Crucible (16 page)

She let me see his room, but I had little luck there, for the baillie and his officers had been there before me, and the old woman had already packed up Cummins’s belongings and cleaned out his chamber.

‘There was little enough in it. He had only been here a few days, and was only waiting to conduct some business in the town, and for the arrival of his loom and other things from Rotterdam. His plan was to set up his workshop out
at Crathes. He had work on hand for the laird. The baillie is sending his belongings on to his sister.’

‘Was there anything strange amongst his belongings?’

The woman considered. ‘His clothes were a little strange – in the Dutch fashion, you know.’

‘What about books, papers?’

‘Books he had, with foreign writing on them. Huge books, with pictures and patterns in them. I took a look once, but could make neither head nor tail of the half of them.’

‘And papers?’

‘Receipts, bills, an order book, I think. All of these things the baillie took to look through, and then they are to be sent on to his sister.’

I tried another tack. ‘Did he have any visitors here? Any friends?’

‘Friends, I do not think so. He told me he had left the town as a young boy, and had still been not much more than a lad when the laird of Crathes sent him overseas. But he was a likeable enough man, with a good manner to him. The making of friends would not have taken him long. As to visitors, none, other than the occasional servant on business to him from their master or mistress.’

‘Can you remember who any of them were?’

She pursed her lips. ‘Someone from George Jamesone, the painter’s house. And one from that lawyer – William Cargill.’ Just business then.

‘And what about Robert Sim? Was he ever here? Did Bernard Cummins ever mention him?’

She eyed me sharply. ‘The college librarian. Him that was murdered too? No, he was never near the place and I never heard Bernard mention him. Now, I have work to be getting on with.’

She began to turn away, but I put my hand on her arm to stay her a moment. ‘One last thing. Were Dr Middleton or his wife ever here?’

She shook her head. ‘No, they were not. And I told the baillie that too.’

Those last words repeated themselves in my head as I walked up Futtie Wynd in to the Castlegate. The clatter and clamour of the market, of people coming from the tolbooth, or going down alleyways to the lawyers’ chambers or the sheriff court, of visitors calling at the grand houses that lined the square and of servants hurrying back and forth down the pends between them, all that was drowned out by those last words:
And I told the baillie that too
. I had only spoken with Richard Middleton twice in my life – last night, and on the day after Robert Sim’s body had been found – but I thought I had begun to see in him a man whose friendship would be worth the having, and whatever his wife might deserve, I would wish to spare her what might be coming to her, for my dead friend Robert’s sake and for her own. I knew, in the ebb and flow of the burgh’s prejudices and fears, if the law did not satisfy itself that Matthew Jack was the murderer of the librarian and weaver, it would not be long before it had found another, or others, to replace him in the tolbooth.

Sarah was alone with Deirdre when I walked back into our home. The baby was sleeping, the house quiet and still and showing no signs of the drama of the previous night. Sarah, though, was tired, pale and drawn under her tanned skin. We had not been able to speak to one another since I had left in the middle of the storm to go to Richard Middleton’s aid. I looked at her for a moment, searching for the words that would put things right, but they would not come. Sarah put down the yarn she had been winding and stood up.

‘Alexander, we must talk.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. I sat down in the high-backed chair opposite hers and rubbed my face in my hands. ‘But this is not the best time, Sarah.’

She lifted my face, forcing me to look at her. ‘There will be no best time. Before we ever get to that best time, there will be nothing left to say to one another, and I have much I wish to say.’

I was too weary to argue any further, and gestured with my hand in acquiescence. She sat down by the hearth in front of me and took my hands in hers. The warmth of them, the tenderness in her face was all I had wanted these last days and her next words tore at the very heart of me.

‘Do you think that I hold myself so cheap that I would give myself to another man, when I have you?’

I shook my head but I could not speak. How could I tell her ‘Yes, I do’? How could I tell her of the imaginings that had been tormenting my every unguarded moment?

I did not need to; she read it in my eyes and let go my
hands, appalled. ‘You hold me so cheap? Alexander, for God’s sake, tell me what I have done.’

‘Andrew Carmichael,’ I said, the words barely audible even to myself.

She looked at me in disbelief. ‘This again? Oh, please, not this again.’

I clenched my fists until my nails dug into the flesh of the palms. ‘Remember? I saw you, Sarah. On Tuesday afternoon, at the Snow Kirk. You were with him.’ I felt my voice, hoarse, crack. ‘I saw him stroke your face.’

She looked as if she had been caught, frozen in a moment, and then she began to shake her head slowly. ‘No, Alexander, no …’

I stood up and pushed my chair away so that it banged against the fireplace wall. ‘Do not lie to me, I saw you.’

‘No, Alexander. What you thought you saw you did not.’

‘It was you, and him. I know.’

‘Yes, it was. But it was not as you think. Please, sit down and listen to me.’

I did not know that I wanted to hear it, but I straightened the chair and, drawing a cup of water from the jug on the table, remained standing.

‘I did go to see Andrew Carmichael on Tuesday. I had sent a message to the King’s College, asking him to meet me at the Snow Kirk as soon as he might be able. Zander was at school, and I left Deirdre with Elizabeth. He came in the afternoon, when his students were engaged in private study. I asked him to meet me round the back of the church
because I did not wish to be seen, and I could not think of anywhere else in or between the two towns where we might escape notice.’

Her candour was making me sick to the stomach, and it showed on my face.

‘No, Alexander, you still do not understand. I asked Andrew Carmichael there because I was almost out of my senses with worry for you.’

‘For me? What gave you cause to worry about me, and what in God’s name made you think that Andrew Carmichael was the one you should turn to, rather than William, or Dr Dun, even?’

‘It was what you found in Robert Sim’s room and brought home to this house in your pockets. The Mason Word.’ Her eyes were beseeching me to understand, but still I could not.

She drew some water for herself and continued. ‘Andrew Carmichael mentioned to me once, in that time when you were away in Ireland and he started coming to William’s house, that his father had been a stonemason. It was a passing remark, and in truth I think he wished he had never made it, for he was less inclined to speak of his family than I was of mine.’

Sarah’s own parents had died of a fever when she was no more than five years old, and she had been brought up by her mother’s sister, a poor, weak woman who could not stand up to a cruel and brutish husband. I had more than once thought that everything she did in her determination to make our family the best that it could be was done in an effort to erase the scars her own childhood had left, and to
heal the wounds she had suffered when she had become a woman. And this, indeed, was the point to which this conversation was taking her. She had been sent from what passed for her home into service in Banff, in the house of a master stonemason, a drunken and violent man who had taken her against her will and who was Zander’s natural father.

‘When George Burnett was very drunk,’ she went on, ‘sometimes he used to frighten me with tales of what happened in their masons’ lodge, of how apprentices seeking to be made masons would be scared half out of their wits into keeping their secrets. He would describe the horrible trials, the humiliations they would be put through – he would threaten to do the same to me. And once, when I was trying to fight him off, he gripped hold of me – his face was contorted with malice – and he whispered in my ear the Mason Word. And then he told me the punishment for any who revealed it.’ She shook her head. ‘I will not tell you. He thought to control me that way, with fear.’

She came over to me and I could see in her face the pain of remembering things she had fought for five years to forget. ‘When you came home from Robert Sim’s lodgings with the Mason Word in your pocket, after what had happened to him …’ Her voice broke off and she rubbed the heel of her hand over her eye. ‘I was in a terror at what you had begun to meddle in, and at what might happen to you. I could not think where to go for help. I could not go to the stonemasons and reveal what you now knew, for fear of where that might lead, and I could not think where else
to turn. But then I remembered what Andrew Carmichael had told me, so long ago, and so I went to him.’

‘But to what purpose, Sarah?’

‘I wanted him to talk you out of continuing down this path, to leave off this search into Robert’s past, and let the baillies find what they might. Robert is beyond your help now, and I do not care a jot for the name of the college – Dr Dun had no right to ask this of you. I wanted him to explain to you the dangers in which you enmesh yourself, for I knew you would not pay any heed to me.’

Sarah was not a woman to let her mind be overrun with groundless fears, and I could not question what she had learned at the hands of George Burnett. And Andrew Carmichael had mentioned his father to me too, as we had admired the sundial in Dr Dun’s garden. But there was one thing yet that none of this could explain.

‘Sarah, I saw him rest his hand on your neck and with the other stroke your face.’

She cast her eyes down to her hands, and then up to me again. ‘I know; he should not have done that. I had been weeping. He put his arm around me to comfort me, to reassure me. And then for a moment, just a moment, he lifted his hand and stroked my face. I knew he should not have done it and so did he.’ She looked away. ‘It will never happen again.’

I sank my head in my hands and she rose and went quietly up the stairs to bed.

*

The grave had not been deep, there had been deeper graves. He had looked into deeper graves and wished with every fibre of himself that he could wrench the shrouded corpse from it and breathe life into it once more. But not this one, not this last grave. There had been no shroud and the blood had been warm and wet on his fingers as he had dragged the stone across it.

The other graves had upon them names. His own name, twice. Twice he had watched and mourned as his own name, chiselled into stone, had been set above the clods of dirt and the cold corpse. The dates, the mason’s marks telling the truth, and the lies, of his life. A hammer, a chisel, a square, a skull. Beneath them the bones of those he had loved. But this last grave, most sacred of all the masons’ graves, bore no marks, and it was empty now. In the whisper of the wind, he thought he could almost hear soft footfalls on the ground as the shades of the dead rose to pursue him to his own earthly tomb.

FIFTEEN
Crathes

The next morning, Dr Dun readily agreed to my absence from the college, and from the town, for the next two days, and furnished me with a letter to present at Crathes Castle, in the expectation that I would gain an audience with Sir Thomas Burnett.

‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘The heart of this thing may lie with the weaver, and not in the town at all. I spoke privately with the sheriff last night, and I do not believe the law will pursue the matter of Cummins’s death to Crathes – the town’s officers are convinced they have the killer here, in the tolbooth or outside of it, but they have no interest in looking further afield than this burgh. They have sent Cummins’s clothing and papers to his sister, but do not intend to seek her out themselves. I have said nothing to anyone outside the college about Malcolm Urquhart.’

It was when the dead weaver’s landlady had been telling me about his childhood home, and the patronage of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, laird of Crathes Castle, that I had remembered that Malcolm Urquhart, the student who had
fled past me down the library stairs on the day of Robert Sim’s death, also came from Crathes. The boy’s subsequent disappearance from the college would allow me to pursue my investigations there without raising undue notice.

‘I have written to the laird on the matter of young Urquhart, and you can rely on his hospitality and assistance. You will have little difficulty in your dealings with the boy’s older brother: Patrick Urquhart is a quiet-living, honest man whose gifts should have taken him further than a parish schoolroom. He should have had a glittering career abroad, but was called back after only a year to bring up his younger brother after the deaths of their parents. And now see how that younger brother has disgraced him.’ The principal’s voice was bitter; little angered him so much as wasted talent.

It was not yet nine when I set off out of town across the Den burn and down the Hard Ward towards Rubislaw and the road that would take me, in time, to Crathes. I did not want to be away from Sarah just now. I had waited, the previous evening, until I was certain that she was asleep, before finally going upstairs and getting into bed. I had held her to me through the night and slipped quietly from the bed early in the morning, leaving her only a brief note about where I planned to go today.

The walk was pleasing, and aside from the occasional stop by a burn to refresh myself, nothing hindered me on my way. It was early in the afternoon when I came to
Crathes. The Burnetts had clung to a boggy island fortress nearby on the Loch of Leys until the need for such places was long past, but in the last century the lairds had built for themselves this stately house, a tall tower of stout walls and few windows built storey upon storey towards the heavens, and capped with towers and turrets there as much for whim and fancy as to defend against the hostility of neighbours. I wondered about the many stonemasons who must have worked on it, men who must have lived in humble lodges such as that we had found at the bottom of the Middletons’ garden, and yet could partake of the vision, comprehend the geometry, make real the designs of the finest of architects, to produce such places as this. Forty years since Crathes had been completed. The masons who had worked on it, like the lairds for whom they had toiled, were probably all dead by now.