Fate and Fortune (16 page)

He turned towards a cupboard in the wall, and returned to pour three thimblefuls of sack, as carefully as cups of molten gold.

‘Gentlemen,’ he stated as they drank his toast, ‘I am at your service, for whatever service you require.’

‘I understand my father had deposits here,’ said Hew.

‘He left a little gold secured within my vaults. If you wish to have it you must make an appointment with my servant, at a more
convenient
time. Meanwhile, I can advance you monies on account, if you so wish.’

‘Master Cullan will have monies on account,’ Richard put in quickly. ‘For which, since you hold his capital, there will be no charge.’

‘That goes without saying,’ Urquhart replied. He unlocked a box and took out a small purse of gold. ‘This may do you for the while. Was there something else?’

‘I understand I have inherited a printing press, run by Christian Hall. Can you explain the terms?’ asked Hew.

‘Indeed, I remember the transaction,’ Urquhart nodded. ‘The
documents
are in my deed box. He rummaged awhile at the back of the room, and returned with a paper. ‘Aye, here it is. You are misinformed, however, for you have no interest in the press. It belongs, out and out, to Christian Hall. It was your father’s gift to her, upon her marriage.’

Hew exchanged glances with Richard, who frowned and shook his head.

‘But Christian said her husband borrowed money from my father,’ Hew exclaimed. ‘I do not understand.’

Urquhart coughed discreetly. ‘Christian Hall …’ he looked at the paper again, ‘was the daughter of a woman called Ann Ballantyne, who made her living as a seamstress.

‘Your father has supported her from childhood. William Hall was Christian’s tutor. He was engaged, by Matthew, to teach her to read and write. When her mother died, and William married her, your father gave William the money to set up a printing press, but the stipulation was that it belonged to Christian, not to him. William Hall was her curator, Christian being under age. And William was a good man, as I understand. She took his name,’ he added delicately, ‘because she had no other. Sadly, two or three years ago, her husband died of smallpox. She took on the business, unaware it was already hers. That was your father’s wish; my part in this was simply to oversee the transaction.’

‘Does it say who her father was?’ Richard interrupted.

Urquhart looked at him coldly a moment, as though he did not care for his tone. Hew was too confused to speak.

‘I regret,’ Urquhart answered stiffly, ‘that the father’s name is not recorded here. However, Ann Ballantyne lived with her daughter in a cottage at the north back of the Canongate, beneath the Calton crags.’ He turned once more to Hew. ‘The cottage is presently vacant, since the last tenant has left. I welcome your instructions on disposing of it; I can find another tenant, or it can be sold.’

Hew found his voice at last. ‘And what is that to me?’ he answered hoarsely.

‘Did I not say? The house belonged to your father. I’m sorry if this information has unsettled you,’ Urquhart concluded, folding up the paper. ‘Let me know what you decide about the property.’

‘Did you know about this?’ Hew turned to Richard as they left.

Richard wrestled for a moment with his conscience. Then he said, ‘I’m ashamed to say, that I suspected something of the sort. I knew that Matthew had a friend that he visited at Calton crags. But he did not confide in me. I swear to you, I had no notion that there was a child.’

‘Christian is twenty-two. Then this was while my mother was alive.’

‘I’m afraid it must have been,’ Richard agreed reluctantly. ‘I am so very sorry, Hew. I know you do not wish to hear this.’

‘Why sorry? What is to regret?’ Hew answered wretchedly. ‘In every way, in every sense, my father was not the man I thought he was.’

Richard looked distressed. ‘What will you do? Will you go home?’

‘Go home! You were so keen to have me here, to learn my father’s trade!’ exclaimed Hew bitterly.

‘But by your own admission, you were not well-suited to it. And with this new impediment … It can only cause you grief.’

‘I see no reason to abandon Christian now,’ objected Hew. ‘The least that I can do, is to make good Matthew’s debt.’

Richard shook his head. ‘I cannot think that wise, when you have feelings for her,’ he said gently.

‘What feelings?’ Hew said savagely. ‘I concede it possible, that I felt a connection with her; that is no surprise, since we
are
connected. I assure you, that I have no
feelings
that are not proper between friends.’

Richard shook his head. ‘I can read you too well, and know that nothing I can say will change your mind. But I beg you, reconsider. You are troubled and confused.’

‘I thank you, Richard, and I know that you mean well. But I have nothing to go home for. Christian has done nothing wrong and, beyond a doubt, she has a deeper claim on me than I supposed. Therefore, I will stay, and see her through her troubles now. It is surely less than she deserves.’

‘Then I applaud your courage, though I count it foolishness. What will you tell her? The truth?’

‘I will tell her nothing. Keep this secret. Do not tell a soul.’

‘Of that, you are assured. I pray to God you both may not be hurt by this,’ Richard answered grimly.

Hew stared at him. ‘How should this hurt us?’

‘That much is clear. You have fallen in love.’ 

Richard’s fears for Hew were proved unfounded. For the next time he came to the printing house, he found another woman to distract him, dressed in widow’s weeds. The veil and feathered gown of
blue-black
silk gave her from behind the semblance of a crow. But when she turned, he saw the sculptured beauty of her face, perfectly composed, the pale, translucent skin of the natural redhead, full dark lips and solemn eyes, quizzical and searching. The sharp folds of her skirts were studded with a thousand beads, that shivered as she moved and caught the light, and the thick coif of hair curled beneath her cap was bound with black silk ribbon dressed with pearls. ‘Shall I read it once again?’ she was asking Phillip, in a voice fraught with mischief.

‘Aye, once through.’ Phillip had already set the type, and Hew watched him run his thumb across the rows of letter, pressing down or prising out a character out of line, while the stranger spoke in lilting tones. ‘It is called simply
Song
.

‘That is a pretty song,’ said Hew.

The widow started, for a moment discomposed. ‘Gentlemen do not eavesdrop. I did not see you there.’

Phillip sighed. ‘This is Hew Cullan, a student of the law. Pray, do not mind him. He is often here, and is a friend of Christian’s.

‘Lady Catherine Douglas,’ he observed to Hew.

Hew bowed to Catherine. ‘It seemed more polite to listen than to interrupt. I am sorry if I startled you. Please go on.’

The lady Catherine had recovered her composure. She replied disdainfully, ‘I do not care to read in front of strangers.’

‘Then that is a pity,’ Hew said gravely. ‘I should like to know what happens in the end.’

‘The lady is deceived by her true love, and everything he touches turns to dust. She pines away and dies for him. He is the very essence of your sex.’

‘If that is so, then I will abjure it straight away, and beg to be a girl,’ Hew answered solemnly. ‘And, yet, I would protest, her peaches are not yet so fully blown that she may not share them with another.’

Catherine stared at him. ‘You are impertinent.’

‘Not at all. I merely state, there is a way your song might have a happy ending. Not all men are so treacherous.’

Aye, perhaps,’ conceded Catherine. ‘But a good song should be sad, don’t you think?’

‘A sad song should be sad. But a good song should make the heart soar.’

‘Are we done with the quibbling?’ asked Phillip. ‘Because, if we are, I should like to have the second verse, before Walter falls asleep in the press.’

‘Aye, in a moment,’ Catherine said absently. She had let the paper fall.

‘So you are you a student of the law?’ she inquired of Hew. ‘Then should I be afraid?’ She looked at him through eyes that promised laughter, with the smallest creasing of the corners of the mouth.

Hew made another bow. ‘Aye, madam, you should be afraid.’

Phillip spluttered, ‘Very likely!’

‘You do not look like a scholar,’ Catherine observed. ‘A student of the law must be very dry and dull.’

‘I confess it,’ Hew said smiling, ‘dry as dust.’

‘Let me see.’ She took up Hew’s hand and pulled off his glove.

‘These fingers are quite moist and soft, not all at dry,’ she observed. ‘I think you are a gentleman, though you do not behave like one.’

‘A moist hand in a man is no good thing,’ muttered Phillip.

‘Do you think not?’ demanded Catherine, ‘then let me see your hands,’ and she grasped the compositor by the hand, so sudden that he dropped his composing stick, cursing in annoyance.

‘That is a solace,’ called Christian severely, coming into the room, ‘and worse, in front of Lady Catherine Douglas. Phillip, I’m surprised at you.’

Phillip swore again.

Christian glared at him, and turned to Catherine. ‘Please forgive our want of manners,’ she said quickly. ‘Have you met Master Cullan?’

‘The scholar? Aye, I have. And he is warm and moist, that signifies good humour. The typesetter is dull and dry. Your hands are rough,’ Catherine complained to Phillip, wrinkling up her nose.

‘Madam, they are rough because I work with them,’ Phillip answered shortly. ‘I have to handle letter, that is rinsed in lye.’

‘Truly?’ Catherine mocked. ‘How loathsome!’

‘It really is not fair to tease him,’ interjected Hew, ‘when he has work to do.’

‘Then I am rebuked.’

For Phillip’s sake, Hew took his leave. ‘I see I am disturbing you. I will retire to work upon my script,’ he offered gallantly.

‘Are you a makar, then?’ persisted Catherine.

‘Sadly, no. It is my father’s book, a treatise on the law.’

‘How very dull.’

‘It is, to speak truth, unremittingly dull. We are now come to the second chapter, which deals, in inexorable detail, with the laws of reset.’

‘There are times,’ reflected Catherine, serious for once, ‘when it may serve us well to know the law, and times indeed, when even justice cannot help us. Nonetheless, if I require a lawman, I shall send for you.’

Hew bowed again. ‘I shall be at your service. And, in the meantime, leave you to decide your lady’s fate. May I put in a word for a moment’s happiness?’

‘You may not. You really are impertinent.’ Catherine tossed her head. But she did not seem displeased.

‘Catherine is a tease,’ Christian said to Hew in the collating room. ‘You must not mind her.’

‘I do not mind her in the least,’ he assured her. ‘Is she by any chance related to James Douglas, earl of Morton?’

‘I know not? Why do you ask?’

‘It was what she said about the law. There is a darkness there below the jest. And Morton, who was once above the law, who was himself the law, now stands accused, and helpless in its face.’

‘Doubtless, the earl has blood on his hands,’ Christian considered.

‘Doubtless he has, but doubtless also he is blameless of the charge that will prove his downfall.’

‘Aye, perhaps. But Catherine’s bitterness has quite another source. Her husband died at court, in another woman’s arms, and for a while she could not bear to show her face. If she seems hard and mocking, then it is an act, to cover up her hurt.’

‘You seem to know a great deal about her,’ Hew remarked.

‘For certain, we are printers, and the world brings us its news. Catherine’s poems, in some sad sense, are an answer to a world that treats her badly. She has joined a little group of makars that amuse the king, and some of them have had their verses printed, for their private use, or gifts to friends. Because I am a woman, she has brought her poems to me, and trusts me to protect them from the crowd. They satirise the minor players of the court, such as her husband, and are often cruel and savage in exposing indiscretions. However, they amuse the king, which is why she is allowed to
circulate
them to her friends.’

‘A pity she should be so bitter. She is so very beautiful,’ reflected Hew.

‘Do you think so?’ Christian looked sceptical. ‘But she is very old, I’d hazard, almost thirty. Her looks will not last long.’

Female friendship, Hew reflected, only went so far.

* * *

When next he met his sister Meg, Hew felt ill at ease. He could not discuss their father’s indiscretions. Like a closet door, the subject hung between them, for Meg could read him well, and was sensitive to mood. His sister, in her turn, was not herself. He found her sad and strained, as he had left her in St Andrews, and the change of place and air did nothing to provoke a change of mood. She was grieving, still, at their father’s death, and she had not resolved her differences with Giles. There was a distance still between them that it troubled Hew to see, and Giles left her often to her own devices while he was in conference with his good friend Doctor Dow. With some reservations, Hew brought her to meet Christian, and he was not reassured to see how well they liked each other. They could have been sisters, he concluded bitterly. Though they were not alike – Meg was dark like the raven, while Christian was fair – there was a close affinity between them that confirmed his deepest fears. And there was worse to come, for it turned out they had known each other once as children. Matthew had taken Meg to play at Carlton crags. ‘Then I must have met your father!’ Christian cried, in innocence, ‘and I never knew it, Hew! How strange!’ Hew felt lost for words, and looked away. He turned his attentions more openly to Catherine, for whom Meg had formed a consummate dislike. She thought Catherine artful, proud and haughty, and complained as much to Hew. To which her brother said merely, ‘Things may not be as they seem.’

Catherine was a clear distraction, and a welcome one for Hew. In honesty, he admitted to himself that it was not just her company he relished but the friction that she caused within the printing house. Phillip did not approve of her. He resented her dry mockery, her hauteur and her wealth, and he disliked the vicious candour of her poems. Catherine became a lure, and Hew began to plan his visits to coincide with hers. Catherine let it slip that she was growing fond of him. She hoped their friendship would not finish with the printing of her poems. Hew assured her it would not.

He came to chapel suppers still, though, for Christian’s sake, he often stayed away. It saddened him to watch her sitting by the fire, stitching ribbons to the sleeves of William’s frocks, unaware that she was Matthew’s child. And William was a Cullan through and through. Invariably, the ribbons were torn off in his adventures with the
nursemaid
on the muir. The small boy charged around the shop, and had to be restrained from tumbling in the press. Once, he pulled the drawers that lay in the correcting stone, and scattered Phillip’s flourishes and blocks. When Phillip retrieved him, and turned him upside down, by way of a distraction, an apple core came tumbling from his smock. Christian picked it up and frowned. ‘What’s this?’

‘
Pippin
,’ William said obligingly. He took the pippin from his mother and began to gnaw on it.

‘He’s teething,’ Alison said defensively.

‘Aye, for sure. Who gave him it?’ Christian asked quietly. ‘Was it the fruitman again?’

William said, ‘It was
Davie
,’ and Alison blushed.

‘And who is Davie?’ queried Christian.

‘Alison’s friend,’ the little boy answered. ‘He walks with us on the muir.’

The nurse flushed deeper and stuttered, ‘It is a man we met. There is no harm in it.’

‘Alison has a sweetheart,’ Michael sniggered. Phillip glared at him.

Alison looked stricken, and Hew felt sorry for her. She was a foolish, gentle girl, whose face, though never handsome, had been scabbed by pox. She had caught the smallpox nursing William Hall, while Christian and her infant had been kept away. Her chances of a sweetheart, in her present state, seemed poor enough.

Christian said quietly, ‘Alison, I do not want you to take William on the muir again.’

The girl looked up and bit her lip, mutinous behind the threatening tears. ‘The air by the park is good for the bairn.’

‘Understand me, Alison; you are not to take him there. And I will not have him given things by strangers, as I told you once before.’

Reluctantly, Alison nodded. Christian said nothing more, but took the apple core from William and threw it on the fire.

Later, as Hew said goodnight to Christian at the door, he asked, ‘Is it so very wrong for the child to have an apple? I know my brother Giles is set against them, but I’m sure a pippin never did me any harm.’

Christian shook her head. ‘It is not the apple, Hew. I do not like them talking to strangers.’

‘Can it really hurt that Alison has found a friend?’

‘What friend?’ Christian challenged. ‘She is so very trusting, that I fear she is misused. Alison is poor and simple, and she does not
understand
the ways of men. How likely is it that this man will want to marry her?’

‘Not very,’ Hew admitted. ‘But everyone may have a little
happiness
, don’t you think?’

‘I used to think so. Now, I’m not so sure. But perhaps you’re right; I am too hard on her. I cannot always bind her to my will. The truth is,’ Christian sighed, ‘I am afraid. And though I know that fear has blinded reason, still I feel the need to keep them safe.’

Unconsciously, Hew took her hand. ‘What is it you are so afraid of?’ he asked gently.

Christian whispered, ‘Someone has been coming here at night.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Odd things have been happening. When I open the shop in the morning, things have been moved. Small things that are not
significant
. Yet taken together, they begin to look strange.’

‘What sort of things?’ Hew probed

‘We have lost the proofs to Catherine’s poems. It does not really matter; they have been corrected. Phillip left them lying on the stone. In the morning, they were gone.’

‘The proofs were waste,’ Hew reasoned. ‘Why should it matter, then, if someone threw them out?’

‘It matters,’ Christian answered seriously, ‘that no one did.’

‘Then is it not quite possible that Catherine took the poems herself?’

‘More than likely,’ she agreed. ‘That is my hope. Catherine looked over the proof copy, and made the corrections with Phillip. The trouble is, I dare not ask her, for I dare not let her know that we have lost her poems. When she brought them to us, she gave us her absolute trust.

‘In the wrong hands,’ Christian went on, ‘they could do us
incalculable
harm. It is forbidden to print ballads, verses and the like without a licence. Catherine’s poems are for private circulation, and are not intended for the common eye. We are printing them without a name, and without our mark, which is itself a crime. Therefore we must be careful that we leave no trace. Phillip will check the count,’ she broke into a smile, albeit a little weak. ‘He says Walter has nine and a half fingers – the half he lost eight years ago when he first used a press – and therefore we are fortunate that he can count to ten. Beyond that is beyond him, and beyond our hopes.’