The King's Corrodian (28 page)

‘There must be a link,’ Alys assented, ‘only we cannot find it.’

‘And your man thinks they’ve the wrong fellow locked away.’

‘He does,’ she agreed. ‘We both reckon he’s no one to use a knife, least of all to plan ahead enough to steal one out the kitchen and keep it hid.’

‘But the poor laddie,’ said Mistress Buttergask, tears in her eyes. ‘To be killed in his sleep like that, never knowing his end.’

‘Better than some, Bessie,’ said Rattray. ‘He’d been at his prayers, he’d confessed lately, he’d never ken it happened. No like thon fellow in Montrose.’

‘You keep talking about Montrose,’ she said, wiping her eyes with the linen she was working on. ‘What took you there, any road? I began to think you’d never come back.’

‘Never think that, you daft woman,’ he said with rough affection. ‘I’d a letter afore Yule there from a man o law at Montrose, concerning the will o one Skene o that place, asking did I ken the whereabouts o Andrew Rattray or his sister Margaret.’ Alys sat very still. ‘And since I reckon they’d be some kinna cousins to me, I writ back asking more detail. Found his answer waiting for me, and little advance it was, so I rade off to Montrose to see for mysel.’

‘But what was it about?’ Mistress Buttergask asked, round-eyed. ‘Why did you need to go there? Is it no a long ride?’

‘Fifty mile,’ he said, shrugging, and pushed the dog away with his foot again. ‘Away wi ye, it’s all done. All done! Turns out this Skene deceasit last autumn, was pulled out the harbour, took a peripneumony o the lungs, survived long enough to confess and make his will, and got his man o law to that rather than the priest.’

‘Och, yes, indeed!’ said Mistress Buttergask. Alys nodded her understanding. One’s man of law would write down one’s own wishes; a priest would set about persuading one to remember Holy Kirk, to the disadvantage of one’s own kin.

‘I’ve seen the document. Seems the lassie, Margaret, was his wife, and ran off, taking the bairn wi her. The will gied directions for the return o the conjoint fee and her dowry, and a bit for the bairn’s inheritance, and the rest to Andrew Rattray on condition he sees his sister right.’ He eyed Alys. ‘So what d’you ken o her, mistress?’

‘Me?’ she said, alarmed.

‘Aye, mistress, you. I saw your face change when I said how Skene dee’d. What way did you think he went?’

‘I ken nothing o the man,’ she parried, wondering how much to say. Mistress Buttergask leaned forward, giving her a significant look, so that she wondered if the other woman’s voices had spoken.

‘You can tell him, lassie,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell him.’

‘But what will you do now,’ Alys asked, avoiding the issue, ‘seeing Andrew Rattray’s dead?’

‘I’m none so certain,’ he said slowly, his attention still on her face. ‘Skene having predeceasit him, Andrew dee’d in possession o all that was left to him, but I’m assuming he made no will, and he’d already gied all his worldly goods to the Blackfriars, I’d suppose. It’s a nice question who it devolves upon, which I’d hope your man would turn his thoughts to, seeing he’s a man o law and all, I believe.’

‘Are you no a man of law yoursel, sir?’ she asked. ‘You’re knowledgeable in the subject.’

‘I studied it,’ he said. ‘So how far is she from here?’

‘You think she’s in Perth?’

‘I think she’s in Perth.’

‘You can tell him, lassie,’ said Mistress Buttergask again.

‘I’ve nothing to tell,’ she said. For it’s not my secret, she was thinking.

Rattray was still looking intently at her, and she hoped she was not blushing. He drew breath to speak, but Roileag scurried out from her mistress’s skirts growling, as quick footsteps in the other chamber heralded Jennet at the door.

The girl bobbed a general curtsy to all three, but said to Alys, ‘If you please, mem, Brother Michael is wishful to open the oven. He needs to get back for Compline, he says, and he thinks it’s about time.’

She jumped up, hoping her relief did not show too clearly.

‘Certainly!’ she said. ‘And Mistress Buttergask needs her kitchen cleared and all.’

‘There’s been wee noises coming out it,’ Jennet confided. ‘We’d as much trouble keeping the men from keeking in there to see what was at work.’

‘What kind of wee noises?’ Alys led the way out towards the kitchen, trying not to trip over the dog, who was clearly convinced there would be food involved.

‘Like something tapping? Or maybe like a branch tapping on the window, that kind o noise. No very loud. And sic a stink o burned meat!’

As Jennet had said, the kitchen was full of the smell of burned meat. Brother Michael was still on guard before the oven, staff in hand. When he saw Alys he visibly relaxed, and the group of people round him fell back a bit, one of the men laughing self-consciously as if he had been the most importunate about opening the door.

‘Cooled now,’ said Brother Michael.

‘Was there any smoke?’ she asked him, suddenly apprehensive. ‘Did anything—?’

‘Nothing to see,’ he said. ‘Heat, you felt that, the smell, no other outward sign.’ He gave her an approving look. ‘Open it up.’

‘Och, aye, open it up,’ said the man who had laughed. ‘Let’s see what sort o magic you worked, or whatever it was.’

‘There was no magic,’ said Brother Michael wearily.

‘Are we to see what’s happened, or no?’ demanded Rattray.

The Franciscan turned his shoulder on him and leaned on his staff, keeping the multitude at bay. Alys, taking a deep breath, got a grasp on the oven door and dislodged it. Flakes of paste fell away at her feet, and a waft of dark smoke emerged from the gap. One of the maidservants shrieked, and the other began muttering an
Ave
.

‘Oh, Rattray!’ said Mistress Buttergask. ‘What is it? What’s in there?’

Alys lifted the wooden door from its socket and set it aside. The burned-meat smell was even stronger now. Flapping her hands to clear the smoke, she peered into the cavity of the oven.

‘It hasn’t worked!’ she said in disappointment.

‘Look closer,’ said Brother Michael.

‘But there’s still—’ she began, then as the smoke cleared, ‘Oh! We need to get it out of there. Is there a shovel or the like?’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Need witnesses.’

‘Oh! Aye, you’re right.’ She stood aside. ‘Mistress? See what has happened?’

Mistress Buttergask came forward with reluctance, clutching her beads for protection, glanced warily into the oven, then leaned forward to look closer.

‘Oh, my!’ she said in amazement. ‘Saints preserve us, who’d ha thought it? It’s all burned up save the two bits at the ends.’

‘What?’ Rattray stepped up behind her, looking over her plump shoulder. ‘Well, I’ll be … and you really put nothing in there but the meat and a candle?’

‘And two trivets,’ Alys said. ‘Which are half melted.’ She found herself looking as proudly at the heap of ashes, the shrivelled fragments of meat and bone, the two twisted metal structures, as she had done at her very first meat pie.

‘Christ on a handcart,’ he said. ‘I’d never ha believed it if I’d no seen it mysel.’ He looked about him. ‘Here, you two, see what your mistress has wrought. Jockie, Ned, you get a look and all.’

‘Is there a shovel?’ Alys asked again, as Tam and Jennet elbowed one another to inspect the interior of the oven. ‘I’ll not use the bread-peel. The ash would cling to it. You’d never get it clean.’

After some searching the shovel was located by the back door, and a rake fetched from the hearth in the other chamber. Carefully, with much advice from Mistress Buttergask, Alys manoeuvred the fragments of her experiment onto the metal-edged blade of the shovel, raking round the floor of the dark cavity to be certain she had found everything. The smell of burned meat was almost overpowering, but she thought there was also a trace of the strange, sweetish smell she had noticed in Pollock’s house. Reminded, she looked closer at the oven floor, and realised that as well as the ash from the meat the bricks were coated in grease.

‘Aye,’ said Brother Michael when she commented. ‘Like your experiment yesterday.’

‘Is that all it is?’ said one of the maidservants as Alys drew the shovel out of the oven. ‘Just some burned meat? I thought it was some great work, maybe wi gold at the end o’t.’

‘Well, if it was to be gold, it’s no worked,’ said the man who had laughed.

‘It’s worked well,’ said Alys. ‘It’s done exactly what I hoped it might.’

‘Well!’ said Mistress Buttergask. ‘I still don’t see what you’ve proved wi’t, lassie, but if it’s what you hoped for I’m right glad of it.’

‘Let me set this down.’ Alys looked about her, and someone pushed a stool nearer for her to set the shovel on. She bent over it, poking among the ashes and lumps of material she had extracted. Brother Michael joined her, picked out the little dish the candle had stood on, now completely blackened, and isolated two twisted pieces of metal.

‘Is that your trivets, man?’ said Tam over Alys’s head. ‘St Peter’s balls, it’s as well you didny use the mistress’s great trivet here. They’s all melted.’

‘Like Pollock’s key,’ Alys commented.

‘Like the key. It’s successful,’ said Brother Michael. ‘No proof o what happened, a course, but proof o what might ha happened. Good work.’

She had the feeling this was not an encomium he bestowed lightly. She gave him a complicit smile, and said quietly, ‘It was all in the supervision, brother.’ Then, louder, ‘See, the meat has all burned up, save for the end parts, as you said, and the bone has burned and all.’ She turned one of the cindery lumps, and prodded the bone where it projected on one side. ‘That looks exactly like – like something we lifted in Pollock’s house,’ she observed, just preventing herself from identifying the fragment concerned. ‘The cloth has all burned away, even on the ends, though I wrapped it around carefully, but it’s only in the midst of the joint that the meat has caught.’

‘Aye,’ said Brother Michael.

‘So what do you have here?’ demanded Rattray. ‘Tell me again what went into the oven.’

‘Och, that’s a disappointment,’ said one of his men, and turned away as Tam began to rehearse the preparations they had made. Alys straightened up, and looked at Mistress Buttergask.

‘Might I beg the loan o a box, or a basin, or a wee poke? I’d like to take all this back to show to my husband.’ She put a hand on Brother Michael’s brown woollen sleeve. ‘And, brother, thank you for all your help. It’s been an education.’

He smiled at her, in an unaccustomed sort of way.

‘Been a pleasure. And an education, for me and all,’ he expanded hastily. Then, glancing at the darkening window of the kitchen, ‘I should go. The Red Bridge port.’

‘Aye, they’ll shut the port any time now,’ agreed Mistress Buttergask, returning with a green-glazed pottery basin. ‘Better get on your way, brother, and safe home.’

He nodded, delivered a perfunctory blessing, this time in Scots, and strode out. She thrust the basin at Alys and hurried to see him out, the dog scurrying at her heels. Alys carefully tipped the ashes and debris into the basin, making sure she had all the fragments.

‘So this proves,’ said Rattray, watching her, ‘that the man burned up, wi no harm to his house or the rest o his goods.’

‘No,’ she said, dusting the last flakes off the shovel, ‘but it proves it could have happened like that.’

‘Why?’ he said bluntly. ‘Why are you wishful to prove that?’

‘It’s a simpler explanation,’ she said. ‘Simpler is aye better, d’you not think?’

As always, it took far longer than she would have liked to get herself, her servants and the bowl of incinerated meat out of the house. Part of this delay was caused by her own offer to clean out the oven, which was refused firmly by Mistress Buttergask.

‘As if you could start a task like that at this hour!’ she exclaimed. ‘No, no, never concern yoursel, lassie, we’ll sort it the morn when it’s plenty time to dry after.’

Despite argument, she would not be persuaded, so Alys withdrew from the kitchen, to the clear relief of the rest of the household. Further delay was brought about by Sir Silvester, who led her back into the solar and demanded a complete rehearsal of what he had just seen.

‘You’re trying to show it could ha had a natural cause,’ he said when she had gone over the reasoning behind the trials, the procedure and the result.

‘That’s right,’ she agreed, wondering how he had failed to grasp this before.

‘Why?’

‘My husband doesn’t believe in witchcraft.’

‘Do you?’

She opened her mouth to say,
Of course not!
then closed it again and considered.

‘No,’ she said finally. ‘Not witchcraft as spells and cantrips and magic ointments. I have encountered … things I couldny explain. So has Gil,’ she added. ‘But neither one o us thinks it possible to kill someone at a distance by witchcraft. There needs to be a corporal agent.’

‘Does there, now?’ he said. She had the feeling he was laughing at her, and raised her chin defiantly. ‘Do you believe in the Deil?’

‘Of course I do!’ she said indignantly. ‘Any Christian must!’

‘So why could it no ha been the Deil carried the man away, same as Bessie saw?’

‘Did you ever hear of anyone else carried away like that?’ she countered. ‘I never have in this day. A hundred years or more ago, maybe, in stories, but no in our times. It could be what you saw was the man’s soul being carried off: we all ken that happens.’

‘I’m certain that’s the answer, Rattray,’ said Mistress Buttergask earnestly. ‘And it’s away less fearsome a thought, surely.’

‘Aye,’ he said. And then, abruptly, ‘Where does Margaret Rattray stay?’

She had been warned by the slight change in his expression.

‘I can tell you nothing o Margaret Rattray,’ she said.

‘Hah!’ he said. ‘Gil Cunningham’s well cled in his wife. Tell him I’ll gie mysel the pleasure and honour of calling on him the morn, if it’s convenient.’

‘I will, sir,’ she said, and rose to leave. Roileag jumped off Mistress Buttergask’s lap and began barking.

‘Bessie, can you no keep that wee beast quiet?’ Rattray asked, scooping the dog up and muzzling it again.

‘Och, she’s no so bad,’ said Mistress Buttergask, in defiance of the evidence. ‘Lassie, can I get a word wi ye?’