The Nicholas Feast (5 page)

‘Where will the play be?’ he asked Maister Kennedy, who took another handful of the cinnamon comfits and said gloomily,

‘Below in the Lang Schule. There’ll be yet another procession, round the yard and in at the door. I hope they’re setting up the hangings for us now. I’ll need to go and see to that before the second course is done.’

‘Did you write it?’

Nick nodded. ‘I and two of the older boys. There’s been some friction,’ he added grimly. ‘William has improvements to suggest every time he opens his mouth, but since they all enlarge his part, which is already large, at the expense of others I didn’t take many. Had it not been made clear to me that it was expected he would take part,’ he added, the passive verb forms falling neatly in the Latin, ‘the little toad would have been booted out the second time he criticized someone else’s acting.’

‘The same William? The lanky redhead who hinted about peculation and heresy? The one with the striking alto voice?’

‘The Dean,’ remarked the man on the end of the table, ‘asked us to put these painful ideas from our minds for the sake of the feast.’

‘The same,’ agreed Nick, ignoring this.

‘He greeted me when I arrived,’ Gil said thoughtfully. ‘He was very civil until he found I was a Cunningham.’

‘Oh, very likely. St Peter be praised, Bernard has a better ear than I for a tune. We’ve split the entertainment between us – I did the play, he did the music – and it meant neither of us had to deal with William the whole time.’ He turned his head. ‘Oh, God, talk of the devil. They’re going to sing for us. That’s Bernard giving out the beat. His mother’s a cousin of the Lennox Stewarts and his father was one of the French branch of the family. Been here two years, I think, or maybe it’s three. You know how they move around, all the friars, from one house to another.’

‘A learned man,’ said the man at the end of the table. ‘He does most of the teaching in Theology.’

Gil twisted round to look. The gangling William was at the centre of the hall, flanked by the fair-haired boy whose speech he had interrupted, and the boy for whom he had just earned a scolding by distracting him. Two more students joined the group, and under the intense direction of the Dominican chaplain the five young voices rose in praise of music.

‘That’s David Ross,’ said Nick in Gil’s ear, ‘the treble. He and his brother lodge with the Principal. They’re far too young really, but we have to keep the Rosses sweet after what happened to whatsisname. You know he’s teaching in the Sentences here? There he is at the other table.’

Gil nodded. The story of Robert Ross, blinded in one eye by a flung cabbage stalk, and the resulting parental wrath, was known to most graduates of the college.

‘And the second alto is a Montgomery,’ continued Nick, ‘in case you were thinking of being civil to him.’

‘Oh, is that his trouble? We’re supposed to be at peace,’ Gil rejoined. ‘It must be six months at least since there was any difficulty. William isn’t an ensemble singer, is he?’

Nick winced as the mellifluous tones floated high in the climax of the piece, twining round the treble, making it sound slightly flat.

‘You wouldn’t expect him to be,’ he pointed out. William, ignoring the spatter of applause, strolled away from the group and out of the hall. Gil glanced at the high table and found that David Gray was staring with dislike after the narrow departing back in its blue gown.
The subcharge of the service is bot sair
, he thought. There was a man who was not enjoying the feast.

The remaining singers rearranged themselves, and the Dominican gave out a new beat.

‘When’s the harper?’ asked the man who had taught in Paris. ‘I missed a good Scots harper in France. The style is quite different.’

‘What harper is it?’ Gil asked.

‘The man that stays in the Fishergait will come in after the play,’ Nick said. ‘Now what? Oh, bloody Machaut. I really would as soon not eat my dinner to Machaut. I’m going to see if the players are dressed yet. Bernard lectures in the Theology Schule two hours after noon, so if we overrun we’ll have to finish the music without him. Will you risk the second course, Gil, or will you give me a hand? We’re dressing in the Bachelors’ Schule.’

The smaller lecture-room was occupied by a panicky, half-dressed group, jostling for a sight of the mirror and shouting in bad Latin about costumes and properties. Nick was promptly besieged by several people at once. Gil waited quietly, looking about him. A heap of canvas painted with scales lay on a bench, and beside it a bundle of brocade and gauze suggested women’s costumes. Across the room the westward windows showed the near houses on the High Street, with the roof of the Greyfriars church beyond, and dark clouds still piling up above them. It seemed likely that the May sunshine would shortly give way to yet another vicious May shower.

Over by the lecturer’s pulpit, William was apparently hearing the lines of a younger boy whose shaggy hair had probably last been cut by his mother when she saw him in September. As Gil watched, William shook his own well-barbered head and with a superior smile clouted the other boy round the ear, wadded up his script and reached up to put it on top of the soundboard of the pulpit. Ignoring his victim’s despairing pleas, he walked away across the room, taking something from his purse as he went. Maister Kennedy, looking about him, caught sight of the younger boy standing by the pulpit.

‘Gil! You were in the entertainment in our time. Can you take Richie through his part for me? And see him costumed?’

‘What, now?’ said Gil in astonishment.

‘Aye, now! He needs a last run-through. William was just hearing him, but he has to go and sing again. Richie, come here, you imbecile. Why I cast you as a Scholar I’ll never know. Get along with Maister Cunningham. Where’s your script? And your book?’

‘William put them up yonder, Maister Kennedy,’ said Richie, almost weeping with anxiety. ‘I canny reach them!’

‘Speak Latin, fool! Maister Cunningham can reach them, I’ve no doubt.’

Gil crossed to the pulpit, and put a hand up on to the soundboard to bring down a bundle of papers.

‘Is it all here?’ he asked Richie, brushing clumps of dust off the creased margins.

The boy nodded, gulping with relief. ‘That’s my script, maister. But there’s still the brown book. It’s what I tak to show I’m a student.’

He pushed dark hair out of his eyes in a nervous gesture, and peered hopefully up at the soundboard. Gil put a toe on the seat of the lecturer’s bench and swung himself up to look. There were not one but two books up there, bright on top of decades of dust. He reached for them and jumped down, handing them to Richie.

‘This one’s mine, maister. I dinna ken that wee red one, it’s maybe someone else’s.’

‘Nick? Is this yours?’ Gil held the book out.

‘I don’t know whose it is.’ Maister Kennedy gave the book a brief glance, tucked it in the breast of his cassock and turned away. ‘Michael, how can you be a daughter of anybody with a face like that? Scrub it off and try again.’

Gil took his pupil into a corner, sorted out the bundle of papers and gave the boy his first prompt. It soon became apparent why Richie was worried; he was nowhere near word-perfect in the badly rhymed Latin couplets and had only the vaguest of ideas about his cues. Gil stared at him in bafflement.

‘Why haven’t you learned it?’ he asked. ‘In my day it was an honour to be in the play, and earned favours from the Dean. I was let off two disputations for my last part, it had so many lines.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Richie, reddening. ‘I thought it would be easy. I mean . . .’ He fell silent.

Gil, in some sympathy, said, ‘Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Why don’t you carry the script in your book and read it, as if you’re reading Aristotle or Euclid?’

Richie gaped at him as if experiencing an epiphany.

‘D’you think Maister Kennedy would let me?’

‘I should think he’d let you do anything that saved the play,’ Gil assured him.

‘Richie! Are you costumed yet!’ shouted Nick across the room. ‘The singing’s finished, we’re on next. Now have you all got that clear? We’re cutting the scene with Frivolity and going straight to where Idleness enters. Yes, I know, Henry, but you’ve only yourself to blame, you know even less of your lines than Richie here. Walter and Andrew, you will get that padding out or I will personally remove it and stuff it up –’

‘I know Henry’s lines.’ William was by the door, supercilious under a gold brocade turban.

‘You can’t take three parts, William. And we’re doing the first version of your fight, is that clear?’ Nick pursued, ignoring the red-haired boy’s expression. ‘The first version, not the one with the long speeches.’

‘It’s a paltry little play anyway,’ William objected in his fluent Latin, the disdainful expression ever more marked. ‘It would be an act of destruction to omit the best speeches.’

‘I will not argue,’ Nick said in the same language. ‘I am in charge of the play. You heard my instructions, William. Right, are we ready? Let’s go, before the bejants start a riot.’

Gil paused to snuff the candles by the mirror, and followed the company out into the courtyard and along the west range, past the tunnel that led to the yett and into the Lang Schule. The lecture-room had been transformed since the Faculty meeting, and was now hung with painted cloths. Cushioned settles had been placed for the older members and long benches arranged round a stage set off by a suit of worn verdure tapestries which Gil recollected from the Principal’s house in his day. The Masters and senior students were all deep in conversation, as befitted their dignity, but on the side benches the younger bachelors and the bejants, the first-year students, were becoming restless. Slipping in at the side, Gil found himself a seat beside Maister Coventry, who nodded at him.

‘I see you survived the feast.’

‘I avoided most of it,’ Gil confessed. ‘I’ve been helping at the play.’

‘Probably safer. And what is Nick giving us? Some kind of allegory, as usual?’

Nick Kennedy, in a grey wig and gold cloak, stepped on to the stage from among the tapestries, bowed to the Dean and Principal and the rest of the audience, and in the usual deprecatory Latin announced that this rough play and its limping metre would depict an allegory of the student’s life. The regents and Masters applauded, the students groaned, Nick bowed again and left the stage, and there was a long pause, and some hissing whispers behind the tapestry. Then Richie emerged, stumbling slightly as if pushed, and launched abruptly into a halting account of how as a Scholar he had been nurtured at a grammar school on the milk of Latin and rhetoric but was now of an age to wish for stronger food. He followed the words with his finger in his bundle of papers, and spoke in the curious accent affected by Lanarkshire youth on a stage.

To him entered the gangling William, wearing the gold cloak and turban and introducing himself as Fortune, and in a long speech invited the Scholar to accompany him through the world, promising to lead him to a banquet of the richest food an enquiring mind could wish for. Their journey round the stage was marred by a tendency for the students on the side benches to tramp with their feet in time with the scholarly steps, until the Dean’s chilly stare took effect.

‘There are only eight bejants,’ said Patrick Coventry, ‘and two are in the play. How can six boys of fourteen be so wild to handle?’

‘Because they’re boys of fourteen?’ Gil suggested.

Maister Coventry’s reply was drowned by whistling and stamping. The Scholar and Fortune had encountered a bevy of veiled ladies, at least one of whom had not obeyed Maister Kennedy’s directions about the padding. The Dean deployed his stare again, and in the relative silence Fortune declared that these were Dame Collegia and her daughters, among whom were Learning, Wisdom and Knowledge. Learning and Wisdom looked under their eyebrows at their friends, but Knowledge struck a provocative pose and grinned, displaying several missing teeth, as Fortune informed the Scholar that if he were wedded to one of these damsels he would become one of the Dame’s children himself, and would never lack for the finest fare.

The Dame and her daughters sang a motet in praise of the scholarly life, the beat given by Bernard Stewart from the edge of the stage. Gil recognized the music; he hoped that nobody else was familiar with the original words, but Patrick Coventry beside him muttered, ‘Dear me.’

The Scholar appeared about to succumb to one or all of these beauties, but William, who had left the stage, re-entered in a linen headdress, dragging two startled boys with him and declaring himself to be Dame Frivolity with her servants Gambling and Drunkenness. Collegia and her daughters, with shocked gestures, left.

‘They were going to cut this,’ Gil said, as startled as Frivolity’s henchmen.

‘A last-minute change?’

‘The cut was a last-minute change itself.’

Overcoming the Scholar’s reluctance, Frivolity enticed him into a game of dice while the goblet went round, then departed. The side benches, who appeared to know what was coming, began whistling again. The Scholar, pushing his hair out of his eyes, read out that he had lost all his money, and just as he seemed about to fall into a drunken stupor, a fearsome dragon rushed onstage. The bejants cheered.

‘When did we get the costume?’ Gil asked, as the monster rampaged about, threatening the front rows of the audience and making an attempt on the Dean’s silk gown.