Authors: Pat McIntosh
St Mungo's Robin (38 page)
‘Of course he is,’ said Alys indignantly.
‘There is a strange thing,’ said Maistre Pierre, with an indulgent smile at his daughter. ‘Since Humphrey’s resurrection, or whatever one calls it, there have been some
remarkable happenings at the bedehouse.’
‘Remarkable?’ said Dorothea.
The mason shrugged. ‘Maister Barty has his hearing back. The one with the trembling-ill is by far steadier, the one we could not understand has recalled his Latin and also speaks Scots
like a Christian, the very old man – Father Anselm, is it? – is clearer in his head than he was – all small things, but each in its way a grace.’
‘Mistress Mudie is silent,’ contributed Alys, ‘as if she has obtained peace.’
‘Millar has lost his stammer,’ said Gil, ‘and seems by far more confident.’ And Alys and I have got past whatever was troubling us, he thought, and smiled at her
again.
‘And yet Humphrey’s own brother has received nothing,’ went on Maistre Pierre, ‘is taken up for murder and will be tortured for his confession.’
‘He has Humphrey’s forgiveness,’ said Alys. ‘That must count.’
‘If he was the instrument of Humphrey’s martyrdom,
maistre
,’ said Dorothea, ‘he will obtain a special judgement. Nevertheless, if he murdered his servant and the
Deacon, he must pay the price the law requires.’
The final fragment of the picture only dropped into place a week later.
On the morning after the wedding, Gil woke in the late November dawn, warm and comfortable, and fully aware of where he was and why. Alys was curled relaxed against him, her hair silky on his
cheek, and the steady sound of her breathing was intensely pleasant in his ear.
Al nicht by the rose ich lay
. He spent some time dwelling with satisfaction on the events of the last twelve hours, the verse going round in his head. And before that – before they
had avoided the wild jokes of the bedding-party and the rough music in the courtyard, before the dancing in the drawing-loft and the feast in the hall, there had been the moment when he and Alys
stood in front of his uncle in a side-chapel of the cathedral and exchanged promises and rings. She had smiled up into his face, confident and confiding. All would be well.
The whole day had gone well, though he suspected Alys had moved through it in a daze. All the guests had enjoyed themselves, only a few had become unpleasantly drunk, and he had noticed his
mother talking intensely to his godfather at one point, her gestures emphatic. Her glance had flicked to Tib in her scarlet gown, Michael in dull green velvet, in opposite corners of the room, and
the fiery Sir James had nodded meekly and offered her his hand. It seemed likely that some sort of future awaited the miscreants.
He turned his head on the pillow and drew the red woollen curtain aside to look out into the chamber, where the early light was growing. The blue milk-paint had dried to a pleasant misty shade,
though now it looked colourless. The four Cardinal Virtues showed up well on the wall by the hearth behind his head, and opposite them, facing the foot of the bed, Maister Sproat had depicted his
own choice of saints: the Visitation, with the Virgin and St Elizabeth dressed like Scots women and crowned with jaunty rose-bordered halos; and in plain halos, St Giles and his pet doe standing
stiffly by St Mungo. One could tell it was St Mungo; he had a mitre as well as a halo, and held a green branch in one hand and a robin the size of a goshawk on the other, its red breast showing
bright already as the light strengthened.
Like any son of the grammar school or the University, Gil knew the story, how Mungo’s fellow pupils had killed the bird to get him into trouble with their teacher St Serf, whose pet it
was, and how Mungo had brought it back to life. He lay in the dawn looking at the image, wondering if he could bear seeing it every morning in life, and suddenly recalled Humphrey.
He
was
a shrike, but now he’s a robin, because he’s deid.
‘Of course he was a robin!’ he said aloud. ‘He was left in the garden to get someone else into trouble.’
‘Mmf?’ said Alys. He turned to her, getting up on one elbow. She opened her eyes and smiled up at him. Now this on the other hand, he thought, I really could bear to see every
morning when I wake.
‘Naismith,’ he said. ‘You remember Humphrey said he was a robin.’ She made a faint noise of assent. ‘I was looking for a sparrow, but I had the wrong robin. Agnew
tried again and again to get Humphrey into trouble – to get him accused of killing the Deacon. Of course Humphrey said Naismith was a robin. St Mungo’s robin, who was killed to get him
into trouble.’
‘Of course,’ said Alys, blinking sleepily at him.
He leaned down and kissed her, and she put her arms round his neck and kissed him back.
‘Gil, are we really married?’ she said after a moment. ‘I didn’t dream it all?’
‘We’re really married,’ he agreed. ‘And no prospect of an annulment, if I mind matters aright.
Darf ich
naught the rose stele, And yet ich bar the flour
away.’
‘I don’t know why I was afraid,’ she admitted.
‘I hope you’ll never fear me again,’ he said seriously.
‘It wasn’t you I feared.’ She curled closer to him. ‘Gil, listen. When my father bought this house, there was a ceremony with the two men of law, when they handed him a
padlock and some earth –’
‘Sasine,’ he agreed. ‘He would have to take sasine of the property, and those represent the building and the land it’s on.’
‘Yes. And I thought, yesterday, that the rings we gave.’ He felt the hand at the back of his neck stir as if she was rubbing her ring with her thumb, the fine gold circle with the
little hearts and the Latin word
SEMPER.
‘That was as if we exchanged sasine, wasn’t it?’
‘Sasine of one another,’ he amplified, and tightened his clasp on her, charmed by this idea. ‘So you’re mine, and I’m yours, sasine given and taken, without limit
of term.’
‘For always,’ she agreed, and drew the covers further up round them both. ‘Just as it says on my ring. Always.’
The Harper’s Quine
Murder in the cathedral in medieval Glasgow
At the May Day dancing at Glasgow Cross, Gilbert Cunningham, notary-in-training, sees not only the woman who is going to be murdered, but her murderer as well.
Gil is a recently qualified lawyer whose family still expect him to enter the priesthood. When he finds the body of a young woman in the new building at Glasgow Cathedral he
is asked to investigate – she turns out to have been the May Day harper’s mistress and runaway wife of cruel nobleman John Semphill. Gil’s inquiries lead him to seek a murderer
in the heart of the city, but when the killer is finally exposed, justice strikes from an unexpected direction and Gil’s own future is hanging in the balance.
Nicholas Feast
A festive play turns to tragedy at Glasgow university
Gil Cunningham said later that if he had known he would find a corpse in the university coalhouse, he’d never have gone near the Arts Faculty feast. But then, as Alys
his betrothed said, he would not have met Socrates . . .
For his second adventure, the young notary Gil Cunningham returns to his old university, Glasgow, for the Nicholas Feast, at which a play is to be presented by the students.
When one of the actors is later found dead, Gil, fresh from his success in solving the murder of the harper’s quine, is the obvious person to investigate. Assisted by his betrothed, Alys,
her French stonemason father, Pierre, and of course the dog named Socrates, he begins to disentangle a web of espionage and blackmail involving both tutors and students.
The Rough Collier
A body in the peat – is it witchcraft or just plain murder?
Glasgow, 1493. When the peat-cutters came to report the dead man, Gil Cunningham was up in the roof-space of his mother’s house, teaching his new young wife
swordplay.
The finders believe the corpse in the peat to be that of Thomas Murray, a coal worker missing from the estate of Sir James Douglas, Gil’s godfather. But Murray’s
wife claims it must be someone else, while Sir James’s steward, the officious David Fleming, suspects witchcraft. And if the corpse is not the missing man, who is it? Gil, trying to
establish the truth, finds himself dealing with a motley crew of peat-cutters and salt-boilers, colliers and priests, as well as the assortment of females of Murray’s household.