Queen & Country (27 page)

At this, his other customer, turning from the jars, spoke up in defence of the boy he had thrown out. ‘He is not a fool. And ye have no cause to speak to him like that.'

‘He does not understand it.' The apothecary scraped the powder up upon a piece of paper, and funnelled it back into the pot. It left a stain on the counter, like a scab of blood.

‘He understands perfectly. Not only can he see the contempt upon your face, he can read it in your lips.'

‘You are as daft as he,' the poticar asserted.

‘You do not believe me? You do not think, that in his twenty years he has not ever heard the words
daft
and
dummy
, so that he kens their shape? You think you are first, to speak to him like that?'

‘He is a dummy, isn't he? Or will ye tell me next, that he can speak an' a'? You can be gone, too. I am weary of your coming here, with your countless questions. And I will not sell you ratsbane, argent vive, or brimstone, or whatever else you hark for in your daft
experiments. I do not believe for a moment you have come from Doctor Locke. If he wants a powder, he will have to send a paper for it. Or come here himself.'

‘Mebbe,' said the boy, ‘I am sent here by the council, to experiment on you. Mebbe they had wind of your sophistication.'

The man said, clearly rattled, ‘That is slander, sir.'

‘Is it? For tis plain, that is what the painter's boy had come here to complain of. What did you mix into his vermillion? Red lead, was it? Rust? Or mebbe it was blood? Ye should take me on, as your apprentice. I could show you tricks that you have never dreamt of.'

‘Get out of it, ye loun. And do not come again. I will make complaint of you, to Professor Locke.'

Meg interrupted then. ‘It is Roger, isn't it? Roger Cunningham?'

The student turned to her. His courage lost its flame, and he looked abashed. ‘Your pardon, mistress. For I do not ken you.'

‘I am Meg Cullan, wife to Doctor Locke.'

‘On my life, you are, Mistress,' he admitted then, plainly ill at ease.

‘Does Professor Locke know you are here?'

A sly look of triumph had crossed the apothecary's face. Frances felt sorry for the truant student. Had he not spoken up for the dummel?

‘I think he will have guessed it, if I have been missed,' Roger answered honestly. ‘But your point is pertinent. Tis time for me to go.'

‘You might like to tell him you were here,' suggested Meg.

‘I thank you for your kindness. And I will.' The young man bowed to them. His swagger petered out. But at the door, he turned. ‘Ladies, beware, and make sure to sift whatever you will buy from him for sweepings from the floor.'

‘That boy is a menace,' the apothecary said, ‘and I would bid you speak to Doctor Locke agin him, as I shall myself. Pay no heed to his slanders. He is wrath with me, for I refused to sell him what he wants to buy.'

‘What does he want to buy?' asked Meg.

‘He makes some experiments. And sometimes, he has licence for it from Professor Locke. Without such licence, I insist, I will never
sell to him. For, it is my suspicion he makes his own medicines, and peddles them, illicitly, when he has not the kenning for it, nor indeed the skill. Doctor Locke is lax with him, because he was a help in the year of plague. That credit, to be sure, maun sometime soon run out. Now, ladies, I am sorry to have troubled you with this. What more can I do for you?'

‘An ounce of your saffron, if you please,' said Meg.

The apothecary hesitated. ‘Now, that is a pity. For of the best saffron we have quite run out. The painter had it all, to make his yellow pigment. What is left is of a quality so poor, it cannot serve for you. And there will be no more of it, before the Senzie fair.'

Meg asked. ‘May we not see what you have, and judge the quality ourselves?'

‘I will be honest with you, Mistress, I should be ashamed to show it up to you. I cannot sell sic dregs.'

‘We shall have to do without,' Meg sighed, as they left the shop. ‘Until the Senzie fair. That is the great Easter market held in the cloisters of the auld cathedral, by the synod house, that gives the fair its name. If Hew will hold off your wedding till then, it would be as well, for we shall find lace there, and pearls, and fresh fruits and spices, to put to the banquet. This is the worst time of year, when the cup has been drunk to its dregs. In April, twill be filled again.'

‘I see,' Frances said, ‘why that man is not liked in the town. Does he cheat his customers, as the young man says?'

‘I believe he does. But he is clever enough not to palm off his dregs on myself or on Giles, who would well be wise to it. We have both had patients who had physic from him, which is very weak and adulterate. Yet when he is charged with it, he will maintain they cut it themselves, to make it go further, and therefore halve the cost of it. Wherefore his frauds are hard to test and prove. I have no doubt that he has some saffron still, and will sell to another sadly mixed and cut, what he dare not sell to us. There is no love between him and my husband, to speak plain. Giles does not care for those who fleece the poor and sick.'

‘Then did Professor Locke send this student there, to spy on him?' Frances asked.

‘Giles would not do that. But Roger is an agent, and acts upon a conscience, entirely of his own. He is a difficult boy. Still, Giles is fond of him, and finds hope and merit in his cunning for philosophy. Hew was his guardian, and paid for his tuition here.'

Frances echoed, ‘Hew did that?' She had not heard that Hew was ever guardian to a boy, for he had never mentioned it, at Leadenhall or here.

‘Aye. Did he not say? There is something between them, I think. Roger is the son of Richard Cunningham, who was our own father's pupil, and Hew's master at the bar, when he trained to be an advocate. That was a man who had a troubled heart – either it was madness, or a native evil in it – and he came at last to an unhappy end. His history has had a hard effect on Hew. It was Richard that caused that wound in his breast, for he would have killed him, if he could.'

‘I did not know.' Frances was shocked. She had thought that the scar, a silvery line where the hair did not grow, had come from the battles Hew had fought in the Netherlands. She had never asked, and he had never said. So much there was, she thought, she did not know of Hew, though they had shared a house, at Leadenhall, for years. His mystery confounded her, opening up new layers like petals of a flower; the closer she became to him, the more remote she felt.

‘The deaf boy, I suppose, is prentice to the painter, and the one who makes the likeness now of Giles. Tis likely that the poticar has mixed dust into his colours, and his master has complained of it,' said Meg.

‘Will you tell the doctor this?'

‘Perhaps. He will hear it first from Roger, for, you may be sure, he will be quick enough to plead to him the facts of his own case. He is a subtle soul, and wisely kens to play. And though Giles is not foolish or lax in his indulgences, he has always had a soft spot for that boy.'
The painter's apprentice made his way back through the town, to the barn he had leased with his master by the burn. It was less than a house; two tiny chambers in a ramshackle roof, with a window and a door, open to the elements, made secure at night by a flap of leather, tied and nailed across. The painter had made his own window, to keep his colours clean from the dirt and dust that blew in on the breeze, from a sheet of parchment, reinforced with glue, allowing in the light, and keeping out the wind. Here, he ground his colours, with water from the stream, linseed oil or tempera, on a marbled porphyry, until they reached a temper of a satisfying clarity, when he would decant them into cups or walnut shells, and put them in a box, ready to be used. He found a certain solace in the rhythm of the grinding, and the cutting of the water from the sparkling burn; the longer that he spent at it, the purer was the shade of black or white or green, of ochre or azure, that eventually emerged. Colour was the painter's art, the instinct that he did not share with his young apprentice, for if the boy had learned the secret of his trade, he would be equipped to make his way alone; that sense would overcome the flaw of those deficiencies that God had wrought in him, and he would be the master of his craft. He would have the skill to leave his master then; the painter would not have that for the world.

He heard the boy returning from his errand in the town. Unconscious of the sound he made, he did not wander quietly but chuntered as he came, a strident, whistling sound. He clattered where he ran, noisily and clumsily; a wonder that his muckle hands could take and hold so sensitive a pen with which to draw.

The boy was in a mood, the painter sensed at once. And he had been like that, of late, though this huffing and puffing was not in his nature, it was not like him at all. Something had filled him with stubbornness; something had stirred him to rage.

‘What is it, now?' he asked.

The prentice boy showed him the paper he had kept crushed in his hand. The painter had to smooth it out to read it, criss-crossed with lines of the bearer's displeasure.

‘Ach. Dinna fash. Ye mauna tak it to heart.' The paper bore the note he had sent to the apothecar. ‘Send vermillion crystal, the pigment ye sent was cut with red lead.'

The apothecar had put, ‘What I sent was pure. And if it was contaminat, somehow in your workshop, speir to your prentice boy, what hand he may have had in it, if you can make the dummy understand. Which, as I maun tell you, I cannot. I will charge to your account the spillage in my shop that your boy has done. As for the pigment, ye had all I have.'

‘And what he has is
shite,'
the painter said. Although the prentice saw the shape of that word, as it formed on his lips, and kent it full well, it did not raise a smile. The painter pulled his thumb out crudely from his fist, and for a comical effect, made a straining face. Even that did not force the sullen boy to smile. ‘It does not matter, see? We have colours of our own.'

His own mood had changed, sharp and suddenly. He shooed the prentice out to fetch water from the stream, angry with the glower that soured his gentle face. He would send him back again, to the college with the coals, and keep him on his toes, and that would teach the lad to come back in a sulk. He held no grudge against the town apothecary. That he was a swingeour, there could be no doubt, and it was wrong of him to try to blame the boy. Yet the painter did not fault him for his fraud. It took a cunning thief, to ken another thief, and they were of a kind. They could come to an agreement, pleasing to them both, for the painter's fee included the cost of the materials. He would not, even so, put that shit up on the wall, or in a year or two, the pictures would turn black. Thankfully, he had some colours of his own, that he had kept back, for a purpose such as this. He had guarded them so long, he felt a guilty pang to break on them at last, as a miser frets to spend his pot of gold, but he was aware it was a wise investment. And what joy, what pleasure he would have, at breaking out the colour from unconsummated stone, where nature needed no more than a little help? The pictures on the college wall, the portrait of the doctor there, the best the boy had done, would
make their names for them. The art and fortune painting was a beauty, was it not? It would be the consummation of the painter's craft, what he had been born to, what was
meant
for him; Hermes in his silver spurs, fly wings on his feet, who made fate his captive, supple, sly, and fleet, patron friend to fugitives, renegats and thieves.

Chapter 18

Memento Mori

Hew returned to St Andrews with the pleated picture wrapped up in his saddle bag. His next move was to try it on the painter Workman, as he had on Vanson, and, in particular, on the painter's prentice, who, despite what Vanson said, had a clear understanding of portraiture. For this, he was aware, he would require the help of an interpreter, in speaking to a person who was deaf and dumb.

This did not discourage him. Interpretation, he saw clearly, was the key. For the meaning of the picture, unlike the meaning in a cipher, did not lie in the pleats or the lines of paint, or even in the mind of the man who had created them, but in their effect in the mind of the person who regarded it.

He had noticed this, in the effect the painting had, palpably, on James. The young king was afraid of it. And since Hew did not allow that the picture was bewitched – would not, at this stage – then the reason must lie within the king's own conscience; the painting had shown up the conflict deep within, had mirrored and had brought to light, what was already there.

This Hew understood, for he was aware the picture had exerted such a charm on him. But the effect was not the same, for he was not afraid of it. Rather, it allowed him to express, and in some way amend, the discord in his mind that rose from an ambivalence; his muddled guilt and pity for the Scottish queen. He had the vague sense that by solving this mystery, he could set to rest that queen's unhappy death, and his uncertain part in it, and make something that was perilous because it vacillated, somehow firm and fixed,
even if it fused into a constant grief. The idea of a quest, that proved his loyalty to the king, laid to rest that queen,
and
assured his love, very much appealed to him. Had he been honest with himself, he would have understood that the keenness with which he had embraced the challenge, and his general tendency to wander after mysteries, were an attempt to occupy and distract his mind, with riddles that were convolute, intricate and pleasing, and had certain ends, from those greater powers and mysteries of feeling, of human love, and God, which threw him into terror and could not be solved. His introspection, though, did not take him quite so far.

Coming home from Edinburgh, he went straight away to Giles Locke at St Salvator's, before returning home to his wife at Kenly Green. He showed him the painting, which Giles was much taken with. ‘Ah, a turning picture. I like that. Indeed. I like that very much.'