The King's Corrodian (9 page)

‘Aye,’ he said at length. ‘I see what – and you wondered if the secret fire might … No. No, I think it wouldny work. See, it has to be sealed tight.’ His hands emerged from the sleeves of his habit, for the first time, and described fragile glassware. ‘The marriage chamber, you ken?’ She nodded. ‘Sealed wi wax, or clay, so the red man and the white woman may be—’ He bit off his words, suddenly realising his surroundings. ‘Any road, this wasny the same situation.’

‘The chamber was sealed,’ she said, in disappointment.

‘Aye, but you canny seal a chamber the way you can an alembic. The windows, the door, the chimney, the air aye gets in.’

‘All were blocked,’ she said.

‘Were they now? So the air was reduced, maybe,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Like burning charcoal? But where did the flame come from? It behaved,’ she paused, to choose her words. ‘It never behaved like ordinary flame. To consume the man, and the chair beneath him, but never damage the rest of the chamber, surely that was no ordinary fire. That was why I wondered …’

‘Aye.’ He nodded in understanding. ‘A good thought, but no our answer.’ Somewhere above them a bell began to ting. ‘I need to go. Where are you – no, you’re lodged at the Blackfriars, I suppose. I canny come there the now. Can you come back here the morn’s morn? After Sext, maybe?’

‘Who should I ask for, sir?’ She began gathering her skirts together to rise.

‘Why, me, a course. Oh!’ He shook his head, half irritated. ‘Michael Scott. Ask for Michael Scott. No that I’m any relation, you ken.’

‘D’you think he is?’ Jennet speculated as they picked their way out of the church, past the people drifting in to hear Vespers. ‘Any relation, I mean?’

‘Of the wizard?’ Alys said. ‘Surely no. That Michael Scott was hundreds of years ago.’

‘No, surely,’ said Tam. ‘I seen his grave one time, at Melrose, and they showed me where he split a great hill in three, just by the town.’

‘It takes more than wizardry to split a hill open,’ Alys said.

‘That’s what Canon Cunningham said,’ Tam admitted, ‘but the hill’s there, just the same, all in three bits.’

Waiting on the stone bench outside the door to the Prior’s chamber, Gil considered the situation gloomily. He had barely begun to approach the question of who might have killed Pollock, let alone how it might have happened, and now the community was shaken by this double disaster. No saying whether his kinsman would see it as obvious that he should investigate both matters; the novice’s death might be considered an internal matter. And what was Alys doing, he wondered. He had hoped she might have some success questioning the lay servants, who would not have the same objections to talking to a woman as their masters, but after dinner she had dosed everyone in sight with her newly concocted throat medicine, which he had to admit had helped, and then she had disappeared without explanation.

There was someone with the Prior just now; he could not make out the words, but the mumble of voices seemed to be Scots rather than Latin. After a time one of them grew louder, as if the speaker drew nearer to the door. The latch stirred, and the door opened a crack.

‘You’re a fool if you think so, Davie,’ said a forceful voice. ‘It has to be dealt wi, and sooner than later.’ Prior Boyd said something indistinct. ‘Aye, I’ll leave you.’ The door flung wider and a tall Dominican emerged, checked briefly at sight of Gil, then flung over his shoulder, ‘Here’s your man waiting. Better face up to it, Davie.’

Nodding to Gil, he strode off, his white scapular flapping energetically. Gil rose, and tapped on the door-frame. Within the chamber, Prior Boyd looked up from a scrutiny of his clasped hands on the reading-desk.

‘Aye, Gil,’ he said wearily. ‘Come in. We need to talk.’

‘We do, sir,’ Gil agreed.

Despite this, Boyd did not seem in a hurry to speak. He sat for some time, still gazing at his hands. Gil sat equally silent, waiting, and at length the Prior looked up.

‘Henry has the right of it,’ he said, nodding towards the door. ‘It must be dealt wi, no matter the grief it brings us.’

‘What, the boy’s death?’ Gil asked. His kinsman grunted agreement. ‘Aye. It’s a bad business, sir,’ he added conventionally.

‘Very.’ The Prior rose and took a jerky turn about his study, hands moving wildly, clutching at nothing, until he thrust them into the opposite sleeves. ‘I am able to see the implications of these events,’ he said, switching to Latin. ‘The convent is closed at night, the servants go home or sleep in their own quarters. It must have been one of this community who cruelly slew our brother and set fire to our infirmary. The conclusion is odious, but it is not to be avoided.’

‘Very true.’

Boyd turned and gazed across the chamber, light from the window catching the silver hair about his tonsure.

‘How do we proceed, Gilbert?’ he asked helplessly. ‘I have no experience of such violence within a community. It seems to me worse than the matter of our corrodian. I suppose there is no doubt that the young man was slain deliberately,’ he added in faint hope.

‘None whatever,’ said Gil firmly. ‘His throat was cut – you saw the wound yourself. I suspect he was killed while he slept, and then the fire was set, I believe to make us think it was the same circumstance as the corrodian’s.’ Whatever that is, he thought.

‘But why?’ asked Boyd in Scots. ‘Why kill the boy, sic a promising novice, and why the need to make us think it was the same as the other?’

‘I hope we can find out the answers,’ said Gil. ‘You spoke to young Rattray last night, I think. Did anyone visit him after that? Apart from whoever killed him,’ he qualified, before Boyd could speak.

‘Best ask the Infirmarer for that.’ Boyd shook his head. ‘If you can get sense out o him. Poor James, he’s right shocked by the whole thing.’

‘How was the young man when you saw him?’

The Prior returned to his desk and sat down, apparently as much to delay answering as for any degree of comfort. After a space he said, ‘He was much as he has been since I confined him.’

‘And how was that?’ Gil persevered. ‘I never met him. What sort of a laddie was he?’

‘Oh, very bright. Very promising. A fine intellect,’ said Boyd, and repeated the phrase a couple of times. Gil waited. ‘But,’ the Prior said at length, ‘maybe too much sail on for his draught, if you take my meaning. No that steady afore the wind.’

‘Devout?’

‘Passionately. He’d asked for one o the wee figures o Our Lady to be in his cell wi him, and he spent a lot o the last weeks on his knees afore her.’

‘Why?’ Gil asked bluntly.

‘Who can say? He did not, at all events.’

‘And why did he claim to be guilty o the corrodian’s death? Did he say the man was dead?’ Too many questions, he thought, but Boyd bent his head and gave them consideration.

‘When Andrew first confessed,’ he said eventually in Latin, ‘his words were,
Brothers, I ask forgiveness, for I have sinned by causing the vanishing away of our corrodian
. This caused some consternation in Chapter, you may conceive, and I judged it well to isolate the young man and question him myself. I asked him many times how he had achieved this, but he seemed unable to offer any means, only repeating that he was guilty by reason of his hatred for the man.’

‘Why did he hate him?’ Gil asked.

‘This he did not say, though I asked him repeatedly. I hoped the protection of Our Lady in the form of her statue might bring him to rational thought and proper confession, but this had not occurred when I last –’ his voice cracked ‘– last spoke with him.’

‘Did you tell him we had discovered Pollock’s,’ Gil selected a word carefully, ‘remains? That the man wasny carried away by the Devil or anyone else?’

‘I did.’ The Prior contemplated his clasped hands again. ‘He seemed astonished, as we all were. He repeated my words:
The man was burned to ashes? In his house?
Then he crossed himself, and said,
So he is truly dead
. Then he looked frightened, and flung himself on his knees before Our Lady and fell to his prayers. I judged it best to leave him.’ He sighed. ‘I wish I had questioned him more closely now.’

‘He looked frightened,’ Gil repeated.

‘More than that. Horrified, perhaps. Aye, I would say horrified. Poor laddie. I feel I failed him.’

‘Did he have enemies? Any who disliked him within the convent? Or any particular friends?’

‘This is—’ Boyd checked himself. ‘I would have said this is a house of brothers, living together in harmony. Clearly this is not so, but I do not know of any enemies the young man had. His friends were the other novices, with whom he experienced great fellowship and amity.’

Gil, resolving to question the other novices, waited for a moment and then said, ‘What opportunity could one of the community have to leave the dorter and go about the place by night, into the kitchen or into the infirmary?’

The Prior glanced at him, and back down at his hands.

‘The Rule,’ he said heavily, ‘forbids it. Since we are clearly dealing with one to whom the Rule is an irrelevance, I should say every opportunity. The door is not locked. The stairs are shallow, and familiar. There was no moon last night, but each man has a lantern, to light the way down for Prime, or to go out to the necessarium. The only risk, I should suppose, would be in disturbing one of his fellows. Brother Augustine sleeps in the lay brothers’ dorter, the kitchen servants sleep out in the suburb this side of the town, so access to the kitchen would be easy enough. You think that was the knife that was used?’

‘It seems the simplest conclusion. Brother Dickon has set two o his men to search for it, though God knows it’s a small enough thing to find in a place this size.’

The Prior nodded wearily.

‘I have required at Chapter that the miscreant confess, and also that any who know or suspect anything come to me privily, citing the urgent need for confession and penance. If I receive any information I will pass it to you immediately, if I am able.’

Gil nodded.

‘Thank you, sir. And the Infirmarer?’ Gil said. ‘Did he hear or see anything before the fire took hold?’

‘Better ask him yoursel.’ Boyd’s mouth twisted in what seemed like grief. ‘The sub-infirmarer will help you get a word. I think you had best not wait too long about it.’

The sub-infirmarer was the man Gil remembered, a tall fellow with a soft Ersche voice and a calm manner which was slightly fractured just now. The house two along from Pollock’s had become a makeshift infirmary, with a fire blazing in the grate of the outer room, one lay brother tearing and rolling bandages and another pounding something in a mortar on a small table barely equal to the task. A covered dish set by the fire was producing an eye-watering scent of cloves.

It seemed to be the consulting hour, for three friars sat in a row on a bench by the wall while the sub-infirmarer himself listened to Brother Archie coughing.

‘And it’s still coming up black?’ he said as Gil entered the house.

‘It is that,’ agreed Archie hoarsely, and coughed again.

‘There’s little enough I have to give you,’ said the sub-infirmarer in vexed tones. ‘Just this throat mixture of Mistress Mason’s, and that will not be lasting for ever. And the clove decoction when it’s cooled.’

‘Easy enough to make some more o the throat mixture, I’d ha thought,’ said Gil.

‘Good stuff, it is, too,’ Brother Archie remarked. ‘Right soothing, for all it’s full o pepper, she said.’

‘Pepper has great virtues,’ said the sub-infirmarer, measuring out a spoonful from the flask. ‘Come back later,’ he directed, as he tipped it into Brother Archie’s compliant mouth, ‘and you can have some clove decoction. And take care. If you get out of breath, you should sit down till it is passing off. I was telling Brother Dickon the same thing,’ he added, seeing argument in his patient’s eye, ‘so you may be reminding one another of it.’

‘Aye, right,’ said Archie. He adjusted his black scapular and got to his feet. ‘Thanks for that, Brother Euan.’ He nodded to the waiting friars and to Gil, and picked his way out. Brother Euan straightened up and looked at Gil. ‘Is it urgent?’ he asked. ‘Only there is these fellows,’ he indicated his patients, ‘and I must be checking on Brother James.’

‘I was hoping for a word wi Brother James,’ Gil said.

‘Oh.’ Brother Euan pulled at his ear. ‘No so easy, maybe. Come ben, we’ll see if he’s improved at all.’

The inner chamber was also warm, with a fire burning in the grate. Thin daylight came in at the window and showed a kist, two or three stools, and two plank cots like the one Gil had slept in last night; in one of these the Infirmarer lay, propped on a hard backboard, and beside the fire, legs stretched comfortably to the blaze, sat Euan Campbell. As Gil stepped in he scrambled to his feet, an ingratiating grin on his face.

‘Maister!’ he said. ‘I came for a word wi Brother Euan here, like you were saying, but he’s as busy, what wi the fire. Minding the Infirmarer, the poor man, is the most help I can be for him. You see how he is.’

‘I do,’ said Gil, studying the sick man. He lay unmoving, limp against the supporting board, eyes half open, his breathing rough and rapid, and did not respond even when Brother Euan touched his shoulder and spoke to him. ‘Sweet St Giles, how long’s he been like this?’

‘Since afore Terce, maybe,’ said Brother Euan. ‘He was fine after the fire, for all he was so distressed, but when we were all to be rising for Terce I found him like this. We were moving him down here when we set up after the Office.’ He gestured about him to indicate his temporary quarters. ‘I’ve dosed him wi what I can find in the kitchen, but valerian would be the best thing and that’s hardly a kitchen herb.’

‘Can Euan no go into the town for you?’ Gil offered, with faint malice. ‘If you gave him a list he could call at the apothecary. Or maybe the Infirmarer at one o the other houses would help.’

‘I was never thinking of that,’ said Brother Euan. ‘It would be a big help. I could be making up a list, easy, and Brother Edward would give us coin for it.’ He bent to his superior and shook the old man’s shoulder more firmly. ‘Brother James! James! Wake up, man!’