by Pat McIntosh
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, three cats and a daughter.
Titles in this series (listed in order)
The Harper’s Quine The Nicholas Feast The Merchant’s Mark St Mungo’s Robin
Harper’s Quine
Pat McIntosh
Magno amore caris meis, memoriaeque parentum dilectae.
Chapter One
Glasgow, 1492
At the May Day dancing at Glasgow Cross, Gilbert Cunningham saw not only the woman who was going to be murdered, but her murderer as well.
Strictly speaking, he should not have been there. Instead he should have been with his colleagues in the cathedral library, formulating a petition for annulment on grounds which were quite possibly spurious, but shortly after noon he had abandoned that, tidied his books into a neat stack in his carrel, with Hay on Marriage on the top, and walked out. A few heads turned as he went, but nobody spoke.
Descending the wheel stair, past the silent chambers of the diocesan court, he stepped out into the warm day enjoying the feeling of playing truant and closed the heavy door without stopping to read the notices nailed to it. The kirkyard was busy with people playing May-games, running, catching, shrieking with laughter. Gil went out, past the wall of the Archbishop’s castle, and jumped the Girth Burn ignoring the stepping stones. From here, already, he could hear the thud, thud of the big drum, like the muffled beat for a hanging.
There was plenty of movement in the steep curving High Street too. Weary couples, some still smelling of smoke from the bonfires, were returning home in the sunshine with their wilting branches. Others, an honest day’s work at least attempted, were hurrying from the little thatched cottages to join the fun. Hens and dogs ran among the feet of the revellers, and a tethered pig outside one door had a wide empty space round it.
Further down, where the slope eased and the houses were bigger, a group of students were playing football under the windows of the shabby University building, shouting at each other in mixed Latin and Scots. Gil nodded to the solemn Dominican who was guarding the pile of red and blue gowns, and skirted the game carefully with the other passers-by. Beyond the noise of the players and onlookers he could hear the drum again, together with the patter of the tabor and a confused sound of loud instruments which came to a halt as he drew near to the Tolbooth.
At the Mercat Cross there was dapping and laughter. The dancers were still in the centre of the crossing, surrounded by a great crowd. More people lined the timber galleries of the houses, shouting encouragement, and several ale-wives who had brought barrels of ale down on handcarts were-doing a brisk trade.
The burgh minstrels on the Tolbooth steps, resplendent in their blue coats under an arch of hawthorn branches, had added a man with a pipe and tabor and a bagpiper to the usual three shawms and a bombard. As Gil reached the mouth of the High Street they struck up a cheerful noise just recognizable as ‘The Battle of Harlaw’.
‘A strange choice for the May dancing,’ he remarked to the man next to him, a stout burgess in a good cloth gown with his wife on his arm. ‘Oh, it’s yourself, Serjeant,’ he added, recognizing the burgh’s chief lawkeeper. ‘Good day to you, Mistress Anderson.’
Mistress Anderson, more widely known as Mally Bowen the burgh layer-out, bobbed him a neat curtsy, the long ends of her linen kerchief swinging, and smiled.
‘The piper only has the two tunes,’ explained Serjeant Anderson, ‘that and “The Gowans are Gay”, and they’ve just played the other.’
‘I see,’ said Gil, looking over the heads at the top dancers advancing to salute their partners, while more couples pushed and dragged one another into position further down the dance. By the time all were in place the top few were already linking arms and whirling round with wild war-cries. A far cry from Aristotle’s ideal, he thought.
‘It’s a cheery sound, yon,’ said Gil’s neighbour in his stately way. Gil nodded, still watching the dancers. Most were in holiday clothes, some in fantastic costume from the pageant, or with bright bunches of ribbon or scraps of satin attached to their sleeves. Many of the girls, their hair loose down their backs, were garlanded with green leaves and flowers, and their married sisters had added ribbons to their linen headdresses. Students from the College, sons of burgesses in woollen, prentice lads in homespun, swung and stamped to the raucous music.
Watching a pair of students in their narrow belted gowns, crossing hands with two girls who must be sisters, Gil tried to reckon when he had last danced at the Cross himself. It must be eight years, he decided, because when he first returned to Scotland his grief and shock had kept him away, and last year he had been hard at work for his uncle on some case or other. He found his foot tapping.
‘See her,’ said the serjeant, indicating a bouncing, blackbrowed girl just arming with a lad in brown doublet and striped hose. ‘Back of her gown’s all green. Would ye take a wager she’s doing penance for last night’s work next Candlemas, eh, Maister Cunningham?’
‘Oh, John!’ said his wife reproachfully.
‘She’ll not be the only one, if so,’ Gil observed, grinning. ‘There’s a few green gowns here this morning.’
‘And I’ll wager, this time o’ year, Maister Cunningham, you wish you were no a priest,’ added the serjeant, winking slyly up at Gil.
‘Now, John!’
‘I’m not a priest,’ said Gil. Not yet, said something at the back of his mind, as he felt the familiar sinking chill in his stomach. When the man looked sceptically at his black jerkin and hose, he added reluctantly, ‘I’m a man of law.’
‘Oh, so I’ve heard said. You’ll excuse me, maister,’ said Serjeant Anderson. ‘I’ll leave ye, afore ye charge me for the time of day. Come on, hen.’
‘I’m at leisure today,’ Gil said, but the serjeant had drawn his wife away. Gil shrugged, and turned his attention back to the dancing. The couple he had been watching had completed their turn of the dance and were laughing together, the boy reaching a large rough hand to tug at the girl’s garland of flowers. She squealed, and ducked away, and just then the tune reached an identifiable end and the musicians paused for breath. The man banging the big drum kept on going until the tenor shawm kicked him. He stopped, blinking, and the dancers milled to a halt.
Gil took advantage of the general movement to climb a few steps up the nearest fore-stair, where several people were already perched out of reach of the elbows and feet of the mob.
‘More!’ shouted someone. ‘Anther tune!’
The band made its reluctance clear. A short argument developed, until someone else shouted, The harper - fetch the harper!’
‘Aye, the harper!’ agreed several voices at once. The cry was taken up, and the band filed down the steps, carrying its instruments, and headed purposefully for the nearest ale-wife’s trestle.
‘This will be good,’ said someone beside Gil. He looked round, and found the next step occupied by a tall, slender girl with a direct brown gaze above a narrow hatchet of a nose. ‘The harper,’ she added. ‘Have you heard him? He has two women that sing.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ he admitted, gazing appreciatively.
‘They sang Greysteil at the Provost’s house at Yule.’
‘What, the whole of it? All four thousand lines?’
She nodded. ‘It took all afternoon. It was Candlemas before the tune went out of my head.’
‘I have never heard it complete. There can’t be many singers could perform it like that.’
‘They took turns,’ she explained, ‘so neither voice got tired, and I suppose neither needed to learn the whole thing. One of them had her baby with her, so she had to stop to nurse it.’
‘What about the audience?’ said Gil.
The brown eyes danced. ‘We could come and go,’ she pointed out. ‘I noticed the Provost found duties elsewhere in his house.’
‘And his lady?’ said Gil, half at random, fascinated by her manner. She was dressed like a merchant’s daughter, in well-cut brown linen faced with velvet, and she was clearly under twenty, but she spoke to him as directly as she looked, with none of the archness or giggling he had encountered in other girls of her class. Moreover, she was tall enough to look nearly level at him from the next step up. What was that poem some King of Scots wrote in captivity? The fairest or the freschest yong flower That ever I saw, me thocht, before that hour. It seemed to fit.
‘Lady Stewart had to stay,’ she acknowledged. ‘I thought she was wearying by the end of the afternoon.’
She spoke good Scots with a slight accent which Gil was still trying to place when there was a disturbance beyond the Tolbooth, and the crowd parted to make way for three extraordinary figures. First to emerge was a sweet-faced woman in a fashionably cut dull red gown and a newfangled French hood, who carried a harper’s chair. After her came another woman, tall and gaunt, her black hair curling over her shoulders, pacing like a queen across the paved market-place in the loose checked dress of a Highlander. In one arm she clasped a harp, and on the other she led a man nearly as tall as Gil. He wore a rich gown of blue cloth, in which he must have been uncomfortably warm, a gold chain, and a black velvet hat with a sapphire in it. Over chest and shoulders flowed long white hair and a magnificent beard. At the sight a child on its father’s shoulders wailed, ‘Set me down, Da, it’s God the Faither! He’ll see me!’
The harper was guided up the Tolbooth steps, seated himself with great dignity, accepted harp and tuning-key, and as if there was not a great crowd of people watching, launched into a formal tuning prelude.
‘How the sound carries,’ Gil said.
‘Wire strings,’ said the girl. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard him before. Did he not play when the King stayed with the Bishop last winter? Archbishop,’ she corrected herself.
‘My uncle mentioned a harper,’ Gil recalled.
‘I thought you would have attended him,’ she said. ‘The Official of Glasgow is important, no? He is the senior judge of the diocese? His nephew should be present to give him consequence.’
‘You know me?’ said Gil in French, suddenly placing her accent.
‘My nurse - Catherine - knows everyone,’ she answered enigmatically. ‘Hush and listen.’
The Highland woman on the Tolbooth steps was arguing with some of the crowd, apparently about what they were to sing. The other was watching the harper, who, face turned unseeing towards the Waulkergait, continued to raise ripples of sound from the shining strings. Suddenly he silenced the instrument with the flat of his hand, and with a brief word to the women began to play the introduction to a May ballad. They took up the tune without hesitation, the two voices echoing and answering like birds.
Gil, listening raptly, thought how strong was the rapport between the three musicians, in particular the link between the blind man and the woman in the red dress. When the song ended he turned to his companion.
‘My faith, I’ve heard worse in Paris,’ he said over the crowd’s applause.
‘You know Paris? Were you there at the University?’ she said, turning to look at him with interest. ‘What were you studying? When did you leave?’
‘I studied in the Faculty of Laws,’ he answered precisely, ‘but I had to come home a couple of years since - at the end of ‘89.’
‘Of course,’ she said with ready understanding, ‘the Cunninghams backed the old King in ‘88. Were all the lands forfeit since the battle? Are you left quite penniless?’
‘Not quite,’ he said stiffly, rather startled by the breadth of her knowledge. She gave him a quick apologetic smile.
‘Catherine gossips. What are they playing now? Aren’t they good? It is clear they are accustomed to play together.’
The Highlander woman had coaxed the taborer’s drum from him, and was tapping out a rhythm. The other woman had begun to sing, nonsense syllables with a pronounced beat, her eyes sparkling as she clapped in time. Some of the crowd were taking up the clapping, and the space before the Tolbooth was clearing again.
‘Will you dance?’ Gil offered, to show that he had not taken offence. The apologetic smile flashed again.
‘No, I thank you. Catherine will have a fit when she finds me as it is. Oh, there is Davie-boy.’ She nodded at the two youngsters Gil had been watching earlier. ‘I see he has been at the May-games. He is one of my father’s men,’ she explained.
The dancers had barely begun, stepping round and back in a ring to the sound of harp, tabor and voice, when there was shouting beyond the Tolbooth, and two men in helmets and quilted jacks rode round the flank of the Laigh Kirk.
‘Way there! Gang way there!’
The onlookers gave way reluctantly, with a lot of argument. More horsemen followed, well-dressed men on handsome horses, and several grooms. Satin and jewels gleamed. The cavalcade, unable to proceed, trampled about in the mouth of the Thenawgait, with more confused shouting.
‘Who is it?’ wondered Gil’s companion, standing on tiptoe to see better.
‘You mean Catherine did not expect them?’ he asked drily. ‘That one on the roan horse is some kind of kin of mine by marriage, more’s the pity - John Sempill of Muirend. He must have sorted out his little difficulty about Paisley Cross. That must be his cousin Philip behind him. Who the others might be I am uncertain, though they look like Campbells, and so do the gallowglasses. Oh, for shame!’
The men-at-arms had broken through the circle of onlookers into the dancing-space, and were now urging their beasts forward. The dancers scattered, shouting and shaking fists, but the rest of the party surged through the gap and clattered across the paving-stones to turn past the Tolbooth and up the High Street.
Immediately behind the men-at-arms rode Sempill of Muirend on his roan horse, sandy-haired in black velvet and gold satin, a bunch of hawthorn pinned in his hat with an emerald brooch, scowling furiously at the musicians. After him, the pleasant-faced Philip Sempill seemed for a moment as if he would have turned aside to apologize, but the man next him caught his bridle and they rode on, followed by the rest of the party: a little sallow man with a lute-case slung across his back, several grooms, one with a middle-aged woman behind him, and in their midst another groom leading a white pony with a lady perched sideways on its saddle. Small and dainty, she wore green satin trimmed with velvet, and golden hair rippled down her back beneath the fall of her French hood. Jewels glittered on her hands and bosom, and she smiled at the people as she rode past.
‘Da!’ said the same piercing little voice in the crowd. ‘Is that the Queen of Elfland?’
The lady turned to blow a kiss to the child. Her gaze met Gil’s, and her expression sharpened; she smiled blindingly and blew him a kiss as well. Puzzled and embarrassed, he glanced away, and found himself looking at the harper, whose expressionless stare was aimed at the head of the procession where it was engaged in another argument about getting into the High Street. Beside him, the tall woman in the checked gown was glaring malevolently in the same direction, but the other one had turned her head and was facing resolutely towards the Tolbooth. What has Sempill done to them? he wondered, and glancing at the cavalcade was in time to see Philip Sempill looking back at the little group on the steps as if he would have liked to stay and listen to the singing.
‘Who is she?’ asked Gil’s companion. ‘Do you know her?’
‘I never saw her before.’
‘She seemed to know you. Whoever she is,’ said the girl briskly, ‘she’s badly overdressed. This is Glasgow, not Edinburgh or Stirling.�
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‘What difference does that make?’ Gil asked, but she gave him a pitying glance and did not reply. The procession clattered and jingled away up the High Street, followed by resentful comments and blessings on a bonny face in roughly equal quantities. The dance re-formed.
‘What is a gallowglass?’ said the girl suddenly. Gil looked round at her. ‘It is a word I have not encountered. Is it Scots?’
‘I think it may be Ersche,’ Gil explained. ‘It means a hired sword.’
‘A mercenary?’
‘Nearly that. Your Scots is very good.’
‘Thank you. And now if you will-let me past,’ she added with a glance at the sun, ‘I will see if I can find Catherine. She was to have come back for me.’
‘May I not convoy you?’ suggested Gil, aware of a powerful wish to continue the conversation. ‘You shouldn’t be out unattended, today of all days.’
‘I can walk a few steps up the High Street without coming to grief. Thank you,’ she said, and the smile flick ered again. She slipped past him and down the steps before he could argue further, and disappeared into the crowd.
The harper was playing again, and the tall Highlander woman was beating the tabor. The other woman was singing, but her head was bent and all the sparkle had gone out of her. The fat wife who was now standing next to Gil nudged him painfully in the ribs.
‘That’s a bonny lass to meet on a May morning,’ she said, winking. ‘What did you let her go for? She’s a good age for you, son, priest or no.’
‘Thank you for the advice,’ he said politely, at which she laughed riotously, nudged him again, and began to tell him about a May morning in her own youth. Since she had lost most of her teeth and paused to explain every name she mentioned Gil did not attempt to follow her, but nodded at intervals and watched the dance, his pleasant mood fading.
That was twice this morning he had been taken for a priest. It must be the sober clothes, he thought, and glanced down. Worn boots, mended black hose, black jerkin, plain linen shirt, short gown of black wool faced with black linen. Maybe he should wear something brighter - some of the Vicars Choral were gaudy enough. It occurred to him for the first time that the girl had not addressed him as a priest, either by word or manner.
