Turn of the Tide (28 page)

Agnes was equally firm. ‘I have looked after all your bairns and you before them. If I can’t be trusted to watch them for a ween of days, I don’t know who can.’

‘You see?’ Munro, thinking of what his mother had said, risked rebuff by catching Kate around the waist and spinning her like the top he had once bought for Robbie. Strands of her
hair escaped from her cap, the pomander that dangled from a ribbon at her belt swinging wildly. Dizzy, she collapsed against him and he wrapped his arms around her. Lest she took flight he said
nothing more, only began to draw circles on her back with the tip of one finger, while with his other hand he stroked her hair.

It took Kate three evenings to unpick the pearls which dusted the mitred sleeves of the dress that Mary had sent, that she might re-use them on the bodice, which she pinned and
tucked and corsetted and re-cut into a long, narrow point. The remainder she set aside for outlining the waist and trimming a new cap. She added a double ruff to the shoulders and a hanging
oversleeve that came far past the end of her fingers. The timely arrival of a pedlar allowed her to buy a set of tiny silver buttons to match the lattice-work that trimmed the full skirt. Daringly,
she altered the neckline; the décolletage softened somewhat by a lace frill. Even so, Agnes sniffed when she saw it and Kate herself, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, wondered if
she had perhaps cut it a little too fine. When it was done, they took it to Mary to let her see the result.

It was the first time that Kate had ridden out since Anna’s death and she betrayed her nervousness in every twitch of the reins. But lifting her face to the sun and relishing the breeze
that ruffled her hair, she relaxed. The horse Midnight having been sold, she rode the one that Munro had bought the previous autumn, its coat, now that it had shed the winter shagginess and had
been both well fed and well groomed, gleaming copper in the sunlight. The newly fashioned dress, carefully wrapped, straddled the saddle in front of her.

Mary was complimentary, ‘I knew fine you’d make a job of it,’

Kate revolved, her fingers slipping to the lace at her chest.

‘And don’t worry about that neckline. They have been lower before and I dare say will be so again, but you have nothing to fear from the sight of your throat. Come closer that I may
see the buttons.’

It was the fourth week of April when a pedlar brought the news that the King’s fleet was expected within days. Munro left immediately to ride to Edinburgh to seek
accommodation, contracting to take two rooms on the third floor of a house on Merlyon’s Wynd. His first thought, though a mite optimistic, had been to try the High Street, perhaps even to
stretch to a balcony. But generous as his mother was, her money hadn’t been any match for that of the lords and earls who flooded into Edinburgh to await the return of the King and his young
bride, and who competed for lodgings to match their station.

‘We are lucky to get even these,’ he said as he led Kate down the narrow wynd and up the flight of stone steps to the low door. She ducked to enter, rubbing her finger against one of
the iron diamonds that studded the dark oak, noting the sharpness of the point, not yet blunted from repeated painting. Inside, they climbed up a stair that clung to the wall, emerging onto an open
landing with timber rails and a pitched roof. A second stair dog-legged up to an even smaller doorway set in the corner, the timber treads creaking and groaning as they climbed so that she
said,

‘No risk of surprise visitors then.’

The door opened straight into the main chamber, which ran the full depth of the house. A narrow window at the far side, set in a triangular alcove, spilled a shard of sunlight across the centre
of the floor. Munro waited, saliva flooding his mouth, as Kate leant her elbows on the stone sill, pressing her nose against the glass. She moved to the bedchamber and swung the door back and
forwards. It was made of broad planks about eight inches wide, curiously put together: on the one side the planks set vertically, on the other horizontally.

‘Why d’you think . . .’ she began, sliding her thumb up the edge.

‘It’s to avoid warping.’ He wondered if she concentrated on the door to save commenting on the rooms.

And then she was beside him, linking her arms around his waist. ‘We are here. That is what matters and I don’t expect to spend over long inside. She moved to the bed and pressed down
firmly on the centre of the mattress, then pulled back the coverlet to examine the sheets. ‘Or not by day, at least. It doesn’t sag and the sheets are clean. What more do we
need?’

Munro woke first. Daylight slipped into their bedchamber like a wraith: grey and insubstantial, filtered through the grime and soot that coated the outside of the windowpanes.
He had little idea of the time and lay without moving, allowing his mind to drift. Beside him Kate stirred, then slid from the bed to go to the chamberpot, tucked into the corner behind a wooden
screen. He stretched and yawned, lying back against the pillows, his hands behind his head. As she moved to the window her hair, caught in a caul, curled and sprung on her back, rich blue-black
against the white of her shift. He travelled the outline of her body, past the narrowing of her waist and the spread of her hips, need rising in him. ‘Kate?’

She turned and lifted her arm to push a strand of hair from her eyes, her shift tightening against her breast.

‘There aren’t cattle to feed, nor lambs to check, nor bairns to distract . . .’ He heard her breathing quicken, ‘And I’m not hungered, or not for food, the
now.’

When they woke again, though the light hadn’t altered, noise from the High Street surged through the close, the volume rising and falling in waves. Kate lay, her head
tucked into Munro’s shoulder, one arm thrown across his chest. In the background expected sounds: the rumbling of cartwheels on the cobbles, the creaking of axles, the click-clack of wooden
pattens, a pedlar, calling his wares up and down the street. The scuffling and cursing as stallholders set up for the day: flinging back shutters on the lucken-booths, dragging tables onto the
street, hanging bells in doorways. A jangle of accents and languages: Scots, French, Gaelic, even the occasional burst of English. Kate sensed an extra excitement.

She shook Munro.

He muttered and turned and sat up, rubbing his eyes. ‘What is it?’

‘The noise. It may be nothing but . . .’

‘Of course there’s noise. This isn’t Broomelaw.’

‘There are the noises I looked for, but it doesn’t sound . . . she cocked her head to one side and searched for a word to describe her feeling. ‘It’s the
voices.’

He reached up to pull gently on a curl that had escaped from her caul. ‘You didn’t expect to hear only Scots?’

She refused to be distracted. ‘It isn’t the languages. It’s . . .’

‘Intuition?’

‘You may lie all day if you please, but I’m for finding out what’s going on.’ She was out of bed, twisting her hair into a knot, stepping into the dress hanging over the
screen. ‘The King and Queen may have arrived.’

‘They won’t come without warning.’ He lay back, ‘James may have slipped away quiet, but he won’t return without suitable fanfare.’

She was struggling with her fastenings, so that Munro, taking pity, padded across the bare floorboards to tug at the strings, nipping her waist tight.

‘Forgiven?’ His breath was warm against her ear.

‘If you’re quick. For I’m not for waiting.’

Emerging into the wynd that led to Edinburgh’s High Street, Kate lifted her skirts high. Beside her, Munro lifted one eyebrow.

‘I won’t have my new gown ruined for the sake of a wee bit sight of my stockings. Or not at least till the Coronation is past.

‘It isn’t the stockings I’m looking at.’ His grin was wicked. ‘Rather the ankles.’ He brought his brows together in pretended thought. ‘Shapely still,
though I suspicion there may be a slight thickening. . . .’ He sidestepped, but not fast enough, as her foot flashed out and caught him neatly on the shin. He rubbed at the spot with his
other foot. ‘You didn’t warn me I might need the protection of my boots.’

‘You didn’t warn me I came to be insulted.’

‘Glad you came then?’

‘Maybe.’ She looked down at the cobbles dipping against the edge of the pavement, and with the toe of her shoe poked at the gutter, where a mess of vegetable peelings mingled with
the rotting remains of fish bones and wood ash. And among them the ribcage of a crow, his wing part splayed, slivers of white bone visible through the sodden feathers. His head was twisted to the
side, staring fixedly at the sky from the empty eye socket, the beak open as if for one last indignant squawk. Kate’s hand flew to her mouth. Not that she wasn’t used to the sight of a
dead bird. On the contrary, it was common enough on the open moorland, but this bird, unlike those at home, swiftly picked clean by other scavengers, had lain over long and maggots crawled at the
corner of its mouth.

‘Dust and dirt I expected, but not this glaur.’

‘It doesn’t say much for the street cleaners, I admit.’

Her eyes widened.

‘Don’t look so sceptical. There is a contract for the cleaning of all the paving. It’s to be kept smart till the royal entry is past. Maybe they haven’t got this far
yet.’

‘Or maybe they’ve no idea what clean is.’

As they emerged into the sunlight from the dimness of the close, Kate, courtesy of Mary’s thoughtfulness and her own skill with a needle felt perfectly at home amongst the crowds of
well-dressed ladies that paraded between the Castle and the Canongate and dallied at the stalls that lined the broad street. Fingering the nap of the velvet she hoisted the hem a little higher.

Munro slipped his arm around her waist, his fingers counting out the pearls that circled it. ‘Glad you came?’ he repeated.

Her answer: to lean into him as far as the width of her skirt would allow.

They sauntered towards the Tolbooth and she spent a happy hour browsing among the riot of colour that was the cloth market: the deep plums and reds and burgundy velvets, the tawny and gold
brocades, the blue and silver satins. She lingered longest at a stall piled high with bales of shot silks, irridescent at her touch. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have brought me,’ she
said, turning them backwards and forwards in the light.