The Stolen Voice Read online

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘It’s a strange thing, that,’ said Adam at last.

  ‘How so?’ asked Gil.

  ‘The Ratton just vanished. Like the Drummond laddie –’

  ‘No, no, Adam, the Drummond boy was on his way back, by what we hear.’

  ‘There’s no knowing that,’ argued Adam. ‘He’d maybe not have told his kin if he was planning to go a long journey.’

  ‘Aye, but he’d a gied his bedfellows some notion, surely!’

  ‘The Drummond boy met wi some accident, how could he warn his bedfellows?’

  ‘So you’d no inkling Rattray was going away?’ Gil put in, before this could build into an argument. ‘You don’t think his servant was right and he’s been taen off by the Deil?’

  ‘Ha!’ said Kilgour.

  ‘Walter Muthill’s a daft laddie,’ said someone else. ‘The Deil kens what he saw, but it wasny the Deil.’ This got a laugh, but the speaker protested, ‘Aye, fine, but you ken what I mean. There’s plenty folk in Dunblane I’d sooner believe had been borne off by the Deil than John Rattray. He’s aye been a good-living kind o fellow.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing just the same, he’d got across Andrew Drummond,’ said the man called Adam, ‘and then vanished the same as Drummond’s brother.’

  ‘Adam, I tellt you, it was nothing like the same,’ said Kilgour. ‘Besides, the way Andrew Drummond came speiring about it, he knew no more than any of us.’

  ‘He was interested, was he?’ asked Gil.

  ‘Oh, aye, asking all around.’

  ‘What about Rattray’s kin? Has he nobody else that might hear from him?’

  A short debate turned up the fact that John Rattray was the last of his house, save for a brother teaching, or perhaps studying, the Laws in some university in Germany. That would account for the length of time it took before anyone was concerned, Gil thought.

  ‘I mind he did say his parents were carried off in the pestilence,’ said someone.

  ‘And when he left, he never said anything, or gave any sign? What generally happens?’

  ‘Not a word,’ said the man called Geordie.

  ‘It’s usual for one Precentor to write the other,’ said Kilgour. ‘Dougie Cossar had a message only last month, to ask if we’d a tenor we could spare to Stirling.’

  ‘So it’s arranged between the Precentors?’ Gil prompted.

  ‘Aye, in general. Wi maybe an offering to sweeten the exchange. But Dougie had no notion John Ratton was off either.’

  ‘He did buy the ale that night,’ said another voice.

  ‘Aye, that’s right, Simon, he did,’ agreed Kilgour. ‘We take it in turn,’ he explained to Gil. ‘It wasny John’s turn, but he bought the ale, and bannocks too.’

  ‘But he never said a thing about going away,’ said Geordie, shaking his head.

  ‘You never found anything in his chamber when you took it on, did you, Nick?’ asked Kilgour. A man perched on the end of the bench shook his head.

  ‘Nothing at all, save a couple o Flemish placks away under the bed where Muthill’s wife hadny swept far enough. I found them when I shifted it round – I canny abide to sleep wi my head to the window.’

  ‘He’d never been to the Low Countries, had he?’ said Geordie.

  ‘No, but we all get enough o those, this close to a market the size o Stirling,’ said Nick Allen. ‘I’d another three in my purse only last month.’

  ‘And you’ve never heard where he went to? Where do you suppose he’s gone?’

  ‘Somewhere they pay their singers better,’ said the man in the corner.

  ‘Near anywhere in Scotland, you mean?’ said Adam, and got a general sour laugh.

  ‘Aye, but Maister Belchis writ every other diocese,’ objected Kilgour, ‘asking was he in their pay now, and they all said he wasny.’

  Gil privately doubted this. If Rattray owed nobody money there was no motive to hunt for him, and there was by far too much work to do in any diocese to pursue a single missing singer for no reason.

  ‘How good is his voice?’ he asked. ‘What does he sing?’

  ‘He’s countertenor,’ said Kilgour. ‘A high tenor, ye ken. And he’s no bad, no bad at all. In fact he’d come on a lot last winter, you’d think he’d been practising or something.’ This raised another laugh; it seemed to be a joke. ‘It was the kind of voice we don’t get to keep very long, it’s no surprise he’s left us. The only by-ordinar thing about the business, Maister Cunningham, is the way he slipped off wi never a word to say he was away or where he was going. And that nonsense of his laddie’s about seeing the Deil at his window,’ he added.

  ‘That’s two things,’ said Adam.

  Kilgour swung a friendly fist at him, but said to Gil, ‘So if you find him, maister, we’d be glad to hear it.’

  ‘If I find him,’ said Gil, ‘I’ll send you word.’

  Chapter Four

  In the morning, nursing a headache, Gil asked the Bishop’s steward how to find Canon Drummond. This got him a close look, and a dubious,

  ‘Aye, m’hm. You’ll need to speak to him, right enough, though I’ve no notion what good it might do.’ The steward, a lean-faced individual with straggling grey hair, looked down at the towel and bread-knife he carried, and absently wiped the knife with the towel. ‘He’s had his troubles to bear, Maister Cunningham, and he’s badly afflicted by them.’

  ‘Troubles,’ repeated Gil, lifting an eyebrow.

  ‘His, er – his, er – a woman dear to him,’ said the steward euphemistically, ‘dwelling outside the town, dee’d a month since, and the bairn wi her. It seemed as if he’d ha been right enough, what wi his faith in God and His saints, and the comfort o his brothers in the Chapter, but then he’d the letter telling o his brother David’s return, and then ten days syne another, and since that time he’s fell straight into a great melancholy. His folk say he neither moves nor speaks the most o the time.’

  ‘Why should that have sent him melancholy?’ Gil asked in surprise. ‘I’d ha thought it would help him.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ The steward looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m no one to gossip, maister, you’ll understand –’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Gil reassuringly, ‘but anything you can tell me that helps –’

  ‘Aye. His man tellt me. The bairn lived a few hours, see, but it was never like to do well, and they gied it baptism in the name o David for his brother. And then it dee’d.’

  ‘And then his brother came back from wherever he’s been,’ said Gil. ‘I see.’

  ‘Aye. The way I heard it, it’s as if he’s thinking, if they’d gied the bairn some other name, it might no ha been taken.’

  ‘Hardly the way for a clerk to be thinking,’ observed Gil.

  ‘A man canny aye school his own thoughts,’ returned the steward sagely. ‘So you can call at Andrew Drum-mond’s manse, maister, but you might no get much good o’t.’

  Thus warned, Gil was almost prepared for the sight of Canon Andrew Drummond, seated in the arbour at the far end of his little pleasure-garden, hands dangling between his knees, his felt hat on the bench beside him and the sun beating down on his tonsured head while he stared blankly at a knot of clipped box-hedge.

  ‘Here, Canon, you’ll get stricken by the sun,’ said the servant who had led Gil out from the well-appointed house. ‘Put your hat on, now,’ he instructed, lifting it. He placed it over the tonsure as if his master was a child, turning it so the single silver badge on the brim showed to advantage. ‘Here’s a man to speak to you, sent by Robert Blacader, so you’ll need to gie him an answer.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Blacader,’ repeated the Canon dully, and turned his gaze on Gil. ‘Aye, I feared he’d send someone. You can tell him I’m full aware o my guilt, maister. Or am I summoned to make a confession?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Gil, bowing politely and trying to conceal his dismay. ‘I’m right sorry for your loss. But I’m here about another matte
r entirely. May I sit and talk wi you?’

  ‘I kent it,’ stated Drummond, his speech slow and hoarse. He was a big-boned man in his forties, in clothes which hung on him as if he had lost weight lately. Pink cheeks slumped over a square jaw, blue eyes ringed with dark shadows stared guiltily at his audience. Below the brim of the hat fair frizzy hair, clipped short, exposed his bare neck and showed a long shiny mark like an old burn scar. Sweet St Giles, thought Gil, if that was the mark of the rope, he was lucky to lose no more than his voice. ‘I kent she would dee, right from the moment she said she was howding again. And the bairn and all.’

  ‘It’s a great grief,’ said Gil awkwardly, and sat down uninvited so that he could put a hand on the man’s arm in sympathy. ‘Death comes to us all, soon or late, but it’s a sad thing for those left living.’ Hoccleve, he thought. That chaunge sank into myn herte-roote. Poor devil, and he has no means of mourning his mistress officially, either.

  ‘Now, Canon,’ said his man in bracing tones, ‘you’ve two bonnie bairns yet. Think on them, and take heart, maister.’

  ‘They’ve gone from me and all,’ said the Canon in his croaking voice, and sighed again. ‘A’ that’s close to me, wede awa.’

  ‘There’s no telling what’s God’s will,’ said Gil. ‘No sense in going to meet grief.’

  ‘Come away, now, maister, Mistress Nan was shriven in childbed,’ the servant pointed out, ‘and the bairn baptised all in his innocence. They’d be taen straight to Paradise, borne up by holy angels, the both o them. You’ve no call to grieve on their account, maister. And yir ither bairns are only the length o Perth wi their grandam, you can see them any time you’ve a mind to it.’ He made sympathetic faces at Gil over the Canon’s felt hat, and said in what was obviously intended as an aside, ‘It was just after we’d took the bairns to Perth, when the second letter came from Balquhidder, that he fell into this state, and I’ve no notion what to do for him.’ He bent to the Canon’s ear and went on encouragingly, ‘Brace up, now, sit nice and talk wi Blacader’s man, and I’ll bring you a wee drink and some o the honey cakes, will I?’

  He departed without waiting for an answer. Drummond looked briefly at his retreating back and then at the gravel beneath his feet. Gil cleared his throat, wondering whether he should remain. The Canon’s condition answered his major question; it was hardly surprising that a man in this state had not ridden out to Balquhidder to greet his returned brother.

  ‘She must ha been very dear to you,’ he said. ‘Had you kent her long?’

  The shadowed blue eyes flickered in his direction, and the man nodded.

  ‘Ten year,’ said the hoarse voice.

  ‘Long enough. What drew you to her? Was she bonnie?’

  Another blue glance, another nod. ‘A bonnie, loving lass wi no tocher,’ pronounced Drummond in that harsh voice.

  A strange epitaph, thought Gil, though he knew the kind of arrangement a cleric would offer. For a girl with no dowry like Mistress Nan, it was often an attractive alternative to a life as a poor relation in another household. What did a churchman’s mistress do to please him, apart from the obvious?

  ‘Did she sing for you? Play the harp?’

  The Canon’s broad shoulders straightened a little, and he said more attentively, ‘What way would she be singing? I’ve to listen to the choir all day, I’ll hear no singers in my own home. She would harp for me, maister. She harpit as good as any woman in the realm o Scotland. She could ha played for the King, my poor lassie.’ Another of those huge sighs.

  ‘God hath her tane, I trowe, for her good fame,’ Gil quoted, ‘the more to plese and comfort his seintis.’

  ‘That’s bonnie,’ said Drummond after a moment. ‘Aye, that’s bonnie. My poor lass. To plese and comfort his seintis,’ he repeated, on a bitter note.

  The servant returned, crunching down the gravel path with a wooden tray. The drink he had brought tasted of fruit and honey, and the little cakes were sweet and spicy. Gil was not hungry, but nibbled one to encourage Drummond, and said:

  ‘Canon Drummond, I’m sorry to break in on your grief –’

  ‘No matter, for I’ve no right to mourn her,’ said Drummond harshly, ‘I’m guilty o her death.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ persisted Gil, ‘about your brother David.’

  ‘I’ve no brother David. He’s been gone these thirty year, whatever my mother’s writ me.’

  ‘What do you recall of the time he vanished?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Where were you when he disappeared?’

  Another shadowed glance.

  ‘I was here. I never left the town.’

  ‘Why did you not go home with him?’ Gil wondered. ‘Did you not want to see your family too?’

  ‘Hah.’ Drummond shook his head with a bitter laugh. ‘Walk that distance to help wi the reaping, when I could stay here and –’ He broke off the sentence.

  ‘What about St Angus’ fair?’ Gil asked. ‘That would be worth the journey, surely?’

  Drummond put up a hand to straighten his hat, though it had not moved.

  ‘Another ancient saint out of Ireland,’ he said, rather bitterly. ‘Not to me, maister.’

  ‘Had you any reason to think your brother might not come back to Dunblane?’

  ‘No!’ said Drummond sharply.

  ‘So he’d never said anything to suggest he might go away from here, like John Rattray?’

  The Canon’s blue stare settled on Gil’s face, unreadable.

  ‘Like Rattray?’ he said. ‘How do you think it’s alike? The two cases are no the same.’

  ‘They’ve both vanished,’ Gil said, grateful for this show of alertness.

  ‘Aye, but Rattray was –’ Drummond turned his gaze on the knot of trimmed box. ‘Rattray left all in good order, he’d clearly planned to go, as you’d find out if you questioned the soutar that rented his room to him, maister, whereas my brother was borne up and taken away unexpected.’

  ‘By the fairy-folk,’ said Gil. Drummond gave another of those small bitter laughs.

  ‘So my mither aye said. It contented her.’

  ‘And now he’s returned,’ said Gil deliberately.

  ‘Aye. I should never ha baptised the bairn in his name. It’s fetched him back, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I’d have thought his friends would be glad to hear he’s home,’ Gil offered. ‘Has William Murray at Dunkeld heard, do you know?’

  Drummond was still for a moment, then raised his head.

  ‘His friends,’ he said. ‘Aye. He’d more than one. I’d forgot Billy Murray.’

  ‘And you? Were you glad to hear it?’

  A sour smile spread across Drummond’s face.

  ‘That depends,’ he said. ‘That depends on how well he can sing now.’

  Riding back past the winding loch, with the men joking at his back, Gil tried to fit the new information into the picture he held already. It seemed to do little to clarify matters. The songman did appear to have left peacefully and of his own accord, but what was one to make of Walter Muthill’s account of the figure at the window in the twilight? The boy was very clear about what he had seen and heard, but in the absence of a smell of sulphur or scorch marks on the windowsill, Gil was not inclined to believe the interpretation Walter had supplied. There seemed no obvious reason why the Devil should carry away a decent man. And why had the decent man given his friends no sign that he was leaving? He must have had at least a day in which he could have said his farewells, and yet he seemed to have gone to some lengths to leave in secret.

  As for the older matter, the only gain there was another tangle of questions, and some new names to ask them of. If David Drummond had really fallen into some crevice in the hills, thirty years since on his way back from Dalriach, then the young man using that name now was not the same person. If he had not – if he had vanished in the same way as John Rattray and the other adults this year – then he still seemed unlikely to be the same person, but in that case
who was he? His brother Andrew would make little sense any time soon, Gil judged, and Kilgour’s account suggested there was not much more information to be got in Dunblane. More useful to ask around Balquhidder, and perhaps in Dunkeld.

  ‘Haw, Maister Gil,’ said Tam from behind him, and urged his horse forward alongside Gil’s. ‘See yon farm?’ He pointed across the loch, where a burn tumbled down a narrow glen from a saddle-like pass between a vast rugged shape and a smaller one. A huddle of low buildings lay near the foot of the glen, where the slope eased before it met the loch shore. ‘They’re saying that’s where the lad-die’s friend dwelt.’

  ‘What, there?’ Gil looked about, surveying the landscape. They were near the head of the loch; there would certainly be a track to that side of the glen. ‘How did you learn that, Tam?’

  His servant shrugged eloquently.

  ‘Lachie, him that’s head o the stables at Stronvar, minds when the laddie vanished, and he tellt me and Steenie all about it, and how he was to meet Billy Murray o Drumyre at the foot o the pass and never came there. And now these fellows,’ he jerked his head at the two sturdy men of the escort, ‘are saying yon’s the pass, and yon’s Drumyre, and still a Murray holding it.’

  ‘Well, I think we’ll go and call on them,’ said Gil, looking over his shoulder, ‘see if anyone minds the day. Can you guide me there? It’s no so far off our road, after all.’

  The senior of the two men nodded.

  ‘Aye, I can take you there. But you’ll need to watch, maister,’ he cautioned, ‘it’s a Drummond you’re asking after, and these are Murrays. Gang warily, won’t ye no?’

  ‘I will,’ promised Gil. And don’t mention Monzievaird, he thought. How long is it – five years? No, it’s no more than three. He recalled news of the atrocity reaching Glasgow in the autumn of 1490. A scion of the house of Drummond had burned Monzievaird church, together with all the Murrays who had taken refuge inside it, shocking even his wild contemporaries. It had shocked the King and his Council too, and young Drummond had paid with his head despite the pleading of his mother and sister. This was barely sufficient for the Murrays, who still hoped to see the Drummonds wiped out in retaliation, and it seemed likely that tact would be needed.