk, bustling through the town with prurient efficiency. Was it not John Blair, had turned out the young Dyer bairns for fidgeting in kirk, when their da had died? And the same John Blair, that took a throaty pleasure in the stripping of a whore, exposed for all to jeer at in the market place? And when Agnes Ford was taken for a witch, was it not John Blair had kept her from her sleep, and applied her torments keenly and assiduously?

‘Sam Sturrock, the surgeon, ye ken,' the doctor continued, relentless. ‘And this lad here is John Blair's prentice, Alexander Forgan.'

Alexander Forgan said ‘Eck,' unused to, and recoiling from, the full force of his name, which woke in him a kind of fearful superstition.

‘Eck,' conceded Giles, ‘tell to Master Hew here all that you told me, that he may be a witness to your true account.'

Eck surpassed himself, with a flush of pride, for despite his squeamish pity at the scene, and a vague suspicion things did not bode well for him, a thrilling kind of horror bubbled in the boy, and he was brimming over with the tale he had to tell. ‘It was I that found him. Ah
fund
him, d'ye see?'

The matter amounted to this. He had last seen his master, alive, between eight and nine of the clock, the night before. He thought it must be closer to the nine, for he minded that the bell had rung, to mark the college curfew, just as he reached home; he lived landward, with his mother, half a mile away.

He had spent the day, and the evening after dark, making some deliveries of candles through the town, and some way beyond. It was a busy time. And it did not surprise him that his master lingered on, working through the night. He had known him work all the night before, to see the orders done. When he was tired, he would sleep in his chair. His wife was forewarned not to expect him.

At the mention of a wife Hew's stout heart sank a little. Sam Sturrock stood and listened all the while, saying not a word, as Eck babbled on.

The master was not well. He took very bad headaches, and sick with it too, that hampered him cruel in his work. He consulted with the surgeon for it, and, on Saturday, went to him to be bled. The surgeon said to rest. And he had rested, properly, on the Sabbath day. On Monday – yesterday – he said he was recovered, and came back to work. He had a deal of work, since today was Candlemas.