Friend & Foe (23 page)

‘What loss was that, then, son?’

‘Your cousin that was killed.’

The father said ‘
Piss off
,’ and slammed the door on him. But Hew had not retreated far when the lass herself appeared, shuffling across the cobbles in her stocking feet. ‘You should not have come,’ she sniffed. ‘He was not a cousin, in the proper sense.’

‘I am sorry, Bess. Harry was a good man. You must miss him sorely.’

‘He was not, you understand, like all the rest. I do not say that we were like to have been married, it was not like that, but Harry was a friend.’

‘I liked him, too. He showed me round the castle once.’ Hew understood her will to talk, and drew her out with gentleness. ‘He told to me the history and secrets of the stone, and showed such deep felt fondness for the place, I felt it meant the world to him.’

‘Aye, that is true. He loved that place. His father was a builder, sir and Harry had a passion for all kinds of works. He telt many tales.’

‘Did he ever mention he had claims upon a house?’

The lassie wiped her nose upon a grubby sleeve. ‘I do not think, so, sir. He said that he had
expectations
, but I paid no heed to it. Harry had elusions, he was always talking grand.’

‘What elusions did he have?’

‘That he would come to money, sir, had grand important friends.’

‘Like Master John Colville, perhaps?’

‘That I do not ken.’ Bess was guarded now, warned off by the name. Hew tried another tack. ‘A gentle man was that, and vexed at Harry’s death. A brave man, so he said.’

‘Did he say that, sir?’ The simple lass brightened. ‘Then that was civil of him. I mind he asked me once if Harry had been in that day, but I no idea that they were friends. I must go in now, sir.’ Bess recognised, perhaps, that she had said too much. ‘My daddie will not like it that I traffick in the street.’ She shrank back to the shadow of her father’s house.

Colville, then, had lied, for Harry Petrie’s name had not been strange to him. On his return to the college, Hew took out the paper from his desk, but looking at the map, could find no further clue from it. He slipped it for safekeeping in a book of Latin verse, and returned it to the desk, where it lay forgotten in the coming days, its presence there eclipsed by far more close concerns.

John Colville sat in darkness in the stillness of the vault. He did not turn his head, nor raised the wine cup to his lips, but sat in sombre thoughtfulness, till Violet brought the light.

‘Look at you there, in the dark. Ye have let the lamp blow out.’ She lit it from the flame, and looked into his face. ‘Ye havena touched your wine.
Aquavite
, a posset, that is what ye want. I will make a bed for ye.’

‘No.’ He lifted his right arm, and took her hand in his, sheltered her small hand, withered as a leaf, dry and coarse and red. ‘I cannot stay tonight.’

‘Tsk.’ She pulled back her hand, and set straight the stool, put her cup on a tray, wiped down the board, tidying briskly. ‘What, will ye gang now, catching your death?’

‘Aye, mistress, probably.’ He smiled at her. ‘Here.’

He took off the fur tippet he was wearing round his neck and placed it round her shoulders. Violet let her cheek rest briefly on its pelt. ‘I cannot wear that.’

‘No. But ye can keep it.’

‘Your wife will wonder what has become of it.’

‘She may wonder, Violet. But she will not ask.’

She kept it for a moment there, before she took it off, and lifted up her skirts, her bare legs in plain sight. John Colville smiled. ‘Wicked, wicked woman. Have ye no small shred of shame?’

Violet tied the tippet close around her waist, smoothing out the kirtle she pulled down to cover it. ‘I will keep it warm for you, biding your return.’

‘Aye, then, lass. Dae that.’

‘I suppose,’ she understood, ‘we will not see you for a while?’

‘Not for a while.’

‘What was in the letter, then? Was it that important?’

‘What?’

Colville seemed already far away, intent upon his journey, wherever he would go. She wondered if he would be cold, without his little scrap of fur.

‘No, it was not important. But ye did well not to tell the man that I had met with Harry, and you have my thanks for that.’

‘I wad not tell your business,’ Violet promised, ‘not if they put me to the jayne, and broke my banes wi’ torments. I wad save ye, see?’

Colville smiled at her, sadly and tenderly. ‘You would spill my secrets at the first turn of the screw, and I ask no more. I would not hae your sweet blood shed, your white bones snapped for me. But ye have naught to fear, for ye have naught to tell, and will not be asked. I drank here; Harry drank here; that is all ye know, and all that ye should ken.’

Violet nodded. ‘How did Harry die?’

‘That I do not know. But a man like that, that lets his fingers dip into so many men’s pies, he shouldnae be surprised when someone nips them off.’

Violet shivered. ‘Ah, I liked him, though. Ye maun be careful, Johnny.’

‘When am I aught else?’

He kissed her lightly on the cheek, and Violet felt the scent of him, the tickle of his beard, long after he had gone.

The servant brought the horses, wordlessly. It was cold on the highway, as the night began to fall; his master had no tippet, but the fever burned his cheeks. The country road tailed off. Colville smelled the air, the hot curling of the smoke stacks, drawn from sleepy chimneys, farmhouse suppers on the wind, heard the seabirds calling, scattering at dusk. They were some way on the road before the servant asked, ‘Will I come wi’ you, sir?’

Colville shook his head. ‘Bless you, Thomas, no.’

‘I do not mind it, sir. You will want a man, to bring you drink and such. And they will surely notice that are not well.’

‘Ye are a guid man, Thomas. Go, tell my wife.’

‘I will dae that, sir. That matter at the college wreaks no ill, I hope? Only Violet telt me, Harry Petrie’s dead.’

‘What? Ah, no harm to it. In truth, no harm at all. I think, in truth, the contrary.’

‘Then I am glad to hear it, sir. They say that Master Cullan has a sharp and ready wit.’

‘That I do believe. Yet he will serve us well,’ Colville answered, sadly. For he had liked the man. He felt sorry, in his heart, for what he had to do.

Chapter 22

The Still House

Hew slept the night in college, to be woken up at dawn, by the frantic knocking of his closest friend.

‘What is the matter, Giles?’ Hew was dredged up from sleep by the force of his passion; he had never seen his friend so exercised before.

‘She has left me! Gone! Run off, with a murderer! And in my heart, I knew that I did not deserve her. I should never have subjected her to that relentless hammering.’

‘Begin at the beginning,’ Hew suggested, kindly. ‘Where is Meg?’

‘If I knew that,’ Giles retorted, ‘I would not be here.’ He was clutching at a letter in his quaking hands, and in his agitation working it to shreds.

‘A letter, Hew! She wrote it in a letter. Am I such a tyranniser, that she could not tell me to my face?’

Giles could speak no more, but sank down, hard and heavy, on the folding bedstead, which creaked a little, straining at the sudden weight. Hew rescued the letter and began to read. He recognised the writing as his sister’s careful script. She had written letters to him while he was in France, under their father’s kind instruction, practising her French. To Hew’s shame, he did not remember ever writing back.

The letters were well-formed, with no blots in the ink. His sister wrote a firm and unexceptional hand.

‘Dearest Giles

‘It grieves me to have had to leave you in this way, at such a time and place; I hope you understand that I could not have done so, without a greater heartbreak was at stake.

‘John Richan is a lost and frightened boy. He has been maligned, and misused by his tormenters, and I cannot allow him to face this test alone. I think you will not believe me – as Hew will not believe me – when I tell you John is blameless of this crime. That fortune somehow has aligned against him, and he is bereft, and left without a friend. Yet even Hew will recognise that sometimes tis the case, a man may be maligned, when he is not at fault, when all inquiries are misled, and all hopes misinform. John Richan is a good and honest man; there is a strangeness in him, that I will confess, but since I know you recognised a strangeness once in me, I know that you will not condemn on that account alone, but understand that a strangeness can hold in its heart a peculiar sweetness, that cries out for our charity, deserving of our love.

‘John made a declaration to me, not long before he left. He wanted me to sail with him, to his Orkney home. Now he is suspected, he must find some other path. And I do not believe that he can do so on his own. He is frightened, lost. Therefore, I must go to him.

‘If you love me, as I know you do, then you will not attempt to follow, for you will know that to do so will put all our lives in jeopardy. Take heart, and trust me, Giles.

‘I am sorry, too, that I could not take Matthew, and he will not have his Minnie when he wakes. But I know he will be well enough the while with Canny Bett, and, of course, with you. He likes to hear you read to him, and he cares not one scrap for Hebrew, Greek, or French, so long as they are spoken to him in your ain dear voice. Then am I well content, to leave him in your hands. He will not miss his Minnie when you are close by. You are half the world to him, as he is all of yours.

‘Dearest, as you love me, do not take your troubles out on Paul. He knows not where I am, and he cannot help you. He is not to blame in
this, as you, and he, may think. He is a good friend to us both, but none the less deserves a life of his own.’

‘What does she mean?’ Hew broke off, ‘about Paul?’

Giles shook his head hopelessly, ‘As it turns out, Paul was not there. He has never been there. He has been disporting with some Jonet Bannerman, while all the while this lovelorn boy was coming to my house. I have dismissed him, of course.’

‘You cannot for a moment think that Meg intends to stay with him?’ Hew’s eyes, though he protested it, were baffled, grey with doubt. ‘She would not leave her child!’

‘Do you not understand? She could not take him from me, Hew. She left him here for me, a final act of love.’

Hew was quiet then, for he recalled the sadness in his sister’s face, her grening for the life that she had left behind. What was it she had said, of Clare and Robert Wood, ‘No one ever knows what secrets and collusions are between a man and wife. Some are happy, that seem not; and some that seem the best of friends . . .’ Are not happy, she had meant. Surely, she had not referred to her own life with Giles?

‘Well then, we shall look for them. We shall call a search.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘John Richan is a fugitive. And, if she is found with him, then she will be accused of art and part, complicit in his crime. Besides, she does not want it, Hew. I would not have her back against her will.’

‘Then we will wait a while, and trust in her return,’ Hew consoled his friend. But as the day wore on, he became less sure.

John Richan had pulled Harry’s body clear of the high water. He did not want to leave it in that place, where the devil might have claimed it. Though Harry’s heart was warm still, John knew he was dead. The corpse was hard and dense, a solid flank of flesh that took John all his strength to drag clear of the tides. He owed him that, at least, for Harry had that morning dragged him from the pit. John found a
quiet resting place close against the cliff. He wiped the weed and silt from Harry Petrie’s face. Harry’s cheek had cracked and splintered in the fall, and his mouth had slackened, showing broken teeth, but there was not much blood. John had done his best to make the corpse more comfortable.

John Richan understood the tides. He worked his way round to the harbour, clambering over rocks, between the water marks. Most of the boats had gone out with the flood, and would not return for several hours. The haven was still as he passed, slipping unseen by the white-footed cat and inquisitive black-headed gulls. He was at the shoreline before the town above was properly awake. He made his path along those parts the devil called his own. And when the waters turned, he retreated to the cliffs, clambered over rocks, sheltered from the flow in crevices and caves. He understood the sea, and he was not afraid of it, though he could see the sea-trows, dancing in its foam, and heard the mermaids singing, sitting on the rocks. He had heard them in the cavern at the bottom of the pit where their lonely lullabies had come to comfort him. He scented in the early morning salt the sleek skins of the selkies, who came out to sun themselves, glistening through the haar.

He followed closely to the cliff, until he saw the tower and smoke, the woodlands that marked Kenly Green, and then he found a place to climb up from the shore. He crept into the wood, and found a place to shelter, deep among the trees, and crouched as darkness rose, a blank and still new moon across the summer sky. When the last of the pale light was failing, he fled, through the gloom that ushered in the night, through the fading shadows of an avenue of trees, and found his way by stealth to that enchanted place where Meg had kept her physick garden, where the buds were nipped, and heavy still with dew. At the bottom of this garden, he found the cool house and distillerie, quietly detached. The cool house shelves held bottles still, of pickled broom buds, pears and plums. He had not eaten since the night he had spent lying in the pit.

The still house had a furnace, and the means to light its fire, but John feared that the smoke might be noticed from the house. He lit a tallow candle with a piece of flint, and kept his night light low, level with the ground, while he looked around the room for the safest place to sleep. A dark and dragging weariness worked upon his bones, a heavy, cold exhaustion sudden and compelling as a witch’s curse. The still house had a cleanness and a coolness that were foreign to him, containing an equipment of uncanny, unknown things; long, lipped phials of coloured glass, flasks and pottles, copper cones. John crept behind the shadow of a kettle cauldron and curled up in a corner, where he fell asleep.

It was chance, after all, that Giles had been called out. Had he not gone out that night, then Meg perhaps would not have left the house. As it was she could not sleep but took the stub of candle up to write her letter in the darkness, several hours before the dawn. She left the letter in the crib; she knew that Giles would see it there, coming from the deathbed that had kept him up, to find a strength and comfort in his little son. She did not like to think of him, returning tired and cold, to find his warm bed empty, his beloved gone.

Though the night was dark, she dared not take the lamp, for fear of waking Canny Bett, sleeping by the fire. She waited till the night was on the brink of dawn before she ventured landward, out into the fields.

And Meg had known, of course, where she would find the boy. She knew, without words, the place that he would wait for her, that place that he had known was closest to her heart. She walked through woods and fields, the well-loved, well-worn path, that she had known and followed since she was a child. But Meg was weary now. The trouble in the town had begun to tell on her, her limbs moved slow and heavily, her head began to ache. She was thankful in the end when she came to Kenly Green, and opened up the door to the distillerie, to sink down to the floor. She saw a white light
flicker in the morning wind, the colours of the sun upon the pewter pots. Meg fell to the ground, where the sunlight danced with her, picking out the rhythm of her jangling limbs.

The sunlight woke John Richan from a slough of dreams. For the first hour, he had fallen to a deep and dreamless sleep; then the dreams began. He was buried in the pit, where the heavy earth had squeezed and crushed each breath, each faint fall and flutter in his frantic breast, and where the rush of water filled his heart with thunder and his heart with blood, until the darkness had itself become a sound. He was standing on the sea tower, high and light as air, where the winds came whipping and the sea birds wept. He was fighting with the devil, over Harry’s corpse. He woke up on the floor of a magician’s workshop, where evil was distilled in glass and pewter pots. Between him and the light he saw her witch herself. The devil had possessed her, and thrawn her like a fish, a limber fair-skinned herring, writhing on the ground. John Richan drew the knife that was hanging at his belt, and crept up to her thrashing throat to cut the devil out.

Nicholas awoke to a cloudless summer day. For the first time in months, he discovered he had slept, restfully and dreamlessly, and woken up refreshed. His thoughts were light and clear. He put the final touches to his George Buchanan, translating the last epigram, of Seneca, on kings. It came in to his mind that he might like to write a prefatory verse, but he dismissed the thought as vaunting, vain and proud. Instead he wrote a line, with plain and simple modesty, inscribing it to Hew, ‘first, and dearest, friend’, content to quote as epigraph Buchanan’s closing words, which he translated into Scots: ‘This ilk I tuke in task for thee alane. Gif thou hast lyking of it, I halde me weill content.’ I undertook this task for you alone. If it meets with your approval I am satisfied.

When this was done, he went downstairs, and found he had surprised the servants and himself, by feeling well enough to take the air outside. He walked into the gardens, through the gentle
breeze, and came to the distillerie, where his presence put to flight the startled Richan boy, who passed him like the wind. Nicholas found Meg, in the throes of the falling sickness, pale lips flecked with blood. He picked her up and carried her, through leaves and flowers and herbs, and brought her to the house, where his good heart gave out.

Meg woke up at last to find both Giles and Hew were sitting by her bed.

‘Nicholas was here.’

Giles took her hand in his, but found, for the first time, for all his long acquaintance with and competence in death, that he was overcome, and could not find the words. It was left to Hew to tell his sister then, how Nicholas had given back the life that he had borrowed from her, when she nursed him from the brink in Giles Locke’s turret tower. The servants said that Nicholas had brought her to the threshold, writhing like a fish, had carried her as lithe and limber as a child, no shiver of the effort of it showing in his face. A light shone in his eyes, and he stood proud and tall, before he set her down. According to the kitchen lass, who was prone to fantasy, a flight of angels came and swept him from his feet, a delusion that the kirkmen were soon to hammer out. Meg remembered nothing but the smile upon his face, which gentle light had stayed with her until she went to sleep, and softened the convulsions that ravaged through her dreams.

‘I came to find the Richan boy,’ she recalled at last. ‘To warn him, that it was not safe for him to go to Orkney. The falling ill came on, when I was at the still house.’ Through all her raft of dreams, dredged up in to memory, she found no trace of John.

‘I thought I had lost you, Meg. I thought that you were gone.’ Giles took her in her arms.

She looked at him, bewildered. ‘Why would you think that?’

Hew left them to their tears, and went down to the laich house, where the servants had laid out the body of his friend. And there he
found no part of him, no fragment that was Nicholas, in that worn out place, shabby and discarded, like a suit of clothes, its owner having grown and gone, to finer, better things. He knelt down in the quiet dust and spilled his heart for Nicholas, the childhood friends that they once were, and what they had become. His heart was quiet then. He went into the garden, to the cool house and distillerie, finding life and solace in the plants and trees. In the corner of the still house, hidden in a cloth, he came upon a jar of plums, the relict of the Richan boy, the only trace and shadow he had left behind.

Nicholas, like Hew, was a true child of reform, and entitled to a resting place beneath St Leonard’s kirk, in the college chapel where they met as boys. Meg had questioned how a body could find rest, in earshot of a ranting clerk, a loud and heavy thunderer. Hew had smiled at that. ‘He cannot hear it, Meg. And the text is milder here than in the Holy Trinity.’ It did not matter now. The fragile ghost of Nicholas long since had departed him, what remained was rag and bone, and soon would fall to dust. At Meg’s request, he was buried at the far end of the kirkyard, next to Matthew Cullan, underneath the trees. Hew did not object. He understood at last what Meg had always known, that no God in his heaven could have closed his doors against those two good gentle souls, whatever were their differences; that Andrew Melville and his Kirk must bare and bow their heads. In accordance to that Kirk, to which Nicholas subscribed, no prayers or psalms were said, no choir of earthly voices sang them to their rest, but there were sparrows in the rowan, fluting high above, and far across the fields, the mellow calling of the doves, riffling through the yellow corn, came faintly on the breeze.