Candlemas Read online

  Barely had Hew entered through the archway to the square when Johannes fell behind him, matching step for step. ‘Salve, Master Hew. I trust you are quite well. If I may intrude a moment on your time…’ Johannes spoke in perfect Latin, well-tuned and precise. His clear pedantic sounding filled Hew with dismay.

  ‘Salve, Johannes. I am quite well. You find me in some haste.’

  ‘Then I shall not detain you, sir. I wanted, simply, to thank you for the help you were kind enough to give me, and to return your books.’

  ‘But surely,’ Hew, despite himself, could not help but say, ‘you have not read them yet?’

  ‘I have, sir, read them all. If you have a moment, I will fetch them now. I have made some notes, of the principal matters contained in the books, and the principal questions, and objections, arising therein, which I should very much like to discuss with you.’

  ‘Facile. Of course. But, alas, not now. Speak with me after the lecture,’ Hew suggested, desperately.

  ‘What lecture, sir, is that?’

  ‘Aristotle, De caelo, which I must give in place of Professor Locke.’

  ‘I have heard Professor Locke, on the movement of the spheres, and of the elements. Most illuminating. I should like to hear, indeed, your own interpretation of it.’

  ‘The lecture is no more than a reading of the text. Trust me, Johannes, I shall not deviate at all, from the version you have heard before from Doctor Locke.’

  Johannes smiled the gentle smile that so rarely broke upon his solemn bright blue eyes, transforming his face from a paragon of seriousness. ‘Now that is a thing that I very much doubt.’

  The student was disarmed, evaded for the while, and Hew came to the cloister, to confront the visitor, whose purpose had been pressing on his mind. For here was Roger Cunningham, who once had set his wits so fiercely against Hew. A student at the college, Roger had withdrawn, in a fine show of arrogance and supercilious pride, before he was expelled, and bound himself apprentice to a barber-surgeon. Giles Locke in particular was hurt by his deception, and found his dereliction hardest to forgive.

  Roger faced him boldly. ‘Well, you took your time.’

  Hew did not rise to this. He sensed, behind the swagger and display, a current of uneasiness. Roger was not comfortable, or brave as he appeared. In the corner of the square, and at the chapel door, a group of students gathered, pausing there to stare, at one whom they no longer counted as their friend. Roger was unnerved. And that was rare enough.

  Hew saw the students off, a brusque wave of his hands, to scatter them like birds. They would not fly far. ‘What is your business here?’

  ‘There has been a death,’ said Roger, ‘in the crackling house. John Blair the candlemaker. Please, will you come?’

  There was meekness in his tone, and in his demeanour, which astonished Hew. ‘Did Doctor Locke send you to fetch me?’

  ‘No, sir, he did not. I am asking you. My master is suspected as complicit in his death. Occasion and the circumstances do inform against him. I wish you to defend him,’ Roger answered simply. ‘For it is not true.’ What did it cost him, to put such a case?

  ‘Why would you ask me?’

  ‘I know of no one else.’

  That much was honest, thought Hew. ‘Suppose that it is true?’ he asked Roger softly.

  ‘Then, I suppose, you will find it out.’

  ‘Understand, I make no promise. I will come and see.’

  Johannes saw them pass, and called out in astonishment. ‘Are you going out, now? Will there be no lecture? What about the students, waiting in the hall?’

  Roger grinned at him. ‘Tell them it is Candlemas, and they have a holiday. They never liked you half as much, as they will like you now. Close your mouth, Johannes, it is dropping to the floor.’

  Johannes said, reprovingly, ‘I know this Roger, sir, that was a student here. I cannot find in him an honest heart or pure. I pray to God you do not place your trust in him.’

  ‘Before the year of plague, there were three or four candlemakers working at the crackling house. John Blair was the last,’ Roger had explained. ‘He leaves behind a wife and a prentice boy. At Martinmas, at slaughter time, he took on extra hands. But for the most part, he worked on his own. He liked it like that. His journeyman Tam Cruik, when he had served his time, found work as a straggler, travelling to the manors and the country farms to make their candle for them when they kill their lambs. Perhaps he comes to yours.’

  Hew did not reply. They had come upon the place. And his answer had been swallowed, stifled by the smell. The stench of the tallow had the curious effect of dulling down the image that appeared before his eyes, stripping it of force, as though the strength of the assault on that most sensitive of senses dampened down the rest.

  The crackling house was narrow, eight foot wide at most. A window on a working day opened to the street, a counter folding down to hold a small display of the candlemaker’s wares, for any who were stout enough to seek them out at source. Most would be content to wait till market day, when the candlemaker’s boy would go forth with his creel to cry them by the cross. The shutters now were closed, the counter folded in. In the chimney a large pot of fat hung suspended, cloaked in a sooty black smoke. Someone had dampened the flames of the fire, in time to save the house from burning to a crisp, the tallow having caught a little as the pan boiled dry. The silt that smouldered still explained the acrid smell. On a board beside were several moulds of copper and a metal trough, where melted grease was poured, and the candles dipped, while a rusting pail oozed tallow fat unrinded, marbled and veined with pale pink and blue, to which the rank rumour of sheep flesh had stuck. Two small windows, barred, looked out on a yard, to allow the smoke a pitiful retreat, and in this yard, come fair or foul, the candlemaker rendered down the raw slabs of the tallow, polluting the fresh air for a mile around.

  Hew allowed his eyes to rest a moment on these things, to fix them in his mind. The gross slab of sheep fat left so much of an impression there, it came back to him when he next closed his eyes; and when he fell asleep, it merged, indistinct and irresistible, with the vision of the candlemaker – which he turned to next – and they became so blurred, his waking mind could scarcely tell the two apart. The figure of the man dissolved into the tallow, sallow, slick and bloodless, sundered from the flesh.

  The candlemaker sat, or somehow had been stuffed, stiff among the cushions of a single settle seat; so broad was his beam he filled its girth completely, packed close as a candle poured into its mould, with no gap for air. It would take a timmerman to prise his carcase out. He was stripped down to his shirt, a loose tent of flax flowing over his breeks. His points were undone, and his sleeves were rolled up. Both palms lay open, slack, in his lap, his elbows constrained by the sides of the chair. From his forearm to the right, a little past the joint, a bandage had been pushed, loosened from its place and very lightly flecked. The arm below was drenched with rivulets of blood, that streaming from the place they first had found a pulse had coursed the long way down through woollen breek and hose and pooled upon the floor, coming to a close at the candlemaker’s shoe, where they had discoloured to a sympathetic brown. A second stream had cupped in the candlemaker’s hand, thick and darkly red.

  Standing on each side, attendant on the corpse, were, to its right, Sam Sturrock the surgeon, and to the left the physician Giles Locke. Between them a lad, of eighteen or twenty, fiddled with his cap and hopped from foot to foot, the one small anomalous flutter of life.

  Giles was first to speak. His presence in a crisis, circumspect and steady, always reassured. But Hew could read no comfort in the voice that said, ‘What brings you, Hew? Is there something amiss at the college?’

  ‘Nothing is amiss. Roger came to call for me, and brought me here to help.’

  ‘Then, as I suppose, there will be no lecture,’ Giles concluded bleakly, more resigned than vexed. ‘And it is hard to fathom how you hope to help. Still, since you are here, you must now bear
witness to this sad affair.’

  Hew understood, at once, that he should not have come, that Giles Locke had a purpose, in trying to ensure that he was otherwise engaged. As witness, he was bound to give evidence in court. And if he were to be called to serve upon the jury – since jury members always had an interest in the case – he could not be allowed to speak for the defence. The white face of the surgeon, whose misery was plain, who looked as sick at heart as the candlemaker’s corpse, convinced Hew a defence was soon to be required. But since he had quite wittingly intruded on the fact, it was now too late to offer to withdraw. He had made himself a witness, willingly or not. In which case, someone else would have to speak for Sam.

  ‘The defunct is John Blair,’ Giles went on. ‘You knew him, perhaps. His friends called him Jock. He was sometime the beadle, at the town kirk.’

  Naming him had humanised the carcase in the chair, assigning it a pathos Hew did not like to admit. The candlemaker’s head had fallen to one side, slipping from its pillow as its owner fell asleep, and – Hew thanked the Lord – the eyes were closed. He forced himself to look upon the candlemaker’s face, and forced himself to see, though the features slipped and shrank upon the bone, as though the lifeless flesh had melted in the fire, that there was something there he dimly recognised. He remembered one John Blair, beadle in the kirk, bustling through the town with prurient efficiency. Was it not John Blair, had turned out the young Dyer bairns for fidgeting in kirk, when their da had died? And the same John Blair, that took a throaty pleasure in the stripping of a whore, exposed for all to jeer at in the market place? And when Agnes Ford was taken for a witch, was it not John Blair had kept her from her sleep, and applied her torments keenly and assiduously?

  ‘Sam Sturrock, the surgeon, ye ken,’ the doctor continued, relentless. ‘And this lad here is John Blair’s prentice, Alexander Forgan.’

  Alexander Forgan said ‘Eck,’ unused to, and recoiling from, the full force of his name, which woke in him a kind of fearful superstition.

  ‘Eck,’ conceded Giles, ‘tell to Master Hew here all that you told me, that he may be a witness to your true account.’

  Eck surpassed himself, with a flush of pride, for despite his squeamish pity at the scene, and a vague suspicion things did not bode well for him, a thrilling kind of horror bubbled in the boy, and he was brimming over with the tale he had to tell. ‘It was I that found him. Ah fund him, d’ye see?’

  The matter amounted to this. He had last seen his master, alive, between eight and nine of the clock, the night before. He thought it must be closer to the nine, for he minded that the bell had rung, to mark the college curfew, just as he reached home; he lived landward, with his mother, half a mile away.

  He had spent the day, and the evening after dark, making some deliveries of candles through the town, and some way beyond. It was a busy time. And it did not surprise him that his master lingered on, working through the night. He had known him work all the night before, to see the orders done. When he was tired, he would sleep in his chair. His wife was forewarned not to expect him.

  At the mention of a wife Hew’s stout heart sank a little. Sam Sturrock stood and listened all the while, saying not a word, as Eck babbled on.

  The master was not well. He took very bad headaches, and sick with it too, that hampered him cruel in his work. He consulted with the surgeon for it, and, on Saturday, went to him to be bled. The surgeon said to rest. And he had rested, properly, on the Sabbath day. On Monday – yesterday – he said he was recovered, and came back to work. He had a deal of work, since today was Candlemas.

  ‘Is Candlemas observed still?’ questioned Hew. He did not think that Andrew Melville, kneeling on the flagstones of his college cloisters, would call for many candles to illuminate his prayers. The reformed kirk was dead to such whims.

  ‘For certain, sir, hereby. For it will ay be Candlemas. Though they reform the kirk, they can’t reform the calendar.’

  Here Hew and Giles exchanged a glance, and Giles informed him wryly, that the pope in Rome had done that very thing.

  ‘Oh, the pope in Rome,’ Eck repeated scornfully, with the blithe contempt of a true bairn of reform, too young to have an inkling where his world was formed, or what fuelled the superstitions to which he succumbed. ‘We do not keep it, mark you, in the popish way. But guid folk want new candles, as they always will.’

  ‘You do not, I suppose,’ Hew could not help but say, ‘have any made of wax?’

  ‘We are not wax merchants, sir. We sell tallow candles, and soap. We have, if you will, some very fine soap,’ Eck replied, mechanically. Hew shook his head. He could not bear to think of the candlemaker’s soap, moulded from the scum of tallow in the vat, against Frances’s white skin.

  ‘But my master, perchance, may procure some to order, if you desire,’ Here Eck tailed off. The horror of the fact had dawned on him in full; his master would not order anything again. ‘Oh, sirs, he is dead.’ Recognition wrung from him a solitary tear.

  Giles said kindly, ‘There. You have done quite well. Perhaps you should go home.’

  ‘Oh, but I cannot,’ wailed Eck, ‘while there is work to be done.’ He looked about him hopelessly, for want of a direction, which at last was settled in the pail of fat. ‘That should not be there. If you do not mind, I will tak it outside.’

  ‘Do, if it will please you,’ Giles encouraged him. They watched as the prentice boy shouldered the pail, and carried the tallow fat out to the yard. He set down his load, and stood scratching his head, the impulse to action apparently fled, quite at a loss as to what to do next.

  Sam Sturrock, all this while, had spoken not a word. Giles turned to him now. ‘Will you speak to us, Sam?’

  The surgeon said, tonelessly, ‘I have telt you all I can. There is nothing more to add.’

  ‘Please, will you tell it to Hew?’

  Sam did not respond. It struck Hew that the man was in a state of shock. And in his shock he was in no fit state to answer to such questions, no matter in what gentle manner they were put to him, and by so kind an inquisitor; perhaps, especially in that case. Giles Locke saw it too, for he proceeded patiently, ‘Sam, you must go home. I will visit you there, before I submit my report, and put the question again. In the meantime, you must give me your word you will desist from practice.’

  The surgeon nodded merely, staring at the corpse.

  ‘There is nothing, now, that you wish to add? You say that John Blair consulted you, about recurring headaches. That on Saturday, you opened up a vein for him, and told him he should rest?’

  ‘That is what I said.’

  ‘And you will not explain, why you chose this course, at such an inauspicious time, that nature, sense and physic all were ranged against it?’

  Sam Sturrock whispered then, ‘He wanted it that way.’

  ‘He wanted it that way? And did you not tell him the danger?’

  ‘I telt to him the danger. But he was not deterred. He professed himself in such an agony and heat, the most extreme and violent measures were required.’

  ‘And did you never think to consult with a physician, what remedy was best in this exceptional case?’

  The surgeon bowed his head, and answered not at all.

  Roger exclaimed, ‘This is not right. It cannot be right.’

  Giles turned his gaze on him. ‘Were you with your master when he cut the vein?’

  Roger faltered then. ‘No, he sent me out.’

  ‘Therefore, you have no purpose here, no place to speak for him. But it seems strange, that he sent you away. Did someone else assist you, Sam?’ Giles persisted quietly.

  ‘There was no one else.’

  ‘And is this the cut to the vein that you made?’

  The surgeon answered, carefully, ‘That is the place.’

  ‘It cannot be. Tell them,’ Roger implored. ‘Will you not speak?’ When the surgeon would not, Roger attempted to walk the man home, but this was repelled.

  ‘Cease, Roger.
Stay. Accept what must come. What has been done cannot be undone. There is no hope.’

  On this grim command, Sam departed alone, and Hew placed a hand upon Roger to hold him. ‘There is a boy, in the yard outside, in want of a strong drink.’

  ‘And what is that to me?’ Roger answered rudely.

  ‘Apposite,’ said Hew. ‘That boy has a tale to spill. And when he is over his dread – which he will be quite presently – he is like to spill it to the first friend at hand. That friend will be you. He will trust you best, for you are most alike.’

  ‘We are nothing alike,’ Roger retorted, his superfluous pride spilling over at this. ‘How can you think so? He is an ignorant loun.’

  ‘And you a presumptuous one. Yet you have more in common than you may suppose. You are close to him in age. You are prentices, both, and both, for want of a master, as likely to be cast adrift. If you cannot in your conscience relate to his predicament, then he has the wit to relate to yours.’

  His own situation so forcefully brought home to him, Roger said sulkily, ‘What should I ask him?’

  ‘Use your own intelligence to find out what he knows. Since you are so clever, that will not be hard.’

  ‘Aye, but he stinks.’ There was such a fit of childishness beneath his stubborn pride, despite his pompous posturing, that Hew was moved to smile. He felt, inexplicably, a fondness for Roger, who was not as worldly as he liked to think.

  ‘Of course he will stink. He is a candlemaker’s boy. But I have seen you carve your way through gobbets of green flesh, and hold your knife and nerve. Surely, as a surgeon’s page, you have not grown fastidious.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ Roger scowled, ‘I like my foul flesh dead. Well then, for Sam Sturrock’s sake I’ll take him for a drink. Since we are puir bairns both, we’ll charge the drinks to you.’

  ‘What are you about, Hew?’ Giles asked his friend, when the two of them were left together in the room, with no matter still between them but the candlemaker’s corpse.

  ‘Roger asked me to investigate the candlemaker’s death. He cannot comprehend that his master is at fault.’