The Nicholas Feast (33 page)

‘My hand on it.’

They spat and shook hands as if it was a trading agreement.

‘Now get out of here,’ said Montgomery. ‘I’ve a lot to think on, and William’s funeral tomorrow.’

Maistre Pierre set the jug of ale down on his desk and wiped his mouth.

‘The house was like a barn,’ he commented. ‘No hangings, no cushions, no comforts at all, and only that ill-conditioned servant to wait on him.’

‘He planned a brief visit,’ Gil surmised as the wolfhound scrambled on to his lap. ‘His lady has stayed behind in Irvine. She might not wish to leave the children, and bringing them would be a lot of work for a short stay. I’ve no doubt there are cushions in plenty in his other houses.’

‘And I did not understand the play at all.’

‘It was hardly play,’ said Gil.

Alys, rubbing violet-scented oil into the bruising on his wrist, nodded, but her father said, ‘What do you mean? I was keeping score.’

‘They were both more interested in the information than the game, father,’ said Alys. She turned Gil’s hand, and he winced. ‘You should not have used this. You won’t be able to sign your name for days.’

‘You are quite right,’ he said, and smiled wearily at her. ‘I was certainly buying questions, and the ones Montgomery asked were even more interesting than the answers he gave me. I don’t know whether he felt the same way,’ he added. ‘He isn’t a strong player but I should hate to underestimate him.’

‘So what have we learned?’ asked Maistre Pierre. ‘And what have we given away, apart from the cipher disc?’

‘The cipher disc is small loss,’ said Alys. ‘It isn’t a simple substitution, so we would need another the same, so that the message could be deciphered at its destination.’

‘Montgomery seemed eager to get it back,’ said Gil, heaving the wolfhound into a more comfortable position. ‘This creature has grown again. We have promised Montgomery – you have promised,’ he corrected himself, and Maistre Pierre pulled a face and nodded. ‘William’s clothes, the notebook, the papers, and the cipher disc. I must have a look at the notebook, but the rest can go back to his kin without harming anyone.’ He scratched rhythmically behind the pup’s ears, and it groaned in ecstasy. ‘What have we learned? Montgomery knows or suspects who William’s father was, and he knows that William was gathering information. He didn’t search the boy’s chamber, he doesn’t know who killed him, and he probably didn’t kill Jaikie, which leaves us with the dog-breeder for that. I hope he thinks we haven’t read the cipher letter. He would have liked us to believe he didn’t know Billy Doig, and I have brought Bernard Stewart to his attention. Oh, and I think he wants a look at the dog too.’

‘Pretty well, for one game of cards,’ said Alys approvingly.

‘But what don’t we know yet?’ asked her father. ‘And what have we let Montgomery know? I thought you let him win far too many questions, Gil.’

‘His questions were very informative,’ said Gil. ‘As I let him find out, which was a mistake. What don’t we know? We don’t know who killed William, or why, though we know he had cumin on his hands. I think we know who killed Jaikie, and possibly why, but for William’s killer we are still searching in the dark.’

‘I thought that was the object of our search.’

‘So did I. Pierre, I must go up the hill. I am too tired to think. Saints be praised, there is a moon tonight. Alys, where is the notebook?’

‘I will fetch it.’

She slipped away, and Gil sat quietly petting the dog and staring at the painted panelling of the small room.

‘I suspect we don’t have all the pieces,’ he said at length. ‘Did you ever break a plate? One of those majolica ones with a picture?’

‘Frequently.’

‘Some of the pieces may have a hand and a foot, or an elbow and a head, and only when you set all together do you see they belong to different figures. I think it’s like that – too many of the pieces we have refer to more than one figure.’

‘I was never good at metaphor,’ declared the mason, and poured himself more ale. ‘We have till noon tomorrow. What will that man do if we have no answer for him?’

‘I feel he will not challenge the Dean and the Faculty to Tarocco.’ Gil sat up straight as Alys returned, holding the notebook.

‘Kittock has just told me,’ she said, ‘that someone came from the college an hour or two since, to say Maister Coventry would like a word with Maister Cunningham.’

‘Too late now,’ said Gil, glancing at the window. He fumbled one-handed with the buckle of the dog’s collar. ‘I’ll leave this beast with you again, and be off up the road, but first I must loosen this. He has quite definitely grown. It fitted him yesterday.’ He slipped the long tongue of the collar through the keeper, and pushed the animal off his knee. ‘Go with Alys. Good dog.’

The pup looked up at him, then doubtfully at Alys, and wagged its tail.

‘Good dog!’ she exclaimed. ‘Gil, he knows my name!’

‘He is an exceptional dog,’ said Gil, as he had said before, and got to his feet. ‘I must go. I’ll talk to Patrick Coventry in the morning.’

The stone house in Rottenrow was quiet, but not dark. Picking his way by moonlight from the Girth Cross, Gil could see the glow of candles in several windows. By this hour the great door at the foot of the stair-tower would be barred, so he plodded wearily along the house-wall and in at the little yard by the kitchen door.

He paused there, hand raised to the latch. It seemed like a very long time since he had left the house by this door. Could he remember what was behind it? Was there still a place for him? Would everything have changed? He was assailed by a sudden feeling that he was about to step into the unknown. It was yesterday morning, he told himself irritably, and rattled at the latch.

‘Is that you, Maister Gil?’

‘It’s me,’ he agreed. His uncle’s stout, red-faced housekeeper opened the heavy plank door, closed it behind him and dropped the bar across.

Inside, all was warm and familiar. The kitchen-boy snored in the shadows, and his mother’s maidservant Nan sat by the fire with a cup of spiced ale.

‘Your minnie’s about given you up, I jalouse,’ said Maggie. She returned to the hearth and lifted her own cup of ale. ‘And what have you been doing to yourself?’

‘Fighting, Maggie.’ Gil sat down on the bench opposite Nan. She clicked her tongue.

‘Haven’t I aye warned you about that? I hope you gave better than you got.’

‘I think so. They seemed satisfied. Is all well in Carluke, Nan?’

‘It is,’ she said, beaming at him over her ale. ‘And my lady Gelis is well and all,’ she added, using the Scots form of Lady Egidia’s name. ‘Likely she’ll still be up, Maister Gil.’

‘She said she’d wait for me. Is the old man abed?’

‘He was at his prayers, the last I saw him,’ said Maggie. She sniffed. ‘Is that violets?’

‘To draw out the bruising,’ said Gil. ‘Or so Alys said.’

‘Oh, if she put it on you, that’s another matter. Were ye wanting anything, Maister Gil, or will ye get out of my kitchen and let Nan and me get to our beds? There’s a candle there on the meal-kist.’

He rose obediently, and suddenly put his good arm round her ample waist and kissed her cheek. She bridled with pleasure.

‘Huh! What’s that for?’

‘For being Maggie.’

‘Saints preserve us, who else should I be?’ she demanded, but he was quite unable to explain.

The hall was dark, and smelled of the herbs his mother liked to burn. He crossed it in the pool of light from his candle, the shadows leaping avidly round him, and made his way to the upper floor. The solar was also in darkness, but a line of light showed under his uncle’s chamber door, and another under the door to the best chamber. He paused for a moment, then crossed the room towards the smell of herbs, and tapped on the painted planks.

‘Come in, dear,’ said his mother.

She was seated by the fire, wrapped in a furred bedgown he remembered from before he went to France, her prayer-book on her knee. He stood just inside the door and looked at her, and she stretched out a hand to him, smiling.

‘Come and sit down. Are you very tired?’

‘Very,’ he agreed, and obeyed, kneeling first to kiss her hand. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I said I would wait up for you.’

‘And I said I would be late,’ he countered.

‘And are you late to good purpose? Have you found who killed the poor boy?’

‘Not yet. Why is Nan not with you? I saw her in the kitchen just now.’

‘She snores, which is why she’s not on the truckle-bed here, or in the attic next to you as David suggested. I hope she won’t keep Maggie awake.’

‘I think nothing would stop me sleeping tonight,’ he confessed. She drew the candle nearer, and surveyed him, then rose, tightening the girdle of her furred gown, and began to delve in one of the packs which were stacked beyond the great curtained bed.

‘I know what you need,’ she said, as she emerged with a pannikin and a waxed linen scrip.

‘How are my sisters?’ he asked, watching her without seeing what she was doing.

‘Kate and Tibby are well, and send their love.’

‘Give them mine,’ responded Gil automatically.

‘I will. I wrote to Dorothea a week since, but I’ve heard nothing, which I assume is good news.’ She was measuring spices, a pinch of this and a speck of that, out of little packages in the scrip. ‘And Margaret is like to make you an uncle again this autumn.’

‘How many is that?’

‘Only her third, as you know very well.’ Lady Cunningham poured ale from the jug on the dole-cupboard on to the spices in the pannikin, and set it in the hearth, then tilted her head, sniffing. ‘Do I smell violets?’

‘My wrist.’ Gil held up his hand. ‘To draw out the bruising, so Alys said.’

‘Ah.’ His mother suddenly became intent on the pannikin of ale. ‘The demoiselle Mason. A very giftie lassie.’

‘Mother,’ said Gil. She looked up, and met his eye.

‘I am not blind to her virtues, my dear,’ she protested. ‘And her nurse is by-ordinar. I had quite a conversation with the nurse. Her father, too. That is a very civilized man. Their house might almost be in Paris. I’m glad to see you with a friend who shares your interests, I told you so this morning.’

‘Alys shares more than that.’

‘
What?
Gilbert, what have you done?’

‘Mo
ther
!’ said Gil, as he had not done since he was eighteen. ‘I mean that she’s clever, and learned, and she thinks more clearly than any woman I know except you and Dorothea. She was of great help in finding out who killed the woman I found dead in the building site at St Mungo’s two weeks since, and she has been at least as much help as her father over this business at the college. I want to teach her philosophy,’ he added irrelevantly.

‘You’re too late,’ she said, staring at him.

‘Too late? What do you mean?’

‘I think she already knows some. At least, she quoted Plato today while I was washing my hands.’

Gil’s jaw dropped.

‘Plato?’

‘She said it was Plato.’ Lady Cunningham bent to the little pan on the hearth. ‘Oh, my dear. You’ve got it very bad, haven’t you?’

‘There was never a girl like her in the world,’ said Gil, recovering. ‘Now do you see why I want to marry her? How many women in Scotland can quote Plato?’

‘Not many, since the Queen died and the old King’s sister Eleanor was married abroad,’ said his mother, ‘but still I canny countenance it.’ She swirled the contents of the pannikin, and set it down again. ‘Sugar. I know I have some sugar.’

Gil watched her cross the room to the pile of baggage.

‘Why in this world not? Is it only the money? The living?’

‘Gilbert.’ She peered at him round the neatly bagged wool brocade curtain of David Cunningham’s best bed. ‘We never planned this for you. I told you, we –’

‘I never planned it either, mother!’ he expostulated.
‘An hendy hap ich hab yhent.
I met her on May Day, I met her father the next day – about cathedral business,’ he added hastily, before she could comment, ‘and by the Sunday, last Sunday indeed, only a week since, he had approached my uncle and then spoken to me. I admired Alys the moment I met her, but I had no thought of overturning your plans for me till the offer was put to me. It came from them, I didny seek it, but I wish it now more than I’ve ever wished anything in my life.’

‘But my dear, you’ve no land, you must get a benefice or preferably two so you can live on the teinds, you must be a priest.’ She made it sound like a logical progression.

‘Pierre will dower her –’

She straightened up and returned to the fire with another small waxed packet.

‘How can we match that? We’ve no land to spare, Gilbert!’

‘My uncle has offered –’

‘Your uncle, your uncle! Well enough for him,’ said his mother desperately, ‘with all his benefices. Son, I have two parcels of land, you know that. I can keep myself and your sisters on the rents of one, and run the horses on the grazing of the other, and we win a living. If I give you either property for your home, how can I –’