The Harper's Quine (5 page)

‘A corp!’ said Kirsty. ‘Who is it? What’s come to her?
And at May-tide, too!’

‘A corpse,’ repeated Canon Henderson. ‘In the Archbishop’s new work? You mean a fresh corpse?’

‘Stabbed, last night, I would say, sir.’

‘Save us! I never heard anything last night,’ said
Kirsty.

‘Is she from the Chanonry? A dependant, a servant? Her
household must be notified.’

‘I think she’s one of the harper’s singers.’

‘Oh, a musician,’ said the sub-dean distastefully. ‘If she
belongs down the town then it’s hardly proper for her to
stay here. Maybe the Greyfriars -‘

‘I thought so too.’

‘And Gil …’ The sub-dean hesitated, staring at the
woven heron, caught in the moment of its death. He
tapped his teeth with a chewed fingernail. ‘How did she
die? Stabbed, you say? And on St Mungo’s land. I suppose
we have a duty to look for the man responsible, even if she
is a minstrel.’

‘We do,’ agreed Gil.

‘Aye, we do!’ said Kirsty. ‘Or we’ll none of us can sleep
easy, thinking we’ll get murdered in our beds.’

‘Be silent, woman!’ ordered Canon Henderson.

‘Well enough for you,’ retorted Kirsty. ‘It’s me that’s at
the side nearest the door!’

‘Is there anyone else I should report this to?’ Gil
asked.

‘No,’ said the sub-dean hastily. ‘Just get her moved.
Maybe the mason’s men can bear her to the Greyfriars. See
to it, Gil, will you? And as for finding the malefactor, you’d
be well placed to make a start. After all, you found her. I’ll
speak to your uncle - perhaps at Chapter.’

Gil, seeing himself out to the sound of a blossoming
domestic quarrel, did not take the direct path to the building site, but cut across the slope of the kirkyard to the
stand of tall trees opposite the door of the lower church.

He made his way through the trees, scuffing the bluebells aside with his feet, many thoughts jostling in his
head. It seemed he would be spending more time away
from his books. Surely it should not feel as if he had been
let off his leash. And when he finally became a priest,
scenes such as this morning’s would become part of his
existence, both the encounter with a recent corpse and the
slice of home life he had just witnessed. The corpse he
could cope with, he felt. One would usually have some
warning, and there were procedures to be gone through,
shriving, conditional absolution, prayers for the dead. One
would know what to do. But what could one do about the
other matter - the behaviour of what his uncle referred to,
with dry legal humour, as The concordance of debauched
canons. Nothing to do with Gratian’s classic text, of
course.

He sniffed the green smell of the new leaves he was
trampling, and tried to imagine himself, a senior figure
in the Church, taking a servant to his bed like Canon
Henderson, or setting up a woman of his own class as an
acknowledged mistress with her own home, like Canon
Dalgliesh. The image would not stay before him. Instead he saw his uncle, whom he knew he would resemble
closely in thirty years’ time, and the scholar who had
taught him logic at the University.

He looked about him, a little blankly. What was it Aristotle said about incongruity? The dead woman was a thing
out of place; the harp key the trebles had found was
another. There was, of course, a significant and bawdy
double meaning attached to the object, but the chanter
appeared to have discarded it as an irrelevance, rather than
as a source of corruption.

He began to search more carefully under the bluebells,
and was rewarded by a lost scrip, empty, a broken wooden
beaker and one shoe. He was casting about nearer the
church, trying to judge where the implement might have
landed after the chanter threw it this way, when a blackbird flew up, scolding, and something snored behind
him.

Wild boar! he thought as he whirled, drawing his sword.
Then it dawned on him that there could be no wild boar in
St Mungo’s kirkyard. Feeling slightly foolish, he stared
round under the trees, sword in hand, waiting for the
sound to be repeated. There it was again - over there
among those bushes. He made his way cautiously through
the long grass, and carefully parted the leaves with the
point of his blade.

The mason’s men, three sturdy fellows in aprons, were
gathered inside the walls of the chapel, standing on the
muddy grass staring down at the corpse. Their master was
issuing instructions about a hurdle when Gil climbed the
scaffolding.

‘Ah - maister lawyer,’ he said, breaking off. ‘What have
you learned? Where does she go home?’

‘Greyfriars,’ said Gil. ‘But we’ll need another hurdle.’

The three men turned to stare at him. One was squat and
grizzled, one was fair and lanky, and the middle one was
the journeyman called Thomas, who had argued with a merchant’s son in the High Street. So her father is the
master mason? he thought.

‘Is your missing laddie about fifteen, wearing striped
hose?’

Thomas swallowed.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Rare proud of them he is, too. What d’ye
mean, a hurdle, maister? Is he - have you -?’

‘I’ve found him,’ said Gil.

The boy was not dead. He lay on his face in a little huddle
under the bushes, blood caked on a vicious wound on the
top of his head, breathing with the stertorous snores that
had attracted Gil’s attention. There was no other mark on
him, but he was very cold.

‘It needs that we nurse him,’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘I have
heard men breathe so before.’ He looked round, to where
two of the men were approaching with a hurdle, and held
up one large hand. ‘A moment, Wattie. Maister Cunningham, do you see something strange?’

‘Very strange,’ agreed Gil. ‘I wondered if you would see
it. There is no sign of the man who struck him that blow.
I followed the boy’s own tracks into the bushes. Someone
else has run by him, a couple of paces that way, but hardly
close enough to hit him like that.’

‘You must stand still to strike so hard a blow,’ said the
mason thoughtfully. He scratched the back of his head,
pushing the hat forward. ‘I have seen a man walk away
after he was struck and fall down later. Perhaps he was not
struck here.’

‘Can we move him, maister?’ demanded the grizzled
Wattie. ‘If he’s no deid yet, he soon will be, laid out here
in the dew like that.’

‘Aye, take him up, Wattie,’ said his master, straightening
the hat. ‘You and Thomas, bear him to our house. Send
Luke ahead to warn the household, and bid him fetch a
priest,’ he added. ‘He must be shriven. Ah, poor laddie.’

The limp form was lifted on to the hurdle. Gil, on sudden impulse of pity, pulled off his short gown and
tucked it round the boy.

‘His bonnet’s here,’ said Wattie, lifting it. ‘It was under
him.’

‘Give me,’ said the mason. ‘Has he been robbed?’

‘Two pennies and a black plack in his purse,’ reported
Wattie, ‘and he’s still wearing this.’ He pulled aside the
folds of the gown to display a cheap brooch, the kind
exchanged by sweethearts, pinned to the lad’s doublet.
‘His lass gave him that at St Mungo’s Fair.’

The mason turned the bonnet over. It was a working
man’s headgear, a felted flat cap of woad-dyed wool with
a deep striped band.

‘There is blood on the inside,’ said Gil, pointing. ‘He was
wearing it when he was struck.’

Maistre Pierre turned the bonnet again. On the outside,
corresponding to the patch of blood, was a rubbed place
with scraps of bark and green stains. ‘With a great piece of
wood,’ he agreed. He set the bonnet on the boy’s chest as
the hurdle was borne past him. ‘Take him home, Wattie,
and come back for the lady. Or if you pass any sensible
men send them up to carry her away.’

As the two men plodded up the slope with their burden,
Gil said thoughtfully, ‘The woman was stabbed, but the
boy was struck over the head. Have there been two malefactors at large in the kirkyard last night?’

‘And the woman was robbed but the boy was not.’ The
mason gathered his furred gown round him and strode up
the slope in the wake of his men. ‘Come, maister lawyer,
you and I can at least put her on a hurdle.’

As they rounded the angle of the Fergus Aisle they saw
a small crowd hurrying eagerly towards them. Wattie’s
idea of sensible men turned out to be anyone who had
been passing when he reached the Great Cross, and it was
with some difficulty that the hurdle with its sad burden
was handed up the ramp on the inside of the scaffoldshrouded walls and down the outside, and set on its way.
Several prentice-boys who should have been at work tried to climb in to see where the blood was, and a couple of the
town’s licensed beggars appeared, offering to pray for the
lady’s soul for ever in return for suitable alms. Once they
realized that her kin had not been discovered they lost
interest, but a knot of women followed at the rear of the
procession, exclaiming and speculating.

Brother Porter at Greyfriars was compassionate.

‘Poor lass,’ he said, raising the fall of the hood to look at
her face. ‘Aye, it’s the harper’s quine right enough. Father
Francis is waiting for her in the mortuary chapel. She can
he quiet there till they come for her. They’ve nowhere they
can lay her out, they live in two rooms in a pend off the
Fishergait.’

‘You know where they live?’ said Gil as the small cortege
plodded past him, through the gateway and towards the
chapel. ‘Someone needs to send to let them know.’

‘Bless you, son,’ said the porter, grinning wryly. ‘Half the
town’s let them know by now. The man’s sister’ll be here
any moment, I’ve no doubt, if not the harper himself.’

‘The other woman’s his sister, then?’ Gil said. ‘True
enough, they’re alike. I’ll wait, if I may, brother. I must
speak with her.’

‘Then I wait also,’ said Maistre Pierre. He drew a wellworn rosary from his sleeve and approached the chapel.
Gil turned away to lean against the wall, thinking. The
woman had clearly been dead for some hours, perhaps
since yesterday evening. If she had reached St Mungo’s
yard in daylight, she must have been about the place at the
same time as he was himself. Alive or dead, he qualified.
When he left the cathedral after Compline, was she already
lying hidden under the scaffolding?

Over in the church, the rest of the little community of
Franciscans were beginning to sing Prime. It felt much
later.

As the Office was ending, the harper’s sister arrived in
a rush, followed by a further straggle of onlookers. It was, as Gil had expected, the other singer, the tall woman in the
checked kirtle, now wrapped in a huge black-and-green
plaid. He straightened up and followed her to the little
chapel, where she halted in the entrance, staring round;
when her eye fell on the still figure on the hurdle a howl
escaped her and she flung herself forward to kneel by the
body, the plaid dropping to the tiled floor.

‘ohon, ohon! Ah, Bess!’ she wailed, unheeding of Father
Francis still reciting prayers before the altar. Gil stepped
forward to hush her, but two of the women in the crowd
were before him, bending over her with sympathetic murmurs. She would not be stilled, continuing to lament in her
own language. The porter hurried in and with some difficulty she was persuaded to leave the body and sit on a
stool where she began to rock back and forth, hands over
her face, with a high-pitched keening which made the hair
on Gil’s neck stand up. The two women showed signs of
joining in the noise.

The mason said to Gil under his breath, ‘Are these all her
friends, that they mourn so loudly?’

‘I don’t know,’ Gil returned. ‘Er - ladies. Ladies,’ he
repeated more loudly, without effect. ‘Madam!’ he
shouted. ‘Be at peace, will you!’

She drew her hands from her face, still rocking, and
showed him dry, angry eyes.

‘I am mourning my sister,’ she spat at him. ‘How can
I be at peace?’

‘Listen to me,’ he said urgently, grasping her wrists.
‘Someone killed her, on St Mungo’s land.’

‘The more ill to St Mungo,’ she said, ignoring the
shocked response of her companions. ‘Oh, Bess, as soon as
I saw the gallowglass, ohon -‘

‘Gallowglass?’ repeated Gil. ‘When was this?’

‘Yesterday, after Vespers. Him and his brother, they rode
through the dance at noon, and him after Vespers casting
up at our door, meek as a seal-pup, with a word for Bess
Stewart and no other.’

‘You knew him?’ said the mason.

‘And why would I not know him, Campbell that he is?’
She spat as if the name were poison. ‘So what must she do,
just about Compline, once the bairn is asleep, but put her
plaid round her and go out with him, though we would
gainsay her, Aenghus and I.’

‘She took her plaid?’ said Gil. ‘You are sure of it?’

She stared at him.

‘But of course. She was a decent woman, and not singing, of course she wore her plaid.’

‘It was not with her when we found her,’ said Gil.

‘He has kept it, the thieving - Oh, and when she never
came home to her bairn, I knew there was trouble, ohon,
alas!’

‘I want to find out who did it,’ said Gil hastily. She
stared at him, and then grinned, showing gapped teeth.

‘It will have been the husband,’ she said. ‘But if it is
proof the gentleman wants, I will help. Then we can
avenge her.’ One hand went to the black-hilted gully-knife
at her belt.

‘Then tell me what you can about her,’ said Gil, sitting
back on his heels. ‘Who was she? No, first, who are
you?’

‘I?’ She drew herself up, and the two weepers beside her
sat back as if to hear a good story at some fireside. ‘I am
Ealasaidh nic lain of Ardnamurchan, daughter of one
harper and sister of another, singer.’

The dead woman was, as Gil had assumed, Bess Stewart
of Ettrick, wife of John Sempill of Muirend. The harper and
his sister had met her in Rothesay in late autumn a year
and a half since.