Cunningham 04 - St Mungo's Robin

  PAT McINTOSH, like Gil Cunningham, is a graduate of Glasgow University. Born and brought up in Lanarkshire, for many years the author lived and worked in Glasgow and is now settled on the West Coast with a husband and three cats.

  Titles in this series

  (listed in order)

  The Harper’s Quine

  The Nicholas Feast

  The Merchant’s Mark

  St Mungo’s Robin

  The Rough Collier

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2007

  This paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2008

  First US edition published by Carroll & Graf Publishers, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc., 2007

  This paperback edition published by SohoConstable, an imprint of Soho Press, 2008

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  www.sohopress.com

  Copyright © Pat McIntosh, 2007, 2008

  The right of Pat McIntosh 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. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  UK ISBN: 978-1-84529-815-9

  eISBN: 978-1-84901-863-0

  US ISBN: 978-1-56947-555-3

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 86 4 2

  For Martin –

  SEMPER

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  Gil Cunningham worked out later that at the moment when the dead man was found in the almshouse garden, he himself was eating porridge, salted by a furious altercation with his youngest sister.

  He had come down in the dark after Prime annoyed with himself for sleeping late, to find her in the hall of their uncle’s house, bright in a fine scarlet gown, the neck and sleeves of her shift embroidered to match it. She had found a taper and was lighting all the stumps of last night’s candles.

  ‘Tib!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you were staying down the town with Kate.’

  ‘Not another hour,’ said Lady Isobel, setting the taper to the last wick on a pricket-stand, her vivid little face pettish in the blaze of light.

  ‘How ever not?’

  She shrugged. ‘Kate spews if you so much as mention food, and you’d think nobody else ever went with child, the way Augie Morison behaves around her. And those brats of his, a body couldny stand to live with,’ she added.

  ‘The wee one was rude to you, was she?’ said Gil shrewdly. She threw him a dark look and lit another candle. Gil lifted the snuffer and began to extinguish the guttering lights along the wall, saying, ‘So you’ve come here instead. Does Maggie ken you’re in the house?’

  ‘I let her in at the kitchen door the now, Maister Gil.’ Maggie Hamilton stepped into the hall from the turnpike stair, a laden tray in her big red hands. ‘And her kist is still in the yard in the rain where that Andy set it down. I wish he’d stayed till I saw him, I’d ha gied him a word for Lady Kate. Here’s your porridge, the pair of ye, and just a wee bit butter to it, for it’s to last. It’s maybe only the two weeks to Advent, but the house’ll be full of wedding guests by Monday night, and where you’re to sleep, Lady Tib, I’ve no idea. And when did you last comb your hair, I’d like to ken?’

  ‘Yestreen, most like,’ said Tib in a vague tone which Gil decided was intended to be irritating.

  ‘She could lie at the castle, with Dorothea,’ he suggested.

  ‘Dorothea? Is she coming? You’ve never invited her to your wedding!’ said Tib scornfully. ‘She’ll cast a gloom over everything, with her long face and her veil.’ She cast up her eyes and clasped her hands in brief mimicry, and the taper went dangerously near the tangled curls.

  ‘You’ll no speak that way about your eldest sister, Lady Tib,’ ordered Maggie. ‘Lady Dawtie was truly called before ever you were born, and none of this running wild like a wee Saracen the way you’ve been let. Comb your hair and eat your porridge, and then you can come down to my kitchen and gie me a hand, for I’ve baking and brewing to see to, and a new receipt for cannel-cakes that Jennet Clark gave me last night. I hope you’ve another gown in your kist,’ she added, ‘for you’re not setting bread in that one. Is it no the one you’re wearing to your brother’s marriage? The idea, wearing it to go about Glasgow at this hour of the day!’

  She set the tray down on a convenient stool, and turned and stumped out of the hall. Tib shrugged, blew out the taper, and slid a sideways glance at her brother.

  ‘Eat your porridge,’ he suggested. ‘You’ll be in a better mood.’

  ‘So’ll you,’ she said pertly, but took the wooden dish and horn spoon from the tray. ‘Where’s the old man? And that dog of yours?’

  ‘Socrates came down earlier,’ said Gil, stirring the small portion of butter into his porridge, ‘likely Maggie let him out, and our uncle has a case to hear after Sext and –’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be over in St Mungo’s tower by now,’ agreed Tib, ‘among all his dusty old papers. Does the dog sleep with you? Alys is going to love that. He’ll want to make a threesome with you between the sheets. I hope she’ll ken who’s embracing her.’

  Gil restrained himself with difficulty, and studied his sister. She was eight years his junior; he remembered her best from before he went away to school and university, when she had been a stout screaming toddler, furious with a world in which she was simply not old enough to do everything her siblings did. Fourth in line himself, he had sympathized with that, though not with the screaming. Now, at eighteen, she was a pretty young woman, but he thought again, looking at her, that she could almost be a changeling. In a family of tall, long-chinned, grey-eyed people, only Tib and the second brother Edward had inherited their paternal grandmother’s small neat frame, heart-shaped face and hazel eyes. And Edward was dead at the battle of Stirling Field along with their father, their eldest brother, and James, third King of Scots of that name. In Tib’s case her temper had also been part of the legacy, Gil reflected, eating porridge.

  ‘When will Mother get here?’ she asked now. ‘And is Margaret coming? Kate never said, but I suppose if you’ve asked Dorothea you must want all your sisters at your marriage. We’ve not been all together,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘since Margaret was wed. Near six year.’

  ‘They’ll both be here the morn, by what Dorothea wrote to me.’ Tib pulled a face, and Gil said mildly, ‘What have you against Dorothea? What’s she done to you?’

  Before she could answer him, the door at the top of the kitchen stair was flung wide, to reveal only Socrates the young wolfhound. Spying his master, the dog sprang forward
, singing with delight, so that the rebounding door missed his tail by some inches. Gil transferred his spoon to his bowl and held both high with one hand, the better to repel his pet’s passionate greeting with the other. ‘Good dog. Sit!’ he said firmly. ‘Sit!’ The dog sat down obligingly, still singing, his stringy tail thumping on the floorboards. ‘I must teach you to shut doors,’ he added.

  Tib, watching, said as if she had not been interrupted, ‘Just, you heard Maggie. Dorothea’s a pattern of perfection, and I’ve to take her as my style-book. I was six when she left home, all I mind is her trying to teach me to say a rosary. Then she came back before she was clothed, and prayed over me, which was worse.’

  ‘Tib, that was twelve years since,’ said Gil. ‘She was younger than you are now. So I suppose you’ll not be a nun, then.’

  ‘No, I will not!’ she said explosively. ‘Don’t you start at that! Besides, what kind of a house would take me without a tocher of some sort?’

  ‘What can you do, then?’ he asked. ‘Live with Mother until we can amass a tocher for you? It could take a while, Tib. Or will you go to Margaret or Kate? We need to settle you somewhere.’

  ‘Spare me from either! Margaret can talk of nothing but the contents of her newest brat’s tail-clouts, and Kate will be the same in another six months, no to mention Augie Morison’s two wee jewels,’ said Tib, with a brief simper in which he recognized, with some amusement, the older of his third sister’s stepdaughters. ‘Give your Alys her due, she doesny go on about that bairn her father’s fostered.’

  ‘Our Boyd cousins move with the court,’ he suggested as Socrates, dignity recovered, paced over to push his nose under her hand. ‘Maybe if Mother wrote to her kin, they might find a place for you.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, looking up from the dog, the acid in her voice again. ‘I’ll be waiting-woman to Marion Boyd, will I, and hope to catch the King’s eye when he tires of her?’

  ‘We need to do something with you,’ Gil began again.

  ‘I’m not in your tutelage, Gil!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nor I’ll not be sent about the countryside like a package because nobody will take a mind to me!’

  ‘But you are,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m head of the family, Tib, like it or no, and I’ll not have you wander about the countryside like a hen laying away, either. We’ll need to find you a life you can tolerate –’

  ‘Aye, like a package!’ she said again. ‘I’ll no be subject to that, Gil Cunningham, and you canny make me! You’ve never found me a husband yet, and here I’m eighteen past and no tocher and no –’ She blinked hard and turned away, rubbing at her eyes.

  ‘Then what will you do?’ She shrugged one shoulder, and addressed herself to her cooling porridge. Gil eyed her in exasperation. ‘If you won’t stay in Carluke with Mother, and I’d not blame you,’ he admitted, ‘we’ll have to –’

  ‘We!’ she said furiously. ‘Why we? Why must you always be meddling in my life? Just because you’re settled down with a perfect French shrew of a housewife –’

  ‘She’s nothing of the sort!’

  ‘I heard her yesterday biting your head off for nothing,’ said Tib triumphantly ‘and scolding at the servants when your back was turned. I wish you joy of her, Gil –’

  ‘Alys is on edge about the marriage,’ said Gil defensively quelling the surge of anxiety her words set off, ‘and she’s organizing the feast herself. You try that and see what it does to your temper, madam!’

  The incident she referred to had dismayed him badly. The clever, competent girl he admired and worshipped seemed to have vanished in the past weeks, to be replaced by a distracted snappish individual who drove the servants and herself unmercifully. The household, taking its tone from Alys’s aged French duenna, kept its collective head down and smiled tolerantly behind her back. Gil himself had escaped the worst of her wrath, had in fact been able to soothe her, until the previous afternoon when a chance remark in support of one of the maidservants had brought the skies down on his head. He had backed off in dismay, and his sister Kate, also visiting the mason’s house in the High Street, had drawn Alys to her side, asking about music for the feast, but the disagreement had not been resolved.

  ‘A perfect shrew,’ Tib repeated now, ‘so Kate and me and everyone else is to be boxed up and tidied away out of sight –’

  ‘My marriage has nothing to do with it!’ he began.

  ‘Then why did we never hear a word of this till after it was arranged?’

  ‘Why did I never hear a word of you not being content till now?’

  ‘Nobody asked me!’ she flashed. ‘And you needny bother yourself, I’ll see to my own future and no need for meddling from a lot of old women!’

  She slammed her empty bowl down on the tray with such force that the wood split, and flounced off to the kitchen stairs. Gil finished his own porridge, rather grimly, set his bowl on the floor for the dog to lick and went up to put his boots on. Like their uncle the Official, Canon David Cunningham, senior judge of the diocese, he had documents of his own to see to over in the Consistory tower, but first he would go down to speak to Alys.

  In his attic chamber, he kicked off the heel-less shoes he wore about the house and sat down on his narrow bed, aware of the strapping creaking under him. He lifted one boot from the kist at the bed-foot, but paused, staring at the small image before which he had said his prayers earlier. St Giles looked enigmatically back at him, his pet doe leaping at his side. Sweet St Giles, he thought, help me to mend this quarrel with Alys.

  It had flared up very quickly. Alys had asked Kittock for a piece of paper with the menu for some part of the marriage feast on it, and scolded furiously when Kittock admitted it was mislaid. Gil had lost track of Alys’s plans long since, but was dimly conscious that there were to be several instalments of the feast, over three or even four days, with different groups of friends and family invited. He had said, half joking, ‘Does it matter, sweetheart? Will anyone notice, if there’s one meal the less?’

  Kittock’s expression had frozen, and Alys had turned on him, scarlet-faced, brown eyes sparking dangerously, and upbraided him in a torrent of wrathful French.

  ‘Of course it matters! Your status and ours matter. I’m working all the hours there are so our marriage can be celebrated appropriately, at least you could be grateful, instead of trying to undermine me with my own household!’

  ‘Alys!’ he had said, astonished. ‘Sweetheart, I am grateful, and I’m amazed at what you’re doing, but I don’t – I’m not trying to –’

  ‘Then keep out of my business!’ she said sharply. ‘Let me manage things my own way.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ he began unwisely, and attempted to put his arms round her, ‘as if you’re doing too much. You’ll be exhausted –’

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ she ordered, and stuck her elbows out so that one dug into his stomach. ‘I’ve enough to do here without you getting in my way.’

  Appalled, he had backed away, and found both Alys’s duenna Catherine and his sister Kate trying to catch his eye with identical warning expressions. Kate had managed to change the subject to the music for the feast, and he had made his escape. Stout Kittock found him before he reached the house door.

  ‘Never mind her, Maister Gil,’ she had said comfortably. ‘She’s set herself far too much to oversee, but there’s nothing even the maister can do to stop her when she gets like this, so never worry. She’ll be fine once it’s all over. Or once you’re all over,’ she added, nudging him and winking broadly. He had managed a smile, and got himself out of the house somehow.

  Sweet St Giles, he thought again. Grant me wisdom to manage this girl. I love her, I admire her, I want only her happiness. Help us both to make a good marriage. Help us both to make it to the wedding.

  The image seemed to stir, the painted face to flicker in a smile. At his side the candle flame leapt again in the draught from the window, where the grey light was growing. He bent to pull on the first boot, wondering why it
was that when Tib shouted at him he shouted back, but when Alys snapped he was horrified.

  Down the wet High Street, past lit windows and dripping eaves, he turned in at the tunnel-like pend which led to the courtyard of the mason’s large stone house. Overhead, heavy feet tramped on the floorboards of the room above the entry, and a burst of raucous song and a smell of linseed oil told him that the painters were still at work. The courtyard itself was empty, though two paint-splashed ladders and a plank lay at the foot of the stair-tower in the near corner. Socrates bounded ahead across the shining flagstones to the main door, which opened as Gil climbed the fore-stair. The dog sprang in, tail waving.

  ‘Gil,’ said Alys. She acknowledged the dog’s greeting, then drew his master in, helped him unwrap his wet plaid, and stepped into his embrace, slipping her arms round him under his furred gown. ‘Gil, I am sorry,’ she said into his collarbone. ‘You are a passynge good knyght and the best that euer I found and I did wrong to shout at you.’

  ‘I’m marrying a shrew,’ he said teasingly, in the French they used when they were together. Then as she tensed in his grasp, ‘I’m sorry too, that I angered you, sweetheart. What is it?’ he asked, feeling her draw back slightly. She shook her head, not looking up at him. ‘Alys, what is wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head again, and freed one hand to rub at her eyes. ‘But the painters say they need another week, and we still have to furnish our lodging, and the apothecary has no more rose petals or ginger, and we’ve run out of braid to trim my gown with, and everything’s going wrong. Where has the dog gone?’

  He held her away from him and looked at her, a slender girl in a mended gown of blue woollen, her honey-coloured hair dragged back out of the way, her face pinched with distress so that the high thin bridge of her nose stood up like a razor.

  ‘Likely down to the kitchen, to find Nancy and the bairn. Is he well?’

  ‘John?’ She blinked distractedly, and gave him a brief smile. ‘Yes, he is well. He said my name this morning.’