Martinmas Page 2

  The boy was Thomas Crowe, the smallest and most timid student in his class. He had shown up nothing, in the last few weeks, suggesting he had character or a spark of spirit. It was not surprising he had not been missed. William noticed now that he was deathly pale. The play at the golf had not improved his colour, as it had his friends’. William Cranston sometimes saw that look on the fourth year students in their final term, as they were preparing for examination. They were hunched and hollow, starved of air and light, withered from long days of work and endless sleepless nights. That numbness he had seen upon the faces of some who mounted the black stane as wretched as a felon taken to the block. He had not seen it in a first year at the start of term. ‘This boy is not well,’ William thought. He recalled some dark shadow in the boy’s family, a kind of consumption, perhaps. He must consult with Giles Locke.

  Thomas had crossed to the place where he sat. He looked at him, wraithlike. William said, ‘Well?’

  The boy’s eyes were trusting. His young voice was brittle and childlike, to cut through the laughter of men. His Latin came clear, and was heard through the hall. ‘Master, and it please you, will you pray with me? I have seen the devil in the college kirk. He has taken up the corpus of a Spaniard for his ghost. And I do not have the courage to confront him by myself.’

  Giles Locke said, ‘I blame the storms.’

  ‘As I recall,’ said Hew, ‘you predicted there would be no storms.’

  ‘Did I not tell you, too, that prophecy can never be exact? I did not pretend to know the mind of God.’

  ‘Then when you said the words “there will be no storms” you forgot,’ Hew teased, ‘to take account of God?’

  Giles retorted huffily, ‘I never made a claim to perfect science. God kens; so should you. This quarrel does not help us, Hew. It is a plain truth that a storm can play havoc with the mind. Young imaginations are yet more subjectable. Bairns are more rebellious when there is a wind. But Thomas Crowe insists he saw a ghost. Whatever else is put to him, he will not be swayed. He does not believe that he imagined it.’

  ‘If he believes he saw a ghost,’ said Hew, ‘then perhaps he did.’

  Giles Locke raised an eyebrow. ‘I have heard you say such things do not exist.’

  ‘A searching eye sees all, and rules nothing out,’ Hew said. ‘But I believe that what he saw owes more to human mischief than the devil’s kind. To put it plainly, now, I do not believe that spirits walk the earth. Where is Thomas Crowe? I will talk to him.’

  ‘Ah, I hoped you would. He is in the fermary, where he is treated for his melancholy.’

  ‘Is he melancholic?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Giles said. ‘What man would not be, who has seen a ghost? If not before, then after. A ghost is cold and dry, to the last degree. Whether there is malice in it I will leave to you. For I have no doubt that you will find it out.’

  The fermary, as Giles Locke called it, was a small, separate building to the north side of the college, which the doctor had established following the plague, to contain infection. Here students were confined who showed sign of fever, or suffered from the flux. The servant Kennocht Cutler acted as the fermer, tending to their needs, and putting into practice what the doctor had prescribed.

  Today, there were two patients in his ward. George Robertson, a tertian, had a tertian fever, brought on by excitement at the golf. Following his breakfast of a pat of butter (loosening), on a hunk of bread (absorbing) and a roasted egg (binding), George would be discharged; his symptoms had subsided in the night.

  The second patient, Thomas Crowe, did not have a fever. His pulse was slow and strong, and his piss was clear. His bowels were brought to flux through the doctor’s clysters, while it was the vomitaries left him limp and pale, wringing out the flush of colour from his cheeks. He had been thoroughly purged. And yet he was not cured. The infection in this boy was of a stubborn, dangerous kind.

  The floor of the fermary was strewn with herbs. Meg’s work, Hew supposed. Though women were forbidden to pass through the college gates, her influence was plain in the comforts Giles prescribed, though absent in the plying of emetics. Meg approved purging only to countermand poisons. But perhaps it was a poison that afflicted Thomas Crowe, working on his mind?

  The pungency of rosemary did not clear the air. Hew felt in his wam a sympathetic lurch. But the old hands in the sick room were inured to it. George Robertson finished his breakfast with gusto, licking his fingers. It was better than the bannock served up in the hall.

  ‘You do not seem ill,’ Hew told him.

  ‘That is the thing about a tertian fever. It manifests itself every other day.’

  Hew knew George quite well. His fevers – tertian, quartan or quotidian – re-emerged at intervals convenient to himself. Hew could guess their source: flannels warmed to boiling point and secretly applied. Kennocht was perhaps complicit in the case. The two appeared fast friends.

  ‘Well, I will be gone,’ George Robertson said cheerfully. He thanked Cutler for the egg, and his gentle care. ‘Good morrow, little friend,’ he said to Thomas Crowe. ‘May God requite your prayers.’

  Thomas Crowe was sitting silent on his bed. He did not look up.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ said Hew. Giles Locke had left instruction that Thomas Crowe should not be left alone. Solitude was perilous in a case of melancholy. Yet Hew was not so sure. Was the ghost a trick that had been played on him? If so, then his companions must come under scrutiny.

  George looked surprised at his question. ‘He is sic a pious little soul.’ He seemed to bear no malice for the boy.

  ‘How are you today?’ Hew asked Thomas Crowe, once Robertson had left.

  Thomas Crowe replied he had the belly-thraw. The requirement to speak Latin was relaxed in the sick room, and his words were shrill and childish, causing Hew to smile.

  ‘That is the bad stuff, swilling out,’ Kennocht Cutler said. He set down a cup of green, brackish liquid, together with a basin covered with a cloth.

  Thomas pleaded, ‘Must I?’

  ‘Ye want to get well, dae ye no?’

  ‘I was well when I came,’ Thomas said.

  Kennocht Cutler looked at Hew and shook his head. ‘Ye see how it is. It is a stubborn case.’

  ‘Leave us awhile,’ answered Hew. ‘I will take care of him now.’

  The fermer left them to it, glad to take his rest.

  Thomas looked at Hew. His gratitude was cautious. ‘Can you make it stop?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Hew said. ‘Can’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Thomas said. ‘Except it is by prayer. The praying has not worked yet. I have not prayed long or hard enough.’

  He seemed entirely earnest in his plea. Hew thought back to George: ‘a pious little soul’. ‘I thought you meant the medicine. I see you mean the ghost.’

  ‘The medicine is meant to drive away the ghost,’ Thomas said. ‘If I tell them it has gone, they will stop the purge.’ His expression told Hew that he had considered it. Who would not consider it, bent over the bowl, and the pot?

  ‘Tempted?’

  The boy’s eyes were watery; frank. They carried in them a conviction Hew believed in utterly. He was used to students, to their sly omissions and their small deceits. He knew the lies they told to portion for themselves some fraction of the lives the college now controlled. The eyes of Thomas Crowe resembled none of them.

  ‘It is meant to tempt me,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Does the ghost come still?’ asked Hew.

  ‘I have not seen it here.’

  ‘Well then, perhaps the physic has worked.’

  ‘I would feel it, if it had. But it was only in the chapel that it came to me.’

  ‘Will you show me where?’

  ‘I can take you to the place. But I do not think that it will show itself.’

  Thomas Crowe showed no reluctance in returning to the chapel. He bore himself with dignity, a modest kind of pride. There were one or two students outsi
de in the courtyard, who whispered and stared as they passed. Thomas did not shrink from them, but seemed to rise and swell a little. Liking the attention, Hew supposed.

  The students were coming from the kirk itself, where the college principal had read the morning prayers. Giles came out briskly, rubbing his hands. He stopped when he saw them. ‘Better, now?’ he asked.

  Thomas said, ‘Ignosce.’

  Giles looked perplexed. ‘You beg my pardon? Or, I should not ask?’

  Hew answered him, obliquely. ‘We are returning to the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Ah. Very good. I will leave you to it. It is cold in there.’

  The restless wind picked up, snatching at the whispers in the crowd. One of the students was bold enough to step out, and address Thomas Crowe directly. A large, freckled boy. ‘Salve, Corve. I am sorry that you are not well. Would you like to have my transcript of the lecture?’

  Corvus was the Latin word for crow. Spoken by a friend, the words might be well meant. But Thomas gave no sign this was a friend. He shook his head, staring at the ground. The freckled boy was moved, thought Hew, by a sense of guilt. Or else he had hoped, by this pubic avowal of friendship, to allay suspicions he had bullied Crowe. If Thomas had been tricked, they would not have far to look. He asked the boy his name, and hurried his charge on. ‘Is that your friend?’ Hew asked. He was not surprised by the reply.

  ‘I did not think he was.’

  Thomas Crowe knelt down in the centre of the church. ‘I was here, like this. I closed my eyes to pray. And when I opened them, the spirit was before me.’

  Hew held up the candle to look into the boy’s white face. He did not doubt his earnestness. The boy was fearful, but composed.

  ‘Then you did not see it come?’

  ‘I felt it. I can feel it now.’

  The boy’s words made Hew shiver. The kirk was cold that day. Dampness seeped across the stone, through the broken slates. The reformers had stripped out the windows, and the chasms had been stopped with whatever came to hand. Some were patched with hides, or the oiled paper sheets that were used in printers’ shops, shielding off the sun. Only on a bright day, did it filter through, catching at the corners of the broken glass, sending out a scattering of violet, green or blue. This morning was not bright. The October sky hung lank, the colour of a bruise. The chapel was lit in snatches of lamplight, dim yellow pockets that seeped into gloom.

  ‘Tell it to show itself.’

  ‘I cannot call it, sir. And I do not think it will come to you.’

  ‘I will go aloft, and look down from there.’ Hew moved further off as the boy began to pray. He spoke the words aloud. He said his prayers in Scots, though Latin was more likely to arouse the ghost. The echo followed through the vaults as Hew moved round the church. The prayers were fast and urgent; as soon as they were done, the boy began again. The words sounded fractured, uncertain, breaking apart from the voice of a child. ‘O dreadful and most mighty God . . . that . . . hast declared thyself a consuming fire . . . we have declined from thee . . . we have been polluted with idolatry . . . we have given thy glory to creatures . . . we have sought support where it was not to be found . . .’

  There was something, by the place where the altar once had stood, that bore a clear resemblance to a spot of blood. Hew bent down to examine it. Not all that looked like blood was blood; and not all blood was human blood, he told himself. He took out his knife to scrape the substance up.

  In the kirk behind him, Thomas gave a cry. A brief, unstructured voicing of surprise. In the time it took for Hew to turn in his direction, he had fallen to the ground. When he was lifted up, and carried to the fermary, the way that he was lying came to be remarked upon. His right arm was flung out at an angle from his body, with the palm upturned. Some said, it was shaken by the devil’s hand.

  2.

  Snell

  ‘God doth suffer spirits to appear unto the elect to a good end,

  but unto the reprobate they appear as a punishment’

  Master Colin Snell had come back to St Andrews zealous in his purpose. He was on God’s work.

  The Lord’s design for him had sometimes been obscure. In his path were obstacles, or trials. The last years had been testing ones. When God – or the devil – threw troubles in his way, Colin had not always borne them stoically. He had been hot-headed in his haste to serve the Lord. His misfortunes had begun with the student Roger Cunningham, who had daubed the college of theology with filth. Colin had attempted to drown him in the jakes, requiting like with like. He now saw that was wrong. But Roger had not faced the justice he deserved. Roger had found profit in his sins, while Colin had been pilloried for his. Colin had been forced to scrub out the latrines, for the crime of contemplating throwing Roger into them. That was the moment when his luck had changed. Ordure clung to him. He smelt it in his sleep. His colleagues at the time had refused to sit by him. Even Dod Auchinleck had wrinkled up his nose. ‘We did a terrible thing.’ Dod would not listen when Colin had protested that they had done nothing at all.

  Now Roger had been prenticed to the surgeon to the town. Colin had discovered this just the other day. He had been tethered to the surgeon’s chair, distracted by a searing soreness in his tooth, when Roger had appeared with the pincers in his hands. ‘I am tooth-pick here.’ Colin Snell had screamed, and broken from his bonds. He would not go back, though the toothache troubled still.

  Roger, after all, might not remember him. The business with the jakes had happened years ago, when Colin was a student, training for the ministry. And Roger had been barely conscious at the time.

  The year of the latrine had been a tumultuous one. The St Mary’s College principal, Master Andrew Melville, and his nephew James had been forced into exile to England at the end of it, and the college of theology had fallen to decline. Colin too had left, without taking his degree. He had not thought, at first, it would hold him back. The Kirk was crying out for preachers of the faith. But it had no revenue to lend to their support. He had travelled round the country while his funds held out. Good men gave him alms, yet he found it difficult to make his message heard. In one place, he was cast out as a vagabond. Pleading his good cause, he was threatened with a whipping that would ‘gar his rumpill reek’, for of all the ‘idle beggars’, scholars were the worst. For his love of God, he was stripped and shamed. His spirit had been broken when he came back to St Andrews, seeking the assistance of his former friends. The Melvilles, by then, had returned. He had been too diffident to apply to Andrew – the master who had sentenced him to shovel up the shit – and turned instead to James. James Melville had been hesitant at first. But after he had found for him another set of clothes – Colin’s were in rags – he had recommended him to a man called Crowe, who was looking for a tutor for his sons.

  Stephen Crowe had asked, ‘Have you taught bairns before?’

  Colin had admitted he had not. But he could equip them for the university. His Latin was impeccable. ‘I can teach them that, and much more besides. Under my instruction, they will be good men.’

  Stephen Crowe had said the Latin would suffice.

  God saw to it that Colin had the place. There were no other applicants. Stephen Crowe had engaged him, on a month’s trial. He had made one condition: ‘Be tender to them, sir.’

  Surely, it was not because he knew of Roger Cunningham? Roger had recovered fully from the pummelling, which had been provoked. ‘When I was a student, not much older than your boys, I was moved to violence more easily than now. I was young, and hot,’ Colin had explained.

  Stephen Crowe had stared at him, and Colin had been cowed by the expression on his face. Violence was the wrong word. “Fervour”, I should say. I was not so temperate as I am now. A wise man is one who learns from his mistakes.’

  His concession was uncalled for, as it had turned out. James Melville’s letter had not mentioned the assault, or Stephen Crowe would not have kept him on. It was not Colin’s temper that the father was afraid of
, or the lively spirit of his growing boys. It was an inherent frailty of the flesh.

  At the end of that first month, the older boy had died. There was no apparent cause. Then Colin understood what God had meant for him. He had been sent there to save Thomas Crowe.

  Thomas Crowe was haunted by his brother’s ghost. Colin told him the ghost was the devil in disguise, and taught him how to pray to drive the devil out. The battle had been hard. There were times when he had felt almost jealous of the boy. What was so special about little Thomas Crowe, that the devil should be drawn to do battle for his soul? In time, he came to realize it was not the boy that God had meant to test. It was Colin Snell.

  At first, he had believed that Thomas Crowe was one of God’s elect. It was Colin’s task to bring him to the light; that was God’s design. Now he understood that might not be the case. God wanted him to ken that however hard he tried, there were certain souls that were lost to God. Stephen Crowe was one. Perhaps his son was too.

  His work was done there now. He had his reward. When he left, Stephen Crowe had given him a gift of money, which he had added to the sum that he had saved. It was not a fortune, but it was enough.

  He had looked forward to renewing his acquaintances. Not with Andrew Melville. He remained in awe of him. In a few months’ time, when he had succeeded in flushing out the Jesuits, Colin’s name would come up at the General Assembly. He would be admired. Andrew would approve. ‘I remember Snell. A young man of great promise, and an asset to the Kirk. His training was cut short.’ The savour of the stool would be forgotten then.

  For now, he passed St Mary’s by. The college was dilapidated, dreary in the rain. It saddened him to see how tired it looked.

  Dod Auchinleck, against all expectation, had completed his training for the Kirk. He had acquired a small living, in a country parish. He had acquired a small country wife. His house was too cramped for Colin Snell to stay with him. ‘If I lived alone, ye wid be mair than welcome. But ye maun see how it is,’ Dod had said. His little country wife was swollen fat with child. Bulbous to the point where it was hardly decent. Colin was surprised at her. He was surprised at Dod. But he did not mind about the living, which was mean and poor, and too far away. He took lodgings on the outskirts of St Andrews, while he drew up the fine details of his scheme.