Friend & Foe (3 page)

He let his quarry drop, and winked across at Harry. ‘Show this guidwife out, and send her safely home.’

The physick wife was pleased. For it was fit and proper she should have a convoy, and a bonny one, at that. She let the soldier take her arm and help her cross the bridge, careful at the middle, where the planks were loose, and she almost slipped. He saw her safe, and smiled at her. ‘What is it that they call you, then?’

The physick wifie preened. ‘Alison. It’s Alison.’

‘Now that’s a bonny name.’

Chapter 3

First Light

Four miles south at Kenly Green the servants brought the May to cheer Hew Cullan’s house. The lass threw back the shutters to admit the sun, stippling grey stone windowsills in pink and yellow stripes. She set her master’s breakfast table out in the great hall: manchet bread and butter, coddled eggs and milk. A little pot of primroses to welcome in the spring fetched warmth and freshness to the dark green cloth. The tower house wanted light. It had seen more cheer when Matthew was alive, though he had lived secluded with his daughter Meg, while Hew was off in France. Meg had made its beating heart, had kept the cold months warm with cinnamon and gingiber, and cooled the summer haze with lavender and rose. Once Meg had left to marry, and the old man died, the heartbeat had been stilled. Meg had not returned there since her bairn was born. The kitchen shelves were crammed with jars from her distillery, the gardens overblown; the apple racks were filled, the sweet plums spiced and bottled, left to gather dust.

A wife was wanted, plainly, to restore the place to life. Now that Hew was master, living at the tower, he barely made a home of it, extending to the house the same reserved politeness he had shown its servants, speaking to his tenants there as if they were his guests. For all that, he turned out to be a canny host, for he did not neglect the business of the land. He made the luckless miller’s son a present of a pig, that left the miller’s widow squealing in dismay, and the miller’s children squealing in delight. When winter came in hard, he saw that no one starved.

The house was quiet now, for strangers seldom called, and those who did were
unco
, sinister or serious. Once, it was the crownar came, the sheriff Andrew Wood, crafty as the rabbit they had served up in a pie. The crownar had a look about him shook you to the bones, and left behind a taste so sour that you would not be hurrying to ask him back for more. The shakebuckler he brought wi’ him was left to stand on watch, and ne’er a scrap nor drop of drink allowed to pass his lips, that made a body thankful not to work for
him
. After, Hew had gone abroad, through far-flung fields and foreign wars, to a town called Ghent. He fetched hame wi’ a soldier laddie – Robert Lachlan was his name – bonny, braw and bold and full of brag and crack, that livened up the place. The lassies sulked for weeks when Robert Lachlan left.

Only one such came by now, and that was Master James, the nephew of the grand reformer at the Haly Trinity, who breathed his gloom and hell smoke thick upon the town. Hew asked him here for Nicholas, he said, ‘
to cheer him up
.’ The three men talked for hours on things they read in books, though precious little comfort to be found in them. So she had telt the cook; the cook had said, more exercised and expert in such things, that yon was brought to Nicholas to mak him ripe for death, and doubtless, he prepared for it, for he was frail enough. Three husbands she had buried, so she ought to ken. Nicholas Colp was Hew’s old friend, librarian and secretar. He laboured under strain of a sair afflicting sickness, though ye couldna fault him for it; he did not complain. He rarely came below, but lived up in the library, wrapped up in his paper mantle, wanner than a ghost. He was dying, then. Even Doctor Locke, who never spoke a straight word where a wrangled one would do, had telt them plain and simply, ‘
It will not be long
.’

‘He is waiting, you see,’ the cook prophesied gloomily. ‘Once Nicholas lies cold, the maister will away. He will not bide here, at the house.’ And Master Hew grew so remote, so quiet and subdued, there was a steady rumour he was turning to the kirk. His father, had he kent of it, would start up from his sepulture, for that
was not the purpose he intended for his son; his father was no founder or supporter of reform. Yet when they dared to ask him for a feast at Yule, with carol songs and dances set to fiddles in the barn, Hew readily agreed to it, and answered with a smile, and that would set the Melvilles spinning in their turn. Hew kept his counsel close. He had sent them down a hogshead, but he had not come himself.

The serving lass returned with collops of cold beef, to find the hall abandoned and the table bare. Her master had gone up to breakfast in the library, dropping crumbs and smearing butter over his best books.
Kittill as a bairn
, the weary lassie sighed. However long she schooled him, he would never learn.

‘The world is light and lunatic.’ Hew broke the loaf in two, and gave one half to Nicholas, who was perched upon a high stool at his writing desk, adding annotations to the margin of his page. Nicholas was making a vernacular translation of George Buchanan’s dialogue on the law of kingship,
De Iure Regnis apud Scotos Dialogus
, at his friend’s request. Hew had sought to occupy him through those dark wracked hours from which he found no rest; he had no personal interest in the finished text, which he could read as easily and well in the original. And though Buchanan’s warnings were offensive to the king, who had never taken kindly to the censure of his tutor, it could scarcely matter here. If Giles Locke’s last predictions were correct – and it was rare enough for the doctor to commit himself – Nicholas would not live out the year. By giving him a purpose, Hew hoped to prove Giles wrong.

‘Hmm? How so?’ Nicholas was used to such incursions. He fished out a crumb of bread, which had fallen in his ink pot, with the blunt end of his pen and a mild air of reproof.

‘All of them, a-Maying,’ grumbled Hew. ‘Frivolous and furious with love. The lasses, up at dawn, and out into the fields, have come home giddy-headed, and with muddy feet. I ask them to fetch butter, and they bring me buttercups, or whatever they may cry
them, those curdle-coloured flowers. Even James Melville – our ain honest James – is marrying today, and his uncle has resolved to treat us to a homily, upon the marriage state, as soon as they are come home from the grand Assembly. The world whirls mad with love, and skips a frantic jig, and none but you and I stay scathless and untuned to it.’

The laughter in his tone drowned out a darker note, for Hew had been reflective and withdrawn these last five months. He had taken up a room in St Salvator’s College, where he now spent half the week, an arrangement to which he had once been bitterly opposed. He gave lectures on the law, spoke the Latin grace, and took supper on a Thursday of mutton, sops and prunes, with the phlegmatic mathematician Bartie Groat.

In his spare hours, he resorted to St Mary’s on the South Street, where he had embarked upon a course of ancient languages – Sanskrit, Chaldee, Hebrew, Greek – under the instruction of James and Andrew Melville, from which he brought home copious reams of script for Nicholas to copy out, in a careful hand. And therein, he told Nicholas, of these contorted languages, were mysteries enough to last him for the while.

Nicholas was not deceived. He had known the world for long enough and suffered too acutely there to fail to know a man who had a troubled conscience, or to suppose that with such work Hew’s spirit might be quelled. He sensed that Hew had lost both head and heart, and sent his quiet sympathies, to one who like himself loved recklessly and hopelessly and who, through no grave fault, found blood upon his hands.

Hew wiped butter from his knife, and tucked it in his belt. ‘Now, I must be gone. Today there is a contest at the butts, in honour of the May, between our college archers and the students from St Leonard’s. I am called to judge.’

‘You might look in on Meg’s physick garden as you make your way,’ Nicholas suggested.

‘Aye, and why is that?’

‘No reason, but for solace of an early summer’s day, to see the sweet herbs flower.’

Hew sensed a deeper purpose lay behind the words. But Nicholas had closed his eyes, and he would not be drawn. Since he had seen his friend fall headlong into danger there, he no longer shared the substance of his dreams.

‘Go, you will be late. Your archers will be waiting for you. I am done with kings,’ he referred to the Buchanan, ‘and by your leave and grace, I intend to rest a while, before I turn to tyranny. You will find me wrestling with it, when you next return.’

‘As I hope.’ Hew hesitated, ‘You will still be here?’

‘Where else would I be?’

There were two paths from the walkway built around the house; one passing by the stable block up to the beaten track, the other to the gardens, through a walk of trees. To the west of Kenly Water both paths crossed and merged, and followed by the burn in its steady slow meanderings, until it reached the dam. On a morning such as this, when the haar had lifted and the rose began to bloom, it was no hardship, Hew decided, to take the garden path. He wandered through the boughs of yew and holly trees, the rowan and the ash, watching over all with ancient powers restorative, their histories extended long into the past. From the orchards on the south side came the hum of bees, sipping at the cups of the cherry and the plum, and the scent of apple blossom, faintly on the breeze. Beyond the kitchen gardens, with salad greens and roots, and rows of beans and cabbages, strawberries and leeks, the physick garden slept in the shelter of high walls, the cool house and distillery, where Meg had made her remedies from summer herbs and flowers. Hew opened up the doorway through the garden wall, and found his sister, barefoot, in a bed of leaves.

She looked as she had looked when he returned from France, expecting a bit lass, to find a grave grown woman, wild and dark and strange. Hew stopped short and shy of her, a shadow forged of mist
and sunlight, dancing in the grass. Only when she spoke to him did she seem flesh and blood.

‘Hew. What brings you here?’ The question he should put to her.

‘Nicholas,’ he said. ‘I know not how, he knew that you would come today. He must have second sight.’

Meg took his answer seriously. ‘He has. For he knows me better, than I know myself. I had not meant to come.’ Already, she was pulling on her shoes, twisting up her hair to tuck into her cap. Hew felt he had disturbed her, stolen something from her, in her natural state.

‘He sees beyond this world, since he is balanced in his frailty so close to the brink of it.’

This simple explanation made no sense to Hew. Nicholas had premonitions, which his friend dismissed as bodily afflictions crept upon the mind, to mortify the spirit, as they bound the flesh. Nor would he allow that Nicholas was close enough to parting from this life, when he himself was not prepared or willing yet to part with him. But Nicholas possessed a subtle power of sympathy, an imaginative force, which allowed him to transcend and see into the heart of things. It was Nicholas who gave instruction how Meg’s garden should be kept, to give a perfect harmony of wildness and intent. Nicholas had kept the garden, as he knew Meg wanted it; his heart had felt the moment when she would return to it. As Nicholas grew more detached, more distant from the physical, the more he came to know, and understand the world.

Meg said, ‘I have come too far and I have stayed too long.’

‘Have you come alone?’

The question was a delicate one, and Hew pursued it cautiously. Meg suffered from the falling sickness. It was unthinkable that Giles would let her out alone, to tramp through morning dew, at dawn, to catch her death, and equally unthinkable that he would hold her back.

‘Giles sent Paul,’ confided Meg. ‘We parted at the barley field, once the sun was up. I came out for the morning dew, and felt my heart was grening then to come back to the garden here, and see how it was kept.’

‘Nicholas has kept it for you. Has he kept it well?’ Her brother smiled at her.

‘He has kept it perfectly. There is a careful order to it, patiently disposed and gentle in its touch, that nature does not feel the hand by which she has been led, and is content to settle under its restraint. But at this time of year, there is so much to be done. The broom buds to be bottled, waters to be stilled; seeds and winter plantings brought out from their glass, all this month and next to gather in the herbs. It is too much for Nicholas.’

‘Then you must come and see to it.’

‘I cannot bring my child with me,’ Meg said, with a sigh, ‘nor leave him long behind.’

‘For certain, he must come,’ pressed Hew. ‘Wherefore should he not?’

‘The road is rough and steep for him. It is too far to come. Besides which, things are different now. There is no turning back.’

Meg seemed so pale and sad, her brother was perplexed. ‘How does the child?’ he asked.

To his relief she broke into a smile, warming her wan face.

‘Matthew is quite perfect. We have loosed his swaddling, for the summer months. His sapling limbs spin furiously, wild as any plant. He is the bright flower of my heart, and the very apple of his father’s eye. By now, he will be breakfasting. He will have an egg. He will wriggle in a napkin, on his father’s lap, striving with a small fat fist to snatch at Giles’ spectacles, while his father reads to him, in Latin and in Greek, and fails to notice milk sops in his hair and beard, and Canny Bett looks in on them, to tut and roll her eyes. He will not want his Minnie for a while.’

Hew laughed at this. ‘Does Giles truly read to him in Latin and in Greek?’

‘In equal measure, both, to see to which he is more naturally inclined. I sometimes think he looks upon us both as an experiment. Is it so wrong to feel . . .’

‘Wrong to feel what?’

‘It is no matter,’ Meg retracted. ‘I have been confined and wintered far too long. I had forgotten quite how much I miss the garden here. Now the hours move on, and I must go back.’

‘I will take you,’ promised Hew. He let discretion veil her tears, and went back to the house, to see about a horse.

To Meg, Hew lent a fine red roan, while he rode on Dun Scottis, who had spent the morning slumbering in peace, and showed no sign of waking to the summer day. At best, the horse was sluggish, and at worst, recalcitrant.

‘I don’t know why you suffer him,’ said Meg.

‘Because he is a friend. And he wants the exercise, whatever he may think.’

‘He is a thankless friend.’

‘The most persistent kind.’