Queen & Country (31 page)

‘Sir, he cannot write,' Roger pointed out.

‘No. But he can draw.'

Roger began to make his book, as the painter's boy continued his recovery. For the first few days, the prentice showed no interest in the chalks, and his book was blank. Then, something moved him to take up the coloured sticks, and he began to draw, fervently and furiously, with delicate fine lines, until every stick was slivered down to dust, and every page was filled. Roger, the atheist, looked at the pictures, and was taken aback. He passed the book to Doctor Locke, by no means an atheist, who was equally perturbed, and passed it on to Hew. ‘Either that poor boy has become deranged, or this was what he saw.'

Hew was not willing to allow the second possibility. For on every page, the picture was the same. And in every picture he had drawn the devil.

The painter's art was imitation. Yet, Hew considered, it was more than that, for it was possible to recognise, from images or words, the likeness of a thing that was never seen before, and yet was unmistakeable. The devil was a spectre never manifest to Hew, and yet he kent at
once what he was looking at. He knew him from his books, and most evocative of all, from stories that were stilled in him from his early childhood, legends and descriptions, which he was aware, no one could have told the painter's boy. The painter's boy depicted only what he saw, for all else in the world, and in the other world, was closed to him. Yet Hew would not believe, did not want to countenance, that the painter's boy had witnessed what he drew.

The devil was depicted in a goatish form, standing on two legs, with every shaft of hair upon them intricately drawn, tapered to the hooves that were cloven at his feet, polished shiny smooth with a piece of chalk that the boy had whittled to a jet black dust. The devil had a tail that was barbed and splayed, swishing from his buttocks like the cruellest kind of whip. The devil had two horns, little buds of bone that sprouted from the furrows of his human forehead; his human head and torso had been coloured red, layer upon layer of the grinding of a chalk, thick and deep as blood, on every turning page.

In the corner of each page, on every one identical, the painter's boy had drawn a figure, cowering from the devil who was bearing down upon him. The cowering figure had, in every single case, the same imploring look upon his frightened face.

Hew spent a long time looking at the book, and did not say a word. Giles Locke understood the struggle in his mind, and, for a while, he left him to his thoughts. Eventually he asked, ‘What, then, do you think?'

Hew's answer circumscribed, and would not admit, the image of the devil that appeared in every place. He concentrated, rather, on the human he oppressed. ‘I was thinking,' he replied, ‘how uncanny a likeness our poor boy has made, of his late master, the painter.'

Refusing to submit to the devil in their midst, Hew began a course that was clear and practical. He admitted, privately, that he did not think that it would work. But the implementing of it occupied his mind, and kept it from a trouble he would not admit. He asked Roger Cunningham to use what means he could to persuade the boy to draw a likeness of the painter that was straight and true, and did
not have the devil in it. He had no idea how Roger might effect this. But somehow, Roger did.

The finished picture Hew had sent to a city printer, where it was engraved, and printed copies made, at his own expense. He affixed a note, that offered a reward of fifty Scottish pounds to anyone with knowledge of the painter and his name, and the crownar's men pinned a copy up in every town and burgh market place in Fife.

He had little hope that good would come from this. He knew full well, himself, that people did not care to look at papers on the cross, and even if they did, the chance that anyone would recognise the painter from the deaf boy's likeness, uncanny though it was, was surely slim. But it was all he had, and it kept his mind for the moment from his riddle of the picture, to which, he was aware, he had no clue at all. The money, too, might help.

The answer, he supposed, must lie somewhere in the works themselves, for it was plain to him that they were meant to speak. He went back to the dinner hall, to look again at the finished piece, art assisting nature, that was hanging on the wall, and spent an afternoon staring at its depths, the scintillating shades of its sparkling waves, elusive and ethereal, and wondered what the picture meant, what it had to tell him. He was there, still, when Giles Locke came to say that it was nearing suppertime, and he was going home. ‘You maun leave it, now. Do you even ken what you are looking for?' Giles asked.

‘I was looking,' answered Hew, ‘for the painter's signature. For it does seem strange, that a man should make a work as beautiful as this, and not put his name to it. I thought it might be hidden somewhere in the waves, in these flecks and curls; but I have stared for hours, and have not found it there. I cannot help but think, that somewhere in this picture there must be a clue. Why did he take his life, so poignantly, in front of it? He made himself a part of it, suspended on a thread, caught up in the flux of art assisting nature. It is a captivating image, with a quality in it which is almost fugitive, that I believe did far transcend that simple painter's craft. And I am not willing, I do not wish, I will not say, that there is magic in it.
Reason and my faith insist, that there can be no magic there, that there must be another, human explanation, but I cannot see it, Giles. I cannot see it.'

The doctor no longer attended to him. His mind had been captured elsewhere. ‘Say again,' he said, ‘what you hoped to find.'

‘A signature,' said Hew. ‘But it was in vain. For he has not signed it.'

‘Ah, has he not!' the doctor exclaimed. ‘You are ingenious, Hew!'

‘I thank you. But I am in the dark, how this may be manifest.'

‘The surgeon is a fool,' said Giles. ‘I always said he was.'

Hew was baffled now. ‘In what respect?'

‘In all respects. But, specifically, in believing that a blow to the skull with a hack-hammer loosened that boy's teeth. His condition goes deeper than that. It is one that I have treated, many times, when it has been caused by those same idiot surgeons, in their reckless treatment of the pox.'

‘Then was it the grandgore, that caused the afflictions that poor boy was born with?' asked Hew.

Giles paused to consider this, ‘That is an interesting perspective on it, and one I had not taken into account. On balance, though, I think the damage to the teeth – or more properly, the gums, is more recent and acute. And I have good hopes that it may be cured. The same may not be said of the disruption of his faculties, which, as I believe, have been with him since birth. They are compensated, quite, by his ability to draw. As to whether that ability is a quirk of nature, or the gift of God, I, as a physician, prefer not to assess. I ken what Meg would say.'

‘Then he has the grandgore, now?' asked Hew.

‘He has never had the grandgore. Please keep up. The answer lies in signatures.
Signatura rerum
.

‘As God marks each plant, each herb,' Giles said, ‘with the signature of its purpose, to guide the physician in its use, so that it resembles that part, that place in the body where is it effective, treating like with like. I saw the painter paint the wings on Hermes' sandals. And when he hoped to catch those little tufts and fronds, to capture speed
and flight, he put aside his brush and painted with a feather. With a
feather
, do you see?'

And Hew did see. For he remembered Heriot, in his goldsmith's shop. He closed his eyes, and gave up thanks to God, that whatever fortune had beset the painter, in his poor distracted heart, the pleated picture Hew had brought there from the king had no active part in it; its power was not to shape, but rather to reflect.

At home at Kenly Green, they explained it all to Frances and to Meg.

‘Tomorrow,' Giles concluded, ‘we must find the painter's workshop, where we will no doubt find the conclusive evidence. The pity is, that no one kens, to tell us where it is. He was in life, and death, reclusive and most secretive.'

‘Can the boy not show you?' asked Meg.

‘Perhaps, when he is well enough. I do not ken how Roger will communicate to him our will to find the place. It is a hard thing, to put into signs. And, I doubt, it is not safe for him to go there.'

Frances said, quietly, ‘It is on the bank of the Kinnessburn.'

Hew and Giles stared at her, blankly, as though she were speaking in tongues. ‘Forgive me,' said Hew, ‘but how can you know that?'

‘Because it is not far from the place where Will Dyer, Tibbie's husband has his dyeing shop. It is an old barn, belonging to him. And Tibbie Strachan says, the painter owed them rent, that was never paid. She complained about it, when I went to see about the dyeing of our cloth. She said Will would go down, to clear the barn out, and maybe take back what was owed.'

‘He must not,' exclaimed Giles. ‘Indeed, he must not.'

Frances was bemused by the change she saw in Hew. He was so much absorbed in the riddle of the painter, his mind had little room to think about much else. When they were in bed, she said, ‘I do not understand the doctrine of the signatures. How are they reflected in this case?'

‘They are not in themselves,' Hew explained. ‘It is a kind of parallel. The painter painted like with like. And so it was the work he did that drove him to distraction. It was not, you see, the painting from the king.'

‘Then did you think it was?' she asked.

‘It is not important what I think, or thought. What matters is the king, who must not come to think his painting is bewitched. I have to reassure him everything is well. This is good news, Frances. Horror though it is, the painter's death now has a rational explanation.'

‘Then I am content. And more so since I chanced to be of help. But there is one thing,' Frances said, ‘I do not understand. Why did the painter's boy draw pictures of the devil? For he could not have seen into the painter's mind. And how could he have drawn, what he has never seen? Signatures, or not?'

That question troubled Hew, and kept him still awake, long into the night.

The next morning, Giles and Hew returned to town. At St Salvator's, they found the painter's boy had spent a restless night. Roger let him out, for exercise and air, and he had wandered mournfully, from door to door and from room to room, chapping at the students to keep them from their rest with his plaintive cries. ‘He has been like this,' Roger admitted, ‘since you took the picture from him he drew of the painter. I kept him, for the first while, in his room, but it does not seem right to keep him prisoned there. Therefore, I resolved to let him out, but to keep him close inside the college grounds. He goes back, again and again, to the dinner hall, rattling at the lock. I think that he is looking for the painter. I do not think he kens that he is dead. And I do not ken the language for to tell him. And if I did, I would not ken, how to make him understand. What can he ken of death?'

And Hew, looking at the boy's dishevelled, mournful face, saw in it a feeling that was raw and unsophisticated, unsullied and unshaped by any hope or faith, and saw that what he felt, that did not shape itself in any kind of words, was a desolation deeper than a death, that had no understanding, but was an abandonment. And he was engulfed in pity for the boy.

It was their intention to set out to the Kinnessburn, to find the painter's shop. But they were distracted, before they could depart, by the arrival of the crownar Andrew Wood. With him he brought
one of his own tenants, whose father had a farm, in the lea of Largo Law. This tenant clutched a picture in his hand, of the painter Andrew Wood had only just nailed up, on the outside door of his own parish kirk. The farmer's son had come to claim his fifty pounds. And he had a tale to tell. Sir Andrew Wood assumed that his credentials were impeccable, for it was a foolish man who spun a yarn to him, or plucked him for a fraud, and a brave one who had spent the last few hours with him, subject to a most exacting inquisition. Andrew, at the last, was utterly convinced, and he had brought to them what shadow there was left, wrung out from his tenant, to collect his prize.

‘You will want to hear this for yourself,' he informed them grimly.

The four of them retreated to the turret tower, where Giles provided chairs, and a cup of brandy wine to encourage the informant, who was deathly pale. ‘I ken this man,' he said, gulping at the drink, ‘his name is Pieter Kemp.'

Hew said, ‘Are you sure?'

‘I ken that face. I see it my dreams. And a thing like that, a man does not forget. Pieter Kemp is dead.'

‘We know that he is dead,' said Hew. ‘What more do you know of him?'

‘That he is in Hell.'

The farmer glanced at Andrew Wood, a real and creeping terror shadowed in his eyes. But it was not the crownar that he seemed to fear; he was grasping for support.

‘I saw him die, you see. He died on Largo Law.'

‘Then you are mistaken. This is not your friend. This man died here at the college,' Hew replied.

‘Wait, hear him out,' the crownar said.

‘This is Pieter Kemp,' the man insistently stubbornly. ‘I would ken him anywhere. I saw him die. He died on Largo Law. The devil came an' plucked him, howling, from that place.'

Chapter 21

A Devil Incarnate

Sir Andrew Wood said, ‘Tell these men your history. For it will relieve that load upon your soul. And you know you want to.'

The tenant took a gulp of the brandy in the cup. The amber liquid stilled in him both courage and a kind of fear. And he began a tale of treachery and greed, that as it was unfolded there made perfect sense to Hew, dreadful though it was.

It had begun, long ago, when the tenant's grandsire had been but a bairn; long before that time, the tenant thought. The devil sets his snares to trip up silly bairns, who fall into his traps, guilelessly and greedily. When Sir Andrew's tenant was a mewling bairn, his grandsire gave to him a rugged piece of rock. And running though that rock, hidden in its core like the seeds inside a pear, were little grains of gold.