Hue and Cry (12 page)

‘Did Nicholas know?’

‘Suspected it, I think. He knew that Gilchrist in effect had sold the boy a place, and sold it cheap. In the weeks before the deaths he had become convinced that the principal was hawking places out to boys without the wit to last the course. Some were underage. Alexander Strachan was himself a little off fourteen.’

‘And he put this to Gilchrist?’

‘Not directly. He became increasingly bitter and outspoken, making it known more obliquely – abstention from meetings, recalcitrant questions. Gilchrist had asked him to write a masque for his students to perform before the king and the royal commissioners next year. He has a talent, quite surprising, for that sort of thing.’

Hew nodded. ‘I remember.’

‘But Nicholas threw out so many squibs and wry remarks the principal had started to have doubts, fearing he would find himself exposed before the court. He asked,’ his voice began to falter, ‘he asked me to look at the play.’

Hew had noted his discomfort. He would return there later, probe the spot, like Giles Locke with his lancet, but for now he would set it aside. He wanted Robert’s confidence. He stood by the window, his back turned away, looking outside, and listened intently. ‘Yet Nicholas accepted the post as tutor.’

‘Yes, naively, at first. Or perhaps for the money; he still had to eat. Later I think he grew fond of the boy. But it was clear he did not want him to matriculate. We discussed it, because I should have had him in my class.’

‘Was there something in their closeness you thought odd?’

‘No, not then. But he did once say . . . he thought the boy had seemed distressed and he himself was troubled. He felt the family asked too much. Though he said the child worked hard. The uncle was a bully. Nicholas disliked him.’

Hew nodded. ‘Aye, I met him. Do you know the Strachans?’

‘I confess, not well. My father knows them slightly, Gilbert more than Archie. Though Archie is the master of the gild of weavers, and likes to think himself a figure in the town. The daughter Tibbie, now,’ unexpectedly, he grinned, ‘is something of a strumpet. Worth going down to kirk upon the Sabbath just to see her toss her curls. Her mother Agnes Ford is a steady, sober woman, and a blacksmith’s daughter, I believe.’

‘You draw their likeness well,’ encouraged Hew. ‘Now tell me what you know about Alexander’s death. Where was Nicholas?
How did he seem to you? What happened in the hours and days before he died?’

‘On the Saturday, Nicholas went to the house to hear the boy’s lesson. He did not return to college until much later that night. I was already in bed when I heard him come in. When I got up for chapel on Sunday he was still asleep. Sometime in the afternoon, Mistress Ford came to college to report the boy had gone, but Nicholas could not be found. He turned up for the evening service, dirty and dishevelled. There was blood on his shirt. It looked as though he had slept in his clothes.’

‘Did you ask about the blood?’

‘He said he’d done it with his pocket knife. He’d been whittling driftwood, I think that’s what he said. Apparently the blade had slipped and gone in very deep. It did not seem plausible. But he was wounded, certainly.’

As Robert seemed to falter, Hew encouraged him. ‘Go on. What happened next?’

‘He must have had the message, for he went on to the Strachans’. I did not see him leave. I came back to the room and read until dark. Then I fell asleep. It was almost daybreak when he returned. He was shivering, seeming distracted, and drenched to the bone. He had walked for hours on the shore through the rain. His shirt was stiff with blood. He told me that they’d found the boy dead, but said nothing more. He crept between the sheets and shivered through the dawn, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. He didn’t speak of it for days. But later I discovered it was Nicholas who found the boy. He was wrapped in some sort of cloth. He lifted out the body and held it in his arms. So the blood was Alexander’s. They found the weapon lying in the bed beside him, a shuttle from the loom. There were fragments of bone and of thread in his hair. Nicholas carried him upstairs into the house, still very calm, and helped the weaver’s wife to lay him out upon the bed. Then he walked on his own through the night. I’d like to stop now, if I may, and take a drink.’

Hew nodded gently. ‘Please. I’ll ask the college servant for some wine.’

‘Tell me about the letters.’

Robert was caught by surprise. Hew had sent out to the cook-shop for pottage and pie, and with a little bread and wine they made their dinner on a board beside the window, talking of desultory things in the afternoon light. The drizzle fell softly. The clouds were beginning to clear. Aristotle’s
De Caelo
lay open before them, and as they touched upon the motions of the meteors and the spheres his fears had begun to recede. In a dull voice he answered, cupping his hands round the broth as though to draw strength from the warmth of the bowl.

‘I found them in the chest.’ Robert paused to look at Hew, who did not comment, then went on. ‘I was looking for … I found … I did not read them all, but there were letters and poems from the boy. I gave then to the coroner the day that the dyer was killed.’

‘Why?’

‘They were evidence.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of unnaturalness between them. They were letters of affection. And the poems … were of a nature most corrupt and intimate.’

‘
Unnatural and filthie converse
.’ Hew spoke almost to himself, as if reciting from a script.

‘Well … I believed so,’ Robert confessed. ‘Indeed they could be read that way. In the mind of the boy … I have the sense that he felt overwhelmed. I don’t say Nicholas encouraged it. I truly think he did not know, until he had the letters, how Alexander felt. But they were many hours together, quite alone. I think the boy felt homesick and friendless. It was natural perhaps he should
be drawn to Nicholas, who was always the most patient of teachers. But from the letters it would seem that there was more than that. The boy seemed increasingly anxious and bold. My sense is that he struggled with his feelings until he found he must express them. He felt very deeply, it seems.’

‘And do you think the feelings were returned?’

There was a long pause before Robert replied. ‘I have asked myself the question many times, and yet I have not found the answer. That Nicholas might hold him in affection, yes; perhaps even love. It is harder to imagine carnal lust. For if he has a fault it lies in his detachment, almost as if he does not feel the frailties of the flesh. He goes for days without eating or sleeping, sometimes without drinking; he seems indifferent to sickness or cold.’

‘Has it occurred to you that he may use these deprivations as a way of self-control?’ suggested Hew. ‘Excuse me if I play the devil’s advocate. Go on. You found the letters, and were shocked to learn their content. I allow they suggest an unnatural bond with the boy. But what gave you to think they had a part to play in Alexander’s death? Was there blackmail implied?’

‘Not that I saw. In a way it was clearer than that, for they were speckled with blood, and wrapped in a blood-crusted gown. I last saw Nicholas wearing that gown the day before the boy died, when he left here to give him his lesson. He had not worn it since. I remarked particularly that he did not have it on in church on Sunday evening. It was a cool night, and he was already ill. And as I said before, he seemed on the edge of his wits. I believe that he had read the letters and the poems, or else the boy confessed his feelings. Perhaps Nicholas repulsed him, and there was a fight. Perhaps even,’ Robert brightened slightly, ‘the boy came at him with his pocket knife, inflicting the wound he sustained in the thigh, and Nicholas took up the shuttle to defend himself, but hit out too hard. Might that be it, do you think? Could it be self-defence?’

Hew did not reply.

‘In any case,’ Robert went on miserably, ‘he suffered so deeply from guilt and remorse it drove him further to the brink of madness when he learned the wrong man was to be hanged for his crime. I spoke with him before he left the college, on the day that he took ill. He was determined to speak to Tom Begbie, though he would not say why.’

‘You think that was remorse?’ Hew asked uneasily.

‘Aye, what else then?’ Robert looked surprised. ‘When I found the letters and the provost told me Nicholas had died, I realised he had meant to make confession, and I set the letters out before the court. But,’ he dropped his head to his hands, ‘it has all gone awry, because Nicholas still lives, and the coroner has put him to the horn and holds him in the Auld College to be charged with the foulest and filthiest of crimes.’

‘And Tom was freed?’ Hew concluded.

‘He already was free. A young lass from the country came to speak for him. She claimed he’d been with her all night.’

They sat together awhile without words, Hew going through in his mind what Robert had told him, turning it over, looking for flaws, swilling and sipping the wine. The dregs in his stomach ran cold. Eventually he spoke. ‘You give a motive for the murder of the boy, but what about the dyer? Why should he kill him, and why did he go there that day? It makes no sense.’

Robert sighed. ‘The coroner suggested that the dyer knew about his closeness to the boy. It was like him, he was always prying. Dyer was an elder of the kirk, and he pursued his offices most fiercely. He was well known to the college, for he often made complaint about the students’ conduct. Nothing pleased him more than punishing transgression, or sniffing out some secret shame or lewd and filthie crime.’

A man like that would have to have had enemies,’ observed Hew.

‘No doubt. It hardly matters, for the fact is that Nicholas was in both places and as good as caught red-hand. Do you think the crown will trouble to investigate? They do not know, or care, how
Nicholas could kill the dyer when he was all but dead himself. What matters is that he was there, he did it, there’s an end to it. And I gave them the proof,’ Robert ended wretchedly.

Hew was uncertain how to proceed. ‘I confess, it looks bad,’ he acknowledged. ‘But there may be something else that we have not considered. A feud between the Dyers and the Strachans, or someone with a grudge against the gilds. As long as Nicholas has not confessed, there must be hope. I’ll go looking at the dyer’s house this very afternoon.’

For the dyer, he believed an answer might be found. But did it matter after all? The evidence about the boy had chilled him to the bone.

The road to the dyer’s house was quiet. Few people seemed to pass this way. Hew left his horse at the west port stables and walked the muddy path along the Kinness Burn. At length he saw a smoking cottage chimney, then a little house set back within a ragged garden overgrown with weeds, a row of sodden sheepskins curling by the door. A small sallow girl sat among them combing out the fleece. In a wooden box beside her someone squalled.

Jennie Dyer was bored. The little ones grubbed round her in the dirt and burrowed like insects, fractious and squabbling, spoiling the wool while the youngest one bawled. She felt like bawling herself. She had wanted to go to the town to the market today, but Will had said no, she must stay at home with the weans, for her mother was sick. She stuck out her lip in disgust. They hardly needed minding now that Nan was almost eight, and big enough to stop the weans from falling in the burn, or big enough at least to fetch the boys to hoik them out. It was worse than when her father was alive, for the boys had to do what he told them; he’d never favour Will or Jem and she was his pet: ‘Och, Janet, let the lass have her bit play!’ And there might be sucket candie then. And when he was cross – which was often – she would drop her
lip low and call up the tears, soundlessly and soft, not letting them fall. And he’d pull her down onto his knees, reeling her in like a slippery fish and spin her and tickle her roughly, kissing the curls of her hair. Only he had understood how wrong it was for her to live among the stink of dyes, to go into the town to be sneered at by the country folk. When she was grown she meant to be a lady, and live in a grand house on the south street with braw painted ceilings and embroidered pictures on the walls, everything smelling of flowers.

There would, of course, be a price, but she knew how to pay it. She would have to pay it anyway. For her mother lived here in this stew and worked hard all her days and still she paid the price; now she was with child again. They took her for a fool if they thought she did not know. She remembered all too well the last time when the baby came, and father had said words that even Will was shocked to hear, godly as he was. And then he had wept and prayed and prayed and wept to God and had them crying, praying half the night while Mother almost died. ‘Why did they not
learn
?’ she heard Jem whisper tearfully to Will, and Will had said when Father died, ‘At least this one’s the last.’

There was a stranger coming. She pulled the baby to her hip in a gesture of protection, but the baby struggled crossly and continued to bawl.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Hew asked her mildly.

‘Don’t know. Perhaps it wants a penny for candie.’ She was ever hopeful.

‘It looks a bit little for candie. Has it any teeth?’

‘Three. And it likes to suck on comfits. Piece of rag soaked in honey, it likes that. So do Geordie and Susan and Nan.’ Three small faces turned towards him.

‘And my name is Jennie. And it isn’t an
it
, it’s a girl. Name of Bess. It likely wants its mother. She has,’ she searched to find the word, ‘she has the lying-in. She’s very sick of it.’

‘I expect she is.’ Hew squatted down on the grass and gingerly
tickled the baby. ‘Hallo, little Bess. There may be a penny for you when I’ve finished my business with your father.’ In an instant the other children dropped their game and crowded expectantly round him.

Jennie played her best card: ‘Faither’s deid.’ The trembling of the lip was only partly feigned. ‘We put him in the ground not two days since. He fell into the dye pot and was boiled.’

‘I’m truly sorry to hear it. I’ll leave something for your mother then.’ She could have howled her disappointment. ‘And for Bess,’ he gave a solemn wink, ‘we’ll have to see. Who does the dyeing now? For I see there’s fleeces still laid out.’