Crucible (15 page)

‘That is what we have spent the last few months trying to discover. The masons, like all the other crafts, have their secrets, their rituals. But unlike the other crafts, they claim old knowledge, old secrets going back to ancient times and enshrined in stone and hidden places by the architects and builders who made the great pyramids, the temple of Solomon, founded on the mathematical principles that govern the universe.’

Again the Hermetic quest, that of the alchemists, of the pretended Rosicrucians.

‘And the men of such lodges seek out this knowledge?’

He shook his head. ‘No. They do not seek out the old knowledge, the secrets of the ancients: they claim to have them. The men who lived here would have had them. Increasingly, we have made the ways of the masons our study, their use of the art of memory and the messages of the lodge itself.’

John Innes’s interest in the Roman architect Vitruvius made a little more sense to me now. ‘Have you approached the stonemasons themselves?’

‘Yes, there was a newly apprenticed mason whom one of us had known when the boy was younger; we asked him if he had any knowledge of the workings of the lodge.
The boy almost vomited with fear and told us never to ask such questions. He has avoided the sight of us ever since.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because, they say, the masons have terrible punishments for those who reveal their secrets. We thought perhaps the boy had been frightened in his initiation by some older men going too far, so we approached one of the older masons who labour in my late brother-in-law’s yard.’

‘Did they tell you any more?’

‘They laughed at us, and told us to mind our own affairs. But though they laughed, I do not think they were rightly amused that we had asked the question, and we did not repeat our mistake.’

‘Richard, tell me, what do you understand by the Mason Word?’

He looked surprised that my knowledge extended so far. ‘It is the name given to the whole body of secrets revealed to the initiates of the craft who have served their time and gone through the initiation of their lodge. It is, they say, encapsulated in two words given to these initiates when first they are received within the brotherhood.’ He shrugged, then winced at the pain in his arm. ‘We have not been able to discover what these words are. At least, we hadn’t. But Robert had hopes …’ A cautious comprehension spread over his face. ‘That day I saw you at Robert’s lodgings …’

‘I think I found what you had gone to look for, what Robert had found: Jachin and Boaz: the Mason Word.’

He shuffled with difficulty towards the pillars just inside the doorway. ‘How foolish we have been,’ he said quietly. ‘How blind not to see it!’

‘I know those were the names given to the pillars at the entrance to Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem, but why should this be of importance to the masons?’

He was running a hand over the top of the small pillars, transfixed. ‘Because the knowledge of the ancients was inscribed in the stone of those pillars by Hiram, architect of Solomon’s temple, the greatest of all the masons.’

His eyes were shining, and I thought a second time that his experiences of the night, and that the fever that was coming over him, had made him a little mad. ‘You cannot think these lumps of stone here to be remnants of the temple of Jerusalem – they are rough-hewn granite quarried not three miles from this place.’

He looked at me almost scornfully. ‘Of course I don’t. But I cannot but believe that somewhere in this lodge we will discover how we might draw closer to that ancient knowledge, a connection …’ and again his voice trailed off.

I got down again on my haunches beside him. ‘Richard, these ancient secrets you seek, this search for that thing common to us and to everything around us, for the Mercury that will enable us to transform it, are not to be found in symbols, in mathematics, in stone, but in the gift of the Holy Spirit. The key is in your own heart.’

‘I have tried to believe that,’ he said quietly. ‘But wait’ –
he grasped my arm and forced himself to his feet once more – ‘there is one more thing I must show you. It is something that excited us greatly when we found it, and which should have alerted us to the true nature of those pillars.’ He led me outside, to a place a little more than three feet from the door, where the turf was covered by a long, mossy slab of granite. The dog was at my side, growling.

I held up my lantern but as it swung in the wind I could see no special markings on the stone. ‘What is this?’

‘They call it Hiram’s grave. The architect of Solomon’s temple was murdered by three masons who tried to extort the secret of the Mason Word from him. His body was found in a shallow grave like this, with a moss-covered slab over it. His secrets were buried with him. Every masons’ lodge has Hiram’s grave, the housing place of their secrets.’

‘And what did you find in this one?’

‘A skull – the bone box of the initiates – and housed within the skull, three sets of keys.’ He waved a hand towards me. ‘You wear one of them at your waist.’

I looked down at the set of keys that had been taken from Robert Sim’s dead body and handed to me by Dr Dun.

Middleton carried on explaining. ‘One fits the lock of the east door to the lodge, from the building yard, the other the west, which is reached by the garden. Robert had the set you now wear, the other two sets were given to others of our fraternity. A fourth set my wife already had – they had been her brother’s and she did not know of any others.’

‘And the fourth set is the one you now use?’

He nodded.

‘Do you keep them – you and the others – about your persons, or do you have some agreement amongst you to return them to their hiding place when they are not in use?’

‘We keep them; the skull is empty now, but we have left it in the ground, in the hope of returning some symbol of some deeper knowledge to it. I will show you, if you can help me.’

He bent down and tried to lift the edge of the slab with his one good arm. The dog’s agitation was now extreme and I had great difficulty in getting past it to hand Middleton the lantern before moving him aside to heave the stone off. It was heavier than it looked, and it was not until the third great push that I felt it move across the turf at my feet. I leant forward to look into the shallow hole in the ground that was the grave underneath and in the short moment between the piercing of the night by a woman’s scream and the crashing of the lantern from Middleton’s grip to the ground, I saw the luridly gaping throat and astonished eyes of a murdered man.

FOURTEEN
The Clothworkers’ Page

In the kitchen of the house, Richard Middleton had once more taken on the role of physician. He had helped his wife inside while I had hastily shoved the cover back on the grave. Rachel Middleton, now dressed in warmer, drier clothing I recognised as Sarah’s, was sitting at the table, shaking. Fearful for his safety, she had refused to wait any longer at my house and had been making her way down to the lodge when she had come upon us at the Masonic grave. Her husband was trying to make her drink a glass of strong wine. I did not like leaving them, but I had no choice.

‘The dog is guarding the grave. I will be back as soon as I can.’

I was halfway through the door, on my way to fetch the constable, when I stopped and turned back to them. ‘Richard, do you know him? The man who lies out there?’

He shook his head. ‘I have never seen him before in my life.’

I looked at his wife, who scarcely seemed to register that we were there.

‘I do not think he was known to her either. Do you know who he is?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’

At six o’clock in the morning, I was once again in the library. In my few restless hours of sleep, the face of the dead man as he lay in his shallow grave, his throat gaping and almost black with blood, had haunted my dreams. By the time the drummer went past our house before five I had at last remembered what had eluded my mind’s grasp in the night, and indeed what had eluded me on the one occasion I had met the murdered man. For I
had
met him, only a few days ago, in the kitchen of William Cargill’s house as he was about to leave with Elizabeth’s lucrative linen order in his pack. I remembered where I had seen his name before. And here it was now before me, written in Robert Sim’s hand, the last entry dated on the day of the librarian’s death, at the bottom of the Clothworkers’ Page of the Trades’ Benefaction Book:

Bernard Cummins, Weaver, lately returned from the Low Countries, 4sh. 6d. to the box.

That was all, nothing more, but I felt that here at last was something which would, if I could but see it, begin to make sense to me.

My first act, after alerting the town authorities to what had been found in the Middletons’ garden, had been to hammer on the door of the college gate house and have the porter fetch Dr Dun who had slept in his college apartments
since the night of Robert’s death. Despite the gatekeeper’s protests and assertions that I had surely, at last, lost my mind, he had eventually done as he was bid and had soon returned with the principal, who had quickly dressed and gathered up his case of medical instruments. It was clear that his first thoughts on being roused were that I was in need of medical attention, and it took a minute or two to persuade him otherwise.

‘I have been worrying about you half the night, Alexander. You did not look in your right wits when I left you with William Cargill last night, and the reports from your students were not good.’

‘I am sorry to have caused you that concern. It was a brief lapse, and it is over now.’

He did not look convinced, but said nothing more on the matter, and had followed me quickly back to the Middletons’ house. Her husband had by this point persuaded Rachel to her bed, and Dr Dun took some time in attending to Richard’s wounds before going down into the backland to examine the weaver’s body. He had been unwilling to say much to me in front of the baillie and town’s officers and had taken little time in despatching me to my own home with a promise and tacit understanding that we should meet in the morning to discuss what we had found.

When I entered the college dining-hall in the morning, a bursar gave me a message that I was to go directly to the principal’s private chamber. I could not tell whether Patrick Dun was dressed because he had risen some time earlier,
or because he had not yet been to his bed. The greyness of his face, the tiredness in his eyes, suggested the latter.

I was ravenous, having not eaten a proper meal in two days, but the principal showed little interest in the food that was brought to us, and I began to see just how heavily the difficulties of the college weighed on him. ‘Matthew Jack is in the tolbooth, of course. He would have done better to have left the town altogether when I him put from the gates, but he was determined that his malice should have its day, and it may cost him a great deal more than his post and his liberty.’

‘You think it likely he will hang for the murder of Bernard Cummins?’

‘I think it a possibility. His threats to Rachel Middleton and his attack on her husband so soon before Cummins’s body was found on that very ground stand ill against him, very ill, and the baillie is satisfied the sheriff will not take long to be persuaded of the logic of that either.’

‘But you are not so sure?’

He got up from the table to look out of the window towards the sea. ‘I pray God that I am wrong, but I fear it will not be long before others make the connections I have been unwilling to make. It looks bad for Matthew Jack, I grant you, and I have no cause to wish him set at liberty, but it looks worse for Richard Middleton.’

I had half-expected him to say it, but still I wished he had not. ‘I know.’ The doctor’s scalpel used to murder Robert Sim, his wife’s adultery with the librarian, the location of the body of Bernard Cummins at a place where
Middleton, Sim and others had secretly met: all of these things pointed not to Matthew Jack, but to Richard Middleton as the likely murderer of one, and possibly both men. Yet it had been Richard Middleton who had insisted on opening the grave, and I could not believe that he was the man we sought. I told Dr Dun this.

‘No more can I,’ he said. ‘But with Matthew Jack screaming his accusations in the tolbooth, it will not be long before the baillies are at the young doctor’s door again. I begin to wonder if Robert’s affairs may have extended further than we at first supposed. What you have uncovered here,’ he said, indicating where Robert Sim had inscribed Bernard Cummins’s name in the Trades’ Benefaction Book, ‘is a connection, on the day of Robert’s death, between these two men, and I cannot believe that it is simply coincidence. I give you leave, if you will consent to take it, to look further into that connection.’

And so it was that I spent the next hour in the company not of Aristotle and a classroom full of young searchers after the truth, but down at Putachieside, by the Green, amongst the smell and the noise of the dyers and weavers, asking questions about Bernard Cummins. Little enough was known about him, he was so recently returned to the burgh after years abroad. He had had grand ideas, nothing that would trouble the trade of the greater number of his fellow craftsmen in the town. A landlady was mentioned, a sister too. Someone thought they had heard tell of the patronage of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, laird of Crathes. Shock at
the murder was expressed. The iniquity of the times blamed.

I found his lodgings, eventually, near the bottom of Futty Wynd, and from his landlady learned a little more. He was burgh born, his father having been a weaver burgess of the town, but when his father died his mother had gone home with the children to her own people.

‘Overseas?’

The old woman laughed out loud. ‘You haven’t even to cross the Dee to get to Crathes.’

‘Crathes?’

‘Aye, Crathes. His mother died a good few years back, but his sister is there yet, at the castle, in service to Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys.’

‘So it is true that the laird of Leys was his patron?’

‘Oh, it was true. He it was that first saw the boy’s gift, and put him as apprentice to a weaver there in the milltown. Then he paid for him to perfect his craft abroad, under the best masters. I wondered that he had ever come back, but he said the laird had called him back, and he was bound in thankfulness to come.’