The Rough Collier (26 page)

‘She’s done what?’ demanded Phemie, as Joanna herself tottered out into the hall, arms outstretched, her bedgown falling away from her slender kirtled figure, and collapsed on the swept stone floor at Bel’s feet. ‘Alys, what has my mother done?’

She kept repeating this while the three of them contrived to get Joanna on to her feet and supported back to her own bed. Alys, chafing at one of the widow’s limp hands, finally had no option but to reply.

‘She has confessed, as Patey said, to poisoning Thomas Murray.’ The hand she clasped tightened convulsively. ‘I do not think she did it.’

‘Then why has she –? And why did you no tell us when you came up here? What are you at here? Whose side are you on, anyway?’

‘My husband’s,’ said Alys, as the first answer that came to her.

‘Aye, I suppose,’ said Phemie sourly. ‘And here I thought you were my friend.’

‘I hope I am,’ said Alys, flinching from this blow. ‘And Joanna’s, and Bel’s.’

‘Then why –?’ She stopped, and stared at Alys from the foot of Joanna’s bed. ‘You’re saying you don’t believe her? Why not? Why’s she still locked in chains if you don’t think it was her doing?’

‘She isn’t in chains, believe me. Do you think it?’ Alys countered.

‘No, but . . .’ Phemie stopped to consider this. Alys watched with interest, despite the awkwardness of the situation, recognizing that the other girl was putting her undoubted intelligence to work perhaps for the first time. ‘She’s my mother. I ken her mind, her way o’ working. I could never see her using her craft for that kind of purpose. You’re no family, you must have a reason for no thinking it.’

Bel crossed the chamber with a small cup in her hand, and offered it to Alys for Joanna. It held the familiar brown sticky cordial, with its scent of cough-syrup. Alys glanced across at the cupboard, to see the yellow-glazed pipkin she had encountered before sitting there with its cover askew. She sniffed the cordial again, trying to compare the smell with that on the flask Gil had brought home.

‘It’s her own store of the stuff,’ said Phemie roughly. ‘You’ve no need of suspecting Bel of trying to poison her.’

‘I know that.’ Alys raised Joanna’s head, and gave her a few sips of the stuff. ‘It was a good thought. Joanna, do you feel better now? Can you talk?’

Joanna pulled herself to a sitting position, but shook her head, putting one hand to her brow. Phemie watched her, frowning, and then said, ‘Why would my mother confess to something she’d no done?’

Bel turned to look at her sister, but made no sign. Alys waited for a moment, and said, ‘For a good reason, I’d assume.’

‘She was asking at me yestreen,’ said Joanna faintly. ‘After the others left for Lanark.’ She put her hand over her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the coverlet. ‘She asked me how the poison might ha’ got into Thomas’s flask, and I said I had no notion. Oh, say she never did it!’

‘Had you talked about it at all before that?’ Alys asked.

‘The old witch wouldny have it discussed,’ said Phemie. Bel tossed her head in disagreement, and Phemie added, ‘No that that stopped Raffie, o’ course, but Joanna was in here most of the time, so she never heard him, did you?’

‘No, I never,’ agreed Joanna wearily. ‘I tellt your mother how Bel brought us the flask that morning and how I put it in his scrip and never saw it again. Nor I never want to see it again neither,’ she added, with a flicker of that spirit she had shown before. ‘I’ll sell it and give the money to the poor. He was never an easy man, but he was my man, I never wanted him dead.’

‘Did she believe you?’ demanded Phemie.

‘I’ve no notion.’

This is getting me nowhere, thought Alys. She was about to ask another question when the shouting began outside. Socrates scrambled to his feet and put his paws up on the windowsill.

‘No again!’ said Phemie. ‘Is it another fight? They shouldny be up on the surface the now anyway.’ She strode across to the window as she spoke, and drew an indignant breath. ‘Would you believe it? There’s that fool Fleming in the place again, after Arbella told him no to come back here!’

‘Fleming?’ said Joanna apprehensively. ‘What’s he here for? Don’t let him –’

‘Fleming?’ repeated Alys, hurrying to look. ‘I had thought him dead by now!’

‘Never you worry,’ said Phemie. ‘Jamesie has him in hand. That’s what the shouting’s all about.’ She looked at her sister, and then at Joanna. ‘I’ll get a word wi’ Jamesie. You stay here,’ she instructed, and left the room, without glancing at Alys.

There was a knot of men by the small building Phemie had identified as the office. Several were colliers or surfacemen, caked with silvery mud and brandishing their tools. In their midst, Jamesie Meikle and David Fleming stood face to face, the man Simmie nodding at the priest’s back while Fleming shouted incoherently at the collier, pointing wildly at the office, at the little chapel, up at the house. As Alys watched through the window Phemie came into sight, clumping purposefully over the cobbles on her wooden soles, but the men seemed not to notice her.

There was a tugging at her sleeve, and Alys turned to find Bel at her elbow, gesturing urgently towards the door.

‘You want me to go too?’ she asked. The girl nodded, and indicated by more gestures that she would stay with Joanna.

‘You’ll likely can stop them getting to blows,’ said Joanna, with a confidence which Alys found touching, and craned unsteadily to see out of the window. ‘Oh, my, what’s Jamesie – oh, what will he do? Please, will you go and stop them?’

Jamesie Meikle was still trying to be reasonable. As Alys approached, he was saying, ‘Our mistress forbade you these policies last time you were here. You shouldny be on her land at all, let alone trying to search the office where the tallies and the accounts are kept. We’d be well within our duties to fling you in the burn and leave you –’

‘The law will support me,’ declared Fleming feverishly, ‘I’ll take the evidence to the Sheriff straight way, and he’ll see the right o’ my actions! I ha’ proof positive now of the witchcraft that’s being worked here, and one or all of these wicked women will –’

‘We’ll ha’ no more of that,’ said one of the colliers, hefting his mell.

‘And as for you, Simmie Wilson,’ continued Jamesie, ‘I’d ha’ thought you’d more sense than turn up here poking your nose where this glaikit sumph tells you.’

‘Sumph, is it?’ howled Fleming. Alys studied him anxiously; she was astonished to see him on his feet, but it was clear his recovery was anything but complete. The man was trembling and sweating, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, his clothes hanging from him as if he had lost half his weight. She could smell the pear comfits from where she stood.

‘Aye,’ Simmie was saying, ‘but I found what he said I’d find, which is proof o’ witchcraft, Jamesie Meikle, so what do you think of that?’

‘Proof? Aye, proof of your own soft-headedness,’ said someone.

‘There’s all the candles gone from the chapel,’ protested Simmie, ‘just as Davy here said I’d find, though he put new ones just the other week –’

‘Is that what Agnes Brewster’s been burning?’ said another voice, to laughter.

‘Well, what d’you call this?’ said Simmie, goaded. He fetched a bundle out of the breast of his doublet and opened it out into an appalled spreading silence. Between the coal-blackened shoulders Alys saw as clearly as any of them what lay within the sacking. Four little mommets, clumsily modelled of white wax, clad in scraps of cloth and pierced with thorns through heart or head, three with bare crumbling waxen legs, the fourth in petticoats. Her heart sank. This was definite proof of witchcraft. But who – which of the people here – had made and hidden these?

For perhaps five breaths the silence hung, and then incongruously a lark burst into song over their heads. As if it was a signal, the man nearest to Simmie struck out, knocked the little figures to the ground, and stamped on them with a muddy boot, saying savagely, ‘Where’s yer proof now, Simmie Wilson? Show that to the Sheriff, won’t ye?’

The other men began shouting round him. Fleming threw himself forward with a cry of rage, scrabbling in the dirt for the fragments of wax, and Phemie, white and trembling, seized Jamesie Meikle’s elbow saying under the noise, ‘He made that up! Surely he made that up, he must ha’ made those things himself!’

Meikle turned to look at her, as some of the men laid large rough hands on Fleming, and Simmie held the sacking wrapper up above the mêlée saying indignantly, ‘No I never, I found them, they were up yonder hid in the thatch!’

‘Up where?’ demanded Phemie, but Alys, who had seen where he pointed, stepped back away from the group and set off round the end of the house and up the hill, the dog at her heels. One for Thomas Murray, she was thinking, one for David Fleming. And the others must be – yes, they must represent Gil and herself, newly constructed, the immediate reason for the absence of candles in the little chapel. And Gil had that terrifying dream. She shivered, crossed herself, and turned uphill, making for the
new over
wyndhous
which Arbella had accounted for so meticulously. For the first time, she had begun to consider that there might be some foundation for Fleming’s persistent ideas, and it was an unpleasant thought.

Halfway up the slope, she found the two men who had accompanied her from Belstane were beside her.

‘What’s ado, mem?’ asked Steenie, still wiping ale from his mouth. He acknowledged Socrates’ greeting and added, ‘Davy Fleming was like to die yesterday, and now he’s up here shouting at the colliers, is it a miracle right enough?’

‘More like the fasting has helped him,’ said Alys, pausing to look over her shoulder at the group in the yard. As she watched Phemie spoke, distracting the men, and Fleming seized the chance and ducked away from the grasping hands round him, slipped into the colliery office and slammed the door. By the time the sound floated up to them Jamesie Meikle had already deployed three men to guard the little building, and was confronting a belligerent Simmie.

‘And what’s the stushie about?’ asked Henry at her other elbow.

‘Fleming has been searching the place for signs of witchcraft,’ said Alys.

‘Witchcraft?’ said Henry in alarm. ‘Here, if Beatrice Lithgo’s taken up for a witch, where am I to get supplies for dosing the horses?’

‘Embro?’ suggested Steenie. ‘Where are we going, mem?’

‘Here,’ said Alys, pausing before the wide, low structure of the upper shaft-house. ‘Simmie said he found something here, hidden in the thatch, and I wondered if there was anything else to find.’

‘Proof?’ asked Henry sharply. ‘Simmie Wilson wouldny ken proof if it bit him on the bum, any more than our Patey. Who I’ve sent back to Belstane, by the way, mistress.’

‘This could have been proof,’ admitted Alys, ‘but one of the colliers destroyed it.’ She shivered. Her skin was still crawling at the sight of the little figures, brief as it had been, with their tatters of clothing and their pierced bodies.

‘Colliers is odd folk,’ pronounced Steenie. ‘But who’s he naming for the witch? Who’d hide something up here as far from the house? What are we seeking anyways?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alys. ‘I want to look for a hiding-place, but there may not be anything left in it, if Simmie found it.’

Both men looked at her a little oddly, but they began to inspect the thatch obligingly enough, looking under the eaves at the bundled ends of the heather-stems and prodding as far up the roof as either could reach. Alys ordered the dog to sit at the doorway, stepped inside and peered up into the shadows at the purlins which supported the thatch, trying to ignore the shaft gaping blackly at the centre of the hut. There seemed to be nowhere to hide anything; the clay-daubed hurdles rose to meet the roof-frame, with no ledge or wall-plate at the top, and she could see nothing like a shelf or niche under the thatch. Up in the crown of the roof there was the ruffling sound she had heard before, exactly like feathers, like a bird settling its plumage. She turned towards the winding-gear, and something fell from the rafters in silence and swooped at her face, missing her as she ducked and exclaimed in terror, sailed on out of the doorway and up over the hillside, the dog in delighted pursuit.

‘What’s up?’ demanded Henry, arriving with Steenie as she straightened up. ‘What made ye squeal, lassie? Mistress,’ he corrected himself. ‘What was yon?’

‘It was a owl,’ said Steenie, looking back over his shoulder. ‘Did it hurt ye, mem?’

‘No,’ she said shakily, her heart hammering, ‘no, it gave me a fright, that’s all. It came down from nowhere, out of the roof.’ Yet another of the creatures. And no wonder Gil had a bad dream, she thought, after the same thing happened to him.

‘Out of the roof? Where was it perching?’ asked Steenie.

Henry nodded. ‘A good thought, Steenie lad. What was it standing on?’ He swung himself up on to the frame of the winding-gear and peered along under the roof-tree. ‘I see it – there’s a cross-beam. Now can I reach it?’

‘Have a care!’ said Alys involuntarily, as he stretched out an arm, but he drew back, with a wary look at the rope disappearing down the shaft, swung himself on to the ground and tried again from the other side of the structure.

‘Aye,’ he said, groping along the beam. ‘I’d say it roosts here. Foot of the shaft must be littered wi’ its pellets. And what’s this? Cloth?’ He came down again, holding his find by one corner, and looked at Alys. ‘We’ll take it into the light, mistress, but are ye for opening it up?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She took the thing from him, and stepped out into the daylight to inspect it. Socrates returned from his pursuit of the owl and sat down, tongue hanging out, as she did so. The cloth bag was as big as the palm of her hand, very dirty though not troubled by owl droppings, and seemed to be of silk damask as if it contained a relic. She untied the cord and drew out a swaddled bundle; both men were watching intently, and Steenie crossed himself as she began to unfold the brown linen wrappings.

The object at their centre was not readily recognizable. It was longer and thicker than Alys’s thumb, yellowish, wrinkled and waxy. She stared at it for a moment, and said, ‘Is it a root of some herb? A mandrake, perhaps? I never saw one.’