The Nicholas Feast (4 page)

‘Christ aid!’ said Maister Kennedy. ‘We’ll be soaked. The University will be wiped out, for we’ll all be dead of lung-rot.’

Gil, looking over the heads of the congregation, was watching William. The boy seemed exalted, his bony face flushed, his eyes glittering as if he had stepped into a new life. He handed a branch of wet leaves to the Principal, with a murmured comment which brought Maister Doby’s head round sharply. William smiled broadly, and moved on to present another bough to John Shaw the Steward. Maister Shaw, attempting to oversee the green boughs as well as the horse-holders, waved him aside impatiently, and got another murmured remark. He shook his head angrily, and William moved away, looking down his nose. The Steward paused almost fearfully to look at his retreating back.

‘The more people are present,’ said Patrick Coventry behind him, ‘the longer it takes, in a kind of geometric progression.’

‘You mean two people take more than twice as long?’ Gil prompted absently. William had moved out of sight now.

‘Two people take four times as long, and three people take nine times.’

‘This means there must be a limit to the numbers for an event like this,’ said Gil, thinking about it, ‘or we would reach a point where it took so long to get everyone mounted that the older members would have succumbed to their years before the procession moved off.’

‘We may have reached that already,’ Maister Coventry observed.

‘What are you two talking about?’ asked Maister Kennedy. ‘Are we to be here all day?’

Achieving the door, Gil stepped out into the sunshine, received a dripping branch from the very young treble, and got back on his horse, remarking to the Second Regent, ‘I feel we will get wet if we are here much longer.’

Patrick Coventry, eyeing the black clouds piling up above the houses of the Chanonry, nodded agreement.

‘It looks like thunder, indeed. I think we will move off soon. And when we get back we make one more procession on foot, right round the outer court and into the Lang Schule
-’

One of the students attending the Beadle worked his way through the throng under the hawthorn branches, looking harassed and saying, in alternate Latin and Scots, ‘Places, please, maisters! Order of precedence, maisters! Places,
please!’

‘– for the Faculty meeting,
to ensure that we are at peace with one another and with the other faculties,’
quoted Patrick Coventry resolutely. ‘And then we have the feast and then, Heaven help us, we have the entertainment. I still think it should have been before the meeting.’

‘What, now?’ said Gil, startled. ‘I thought it was in the statutes – it’s supposed to be after the feast.’

‘Well,’ said Maister Coventry, ‘there was the year two of the Muses were sick, whether from excitement or over-eating, and ruined their costumes. There was the year the bejants got hold of a skin of wine by mistake, and the audience was full of drunken fourteen-year-olds. But I think what settled the matter in my mind was the year everyone who ate the aigre-douce of pork was out the back lined up for the privy and the play had to be abandoned. I’ve been arguing in favour of the Lang Schule before the feast for a year or two now. Perhaps we should take our places.’

The other graduates did likewise, the elderly members were helped back into the saddle, and straggling somewhat, the Faculty made its way down the length of the High Street to the Mercat Cross, rounded it, accompanied by occasional comments, ironic cheers and whistles from the burgesses of Glasgow whose Sunday business was being interrupted, and returned, past the Tolbooth, past the mason’s house, past Black-friars, to the college gateway.

Here they dismounted, and after some more milling about the procession formed up again on foot. Led by the Beadle, the Faculty made its stately way through the arched tunnel into the outer court of the college, once round the courtyard to the accompaniment of singing, and into the largest of the three lecture-rooms, where academic order of precedence broke into some rather unseemly jostling for seats on the long benches. Gil, finding himself an unobtrusive corner, was surprised to be joined by both Maister Kennedy and Maister Coventry.

‘Should you not be near the front?’ he asked. ‘Do you not intend to speak?’

‘I intend to sleep,’ said Maister Kennedy, ‘and anyway once the Dean gets going nobody else can get a word in.’

‘I remember,’ said Gil.
‘Full of fruyte and rethorikly pykit.’

‘You and your quotations,’ grumbled his friend. ‘Move up, will you, and let me in against the wall.’

When the Dean began to speak, Gil perceived the wisdom of this. It was a long speech, expounding the duties of a scholar, ornamented with illustrations, parables and epigrams. The masters listened with polite attention, except for Maister Kennedy. The students developed the glazed look of young men listening to speeches. Finally the Dean sat down, to polite applause, and Maister Forsyth spoke at rather less length, dwelling on only two of the scholarly duties which the Dean had enumerated. He should, he declared in elegant concise periods, treat all fellow scholars as his brothers, and love them accordingly; and he should regard the college where he was educated as his mother, and treat it with the respect due from a loving son.

‘He’s never met my minnie,’ said someone quietly near Gil, and someone else sniggered.

Maister Forsyth achieved his peroration and seated himself, to more enthusiastic applause. The Principal, in the lecturer’s pulpit, invited the rest of the Faculty to join in the discussion.

‘Not that you can call it a discussion,’ commented Maister Coventry, ‘since all the speakers are on the same side.’

In descending order of rank, Masters of Arts rose and delivered laboriously constructed speeches agreeing with the propositions already put forward. The youngest students, the bejants, became restless. Gil was aware of his stomach rumbling. Two rows in front of him, the red-haired alto appeared to be writing in his wax tablets, to judge by the cupped left hand just visible round his faded blue shoulder. Taking notes? Gil wondered.

‘I want my dinner,’ said Nick Kennedy, waking. ‘Where have we got to? Oh, it’s the magistrand. Not long now.’ He paused to listen to the raw-boned fourth-year student who was drawing a somewhat repetitious parallel between the care of a mother for her sons and that of the Faculty for its students, and turned to Gil. ‘Is that what it’s been about?’ he asked in sudden dismay. ‘The college as mother?’ Gil nodded. ‘Oh, fient hae it!’

‘What ails you, Nick?’ asked Maister Coventry across Gil.

‘The Dean has probably stolen all our best lines,’ said Maister Kennedy gloomily. ‘You’ll see. It’s too close by far to the theme of our play.’

‘Sh!’ said Maister Coventry. ‘I want to hear Lowrie Livingstone. He will speak next.’

The fourth-year student sat down, to applause from his peers and teachers. The younger students were fidgeting audibly now. A fair boy two rows from the front began to gather himself together to rise to his feet, but before he could do so the red-haired alto stood up and said in clear and fluent Latin, ‘Teachers, masters, brothers, I have a question to ask.’

Heads turned. The fair boy dropped back on to his bench, mouth open. Gil, looking at the senior members of Faculty seated in the stall-seats on either side of the pulpit, saw David Gray freeze like a hare that hears a dog.

‘Then ask, William,’ said the Dean. William bowed gracefully.

‘This is my question,’ he said. ‘We are taught to regard the college as our mother.’ The Dean inclined his head. ‘But what if one discovers that another of her sons is ill-using her?’

‘Make yourself clearer,’ directed the Dean after a moment.

‘What if another of the college’s sons has misused her money,’ said William in that clearly enunciated Latin, ‘or has inculcated heretical beliefs in her students?’

There was a sudden murmur of scandalized exclamation. The Dean, lifting his voice over it, said, ‘If one were to suspect such terrible and painful things of another member of the college, he should go quietly and reveal his suspicions to the Principal of the college, who would set due enquiry in motion.’ He fixed William with his eye. ‘Does that answer your question?’

‘But what if,’ persisted William, ‘the Principal is not impartial in the matter? To whom should one go then?’

‘What is the little toad up to now?’ asked Nick Kennedy.

‘He should go to the Rector,’ said the Dean, his manner cooling with every word, ‘when those are separate persons. If they are the same person, as for instance just now, then he should go to the Chancellor of the University, that is to Robert our Archbishop. However I must point out that one who brought such serious allegations against a fellow scholar without a firm foundation of truth would be guilty of perjury, being in clear breach of his oath of allegiance to the Rector and to the college.’ There was a crackle of ice in his voice. ‘Does that answer your question?’

‘It answers it,’ said William, allowing a shred of doubt to creep in.

‘Then let us continue,’ said the Dean.

‘But what was he playing at?’ Gil asked, as the procession entered the Fore Hall for the feast.

‘Who knows?’ Nick Kennedy, drawing Gil firmly to the table for the non-regent Masters, claimed two places and gestured at one. ‘Sit down. Indeed, who cares, except those who have to sit next to him?’

‘He is not popular?’ said Gil. He dipped his fingers in the faintly rose-scented bowl which a blue-gowned student was holding for him, and wiped them on the linen towel, nodding his thanks. He got an abbreviated bow in return, and looked again at the boy, reminded of William’s discourtesy at the yett. This was a different fellow, with darker hair springing from a wide brow, but the way he looked down his nose at Gil’s scrutiny was similar.

‘Depends who you speak to,’ said Maister Kennedy. He dabbled his fingers in his turn and wiped them on his cope. ‘I think he’s a clever arrogant little toad, but Bernard Stewart thinks the sun shines out of his – his ears, and the Dean says he’s one of our most promising students, though I think he wasn’t best pleased with him today. Aye, Robert,’ he added to the boy, who moved off, a gleam of amusement in his expression. Nick said roundly, ‘I don’t want to think about William. Tell me about Paris.’

Gil’s description of Paris drew in the Master of Arts opposite, who had been there shortly before Gil himself, and the Master on the end of the table, who had lectured there for a year. Nick listened in discontent until the college chaplain rose to deliver a very long grace in a strong, musical voice. Gil looked at him with some interest, recognizing the man whom William had accosted in the Outer Close. He was, as usual, a Dominican, wearing the robes of his order rather than an academic hood, but instead of the fair chubby man who had held the post in Gil’s time this was a dark, intense creature in his forties with sunken eyes and a mouthful of large teeth.

When the grace was over Nick said, ‘St Peter’s bones, how I wish I’d gone abroad when I had the chance. I wouldn’t be stuck here at the hinder end of nowhere teaching ungrateful brats to dissect syllogisms. What’s the library like at Paris?’

‘Do you mean the library of the Scots College?’ asked the man at the end of the table, whose name Gil had not caught. ‘Or the library of the Faculty of Arts? Or those of the Faculties of Theology, Canon Law, Civil Law?’

Maister Kennedy groaned, and hid his shaggy eyebrows with one hand as the first course of the feast was borne in. To some rather muffled music supplied by a group of students with recorders and lute, a pheasant in train was carried round to be admired, and a succession of mismatched plate and pewter went to the high table, where the Dean ceremoniously broke a loaf and placed it on the alms dish to be given to the poor. The student musicians, hastily tucking their instruments under a bench, armed themselves with long towels and wooden platters and waited to bear portions of freshly carved roast meats away from the impromptu servery midway down the long wall. Harassed servants carried in more dishes to set on the lower tables, one between four.

‘What have we got?’ said Maister Kennedy, sniffing. ‘Oh, God, rabbit and ground almonds. It’s the Almayne pottage again. Pass me the red comfits, Gil.’

Spooning indifferent stew, Gil studied the other guests at the feast. Behind him across the hall another table surrounded by non-regent Masters buzzed happily. At the far end, two tables of students produced an astonishing level of noise and, as the ale-jug went round, a continuous flight of bread pellets like finches in a hedgerow. By the servery the ubiquitous William was in close colloquy with the fingerbowl boy. As Gil’s eye fell on them, Maister Shaw the Steward bustled up. William sauntered off to join the singers, and the other student, accepting an obvious rebuke with gritted teeth, seized a dish and ladle and plunged across the hall towards the high table.

Not a pleasant young man, little Sir William, Gil thought.

On the dais, in front of painted hangings from the Beadle’s supply, the Faculty office-bearers and regents were ranged along one side of the elaborately draped board as if they were people in a prayer-book miniature, conversing politely or glaring at the students, as prompted by temperament. The Dean and Maister Doby were instructing the Steward; David Gray the Scribe was staring into a flan dish as if he could see the flames of Hell among the points of pastry which decorated it. Next to him was old Tommy Forsyth, and then Patrick Coventry, putting out a steadying hand as a ladleful of bright yellow stew slopped alarmingly near to Maister Forsyth’s fur-lined cope.