The Harper's Quine (21 page)

‘What about Lady Euphemia? Her brother? What was
her brother doing? And Mistress Murray?’

‘I don’t lead Euphemia out on a chain,’ said Sempill
forcefully, ‘and I’m not my good-brother’s keeper. It’s very
possible. Ask them. What is this about?’

‘Another lass died today,’ Gil said, ‘and there may be a
connection.’

‘Well, it was nothing to do with me,’ said Sempill. ‘And you’d best find who it was, Gil Cunningham, or there’ll be
no lasses left in Glasgow. Come on, Philip.’

He tugged his arm free of Gil’s grasp and marched out.
They heard him in the street cracking his plaid like a
whip.

His cousin hesitated.

‘Who killed Bess?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you know yet?
John’ll not be fit to live with till it’s discovered.’

‘Does it worry him?’ Gil asked, surprised by this image
of the man. ‘I never thought he cared a spent docken for
her, except as his property.’

‘Exactly.’ Philip Sempill finished his ale and rose, shaking out his grey plaid. ‘And his property’s getting scarce
enough, without folk putting knives through it.’

‘Philip!’ shouted Sempill from the street.

‘So you’ll let us know the answer,’ said Philip Sempill
ambiguously, and followed his cousin.

Gil turned his head to watch the door swing shut behind
him, and Maistre Pierre said, Interesting.’

‘More than that.’ Gil watched the latch click and said
thoughtfully, ‘He must be desperate for money. He knows
it is a boy - that is my fault,’ he said ruefully, counting off
the points, ‘he either cannot find it or knows he cannot
reach it, he seems willing to acknowledge it although he
knows it is not his.’

‘Why can he not marry his leman? He seems to consider
her his wife already.’

‘Simply because she is his leman. His adultery has been
publicly recognized while his wife was alive. Canon law is
quite specific on that point.’

‘So he must acknowledge this baby which is not his. For
how long?’ asked Maistre Pierre.

Gil shrugged. ‘He was a year or two above me at the
Grammar School. I would trust him about as far as I could
throw him. Until he gets his uncle’s money, I imagine the
bairn would be safe.’

Will you put his proposition to the harper?’

‘I will - and whistle for my fee, most likely.’ Gil pushed back his stool. ‘We have a long walk over the bridge too,
but first I think there is something we must do here.’

Maggie Bell eyed him with disfavour as he approached
her. Ignoring this, he took up a position where he did not
impede her view of the room, and said quietly, ‘Mistress
Bell, I owe you an apology.’

‘How so?’ she said, startled.

‘It seems I may have driven one of your lasses away.’

‘Annie Thomson.’

‘The same. I came looking for a word with her, and so
did the two that have just left, and the girl Joan says she
has vanished.’

‘I’m no surprised. My girls are good girls, maister. What
they do in their own time’s their own concern, but there’s
no assignations made in my house. Four of ye in one
evening, michty me!’

‘I wanted a word,’ Gil said, ‘because it was Annie who
spent May Day with the mason’s boy. The one that was
taken up for dead in St Mungo’s yard. Maybe you’ve
heard about that. And now Annie has disappeared, and
the other men who wanted to speak to her have left.’

‘I’ve heard about it,’ said Mistress Bell with a sniff,
measuring a huge jug of ale for another girl, ‘but I don’t
pay much mind to what happens up-by.’

‘I hoped,’ Gil pursued, ‘that she might be able to tell me
who struck him down. Since the boy is still in a great
swound, he can tell us nothing. But now I am concerned
for Annie, since there’s another girl dead.’

‘I remember now,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘Annie came
back late on May Day. About this time, it was, or later,
after Compline anyway. I would have fetched her a welt
for it, for we’d been busy, but she seemed owercouped
by something.’

‘She said nothing?’

‘No to me.’ She poured two beakers of ale for one of the
girls. ‘Mysie, when you’ve served these, get out the back
and search for Annie. All of ye. Take torches to look in the buildings, work in pairs, look in all the corners. All of
them, mind, and the yard as well.’

‘Why? What’s come to her?’ asked the girl pertly. Mistress Bell raised her arm to her and she ducked, grinning,
and spilled some of the ale. ‘I hear ye, mistress.’

‘Maybe we should lend a hand,’ offered Gil as the girl
hurried off. Mistress Bell eyed him carefully.

‘Maybe ye should no,’ she corrected. Gil, understanding
her, felt his face burning, but nodded in acknowledgement.

‘You keep your girls well, mistress. Supposing she is not
to be found out the back, can you tell me where she might
have gone?’

‘I can not. Do ye think I’ve the sight like an Ersche
henwife? Her mother’s at Dumbarton, she might run home
if she’s feart for something.’ She grinned at him. ‘Get you
out my way and wait, maister. Unless you like to lend a
hand here fetching jugs of ale, since I’ve sent all the lassies
out hunting for Annie.’

But Joan, reporting back after a quarter-hour or so, had
no information.

‘Not a sign of her, mistress,’ she said. ‘No in the outhouses, no in the brew-house, no in the yard. Mysie and
Peg looked behind the kindling, Eppie and me checked the
sacks of malt, but there’d been nobody there, you could see
that.’

‘Could you?’ asked the mason. She threw him a challenging look.

‘Aye, you could. Because Rob Morrison tore a sack when
he unloaded this afternoon, and there was no fresh footprints in the spilt grain. But we did find the side gate
unbarred,’ she added to her mistress.

‘Ye did, did ye? Was it closed over?’

‘Oh, aye. Ye’d never have seen from outside that it was
unfastened. I think she’s away, maisters, and I think she
went that way.’

‘May we see it?’ Gil asked.

Mistress Bell scowled, looked round the room and finally said, ‘Joan, mind the tap a wee while. This way,
maisters.’

The light was at that difficult stage where it was too dark
to see clearly, but torches helped very little. The yard
where Mistress Bell brewed her ale was surrounded by a
stout fence of cut planks, as high as Gil’s shoulder. Near
the house there was a narrow gate for foot traffic, closed by
a latch and a bar the thickness of the mason’s forearm. It
conveyed no information whatever. Gil, holding his torch
high, peered round at the dancing shadows of barn and
brew-house.

‘This is the only gate?’ asked the mason.

‘No, there’s the gate for the carts, yonder by the barn.
This is the gate the lassies use in the morn, it’s the one
she’d think of first. The cart-gate’s barred, maisters, I can
see it from here.’ She strode down the yard and brandished
her own torch at the big double leaves.

‘May I open this?’ Gil asked.

,if it makes ye happy.’

Beyond the gate was the muddy track which led
between the ale-house and the next cottage. On one side it
went out on to the street, on the other it disappeared into
the shadows between the two tofts. Mysterious vegetable
shapes jumped in the dimness.

‘Out there’s only Neighbour Walker’s grosset bushes,’
Mistress Bell informed him. ‘If ye’re ettling to search those
in this light ye’re a better man than I am. Walker could sell
the thorns for whingers.’

Gil shut the gate from the outside. It dragged over the
ground, but with one hand in the latch-hole he contrived
to close it completely. As Joan had said, from the outside
all looked secure, and he judged that the hefty girl they
were looking for would have had no difficulty in doing the
same. He opened the gate and stepped back in.

‘Thank you, mistress,’ he said, settling the bar in
place.

‘Seen enough?’

‘I have, for one,’ said the mason. ‘May we now leave the
neighbour’s gooseberry bushes and speak to the girls?’

Joan, handing responsibility for the tap back to her
mistress, admitted that she had no idea what was troubling-Annie.

‘She’s no been right,’ she admitted, ‘she’s been as if the
Bawcan’s after her, peering in corners and ducking at
shadows. She’s been taking more than her turn at the
dishes, which is no like her.’

‘But kept her out of the way of customers,’ Gil interpreted.

‘Aye,’ agreed Joan. ‘But as for telling anyone, no. Mysie
says she tried, and Peg tried, but she’d tell nobody. She
said she’d the toothache, but we thought maybe someone
forced her,’ she admitted.

‘And why did none of you tell me?’ demanded her
mistress. ‘What a flock of haiverel lassies!’ She cast a
glance round the emptying room, and raised her voice.
‘Last orders, neighbours! It’s near curfew.’

‘Do you know where Annie’s mother lives in Dumbarton?’ Gil asked.

‘No; said Maggie Bell bluntly. ‘And if you’ve to get
home to the Wyndheid before they bar the door, you’d best
get away over the river.’

‘You know me?’ asked Gil.

‘I know you’re from St Mungo’s.’

‘Then if you hear any word of Annie - good or bad,’ he
said earnestly, ‘will you send to me? I stay in the Official’s
house - the Cadzow manse.’

She nodded impatiently.

‘I’ll do that. Goodnight, maister. I’ll put Sandy the tanner
out in a wee bit and he’ll shut the Brig Port on his way
home.’

Out in the darkening street Maistre Pierre said thoughtfully, ‘She left well before the Sempills.’

‘Aye. She may simply have run, as the other girl says.’
Gil looked up and down the street and turned towards the bridge. ‘Providing she has not met James Campbell in a
kirkyard, she is probably safe enough.’

‘You think he knifed the other girl?’

‘What do you think?’

The mason remained silent until they had crossed the
bridge with a few last revellers, who vanished in ones and
twos into the closes of the Waulkergait. Finally he said,
‘I do not know. Nevertheless I think we have learned
something useful tonight, even if the scent is broken.’

‘We have.’ Gil hitched his gown round his shoulders.
‘Now - shall we try opening Bess Stewart’s box?’

‘But can you believe anything he says?’ Alys asked, jiggling the baby on her hip. ‘Dance a baby, diddy!’

,It is obvious he needs the child,’ said Gil, looking at it
with more interest. ‘And if he’s wise, he’ll try to convince
his uncle without showing it to him. Even by candlelight,
it’s dearly the harper’s get.’

J 1 V
The baby grizzled at this, but Alys said indignantly, ‘It’s
a boy. Aren’t you, my little man?’ she crooned to the
baby.

J
‘Why is he crying?’ asked her father resignedly. ‘Is he
hungry?’

‘No, because we fed him just now. And he’s all clean …’
She sniffed at the child’s nether regions. ‘Yes. I think he
wants his mammy, poor little boy.’

‘May I take him?’ Gil put his hands out. She hesitated.
‘I am an uncle,’ he assured her, and after a moment she
handed him the bundled baby.

He had forgotten what it felt like to hold a child this age,
small and solid and totally dependent on the adult arms.
By the time he remembered, his left elbow was crooked to
support back and swaddled legs, and his right thumb was
offering itself as a grasp for the small hands. The baby,
perhaps hoping this new person might be the one he was
looking for, stopped wailing long enough to inspect him.

‘There’s a bonnie fellow,’ said Gil, and was suddenly
assailed by longing. He bounced the baby gently, and
turned the little face to the light. Dark wispy eyebrows and
deep-set blue eyes scowled at him; the lip quivered above a jaw alarmingly like Ealasaidh’s. ‘What a bonnie boy,’ he
said hastily, and tried one of the tossing-up tricks other
babies had enjoyed. Although this baby did not laugh as
his nephews did, he showed no immediate signs of disapproval, but waved his arms as he was caught. Gil tried it
again, and the bells on the coral pinned to the infant’s
chest rang merrily.

‘He’s not long been fed,’ Alys pointed out. ‘Shall I take
him?’

‘That’s what my sister always said.’ Gil handed the baby
over reluctantly. As Alys left, the small face peered round
her shoulder, looking for Gil. He waved, feeling rather
foolish, and sat back as the door closed behind them both,
wondering why there seemed to be less light in the
room.

‘It is late,’ said the mason. ‘We only got over the bridge
because Sandy the tanner had not yet returned to shut the
Brig Port. If you are to go back up the brae before the
moon sets -‘

‘True.’ Gil turned his attention to the box in front of him.
‘Have we something on which to make an inventory?’

‘I have,’ said Alys, returning. ‘And pen and ink.’ She
stood at her father’s tall desk, dearly well accustomed to
the position, and lit another candle, which gleamed on the
honey-coloured fall of her hair.

‘Then let us commence,’ said Gil, drawing his gaze with
reluctance from the sight.

The box was not a large one, but sturdy, the kind of
thing a country joiner might make for a woman to keep
jewellery in. The lock gave way after a little persuasion,
and they raised the lid.

‘Documents!’ said Maistre Pierre eagerly.

‘A bundle of five documents,’ Gil agreed, dictating
slowly to Alys. ‘Tied with a piece of red ribbon. We’ll look
at them in a moment.’

‘They were at the top,’ Alys said. ‘Had she looked at
them recently, do you suppose?’

‘Before she went out to meet Sempill,’ speculated Gil, ‘to refresh her memory or to be sure of the wording.’ He had
a sudden vision of Bess Stewart, the fall of her French hood
swinging forward past her scarred jaw, fingering through
the handful of parchments, and then going up the hill to
her death, trusting that Euan her familiar servant would
see her home.

‘What else is there?’