Time and Tide

by Shirley McKay

  Giles opened up the box, whooping with delight, ‘Sweet, subtle Maude, you are an angel, Maude! Look at this, Hew! Is this not rare?’

  ‘What is it? Oh, sweet Jesus Christ, what is that? Whatever did possess you to keep such a relic?’ Hew cried in disgust. For Maude had kept the ring as it had come from Jacob’s body, with the blackened stub of finger still attached.

  ‘I did not have the heart,’ she answered helplessly, ‘to throw the remnant out.’

  Giles marvelled, ‘Look close at this putrefaction, Hew!’

  ‘I have it in my scent. It must be two days old,’ protested Hew.

  The doctor countered, ‘Ah, that is the point; it is far more than that. This ripeness and contusion makes the matter plain.’

  ‘The ripeness of the matter is beyond dispute, the meaning far from plain. I wish you would explain.’

  ‘So shall I, in due course. This ring was fast upon the poor man’s finger, Maude?’ pressed Giles.

  Maude answered, ‘Aye. In truth, the ring was buried in his flesh, his fingers were so black and puffed the first that I had seen it there, was when the fisher wifies pu’ed it off. You ken, sir, that I had no thought to have it to mysel?’ she appealed to Hew.

  He nodded. ‘Aye, we know it, Maude. You keep an honest house.’

  ‘Just so. What will you dae wi it, now?’ wondered Maude.

  ‘Experiments,’ said Giles. ‘In hope the ring will tell us, who its owner was, while from this ragged finger, we may learn how he died. I see now, why the surgeon has mistook the time of death. For Jacob was alive still, when this finger died.’

  ‘What ever does that mean?’ demanded Hew.

  Giles beamed at him. ‘I cannot say as yet.’ He patted round his clothes. It seems that I have come without a pocket to my coat. Wrap it in your handkerchief, and slip it into yours.’

  ‘Let in a little light,’ instructed Giles, ‘and we shall see, what we shall see.’ He threw the shutters wide and allowed the day to force its way into the turret tower. The morning mists had cleared, and a cold shaft of sunshine settled on the astrolabe. Hew stood shivering in his shirt. He had barely been asleep, when Giles came with the dawn to start on their dissections.

  ‘You are precipitate,’ Hew groaned.

  ‘And you are a slugabed. I rose up with the lark. Or to be precise, with the young Matthew Locke, whose piping woke the household,’ Giles admitted cheerfully. ‘There is something to be said for a separate set of chambers. Are you not yet dressed?’

  ‘In a moment, by your leave.’ Hew fumbled with his points. Giles rummaged through the bookshelves. ‘Have you had my pinchingtenals?’ he inquired.

  ‘What would I with your pincers?’ snorted Hew. The forceps, tongs and tweezers that informed his friend’s anatomy surpassed the barber surgeon’s, and their very mention left him feeling faint. He buttoned up his coat and felt round for his purse, in which the finger had been safely settled for the night.

  ‘They have a multitude of uses,’ Giles persisted peevishly. ‘And you have left the chamber in a sad state of array.’

  Hew did not deign to flatter with reply. The students’ weapons had been cleared into the buttery, and now that Hew was up and dressed he made no other mark upon the cluttered room.

  ‘Remind me how we lived together, in the Rue des Fosses?’ the doctor asked, self-righteously.

  ‘I wonder that myself.’

  ‘Now, this is what I mean,’ said Giles, pouncing on a book. ‘You have left your Latin primer where I keep my cupping glass! Have you been teaching schoolboys while my back is turned? Or are you numbing them with gerunds, while you let their blood?’

  ‘Neither,’ Hew retrieved the grammar with a groan. ‘It was left here for a student, and I fear I had forgotten it. I promised to his sister I would pass it on.’

  ‘A sister? Ah! What sort of a sister?’ Giles began to quiz. Hew replied repressively, ‘The married sort. Your pincers are right there, behind the astrolabe,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Ah, yes, I do recall . . . there was a little matter of the rule, that wanted some adjusting. Yet I fear, tis broken now.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the wind?’ said Hew.

  Giles coughed and cleared his throat. ‘Go to, where is the finger? Set it in the light, and on the flesher’s block. It will not be affected, by the taint of blood. You may move the foot.’

  ‘You may move the foot,’ corrected Hew.

  Giles spread out a square of gauze upon the blank dissecting board, setting out his instruments. The sunlight dipped and flickered, bouncing off the blades. ‘Make haste now, or the sun will damage it,’ he warned.

  ‘That seems a vain precaution,’ Hew remarked, ‘when this remnant is already so decayed.’

  He untied the pouch and shook out the blackened contents. ‘Here is a pocket that I will not want to fill again.’

  ‘Do not stop to fret about the puddle in your handkerchief. Twill come out in the wash.’

  ‘Twill come out in the furnace,’ answered Hew.

  ‘You are too meticulous,’ his friend complained. ‘Patience, if you will, and we will make this finger back into the man.’

  ‘As in a puff of smoke.’

  ‘We are philosophers, not conjurers,’ Giles replied severely. ‘I think you are not suited to the task.’

  ‘I commend it, I assure you. Tis only that I find it rather grim,’ admitted Hew.

  ‘Then you shall turn your wits, to finding out the ring, and leave the rest to me.’

  Giles held the putrid finger closely, teasing out the metal from the bone. He wiped the ring clean on his shirt sleeve, handing it to Hew. ‘You want a glass perspective. Back there, on the shelf,’ he gestured indistinctly, returning to his prize. ‘This putrefaction came on by degrees,’ he commented, ‘and by degrees, in turn, gives up to us its secrets, that we may hope to learn from them.’

  Hew searched among the book shelves that lined the turret tower, through almanacs and pickle jars, bones and broken clocks, until at last he found the hidden box of spectacles. He picked up a crystal, cut into a prism shape, and held it to the sun, captured in the colours he saw dancing in the glass.

  The doctor grumbled mildly, ‘Let the colours lie, Hew! Feckless as a bairn! We want a cunning optic glass, that shows the world writ large.’

  ‘I am a bairn, distracted by the sunlight in the glass,’ Hew admitted openly. He took the lenses from the box, and tried them one by one. ‘I have not met with optics such as these.’

  ‘They are of the most common kind,’ said Giles dismissively. ‘There are more special glasses I have not acquired and several others yet, that I never seen.’

  ‘Such as what?’ asked Hew.

  ‘Hhm?’ Giles was scraping at the relic on the gauze. ‘There is a glass magicians use,’ he mentioned thoughtfully, ‘wherein a man may look and see an image not his own. That is the sort of looking glass that I have never seen, much as I would like to. I fear our optics here are of the simple kind. You want the glass that shows the world writ large. It is the plainest, at the back.’

  ‘I see it,’ Hew confirmed. He held the ring up to the light to scrutinise it through the glass. ‘This is a costly piece, for a man in workday clothes, and something rich and rare. It is an Antwerp diamond, fashioned like a flower, they call the rose, or Holland cut. Tis wrought of yellow gold, a little scratched and worn, which signifies a metal of the purest kind.’

  Giles set down his scalpel in astonishment. ‘In truth, I did not count your taste in diamonds so refined, that you might ken the setting from the stone,’ he commented.

  Hew said, a little poignantly, ‘It is no great passion of mine. But when I was apprenticed to the bar with Richard Cunningham, I came to know a little of the goldsmith’s craft, for Richard had a fondness for fine rings. His diamonds were reset to suit the king.’

  Giles, from tact, said, ‘Ah,’ and refrained from further comment as his friend went on, ‘And this is such a ring as Richard used to wear, his
kid gloves finger-slashed, to show the diamonds off. Tis called the Antwerp rose, because it was invented there. Yet we must pause to ask ourselves, how Jacob came to have a ring, that sits a little oddly, among his modest clothes. This is a costly piece.’

  ‘Do we know him by the ring, or better by his clothes?’ considered Giles.

  ‘That must be our question, as I think. He told us, Maude reported, he was not himself. Then we must look for subterfuge,’ said Hew. ‘Better then to know him by his hands. For there, at least, he cannot tell a lie.’ He gave the glass to Giles.

  ‘Now you expect too much. For since we do not have his hands, we must know him by his finger,’ Giles objected. ‘I hope to chance to hazard how he died; I cannot hope to tell you how he lived.’

  ‘Then with his death,’ conceded Hew, ‘let us now begin.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘Why could the gudwives not remove the ring?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it was too tight.’

  And why was it too tight?’

  ‘Because it was not made for him,’ suggested Hew.

  ‘That is more than likely. Yet that remains another question, and concerns his life, when we are now turned to his death,’ reminded Giles. ‘So set that thought aside, and look to the discolouration. Do you see it, Hew?’

  Hew swallowed down his squeamishness. ‘I see it,’ he confirmed.

  ‘This is a dead finger,’ said Giles. ‘By which I do not mean it is a dead man’s finger, but that the finger died before the man. Before that, it was swollen. The ring became too tight as the finger came distended. What then, was the cause?’

  ‘Could not the cause have been the ring itself?’ argued Hew. ‘Because it was too tight, it cut the finger off?’

  ‘Your thoughts are once again, drawn to the living man. And that is only natural,’ said Giles. ‘But concentrate on this. This was not the only finger blackened and distended, though it was the only one that bore a ring. Maude told us that his face was dark and blotted too.’

  ‘They took him for a Spaniard,’ Hew recalled. ‘A black and swarthy creature, as the baxters said.’

  ‘Swollen, blotched and putrid,’ Giles summed up. ‘So that the surgeon took him for long dead, which in a sense, he was. He suffered from a gangrene, of a dry pernicious kind.’

  ‘Sweet lord!’ whispered Hew. ‘What was the cause?’

  ‘I cannot tell you that. And yet I do suppose it died out on the ship. Dearly, I would love to know what happened to the crew.’

  ‘Maude said,’ Hew remarked, ‘that Jacob called to demons as he died.’

  ‘As I confess, that vexes me,’ the doctor said, ‘For Maude is not a woman given to wild tales.’

  ‘That we must count as madness, or else something worse.’

  ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘You said there was an occult glass,’ said Hew, ‘wherein a man might see another man, an image not his own. And Maude said, he reported, he was not himself. Do you think it likely Jacob was bewitched?’

  ‘It is a possibility,’ the doctor answered carefully. Plainly, he had thought of this, ‘That I do not discount. Though, I prefer to be pragmatical . . .’

  ‘You prefer to be equivocal,’ interrupted Hew.

  Giles went on regardless, impervious to the jibe. ‘. . . I count it less than likely, though I cannot say for sure. When a man dies seeing demons, I am more inclined to ask, what he last had to eat and drink. Your theory is provocative. I had you for a doubter, of the occult arts.’

  ‘Though I do not fear their magic, I do not doubt its power to harm those that believe it,’ answered Hew. ‘If I am cursed, and told that I must die, that it is my believing it that kills me in the end. And for that reason, we must keep all hint of witchcraft secret from the town.’

  Doctor Locke agreed. ‘I shall make report, and send it to the coroner, that now is our new sheriff, Andrew Wood. Tis likely we shall hear from him, for he is most assiduous.’

  ‘Then he serves as contrast to our old one,’ remarked Hew.

  ‘So it must be hoped. I met him only once, and cannot say I took to him. No matter, these are desperate times, and want a will of iron to make the measures straight. I have the feeling,’ Giles reported gloomily, ‘that we shall know him well before this year is out. For now, I have a little pot, in which this scrap of finger may safely be disposed, and keep its secrets closed. I hear the morning lecture bell, and have not had my breakfast yet. Will you come and join me, in a buttered egg?’

  ‘Not for all the world,’ said Hew emphatically.

  They parted at the turret door, where Hew turned sharply back and through the college gates, George Buchanan’s grammar in his hand. He caught the trail of students snaking to the hall.

  ‘Which one of you,’ he called, ‘is George Buchanan?’

  A thin and pale-faced stripling stepped up with a sigh. ‘I am George Buchanan, sir,’ he answered wretchedly, as though the very question were a burden to be borne, which Hew supposed it was. The boy bore no resemblance to the scholar.

  ‘I have your Rudimentia Grammatices. Your sister left it for you,’ Hew explained.

  The student answered, ‘Oh!’ and blushed a livid puce, from the purple of his thropple to the pink tips of his ears. A reprimand, Hew sensed, was preferable to this. In kindness, he should turn away, and let the matter drop. Despite himself, he asked, ‘Is your sister your tutrix, then, George?’

  The boy blinked in surprise. ‘Is she my what, sir?’

  ‘Are you her ward?’ Hew glossed.

  ‘I have no tutor, sir, for I am come of age.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Hew countered quickly. ‘I only meant to ask, where is it that you live? Are you come here from her house?’

  ‘I come here from my father, sir. I do not bide with Clare. I stayed with her a night. Tis only that her house is somewhat close to here, my father’s at Linlithgow, somewhat far away, and that is where I live – that is where I lived,’ George corrected poignantly, ‘since now I must live here.’

  Hew felt a prick of guilt.

  ‘Why do you ask it, sir? Have I done something wrong?’

  The boys behind them nudged and winked.

  Hew sighed, ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I will be late, sir, for the lecture, and the regent will be vexed.’ George took the book and stuffed it in his breeks, with a furtive backward glance towards his waiting friends.

  ‘Your sister came in kindness. You need not feel ashamed,’ admonished Hew.

  George coloured once again. ‘I am not ashamed of Clare. But for it is a bairn’s book,’ he blurted out, in Scots.

  ‘It is a Latin grammar book, and it will serve you well. And God help him who laughs at it,’ Hew threw out to the crowd, ‘and does not know his verbs. Now, what must you say to me?

  ‘Benigne, magister . . . domine . . . professor, sir,’ George responded awkwardly.

  ‘Bene. Vive valeque,’ Hew dismissed him with a nod. He watched him scuttle off, gaunt ghost of a child, following the rest into the lecture room. It had not been his intention to humiliate the boy. Why had he forced him to the inquisition? What matter, who his father was, or if he lived with Clare? Clare Buchanan, Hew reflected, trying out the name. Despite his twitch of conscience, he found it brought a smile.

  Chapter 7

  The Dolfin

  Hew first met the sheriff late one afternoon, as he was packing up his saddlebags, preparing to return to Kenly Green. Meg and Matthew grew from strength to strength, and Giles was now restored to full command, though he retained a tendency to drift back to the Swallow Gait, at dull and quiet moments in the day. The coroner replied to Giles’ letter, by bursting without warning into the turret tower, startling Hew to dropping all his books.

  ‘Andrew Wood, of Largo,’ he announced abruptly, ‘looking for Giles Locke.’

  Hew recovered quickly. ‘Sir Andrew Wood, the coroner and sheriff?’

  ‘One and the same.’

  Hew rose to his feet to scrut
inise his guest. Sir Andrew was appointed in the place of Michael Balfour. The Balfours had been sheriffs and coroners of Fife before the fall of Regent Morton, whose downfall had led to their disgrace. Hew had dealt with Michael in the past, and had found him weak and ineffectual. He had no preconceptions of the man’s successor. As he stood before him, he seemed brusque and penetrating, severe in his expression and his dress. His eyes were clear and thoughtful, taking in the compass of the tower, and giving the impression that nothing small was missed. His clothes were cut from fine silk cloth, yet bore no jewel or ornament, sober as a clergyman’s, with less resort to vanity. His beard and hair were dark and closely trimmed, with few white pepper flecks, to give away his age. His family fortune, Hew recalled, was built upon the back of ships; he was the third in succession, though the fourth in generation, to Andrew Wood the admiral, scion of the sea, and master of the fleet to James the Third. Since the time of Morton’s downfall, he had held the privy purse, as treasurer or comptroller within the royal court, a position which brought scant reward, for huge responsibility. The debts he had discharged in service to the king had brought him to the brink of ruin, and were rumoured to have cost him £7000. His offices in Fife, which he received in recompense, did little to relieve him of the burden of his loss. All this Hew kept in mind as he replied, ‘Giles Locke is at home, with his wife and child.’

  Wood responded curtly. ‘You, sir, are Hew Cullan, and professor in the law, which is to the good, for I may have a use for you, and that may serve as well. I do not have the time to wait on Doctor Locke. He is, I’m told, much exercised, in this small matter of his child. Does it affect his judgement, do you think?’

  ‘Not one jot,’ Hew answered, masking his surprise.

  ‘But then, you would say that. You are his brother, as I think,’ suggested Andrew Wood.

  ‘He is married to my sister,’ Hew agreed. ‘And yet to me, he is much more than that.’

  ‘Aye, then, fair enough. For I have sometimes thought,’ conceded Andrew Wood, ‘to say I love him like a brother were a cunning form of wit, since brothers may be profligate, envious, or cruel.’