Time and Tide Read online

  Time & Tide

  Shirley McKay was born in Tynemouth but now lives with her family in Fife. At the age of fifteen she won the Young Observer playwriting competition, her play being performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. She went on to study English and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews before attending Durham University for postgraduate study in Romantic and seventeenth-century prose. An early treatment for her first novel Hue & Cry was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. Her second novel, Fate & Fortune was published in 2010. Time & Tide is the third Hew Cullan Mystery.

  Time & Tide

  A Hew Cullan Mystery

  Shirley McKay

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2011 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  Copyright © Shirley McKay 2011

  The moral right of Shirley McKay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-043-2

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgement

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. An Ill Wind

  Chapter 2. The Hidden Catch

  Chapter 3. A Miller’s Tale

  Chapter 4. The Drowned Man

  Chapter 5. Sisters in Arms

  Chapter 6. A Glass Perspective

  Chapter 7. The Dolfin

  Chapter 8. Copin

  Chapter 9. Big Fish

  Chapter 10. A Miller and his Son

  Chapter 11. A Dry Drowning

  Chapter 12. Kenly Mill

  Chapter 13. Ignis Sacer

  Chapter 14. A Wrong Foot

  Chapter 15. In the Body of the Kirk

  Chapter 16. A Gift Horse

  Chapter 17. Mal de Mer

  Chapter 18. A Man for Hire

  Chapter 19. De Windmolen

  Chapter 20. Soldiers of Fortune

  Chapter 21. The Spinsters of Ghent

  Chapter 22. A Changed Man

  Chapter 23. The Flemish Miller’s Gift

  Chapter 24. A Beating Heart

  Chapter 25. A Welshman’s Hose

  Acknowledgement

  With grateful acknowledgement to James Watson of Culross, the Scotland–Veere Organisation, Esther van Engelen of the Romantik Auberge de Campveerse Toren (open as an inn for the last 500 years); and especially to Peter Blom, municipal archivist of Veere and Paul Veenhuijzen of Earlshall, for keeping alive the spirit of the old entente.

  Thanking thame maist hertfullie of their gude ancient lufe . . . Beseking thame that they will continew thair gude will towart us . . . the maist mutual ancient lufing affection quhilkis we haif born aither towartis utheris of auld tymes.

  Campfeir [to] the gude tounes of Scotland, 1578

  Prologue

  St Andrews, Scotland

  October 1582

  Before he learned his letters, Jacob read the wind. He could not recall a time when its patterns made no sense to him, clearer than his catechism, whispered as a child.

  – What is thy only comfort, in life and in death?

  – That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own.

  Jacob read the wind, and cursed it when it dropped to lank and irksome stillness. When it turned against him, he was unprepared. It was not as if he had not understood. He knew precisely what this wind required of him, yet he could not rise to it. The waters came at last to blast upon the quietness, and Jacob knew, for certain, he was not his own.

  – I am not my own, but belong to my saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.

  He had no hope of Christ in the bowels of the black ocean. It caught the little bark and tossed it like a winnower, blowing dust and thundering, threshing out the storm.

  Joachim had been the last to die. He had died before the storm broke. And Jacob had stitched Joachim into a folded sheet of sailcloth, weighed down with lead shot, before tipping the dead boy into the sea. Jacob’s hands were thick and woolly, like a pair of gloves. He had struggled to sew up the seam. It was a blessing that the boy had died before the storm. Jacob saw his mother still, weeping by the river Leie in Ghent. He knew the family well, and had given her his handkerchief. But Joachim’s mind had turned, like all the rest. Jacob had restrained him in the hold, and all through the night had listened to his howls. The pity was it was not Joachim’s fault. Jacob had allowed the boy to gorge himself on sweetmeats, leavening his last hours with the captain’s bread. He heard him howling still, though Joachim had been dead for several days.

  Jacob had acquired the captain’s cabin, where he wrote to Beatrix after Joachim died. It took a little time, but he had time enough. Tell Joachim’s mother that, he wrote, and crossed it out. He knew that Beatrix would make sure that Lotte learned to read, and so he wrote the child a letter of her own, and sealed them both with wax from the captain’s candle stub. He found a wooden pepper pot, and placed the scripts inside, together with his book. The letter of its creed he had by heart. He let the candle drip to make it tight around the bung, carving the direction on the surface with his pocketknife, Beatrix van der Straeten, begijnhof sint Elisabeth te Gent. He considered for a moment whether he should set the casket on the open sea, or keep it in the stronghold of the ship, closed in the ocean’s grasp. In the end, he kept it there, knowing it was all the same. He placed it in the captain’s kist among the listless instruments, and lying on the captain’s blanket, Jacob closed his eyes. Better to die quiet, and the ship might let him shelter for a while. He thought of Joachim sleeping on the seabed, where the little fish swam silver through the slack seams of his shroud, making streams of water from his eyes. He thought of Beatrix, fearless, with no breath of hope. He cursed the airless ocean, weeping for the sands. Yet when the wind picked up, he was not prepared for it. He climbed up on the half deck and cried out, choked and raging, not ready yet to yield so easily to death.

  Jacob found the wheel, with little hope of turning it. Tobias was dead, and Jacob on his own could not hope to guide the vessel through the storm. Though he read the wind as clearly as a book, he had never been a mariner. He could not take in the spret sail, lower the foresail, bear up the helm or haul the tack aboard, or any of the things he had heard the first mate cry. He no longer felt his fingers in the wrenching wind. Vast waters bellowed, engulfing the deck, and Jacob was knocked from his feet. He clung to the mizzen mast, sodden and blind. He could neither veer nor steer her, rocking through the storm. She was cradled in a trough, where she drank in sheets of water, lapping up from either side. Jacob, drenched and sobbing, sought to scoop them out. He could not clear the decks as fast as she could fill them; and so at last he climbed, exhausted, to the stern, preferring not to drown inside the body of the ship. Yet he found he could not drop into the blackness of the sea. He turned the wheel again, and prayed his old adversary the wind to be a little kind to him. And for a moment, God – or was it yet the wind? – appeared to hear his prayer; the hull began to roll and the fickle gusts rebounded, taking up the sail. The ship was blasted on the waves and blown about its course, with a sudden list and lurching that washed the water out. Jacob gave thanks; to God, after all. And it was Christ his saviour, as Jacob understood
, who lit the castle ramparts shadowed on the rock. Far off in the distance, he was coming in to land.

  It took a while before he realised what the shadows meant. He came to shallow waters, in the darkness of the storm. The landing craft had long ago been lowered to the sea. Before the early fishermen set out to cast their lines, Jacob would be washed up on the strand, wrung out in the wreckage of the ship. He belonged to his saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, for he had no spirit left in him to fight. He looked back at the mizzen mast, and felt it sag and spring. The bark began to fracture as she bore down on the rocks. And then he saw his cargo, braced above the hold, and understood at last what he should do. He found her fixed and fast, unflustered by the wind, though high above her flank the topsails flapped and furled. Jacob crept inside to listen for the crack.

  And she was still and dark inside, quite dry, and so familiar in her warmth that when he closed his eyes he almost could forget the lurching of the ship, the howling of the wind he had often sought for her. And though she yawned and creaked a little, still she did not stir. She smelled of grease and timmermen when Jacob closed his eyes, so that when at last it came he almost did not mind.

  Chapter 1

  An Ill Wind

  The twa extraordinar professouris affirmis . . . they ar not subject to live collegialiter to eat and ly within the college.

  Commission of Enquiry, St Andrews University, 1588

  Hew Cullan kicked aside the broken slates as he turned briskly through the entrance to St Salvator’s, his hat and gown dishevelled in the wind. He crossed the college courtyard and hurried to the hall, setting straight his cap. He was, he was aware, a little late; and yet he knew the hall would wait for him. The scholars rose expectantly to see him take his place. They would have gaped like louns to catch him at the chase, darting through the tennis courts in primrose-stirruped slops. Masters, they well knew, could have no other lives.

  And for the regents in their midst, who had the daily care and teaching of these boys, this was true enough, reflected Hew. His own place was a sinecure: magister extraordinar in law, in a college that could boast no legal faculty. He played little part in its domestic life or discipline. The appointment of professors in the laws and mathematics had left no impression on the core curriculum, grounded in philosophy and arts. Hew gave lectures to the college once or twice a year. As second master, he was sometimes called on to officiate, in the absence of the principal, anatomist Giles Locke. When, as often happened, they were both engaged, on some more pressing business of the Crown, the third professor, grumbling gently, set aside his sums to step in to the breach.

  This third professor, standing at Hew’s side, reached across to nudge him, breaking through his dreams. He plucked a withered fragment from Hew’s sleeve. ‘Acer maius, or, to many, platanus,’ he commented. ‘The greater maple, commonly, and falsely, called the plane tree or the sycamore.’ The mathematician opened out his palm, showing Hew the seed, the winged fruit of the sycamore. ‘You are sprouting wings. What as a bairn I chased round dizzy in the wind. We called them locks and keys, or whirlijacks.’

  Hew suppressed a smile, which old Professor Groat, with his rheumy, washed-out eyes, was quick enough to see. ‘I understand you well. You do not think that I could ever be a child; or else this fledging plane tree harks back to the ark.’

  ‘Ah, no, not at all,’ protested Hew, who had indeed been thinking something of the sort. How old, after all, was Bartholomew Groat? Sixty years? Eighty? Or, as Giles asserted, nearer fifty-three, of phlegmatic disposition, prone to windy gout.

  The professor blew his nose. ‘Tis true enough, that when I was a boy this maple was a novelty, which now is thought a scourge, and counted as a weed.’

  He did not give up the seed, but wrapped it in his handkerchief to put it in his pocket; whether to preserve the ghost of little Bartie Groat, giddy as the wind, or to prevent its spread, Hew could not be sure. ‘The winds were wild last night,’ he remarked more diplomatically.

  This observation had a sobering effect. ‘Foul spirits stir up tempests,’ Groat imparted gloomily. ‘The milk kine startled in the fields, the storm has soured the milk. The priory trees are torn up by their roots; the shore mill lade is flooded. Tis providential, Hew.’

  ‘Stuff and superstition,’ Hew retorted. ‘I do not believe in it.’

  Bartie cast his eyes to heaven, sending up a prayer. ‘The young are always quick to scorn. And yet the wind has one effect that cannot fail to move you. I heard there was a ship wrecked in the bay. All the crew were lost.’

  ‘Dear God, rest them!’ whispered Hew. ‘Were the poor men Scots?’

  ‘Zeelanders or Flemish, judging from the load. I wonder that you did not see it, on your way to town,’ murmured Bartie Groat.

  Hew shook his head. ‘I lay at the West Port last night,’ he explained. ‘My horse does not care for the wind.’ Dun Scottis cared for little that upset his regimen. He baulked at wind and water, with perfect equilibrium.

  ‘You ought to take up lodgings, as I’ve said before. I confess myself perplexed that you will not consider it,’ Bartie answered peevishly.

  It was a well-worn argument, and one to which Hew struggled to respond. He had declined the rooms that came with his election, preferring to remain at home at Kenly Green. The house stood four miles south, an hour on foot upon a winter’s day, and a little less in summer, on his sluggish horse. Returning to the college for a second year, he already felt the cloisters closing in, the hallowed kirk and walkways a conspiracy of spires. It was not a feeling he could share with Bartie Groat, who took his dinners daily at the college mess, and brightened when the cook doled out a second slop of neaps. Hew did not care to end his days collegialiter. He changed the subject quickly. ‘I see the doors have closed. So we are all assembled, and ready to begin.’

  One by one, the names were called, and the students swore allegiance to the university. The youngest scholar stumbled at the stand. In awe at the proceedings, he clean forgot his oath. Hew Cullan winked at him, and saw the boy’s astonishment collapse into a grin. A regent hurried forward and retreated with his charge, who, to Hew’s amusement, was named as George Buchanan. He saw nothing in the boy that stuck him as remarkable. It seemed unlikely that their paths would cross again.

  Bartie had withdrawn, like a tortoise to his shell, where for the last half hour he had appeared to be asleep. When Hew was least expecting it, he blinked, thrusting out: ‘It is not like our principal to miss matriculation.’

  Hew answered stiffly, ‘Indeed, not.’ He cursed both God and Bartie Groat. In a few more minutes’ time, enrolment would be done, and he could take his worries out into the street. For now, he must stay resolute, civil and in place. He did his best to look discouraging.

  ‘Perhaps he has been called out to a patient,’ Bartie droned, relentlessly. Giles was a physician, as well as an anatomist, with a thriving practice in the town.

  ‘Aye, perhaps.’

  ‘Or on business of the Crown.’

  ‘Tis very likely,’ Hew agreed.

  ‘Though on business of the Crown, you also are most frequently invoked. Therefore it may be inferred, since you are here, and he is not, it is not business of the Crown.’

  Groat was penetrating, gazing once again with his colourless, damp eyes, no less clear and piercing through the film of age. Hew saw no escape. The ceremony drawing to a close, the boys were ushered out, to lecture rooms and lodging houses. Hew was left behind with Professor Groat. He did not dislike the man. Groat was a fine astronomer, and lyrical upon the motions of the spheres. But he remained inclined to gloom, his prognostics seldom ending happily. On this subject, at this time, Hew had no wish to talk to him.

  ‘His young wife is with child, of course,’ Bartie reached his pinnacle.

  ‘She is,’ admitted Hew.

  ‘Pray pardon – I had quite forgotten – he is married to your sister, is he not? Who has the falling sickness?’

  ‘I commend you on your powers
of recollection,’ Hew returned abruptly.

  Groat persisted, undeterred. ‘Doubtless, there are dangers there. Please tell Giles, they are in my prayers.’

  ‘Doubtless, he will thank you. I will tell him straight away.’

  Professor Groat was right. It was unthinkable that Giles would miss matriculation, without a word of explanation or apology to Hew. If he was not in college, then he must be at home, and if he was at home, that could only mean one thing. Hew abandoned Bartie at the door and hurried down the North Street towards the Fisher Gait.

  The streets beyond the college were deserted, as though the wind had swept them clear, and left behind its footprints in a scattering of leaves. The fisherwives had dropped their cries of codlings and late crabs, their empty crates and buckets littering the steps. A bare-legged child stood watchman, rushing at the gulls. Hew called out in passing, ‘Are the markets done? The clock has just struck twelve.’

  The child stopped to consider this, sucking on a thumb. It offered up at last, ‘All gaun, tae the wreck.’

  ‘And left you on your own? Good bairn,’ Hew answered vaguely. He could not discern, from the whisper thick with thumb, whether he was talking to a girl or boy. He found himself unsettled by the queerness of the child, and by the empty thoroughfares that led to the cathedral, the town and markets suddenly bereft, upended by the storm. He hurried past the fishing quarter to the castle on its rock, towards the little house that overlooked the cliff. The wind had dropped back, the sea a sheet of glass, where a hazy sunshine skittered, bouncing back and lighting up the stones.

  The house was battened fast against the wind and sunlight, doors and shutters closed. Hew’s knock was answered by the servant, Paul. ‘I kent it was yersel’,’ he yawned, ‘by dint of a’ the din. The master is asleep. I’ll tell him that you called.’

  ‘How so, asleep? Has your mistress had her child?’ demanded Hew.