He was running a hand over the top of the small pillars, transfixed. ‘Because the knowledge of the ancients was inscribed in the stone of those pillars by Hiram, architect of Solomon’s temple, the greatest of all the masons.’
His eyes were shining, and I thought a second time that his experiences of the night, and that the fever that was coming over him, had made him a little mad. ‘You cannot think these lumps of stone here to be remnants of the temple of Jerusalem – they are rough-hewn granite quarried not three miles from this place.’
He looked at me almost scornfully. ‘Of course I don’t. But I cannot but believe that somewhere in this lodge we will discover how we might draw closer to that ancient knowledge, a connection …’ and again his voice trailed off.
I got down again on my haunches beside him. ‘Richard, these ancient secrets you seek, this search for that thing common to us and to everything around us, for the Mercury that will enable us to transform it, are not to be found in symbols, in mathematics, in stone, but in the gift of the Holy Spirit. The key is in your own heart.’
‘I have tried to believe that,’ he said quietly. ‘But wait’ – he grasped my arm and forced himself to his feet once more – ‘there is one more thing I must show you. It is something that excited us greatly when we found it, and which should have alerted us to the true nature of those pillars.’ He led me outside, to a place a little more than three feet from the door, where the turf was covered by a long, mossy slab of granite. The dog was at my side, growling.
I held up my lantern but as it swung in the wind I could see no special markings on the stone. ‘What is this?’
‘They call it Hiram’s grave. The architect of Solomon’s temple was murdered by three masons who tried to extort the secret of the Mason Word from him. His body was found in a shallow grave like this, with a moss-covered slab over it. His secrets were buried with him. Every masons’ lodge has Hiram’s grave, the housing place of their secrets.’
‘And what did you find in this one?’
‘A skull – the bone box of the initiates – and housed within the skull, three sets of keys.’ He waved a hand towards me. ‘You wear one of them at your waist.’
I looked down at the set of keys that had been taken from Robert Sim’s dead body and handed to me by Dr Dun.
Middleton carried on explaining. ‘One fits the lock of the east door to the lodge, from the building yard, the other the west, which is reached by the garden. Robert had the set you now wear, the other two sets were given to others of our fraternity. A fourth set my wife already had – they had been her brother’s and she did not know of any others.’
‘And the fourth set is the one you now use?’
He nodded.
‘Do you keep them – you and the others – about your persons, or do you have some agreement amongst you to return them to their hiding place when they are not in use?’
‘We keep them; the skull is empty now, but we have left it in the ground, in the hope of returning some symbol of some deeper knowledge to it. I will show you, if you can help me.’
He bent down and tried to lift the edge of the slab with his one good arm. The dog’s agitation was now extreme and I had great difficulty in getting past it to hand Middleton the lantern before moving him aside to heave the stone off. It was heavier than it looked, and it was not until the third great push that I felt it move across the turf at my feet. I leant forward to look into the shallow hole in the ground that was the grave underneath and in the short moment between the piercing of the night by a woman’s scream and the crashing of the lantern from Middleton’s grip to the ground, I saw the luridly gaping throat and astonished eyes of a murdered man.
FOURTEEN
The Clothworkers’ Page
In the kitchen of the house, Richard Middleton had once more taken on the role of physician. He had helped his wife inside while I had hastily shoved the cover back on the grave. Rachel Middleton, now dressed in warmer, drier clothing I recognised as Sarah’s, was sitting at the table, shaking. Fearful for his safety, she had refused to wait any longer at my house and had been making her way down to the lodge when she had come upon us at the Masonic grave. Her husband was trying to make her drink a glass of strong wine. I did not like leaving them, but I had no choice.
‘The dog is guarding the grave. I will be back as soon as I can.’
I was halfway through the door, on my way to fetch the constable, when I stopped and turned back to them. ‘Richard, do you know him? The man who lies out there?’
He shook his head. ‘I have never seen him before in my life.’
I looked at his wife, who scarcely seemed to register that we were there.
‘I do not think he was known to her either. Do you know who he is?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’
At six o’clock in the morning, I was once again in the library. In my few restless hours of sleep, the face of the dead man as he lay in his shallow grave, his throat gaping and almost black with blood, had haunted my dreams. By the time the drummer went past our house before five I had at last remembered what had eluded my mind’s grasp in the night, and indeed what had eluded me on the one occasion I had met the murdered man. For I had met him, only a few days ago, in the kitchen of William Cargill’s house as he was about to leave with Elizabeth’s lucrative linen order in his pack. I remembered where I had seen his name before. And here it was now before me, written in Robert Sim’s hand, the last entry dated on the day of the librarian’s death, at the bottom of the Clothworkers’ Page of the Trades’ Benefaction Book:
Bernard Cummins, Weaver, lately returned from the Low Countries, 4sh. 6d. to the box.
That was all, nothing more, but I felt that here at last was something which would, if I could but see it, begin to make sense to me.
My first act, after alerting the town authorities to what had been found in the Middletons’ garden, had been to hammer on the door of the college gate house and have the porter fetch Dr Dun who had slept in his college apartments since the night of Robert’s death. Despite the gatekeeper’s protests and assertions that I had surely, at last, lost my mind, he had eventually done as he was bid and had soon returned with the principal, who had quickly dressed and gathered up his case of medical instruments. It was clear that his first thoughts on being roused were that I was in need of medical attention, and it took a minute or two to persuade him otherwise.
‘I have been worrying about you half the night, Alexander. You did not look in your right wits when I left you with William Cargill last night, and the reports from your students were not good.’
‘I am sorry to have caused you that concern. It was a brief lapse, and it is over now.’
He did not look convinced, but said nothing more on the matter, and had followed me quickly back to the Middletons’ house. Her husband had by this point persuaded Rachel to her bed, and Dr Dun took some time in attending to Richard’s wounds before going down into the backland to examine the weaver’s body. He had been unwilling to say much to me in front of the baillie and town’s officers and had taken little time in despatching me to my own home with a promise and tacit understanding that we should meet in the morning to discuss what we had found.
When I entered the college dining-hall in the morning, a bursar gave me a message that I was to go directly to the principal’s private chamber. I could not tell whether Patrick Dun was dressed because he had risen some time earlier, or because he had not yet been to his bed. The greyness of his face, the tiredness in his eyes, suggested the latter.
I was ravenous, having not eaten a proper meal in two days, but the principal showed little interest in the food that was brought to us, and I began to see just how heavily the difficulties of the college weighed on him. ‘Matthew Jack is in the tolbooth, of course. He would have done better to have left the town altogether when I him put from the gates, but he was determined that his malice should have its day, and it may cost him a great deal more than his post and h
is liberty.’
‘You think it likely he will hang for the murder of Bernard Cummins?’
‘I think it a possibility. His threats to Rachel Middleton and his attack on her husband so soon before Cummins’s body was found on that very ground stand ill against him, very ill, and the baillie is satisfied the sheriff will not take long to be persuaded of the logic of that either.’
‘But you are not so sure?’
He got up from the table to look out of the window towards the sea. ‘I pray God that I am wrong, but I fear it will not be long before others make the connections I have been unwilling to make. It looks bad for Matthew Jack, I grant you, and I have no cause to wish him set at liberty, but it looks worse for Richard Middleton.’
I had half-expected him to say it, but still I wished he had not. ‘I know.’ The doctor’s scalpel used to murder Robert Sim, his wife’s adultery with the librarian, the location of the body of Bernard Cummins at a place where Middleton, Sim and others had secretly met: all of these things pointed not to Matthew Jack, but to Richard Middleton as the likely murderer of one, and possibly both men. Yet it had been Richard Middleton who had insisted on opening the grave, and I could not believe that he was the man we sought. I told Dr Dun this.
‘No more can I,’ he said. ‘But with Matthew Jack screaming his accusations in the tolbooth, it will not be long before the baillies are at the young doctor’s door again. I begin to wonder if Robert’s affairs may have extended further than we at first supposed. What you have uncovered here,’ he said, indicating where Robert Sim had inscribed Bernard Cummins’s name in the Trades’ Benefaction Book, ‘is a connection, on the day of Robert’s death, between these two men, and I cannot believe that it is simply coincidence. I give you leave, if you will consent to take it, to look further into that connection.’
And so it was that I spent the next hour in the company not of Aristotle and a classroom full of young searchers after the truth, but down at Putachieside, by the Green, amongst the smell and the noise of the dyers and weavers, asking questions about Bernard Cummins. Little enough was known about him, he was so recently returned to the burgh after years abroad. He had had grand ideas, nothing that would trouble the trade of the greater number of his fellow craftsmen in the town. A landlady was mentioned, a sister too. Someone thought they had heard tell of the patronage of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, laird of Crathes. Shock at the murder was expressed. The iniquity of the times blamed.
I found his lodgings, eventually, near the bottom of Futty Wynd, and from his landlady learned a little more. He was burgh born, his father having been a weaver burgess of the town, but when his father died his mother had gone home with the children to her own people.
‘Overseas?’
The old woman laughed out loud. ‘You haven’t even to cross the Dee to get to Crathes.’
‘Crathes?’
‘Aye, Crathes. His mother died a good few years back, but his sister is there yet, at the castle, in service to Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys.’
‘So it is true that the laird of Leys was his patron?’
‘Oh, it was true. He it was that first saw the boy’s gift, and put him as apprentice to a weaver there in the milltown. Then he paid for him to perfect his craft abroad, under the best masters. I wondered that he had ever come back, but he said the laird had called him back, and he was bound in thankfulness to come.’
She let me see his room, but I had little luck there, for the baillie and his officers had been there before me, and the old woman had already packed up Cummins’s belongings and cleaned out his chamber.
‘There was little enough in it. He had only been here a few days, and was only waiting to conduct some business in the town, and for the arrival of his loom and other things from Rotterdam. His plan was to set up his workshop out at Crathes. He had work on hand for the laird. The baillie is sending his belongings on to his sister.’
‘Was there anything strange amongst his belongings?’
The woman considered. ‘His clothes were a little strange – in the Dutch fashion, you know.’
‘What about books, papers?’
‘Books he had, with foreign writing on them. Huge books, with pictures and patterns in them. I took a look once, but could make neither head nor tail of the half of them.’
‘And papers?’
‘Receipts, bills, an order book, I think. All of these things the baillie took to look through, and then they are to be sent on to his sister.’
I tried another tack. ‘Did he have any visitors here? Any friends?’
‘Friends, I do not think so. He told me he had left the town as a young boy, and had still been not much more than a lad when the laird of Crathes sent him overseas. But he was a likeable enough man, with a good manner to him. The making of friends would not have taken him long. As to visitors, none, other than the occasional servant on business to him from their master or mistress.’
‘Can you remember who any of them were?’
She pursed her lips. ‘Someone from George Jamesone, the painter’s house. And one from that lawyer – William Cargill.’ Just business then.
‘And what about Robert Sim? Was he ever here? Did Bernard Cummins ever mention him?’
She eyed me sharply. ‘The college librarian. Him that was murdered too? No, he was never near the place and I never heard Bernard mention him. Now, I have work to be getting on with.’
She began to turn away, but I put my hand on her arm to stay her a moment. ‘One last thing. Were Dr Middleton or his wife ever here?’
She shook her head. ‘No, they were not. And I told the baillie that too.’
Those last words repeated themselves in my head as I walked up Futtie Wynd in to the Castlegate. The clatter and clamour of the market, of people coming from the tolbooth, or going down alleyways to the lawyers’ chambers or the sheriff court, of visitors calling at the grand houses that lined the square and of servants hurrying back and forth down the pends between them, all that was drowned out by those last words: And I told the baillie that too. I had only spoken with Richard Middleton twice in my life – last night, and on the day after Robert Sim’s body had been found – but I thought I had begun to see in him a man whose friendship would be worth the having, and whatever his wife might deserve, I would wish to spare her what might be coming to her, for my dead friend Robert’s sake and for her own. I knew, in the ebb and flow of the burgh’s prejudices and fears, if the law did not satisfy itself that Matthew Jack was the murderer of the librarian and weaver, it would not be long before it had found another, or others, to replace him in the tolbooth.
Sarah was alone with Deirdre when I walked back into our home. The baby was sleeping, the house quiet and still and showing no signs of the drama of the previous night. Sarah, though, was tired, pale and drawn under her tanned skin. We had not been able to speak to one another since I had left in the middle of the storm to go to Richard Middleton’s aid. I looked at her for a moment, searching for the words that would put things right, but they would not come. Sarah put down the yarn she had been winding and stood up.
‘Alexander, we must talk.’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. I sat down in the high-backed chair opposite hers and rubbed my face in my hands. ‘But this is not the best time, Sarah.’
She lifted my face, forcing me to look at her. ‘There will be no best time. Before we ever get to that best time, there will be nothing left to say to one another, and I have much I wish to say.’
I was too weary to argue any further, and gestured with my hand in acquiescence. She sat down by the hearth in front of me and took my hands in hers. The warmth of them, the tenderness in her face was all I had wanted these last days and her next words tore at the very heart of me.
‘Do you think that I hold myself so cheap that I would give myself to another man, when I have you?’
I shook my head but I could not speak. How could I tell her ‘Yes, I do’? How could I tell her of the imaginings that had bee
n tormenting my every unguarded moment?
I did not need to; she read it in my eyes and let go my hands, appalled. ‘You hold me so cheap? Alexander, for God’s sake, tell me what I have done.’
‘Andrew Carmichael,’ I said, the words barely audible even to myself.
She looked at me in disbelief. ‘This again? Oh, please, not this again.’
I clenched my fists until my nails dug into the flesh of the palms. ‘Remember? I saw you, Sarah. On Tuesday afternoon, at the Snow Kirk. You were with him.’ I felt my voice, hoarse, crack. ‘I saw him stroke your face.’
She looked as if she had been caught, frozen in a moment, and then she began to shake her head slowly. ‘No, Alexander, no …’
I stood up and pushed my chair away so that it banged against the fireplace wall. ‘Do not lie to me, I saw you.’
‘No, Alexander. What you thought you saw you did not.’
‘It was you, and him. I know.’
‘Yes, it was. But it was not as you think. Please, sit down and listen to me.’
I did not know that I wanted to hear it, but I straightened the chair and, drawing a cup of water from the jug on the table, remained standing.
‘I did go to see Andrew Carmichael on Tuesday. I had sent a message to the King’s College, asking him to meet me at the Snow Kirk as soon as he might be able. Zander was at school, and I left Deirdre with Elizabeth. He came in the afternoon, when his students were engaged in private study. I asked him to meet me round the back of the church because I did not wish to be seen, and I could not think of anywhere else in or between the two towns where we might escape notice.’
Her candour was making me sick to the stomach, and it showed on my face.
‘No, Alexander, you still do not understand. I asked Andrew Carmichael there because I was almost out of my senses with worry for you.’
‘For me? What gave you cause to worry about me, and what in God’s name made you think that Andrew Carmichael was the one you should turn to, rather than William, or Dr Dun, even?’
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