Martinmas Read online

  From the kitchen, he looked out to a yard at the back, where he saw some hens scratching in the dust, and a pile of wood, neatly chopped and stacked. Looking for a door that would take him out, he came upon a cupboard, four or five feet high, built into the wall. Large enough, perhaps, for a man to hide. But when he looked inside, he saw a flight of stairs.

  The steps led underground. And Colin knew at once that he had found the place.

  Colin felt a thrill that he had experienced only once before, when he had smacked against the hard core of his fist the pulp of Roger Cunningham, and had conceived the plot to throw him in the jakes. His reactions then had been muddled in their heat; he now saw that was wrong, but he still believed the sentiment was sound. Evil must be carefully, thoroughly snuffed out, retribution calculating, slow. A cornered rat might fight. But Colin was prepared to take him on.

  He had no need of the candle coming down the stairs. There were several lanterns lit along the way, to illuminate his path. In the vault ahead, he could hear a murmuring, he could smell the swirling of a dark, Massy scent, in the very bowel and belly of the house.

  Yet he was unprepared for the thing he found. The tunnel opened out into a vaulted chamber, with a blaze of candles burning on all sides, and many others molten, puddled on the ground. The perfume he inhaled was candlewax and grease. Where he had expected to come upon an altar, a simple homemade cross was nailed up on the wall. Where he had expected the vestments of a priest were two aged servants kneeling on the floor, a man and a woman, whispering their prayers. In a kist between them Colin saw a corpse, carefully laid out.

  The woman raised her eyes. ‘You are not kin. Who are you?’ she said.

  He could not take his eyes from the body in the kist. He felt compelled to ask, yet dared not shape the question. In his heart, he knew. He answered in a whisper, ‘I am Colin Snell, come frae the Kirk.’

  The old man looked up at him, sorrowful and dignified. ‘What kirk is that?’

  Colin said, ‘The right an proper one.’

  The old woman sighed, while her husband said, ‘Kirk or no kirk, show my mistress some respect. Tak aff your hat.’

  Colin clasped his bonnet limply in his hands. ‘When did she die?’

  The woman said, ‘Yisterday, early in the morn. The boy frae the Poffle went to fetch her folk. They will bury her. Hae the grace to leave us, sir. There is nothing here for you to do.’

  ‘Have you kept watch here, all night?’ He knew how such vigils were kept. The servants were praying for Ann Balfour’s soul. He felt a cold kind of clutching, somewhere in his bowel. If Ann Balfour was dead–

  ‘Who is it sitting up the stair?’ The words were out. And his belly lurched at the glances they exchanged.

  ‘Wha dae ye mean, sir?’ Adam said.

  His guidwife rose stiffly from her knees. ‘Can it be the family come so soon? I will gang an see.’

  Adam stayed behind to watch over the corpse. It was plain he was devoted to his mistress. It was plain he did not want to leave her side.

  Colin went behind the woman up the steps. Her responses to his questions, simple as they were, brought him little hope. Ann Balfour had died in her chair early in the morning of the day before, leaving her breakfast tray untouched. Adam had left his wife to wash and dress the corpse, while he walked the mile to the Poffle farm. The sons from the farm had helped to take the body to the cellar underground, where it would be cool, until the family came.

  ‘We have stayed by her side, ever since.’

  ‘Did she have a priest with her, in her final hours?’

  The woman was scornful. ‘A priest? Where wid she hae that? There is no priest for miles, thanks to your ain kind.’

  As they came through the kitchen, she caught sight of the pie. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Mercy!’ she cried. ‘Go tell my husband that we have been robbed! There is a thief somewhere in the house.’

  Colin felt obliged to confess. Weakly, he told her he had been asked.

  ‘Who asked you?’ she said.

  ‘I believed it be the mistress of the house.’ He withered in her gaze.

  ‘Shame on you, sir, for a wicked lie. For a man o’ the Kirk! That pie was sent this morning from the Poffle farm, for the funeral feast.’

  He followed her, quailing, to the hall. The woman in the chair would put the servant right. Someone from the family, recently arrived, exhausted from the ride. So he told himself, knowing in his heart it would not be so.

  The entrance hall appeared just as he had left it, except that the front door was closed. ‘There is no one here, sir,’ the servant said. She opened up a shutter, letting in the light. Colin was astonished at how easily it moved. The woman let slip a small mew of distress. ‘Forgive me. I forgot the tray.’ He sensed that the apology was not meant for him, but for someone else. In the light from the window he saw that the bread on the tray was hard. Yesterday’s breakfast. Yesterday’s tray. How was it he had failed to notice that before?

  She had seen the tapestries. ‘What happened to the cloths? Who has torn them down?’

  He brushed her questions off. ‘There was someone here. She has gone outside.’

  She looked at him, wondering. ‘Are ye sure, sir? I left the door locked.’

  She showed him. It was locked still, and the key was inside.

  ‘If it was locked,’ he said wildly, ‘how did I come here?’

  ‘I thocht to ask you that,’ she said.

  Colin shook his head. ‘There is a back door. She went out by there.’

  Grief had made her dull. But she regarded him with a kind of pity, which drove him to the edge of a terrifying precipice. ‘That door is locked, too. I have the key.’

  That key was like a blade, cunningly slipped out, just to cut him down, paring off his reason by degrees. It glinted in her hand.

  He whimpered. ‘She was sitting there, just there, in the chair.’

  ‘In that chair?’ As she moved towards it, the servant gave a cry.

  ‘She sees,’ Colin thought. ‘Though she will not say. Her mistress now appears to her, as she did to me.’

  Relief did not last long. The woman reached her hand out to the empty armchair, finding something there. ‘This was her hankercher,’ she said. Her simple face had crumpled, as the tears began to spill. ‘God forgive my foolishness. For though I ken that she is in a better place, and I will be there after, we three were together very many years. God bless her guid soul.’ She lifted up the handkerchief, dabbing at her eyes, and Colin saw upon it spots of his own blood. His hand flew to his tooth, his mouth began to move against the searing pain, and the sound that came from it was very like a sob.

  3.

  Balfour

  ‘a counterfeit and deceiving spirit’

  Hew came from his lecture on the third day of November to find Roger Cunningham waiting in his room. Roger was playing at a game of knucklebones with a silver button and a rotten tooth. He threw the tooth and caught it.

  ‘If this is how you spend your time,’ said Hew, ‘I am not surprised that you persist in haunting us. Though I would remind you that you are expelled.’

  ‘I have something for you,’ Roger said. He ignored the jibe.

  ‘Not that, I hope.’

  Roger put the tooth in a pocket. ‘Not this. This is a part of my collection. Something you will want.’

  ‘Aye? And what is that?’

  ‘News,’ Roger said. ‘I have brought you news. I know that it will interest you. Thank me, if you like.’

  ‘I may thank you, or no, when you tell me what it is.’

  ‘Do you ken a man called Colin Snell? He was a student here at the New College, who had in mind to hurl me into their latrines. I nearly died.’

  ‘An exaggeration. But I mind the man.’

  Roger grinned at him. ‘I knew you would. Well, he has returned. This is his tooth.’

  ‘I dare not ask,’ Hew said, ‘how he came to part with it.’

  ‘I pulled it out m
yself. I never saw a man so pitifully feart. He almost shat himself. I had to let him think I had forgot the jakes. I minded it, of course.’

  Hew said, ‘You are a fiend.’

  ‘That is unkind. I did not hurt him, more than necessary. Which was quite enough. Colin Snell is in a wretched state. He is presently in the care of James Melville of Kilrennie, who has brought him to his uncle at the New College. It was James who paid me to extract the tooth. He is a patient but practical man. Colin Snell is lunatic.’

  ‘That is very sad. But I do not see what it has to do with me.’

  ‘I though you would be interested in what has made him mad. He has seen a ghost.’

  ‘Really? Where was that?’

  A second ghost was surely more than a coincidence. Hew wondered whether Roger had heard of Thomas Crowe, and hoped that he had not. Rumour quickly spread. Roger was by no means the common sort of gossip; he was far more dangerous than that. He kept his secrets close, waiting for the moment when they could be put to their best effect.

  ‘At the Poffle of Strathkinness. He was on a priest hunt there, when he saw the spirit of a woman called Ann Balfour.’

  ‘Is Ann Balfour dead, then?’

  Roger said pleasantly, ‘I imagine so, if she is a ghost. That is what I heard. I listen, and I hear things. Colin Snell did not confide in me. But I heard James Melville talking with his uncle, and this is what I learned. James had from Colin a precise and curious account. He had gone to the Poffle on November first. When he arrived, he found Ann Balfour sitting in her chair, with a breakfast tray beside her. The breakfast was untouched. Colin Snell made much of the breakfast. James said he was quite fixed on it. Some words were exchanged, between Colin Snell and the woman there. Then Colin went to search the rest of the house. In a vault underground, he found Ann Balfour’s body, watched by her servants. She had been dead since the day before. The servants had watched, all through the night. There were no other persons in the house.

  ‘When Andrew was informed of this, he sent a party from the Kirk. The party confirmed that Ann Balfour’s body had been decently laid out. Her family had turned up, and arranged for her burial at the kirk of Holy Trinity.

  ‘She was buried yesterday, in fact. The party found no trace of a spirit in the house. The servants were distressed at Colin Snell’s suggestion that the devil had appeared to him, in the form of their mistress. They are of the superstitious kind, who believe that ghosts are the spirits of the dead. But they did not believe their mistress could have roamed abroad, as that was what their vigil was intended to prevent. They had believed a death at Halloween put the corpus under threat, yet they were convinced they had averted it. They saw and heard no ghost. The consensus is that Colin is insane. He is kept at the college, where he is asleep, silenced with a draught. Now, are you not pleased that I have brought this news?’

  Hew did his best to feign indifference to it. ‘I hope that you have not spread your prattle far and wide. It does not do to fright the world with ghosts.’

  Roger laughed at that. ‘You need not fear. I do not lightly break a patient’s confidence. I saved the news for you. It is a gift, to thank you for the help you gave to Sam at Candlemas. I know it is exactly the sort of thing you like. Confess, you are agog. Now that I have telt you, we are even, are we not?’

  Pulling out the tooth, he looked at it again. ‘When I have gathered teeth from all my old adversaries, I will make a necklet,’ he said. ‘One of yours among them will look very fine.’

  ‘When I have the toothache, I will remember that. I will not come to you,’ said Hew.

  ‘Ah, but you should. I am very good.’

  ‘Be gone, ghoulish creature. You are very bad. Possibly the worst loun in the world.’ Hew chased him out. But he was not displeased.

  He went in search of Giles, and found him in the chapel. Giles appeared distracted. ‘I was thinking that we should repair the roof.’ Hew did not comment. He recognized the roof was not why Giles was here.

  ‘Did you want something?’ Giles said.

  Hew said, ‘Indeed. Did you ken that Ann Balfour was dead?’

  ‘I certified the death.’

  ‘You did not mention it.’

  Giles replied simply, ‘You did not ask.’ His daily life dealt so often in such small departures, that they passed him by without report. ‘Her death was unremarkable. I found her sitting peaceful in her chair.’

  ‘Was the death expected?’

  ‘It was not unexpected. What is your interest, Hew?’

  Hew did not answer the question. Instead he asked, ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was on the morning of October thirty-first, All Hallows Eve. A boy from the farm at the Poffle came to fetch me.’

  ‘Were there other people in the house?’

  ‘The servants. The boy from the farm. I saw no one else there. Why?’

  ‘A man called Colin Snell believes he saw her spirit, on November 1st. He went to her house, on a hunt for priests.’

  ‘What? Another ghost?’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  Giles looked, in that moment, so intently troubled that Hew thought, ‘He believes the spirit Thomas saw was real. That is why he came here to the kirk.’ Giles Locke was a Catholic, after all.

  But the doctor’s mind was on another track. ‘Who is Colin Snell?’ he asked.

  ‘He was once a student at the New College. He was disgraced, in the affair with Roger Cunningham.’

  ‘Ach, I knew the name. It was in a letter that I had from Stephen Crowe. Colin Snell was tutor to his boys.’

  ‘Then they are connected,’ Hew exclaimed. ‘It cannot be by chance that both have witnessed ghosts.’

  ‘I fear an epidemic,’ Giles said gloomily. ‘There has been contagion here. So much must be plain. But why should it continue now they are apart? Colin Snell has had no communion with the boy. I mind now, he was absent at the start of term. Thomas telt me he had come here with his tutor. But when we looked for him, to have his own report, he could not be found.’

  Hew said, ‘He hid from us, perhaps.’

  ‘Now you trouble me. I do not like to think that such a man insinuated into that poor boy.’

  ‘Perhaps it is the boy insinuates in him.’

  Giles shuddered. ‘Horrible, quite horrible. I do not like to think it. He is just a bairn.’

  ‘Do not be distressed,’ said Hew. ‘Whatever is the source, I will find it out. But we must be vigilant. There is more to this than we had supposed. How does the patient?’

  ‘You had best ask Meg. He is her patient now. What use was I to him? To ply purges on a boy, who had starved himself?’ Giles responded wretchedly. ‘I depend on her to put right our neglect.’

  Hew saw that it was conscience that had brought him to the kirk, not the fear of ghosts. He came there to atone, to make his peace with God, for the guilt he felt for failing Thomas Crowe.

  Colin Snell was fettered in a fractured sleep, and unable to confirm his own account to Hew. But a word with James left him in no doubt.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Hew, ‘he did not find his priest?’

  ‘There is no priest,’ James said. ‘I doubt you may have heard of one called Father John, who was well kent here. He compeared before the Kirk session at St Andrews, several months ago, and was ordered to desist from holding Mass. He was sick and frail, and no action was pursued against him at that time. Shortly after that, he passed away. I tried to say as much to Colin Snell. He would not hear. He is a fanatic, Hew. There is no kind of reason to his mad pursuits. I bitterly regret I sent him to those boys. God kens what hard doctrine he instilled in them, when they came already from a tragic house.’

  The story of that house had lately been disclosed, in letters to Giles Locke from the father Stephen, after Thomas Crowe had fainted in the kirk. The doctor had examined him, for the first time thoroughly, and had found his fragile body beggarly and thin. It soon became apparent he had starved himself. The regent William Cranston w
as unable to recall ever seeing Thomas eat his dinner at the board. Thomas was a quiet boy, who did not draw attention to himself. In his defence, Cranston said he had never come across a boy who did not want to eat. The students in the main had ferocious appetites. They were never satisfied, but always wanted more. Which Doctor Locke would ken, if he ever stayed to supper in the hall.

  Giles had blamed himself. In particular, it vexed him that he had ordered purges for a patient who was plainly ill. It was his fault, entirely, that the boy had fainted. The visions he had seen – which the purging had exacerbated, rather than relieved – resulted from his fast, for fasting was a cause of illusions in the mind. He believed the fasting had been caused by melancholy, and that Thomas Crowe had simply lost his appetite. Hew’s investigations bore this out. It did not take him long to find the bits of bread that Thomas Crowe had hidden in his room. The bread was hard and stale.

  The remedy prescribed was the soundest cure of all. Giles had taken Thomas home with him to Meg, trusting her to mend the harm that had been done.

  Hew continued, meanwhile, to pursue the ghost. While it had a cause in Thomas Crowe’s poor health, he believed its substance had a human source. It did not take him long to find it. A brisk inquisition of the first year class – who were awed by the sight of Thomas carried out – had delivered Malcom Crabbe and his pamphlets to his hands. Hew was impressed by the contents of the library.

  “A pack of Spanish lies” may be well and sound. But I like this one best: “A new ballet of the strange and most cruel whips which the Spaniards had prepared to whip and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish ships in July last past. To the tune of The valiant soldier.” You cannot hum that, I suppose?’