Queen & Country (29 page)

He did not seem to notice it. ‘That is perfect, then.' He grinned at her. ‘You will like the fair. And I would like to take you to it, if I am still here.'

‘Where else would you be?'

‘Wherever I must go, to find this matter out. You will not mind it, Frances, to stay here with Meg? She likes you very much. I must go again, to Edinburgh, first, to question the king's servants, who found the turning picture at the gate at Holyrood. For I have no doubt, one of them kens something, that he does not want to ken, or that he does not want the rest of us to know.'

His confidence and pleasure in it filled her with a sadness she could not express. ‘Must you go again, when you have just returned?'

He hesitated, then. ‘I need not go, at once. For nothing can be hurt by it, to leave it for a while.'

And for the next three days, while he remained with her, he did not let the picture slip into his mind.

On the fourth day, he was asked by Giles to come back into the college to help, as he had promised, with the students who were due to graduate that year, whose studies had been interrupted by the year of plague. ‘If you could hear their practice in the disputations, that would be of help. Some will have their laureation shortly, at the Pasque, others are not ready for it, and must wait till June. Roger is the student I am most concerned about. I will be indebted to you, if you hear his argument.'

‘Gladly,' answered Hew. ‘Though I should not have thought he needed help in arguing.'

‘His arguing is faultless in its presentation. It is in the content that it lets him down.'

‘As when he says, for instance, that there is no God,' said Hew.

The doctor groaned. ‘Did he say that? The wicked boy. But he does not believe that, Hew.'

‘I supposed as much.'

‘I have been too soft with him. But these are public examinations, and he will not, he cannot, pervert them to his own misgoverned ends. What he wants is someone who will argue properly, and who will be quite firm with him.'

‘That, I can do. In fact, I should find pleasure in it,' Hew said with a smile.

‘I had hoped you might.'

They walked together into town, coming to the college shortly after eight. The porter at the gate called them to him urgently. ‘There is an unco problem, sir. The denner hall is locked, and the painter man inside, and we hae chapped and roared, but he will not let us in.'

‘Again?' The doctor sighed. ‘I hoped that he had done with that. He has become quite strange, and is no longer reasonable. I must, I think, take measures to address the man myself.'

‘I doubt ye ought to, sir. He was there all night. And not a peep fae him, nor yet his dummel boy. I ken he cannae hear us, sir, but often we hear him; the more so, sin he disnae ken the clatter that he makes.'

‘All night?' repeated Giles. ‘Now, that does seem strange.' He looked askance at Hew, who wondered, ‘Has he stayed before?'

‘Never, in the night,' the porter said. ‘For he has a workshop, somewhere in the town, where he gangs to sleep. He does not ever stay here when it is not light, for then, ye see, he cannot see to paint. But when the daylight fades, he quits the denner hall, and brings the key to me. Last night, he did not. Nor, as I maun swear to you, did he pass the gate. And no one here has seen him or his prentice boy.'

Hew looked back at Giles. ‘I do not like this much.'

The doctor was suddenly brisk. ‘Now, I have a key, somewhere in the tower. It is an old and rusted one, and may not be of use to us. But I propose to fetch it down, and try it out, at once.'

Giles was the first to look in. He took a step back. ‘Ah, dear me, dear me. Now, William,' he said to the porter, ‘there are students outside. I want you to tell to their regents, to call them all in, and to the lecture hall. They must keep them there, until I send them word. Tell them to read to them, from the disputations, and then to put them all to work upon a paradox, whatever class they're in. And if they are kept long, and past the dinner hour, the bursar will attend to them, and send them meat and drink. And for their pleas of nature, show them to the pot. Lock the college gate, and send out to the tolbuith whether Andro Wood the sheriff is in town, for we may want his help. You, Hew, with me.'

The porter left them then, and the students were dispersed, all of them but one, and that was Roger Cunningham, who came up the stair and followed Giles and Hew, unheeding and unseen.

Ars et Natura
was complete. The painter had hung up his painting, a panel in three parts that measured four by five, in the very centre of the long back wall. And in the hall in front of it, he had hanged himself.

Chapter 19

Speaking Pictures

It made sense to Hew, only as a scene. He could see it with his eyes, but could not understand what it was he saw, fractured and diffused, confusing to his mind, like a false perspective in a picture or a prism. Yet the images in front of him were not at all distorted, presenting with a clarity that could not be misread. And yet, and yet, his brain refused to comprehend the whole, but splintered into parts the horrors it beheld, could only apprehend them, broken, through a glass. It was like the tears, that cannot grasp a grief, divided and discharged, reflected in a thousand places in their blurry shards. The tableau that unfolded there took some time to print itself entire upon his consciousness. And, when it did, he did not think it likely it would ever be erased.

Art assisting Nature, fixed upon the wall, cast its shadow foremost over all else there. The figures in the painting did not have much depth.
Hermes et Fortuna
had nothing to distinguish the expressions in their faces, which bore none of the elusive, wary sensitivity the painter's boy had shown, but were bland and smooth. The draping of the clothes around their limbs and torsos, standing on their pedestals awkwardly and stiff, was flatter than the panel where they were depicted, which they could not lift. It was hard to imagine they were of the gods, who, with their vacant, inscrutable faces, could influence the storm clouds painted at their back, tipping out the listless vessels in a stolid sea. The sails of the ships, the curved piece of cloth in Fortuna's hands, were as fixed as wood, and carried in their solid folds as little there of movement. But what brought the
picture out, to a transcendent brilliance, was the clarity and colour in the pigments that were used. Deep, mellow ochres, fresh and verdant greens, oozing, venous reds and florid, fleshy pinks, scintillating blues. The eyes of the serpents, wound round Hermes' rod, were a penetrating black; the wings on his helmet and his heavy feet were pure and white and clean. Nature's earth was coloured with a hot, honeyed dust long ago baked dry in an Asiatic sun. The colours of the sea, tempered greens and greys, were not swirled together in a muddy froth. Rather, they rose up, in little tufted curls, each one clear, discrete, white-flecked at its peak. The letters underneath, and the scroll on Hermes' helmet, were inscribed in leaf of glinting, brittle gold. And the pewter of the helmet, and the sea beyond, had a subtle shimmer to it, an effervescent sheen, that when the sunlight fell on it, made the metal and the water feel translucent and ethereal. So the painter's art had brought the work to life.

Nature's colours, to the painter, had been less than kind. A rush of blood and bile had pooled behind his face, swelling out the flesh, in a livid hue. He had hanged himself with the same wire he had used for the picture, strong enough to hold his painting's weight, and sharp enough, almost, to sever his own throat. His corpus had discoloured to a mottled splurge of purpled and heaving, bilious red. No clarity at all remained to him in death.

Though Hew's eyes were compelled, and held against his will, to look upon that place that was the painter's signature, his signing out of life, he became aware that it was not complete. There was another part to it, further up the hall. On the dais where the doctor had been sitting for his portrait, lay the painter's boy, figured as he fell, like an actor on the stage. He was covered over, half, by the backcloth to his painting, pulled down in his flight, and in the crook of his arm, toppled from its perch, lay the doctor's skull. The portrait of the doctor had been painted out, its gentle face obliterated in a mask of cinnabar. On the floor in front of it, with the paint and brush, was the hammer that was used, in assisting Art and Nature to their place upon the wall, and upon the boy, whose face appeared, to Hew, the
one thing in that room to have no colour in it; but a thin fluid leaking from the dead boy's ear, turned up from the ground, kept a faint taint of pink, as though its stream of blood was long ago washed out.

Looking over all, quiet and impassive on its scaffold still, with its back to the door and its eye upon the set, was the king's turning picture, mindful, as always, of what it meant to die.

He heard Giles say, ‘We must leave this scene untouched, to wait for Andrew Wood, if he is in town.'

His own voice answered then, reluctantly, absurd. ‘We have no want of him.'

The doctor reasoned, calm, ‘Ah, I think we do. We need the king's man, to help us deal with this. So will he do, efficiently and quietly. If what appears is true – and I do not say it is, before we ken the facts – but going by appearances, we have a man here who is murdered, and a man who murdered him, and has killed himself, which is a sin against nature, and God.'

And that, considered Hew, was what the speaking picture seemed to want to say, what his mind perceived, and Giles put into words. It seemed that the painter had murdered his boy, and then murdered himself, in a fit of remorse. As to what had happened first in the sequence of events, in the damage to the portrait, the hanging of the painting and the killing of the boy, the picture did not say. Nor was there a clue to what drove him to the act. One thing though was clear. All of this took place before the painter hanged himself, and so the painter ended this unhappy chain, wherever it did start. Or so it must have been, if what appeared was true, for without certain proof, Hew could not swear it was. The painting had been staged, the painter in its frame. Cold reason must dictate, that there was no one else. Yet he had placed himself at the centre of his painting, where Art and Nature turned, and cast their gaze on him, and they could not discount the disturbing possibility, that the painter was compelled by some other, stranger force, to commit a crime that seemed quite inexplicable.

‘I cannot understand it,' Giles Locke said. ‘For in the hours I spent with them, sitting for my picture, I never saw a cross or an uncanny
look between them. So close and sympathetic was the understanding there, they moved and worked as one.'

‘Perhaps that does explain the strength of a remorse, that drives a man to hang himself,' said Hew.

‘Remorse, aye, but not this show of violence. This painter was, I never thought, a violent sort of man. He was not a man, that had that passion in him,' Giles Locke answered sadly. ‘This is a terrible thing. But we cannot let our horror at it blur the practicalities, or deflect us from our duty in this case. The provost must be told, and this man's kin informed. I have a college full of students, who must be protected here, and this is not a thing we can handle on our own. It is too much for us. Andrew Wood must witness this, before we cut him down. This picture must be firm imprinted on our minds, before it is disturbed.'

It was imprinted now, on Hew, who thought he never would again accept an invitation to a dinner in that hall. The scene though, was disturbed, before the crownar Andrew Wood had had the chance to look at it. For it was broken up by Roger Cunningham. Roger had slipped in unseen, unnoticed and undaunted by the gruesome scene. He did not stand to gawp, but put his practised science into good effect, by lifting up the head of the broken painter's boy. He interrupted, urgently, ‘Sir. Professor Locke. This man has a fractured skull. But he is not dead.'

They carried the boy, between them, to Bartie's room, which had lain vacant since his death. The room had been stripped bare and scrubbed, but Giles found from somewhere a folding camp bed, of the sort that soldiers used, and in this sling of canvas they set down the boy. And Hew was thankful to depart from the garish dinner hall.

Giles said, ‘I have sent for the surgeon. But I will tell you now, this boy will not live.'

The boy's skull was dented, hollowed on one side, cracked upon itself like the splintered eggshell of a soft boiled egg. A little fluid dribbled on a napkin underneath, as though the egg had not been left long in the fire.

‘We should shave his head,' Roger said.

‘Leave it, for the surgeon. You should not be here,' said Giles. So dull and heavy were his words they lost in transit all their force, and Roger paid no heed to them. Instead, he fetched a razor, water, towels and soap, and shivered off the boy's black hair until a narrow bracelet circumscribed the dint in it, where the white bone dipped, and sunk upon itself. The boy was still, unconscious all the while.

The surgeon came at last. But there was very little that the man could do. ‘There are fragments of bone depressed upon the brain. It requires an instrument to lift them out, of a particular kind, and I do not have that instrument,' he said.

The surgeon drew teeth, and let blood. He detached limbs, that were withered or gangrenous, and sometimes he sold those limbs, for purpose of dissection, to Professor Locke, who was a skilled anatomist. But he had never probed before into a living brain. He had not seen a wound like this on anyone alive.

Roger said, ‘Professor Locke has an instrument like that.'

‘I? You are mistaken.' Giles replied, perplexed.

‘Aye, sir, you do. It is the tower, among the other instruments.'

‘In truth . . . it may be possible,' Giles conceded slowly. ‘There is something there. But it is not for use.'

‘Not for use?' The surgeon challenged him, direct. ‘Why should ye have such a thing, and it were
not for use?'
Why should you have, he intended, such a tool at all, which belongs to my profession, not to yours.