The Merchant's Mark

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘And now,’ said the Archbishop, getting to his feet, ‘I must go back to the King. Come with me, Gilbert.’

  The inmost chamber was crowded with bystanders and servants in the royal livery, but their gaze, direct or sidelong, showed where to look. Near the empty hearth a table was set up, covered in a silk carpet, the cards still lying on it in tricks as they had been gathered in among the heaps of coin. Three people were seated round it. On the far side King James, aged nineteen, chestnut hair and long-nosed Stewart good looks set off by green velvet and blue silk, was talking to a hulking man whose cropped hair and beard showed streaks of grey: Archibald Douglas, fifth earl of Angus. On this side was a well-found blue-jowled person in furred red silk embroidered with trees of life, a match for the Archbishop save for the lack of a tonsure; plump hands studded with rings were folded on his knee as he watched the conversation with the open smiling gaze of a statesman.

  ‘His grace will want the story of the finding of the treasure,’ said Blacader, placing himself expertly to catch Angus’s eye, and his counterpart turned his head sharply, his silk rustling.

  ‘Are ye sure of that, Robert?’ he asked. ‘This is gey public. And is this the man that found it?’ He looked closely at Gil with round pale eyes, and then cast a pointed glance at Maister Dunbar, who stared at the patterned ceiling.

  ‘Wheesht, William,’ Blacader said, intent on the King, and Gil appreciated that the other man was that chimera of his age, neither cleric nor layman, William Knollys the Treasurer of Scotland and Commendator of the Knights of St John.

  The royal conversation paused, and Blacader inserted a practised word. Gil found himself kneeling again, and then somehow seated on a stool which manifested behind him, giving an account of the finding of first the head and then the bag of coin. The two men of state watched him as he talked, intent and impassive, and Angus leaned back to whisper to a servant, but the King listened closely, his mobile face expressing interest, concern, dismay as the narrative proceeded.

  ‘And what has the inquest found?’ he asked. ‘Did they get a name for the man?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Gil. ‘Nobody in the burgh knew him.’

  ‘No surprise in that, I suppose,’ said the King. ‘He’s likely from wherever the hoard money’s been hid these four years, and not from Glasgow at all. And the barrel came from Linlithgow, you say?’

  ‘The barrel was exchanged for ours,’ said Gil with care, ‘somewhere between Linlithgow and Glasgow. Or so I believe, sir.’

  ‘Aye,’ said James thoughtfully. ‘No saying, is there? But why? And why put the head and the coin both into brine?’

  ‘I hope to find out,’ said Gil.

  ‘Tell me when you do. And I hope you find your books, maister,’ said the King, and Gil realized this was the first person to whom he had told the tale who had expressed the wish. ‘Meantime, there’s the matter of a reward for finding the treasure. That’s two thousand merks waiting for us in Glasgow, forbye the jewels – we’re certainly grateful, man. My lord Treasurer, you’ll see to that the now, will you?’

  Thus dismissed, Gil retreated from the card-room, followed immediately by Knollys, who gestured to one of his own servants and bustled Gil back through the sequence of stuffy crowded rooms, asking affably after his uncle as they went, studying him with those round pale eyes. Gil, recalling Canon Cunningham’s strictures on this man as one of the most litigious in Scotland, answered as non-committally as he could.

  ‘And this barrel,’ said Knollys, pausing at a door which led out into a courtyard. The servant began striking light for the torch he carried. Knollys stepped into the yard, and Gil followed. Windows glowed above them, and overhead the sky was still greenish with the last of the light. ‘Naught else in it?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Gil. ‘Just the saddlebag of coin and the head.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Knollys thoughtfully. He stopped in the centre of the courtyard, tapping his teeth with a fingernail. One of his rings glittered as his hand moved. ‘What made you so sure it was from the late King’s hoard, then?’ he asked, his tone soft.

  ‘The only thing that’s certain,’ said Gil with caution, ‘is that along with the coin we found a roll of jewels, including badges of the Queen’s household and the like. There’s no seal on the purses, but we assumed the coin went with the jewels. The saddlebag isn’t marked, the barrel and the head could have come from anywhere.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Knollys again, and the ring sparked. ‘What like man is it, the head I mean?’

  Gil shrugged. ‘He looks like a Scot,’ he began.

  ‘I never suggested he wasny,’ said Knollys.

  ‘Maybe a fighting man, by the haircut. No more than thirty year old, maybe less.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Knollys a third time, tapping his teeth again. The man in the St Johns livery approached, holding the sputtering torch high. ‘I see what you mean. Could be anyone.’ Ignoring his servant, he set off towards the far corner of the courtyard. ‘I’ve no doubt you’ll keep the Archbishop informed,’ he added as Gil followed him.

  Up two more flights of stairs they reached a tower chamber where, even at this late hour, a clerk was working at a tall desk. The servant stationed himself outside the door, torch in one hand, the other on his sword.

  ‘Aye, Richie,’ said Knollys to the clerk. ‘Where are your keys? We’ll have the great kist opened, if you please.’ He produced a bunch of keys on a chain at his own belt, and he and the clerk went through the careful procedure of opening the great iron-bound box in the corner of the chamber, selecting and counting out twenty merks, placing them in a canvas purse, closing the box and locking it again.

  ‘The man who found the treasure will be grateful,’ Gil said, signing the receipt presented to him and thinking of Andy. ‘If it is from the late King’s hoard, is that the last, do you suppose?’

  The clerk paused in turning to file the paper, but did not speak; the Treasurer said blandly, ‘Oh, I am certain Robert Lyle thinks there is more out there.’

  ‘Is there no record of who held the different portions?’ Gil asked.

  ‘None that I ever saw,’ said Knollys. ‘Or if any was kept, it was lost at the battle. I doubt if even his grace himself knew, by the end, where he’d planted this or that portion.’

  ‘Who do we know of, that has returned their kists?’

  ‘Atholl the late King’s uncle,’ said Knollys promptly. ‘My predecessor in this office. Robert Hog at Holyrood. Alan of Avery, or rather his sire.’ The clerk said something. ‘Aye, Richie, I’d forgot that. George Robinson the Edinburgh custumar was said to ha taken a thousand pound o’ the customs money,’ he explained to Gil, ‘and carried it to the north to raise a host, where folk were mostly for the late King. If he did, it’s never been recovered, and in any case I have my doubts. It’s a suspicious kind of sum, a thousand of anything. The sort of amount folk name when they just mean a lot of coin.’

  Gil nodded agreement.

  ‘But you must understand, Maister Cunningham, this was all in my predecessor’s time. I know nothing of the matter, other than what has appeared since the start of the present reign.’

  The clerk flicked a glance at his master, but said nothing. Gil nodded again, and took the canvas purse from the desk and stowed it in his jerkin.

  ‘Why this portion should have appeared now, in such circumstances,’ he said, ‘is beyond me.’

  ‘Your father was out at Stirling field for the old King, was he no?’ said Knollys.

  ‘He was indeed, my lord,’ said Gil politely. ‘And died for him too.’

  The ruby ring flashed again, but Knollys, a man who had changed sides at the moment most expedient to himself, did not respond. Instead he said, in considered tones, ‘Some of his friends might be a help to you, if you want to know where the barrel came from. Ross of Montgrenan, Ross of Hawkhead, Dunbar of Cumnock, all might have ideas about it.’

  ‘It’s very possible, my lord,’ Gil agreed. ‘A valuable suggestion.’
/>   ‘So now if you’ll excuse me,’ said Knollys, ‘I’ll get back to the cards.’

  ‘Afore ye go, my lord,’ said the clerk quietly, and his master turned to look at him. ‘If you’d just sign this.’

  ‘What is it? What is it?’

  ‘For the coin I gave out to Wilkie and Carson at noon. Expenses.’

  ‘To –?’ Knollys bit off the question. ‘Aye, right. I hope to God they catch up with Carson’s brother. Why they ever let him go off his lone –’ He stopped himself again. ‘You never paid them for that last piece of work, I hope, Richie?’ The clerk shook his head. ‘Right. I don’t pay for failure.’

  ‘The word was good,’ muttered the clerk, and fell silent at a burning glance from Knollys. Gil made some business of ensuring that his jerkin was laced over the purse he had been given, and Knollys signed the paper and flung the pen down on the desk, shaking his wide furred sleeve down over his rings.

  ‘So you’ll be into Ayrshire, then,’ he said, making for the door. The man with the torch set off in front of him, to light the stair.

  ‘One other thing you might be able to tell me, my lord,’ said Gil, following the Treasurer down the spiral. ‘I’m looking for a harper I believe might be in Stirling – the man McIan. He and his sister have played for my lord Archbishop before now. Do you know how I might find out his whereabouts?’

  ‘Aye, I believe I’ve heard them,’ said Knollys dis-missively over his shoulder. ‘If they’ve played before Robert Blacader, likely Maister Secretary will ken where they’re to be found. Ask at William Dunbar, Maister Cunningham.’

  Having warned the household of the Precentor of Holyrude Kirk that he would likely be late, and promised to bar the door when he came in, Gil set off with Socrates towards the lodgings Dunbar had suggested as a likely place to find his friend the harper. Despite the curfew bell there were many people still about, day labourers hurrying homeward, folk going visiting for the evening. A troop of mounted men clattered past him down the hill, the eight-pointed star of the Knights Hospitallers gleaming pale on their black cloaks. The harper’s lodging lay one stair up, well down a vennel off the High Street, but the dog seemed to detect no unusual threat, and Gil picked his way down the darkening alley with no more than ordinary caution.

  This much of Knollys’s advice was sound: the harper was clearly at home. There was light in the windows, the shutters were open, and the sound of voices and several conflicting musical instruments floated into the evening. Gil followed the sound and knocked on the door, and was admitted by a man in royal livery with a vièle under his arm and a beaker in his hand.

  ‘Angus!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Here’s another singer. Christ save us, have we no enough? Have you no instrument, man?’ he added to Gil.

  ‘I’m no musician,’ said Gil hastily. ‘I’m the audience.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said the doorkeeper. ‘We aye need an audience.’ He stood aside, and Gil stepped into a candlelit room full of people in well-worn finery. Nearest him, two more men with vièles of different sizes and another with a German flute were arguing about the pitch of a note someone had just played, but beyond them three lutenists were tuning their awkward, fragile instruments, and a mixed covey of singers beside one of the candles had their heads together over a piece of paper and were humming something.

  ‘Who is it, Will?’ The harper’s sister Ealasaidh came forward. For a moment Gil did not recognize her: instead of her usual loose checked gown, the common garb of a Highland woman, she wore fine brocade and velvet, and her long dark hair was hidden under a French hood. ‘It’s yourself, Maister Cunningham. Come in, come in. Is the bairn safe?’ she demanded urgently.

  ‘The bairn is well,’ said Gil reassuringly, annoyed with himself for not thinking of this before. Naturally, their first thought would be for the harper’s motherless infant son. ‘I’m in Stirling about another matter, and I thought the two of you might have the answer to one of my questions.’

  ‘Another death, is it?’ she said, staring at him from under dark brows. Socrates, uneasy in the crowded room, wagged his tail doubtfully at her and she bent to pat his head.

  ‘Maister Cunningham?’ called the harper from his chair by the hearth. ‘Come in, maister, and be welcome.’ He rose, clasping his harp. Gil made his way past the lutenists, two men and a woman who had now launched into a plangent setting of I long for thy virginitie, and as he recognized the tune he was assailed by a sudden sharp thought of Alys, and of the impossibility of setting a date for their marriage yet.

  ‘It will be well,’ said McIan, standing imposing in his blue velvet gown, his white hair and beard combed out like snow over chest and shoulders. He turned his silver eyes towards Gil. ‘It will be well, and worth the wait. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be, but that is not what you have come about.’

  Gil, used to enigmatic statements like this, said simply, ‘No, I have a question for you, sir. And some of these others might have an answer to it as well,’ he added.

  ‘Ask it,’ said McIan, as his sister put a beaker of wine into Gil’s hand. Gil hesitated, wondering where to begin. ‘The woman of the house is right, is she not, maister? It concerns a death? And more than one.’

  ‘Only one,’ said Gil. ‘When did you last hear of the lutenist called Balthasar of Liège?’

  ‘What, is it Barty that is dead?’ asked Ealasaidh at Gil’s elbow, and crossed herself in dismay. ‘Sorrow is at me to hear the word.’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ said Gil. The lutenists stopped playing and turned to stare, and the singers and the broken consort took the opportunity to start a part-song, Scots words to French music. ‘Someone very like him has turned up dead in Glasgow, and I hope you can tell me it’s not him.’

  ‘Balthasar of Liège?’ said one of the male lutenists. He was wearing a regrettable striped doublet of red and cream with bunches of crumpled green ribbons attached to all the seams, bright even by candlelight. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Barty Fletcher,’ said the woman beside him. ‘I’ve seen him, but no since last week, maister.’

  ‘When was that?’ Gil asked. ‘Where was he?’

  ‘When we came through Falkirk,’ the woman said, looking at the third lutenist, more soberly dressed in rubbed blue velvet. ‘Would that be Thursday?’

  ‘I never saw him,’ he said suspiciously.

  ‘You were paying for the ale. I never spoke to him, I just saw him go past.’

  ‘Falkirk,’ said Gil above the music. ‘When would that have been? What day?’

  ‘Friday,’ said the man, still frowning. ‘When was I paying for the ale?’

  ‘After we ordered it,’ she said. The singers finished their part-song, and without consultation started it again, the vièles coming in raggedly.

  ‘Friday,’ said Gil doubtfully, reckoning in his head. ‘Friday of last week?’

  ‘When did the man die, that was found in Glasgow?’ asked McIan.

  ‘And why should you think it might be Barty?’ asked his sister.

  ‘What do you recall about him?’ countered Gil.

  ‘Nothing that would identify a dead man,’ said the harper rather harshly. ‘Voice and manner do not survive.’

  ‘His eyes,’ said the lute-woman. The man in blue looked sharply at her.

  ‘Aye, his eyes,’ agreed Ealasaidh. ‘They are different colours. One blue, one brown.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gil. ‘So I recalled.’

  ‘He has an earring,’ added Ealasaidh. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘And is that what you have found?’ asked the harper. ‘A dead man with odd-coloured eyes?’

  The words fell into a silence as the singers paused again, and suddenly everyone was paying attention.

  ‘We found,’ said Gil, picking his words with care, ‘the head of a man, put in a barrel of brine. The dead man had short dark hair, he had worn an earring at some time, and he had one blue eye and one brown. We think the barrel had been exchanged for one unloaded at
Blackness on Monday last.’

  ‘Barty’s hair is long,’ said Ealasaidh with relief. ‘Down on his shoulders, it is.’

  ‘Hair can be cut,’ said McIan.

  ‘Just his head?’ said one of the singers, a round-eyed woman with gold curls, and a great deal of swelling flesh above her low-cut velvet bodice. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Barty,’ said the tenor beside her.

  ‘Alissy’s saying it’s Barty,’ qualified the bass vièle.

  ‘Our Lady protect us!’ said the plump singer, crossing herself energetically. ‘And to think I saw him just yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ said Gil. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘Linlithgow, I think,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘You were here in Stirling yesterday,’ the tenor reminded her.

  ‘Well, maybe it was the day afore. When were we through Linlithgow, Georgie?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ said the bass vièle confidently.

  ‘Oh, aye. I mind now. Everyone was coming from the Mass at St Michael’s, and I saw Barty among them.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’ Gil asked.

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘Did he answer you, Marriot?’ asked McIan heavily, and Gil recalled tales his nurse had told him, of people seen clearly after they were dead.

  ‘He did,’ said Marriot, nodding her head so that her gold curls bounced. ‘He said he was fixed in Linlithgow a day or two. He had to meet someone, he said.’

  ‘And that was Tuesday,’ said Gil.

  ‘Aye, it was Tuesday,’ agreed the bass vièle. He propped his instrument against his shoulder, reaching round it to count on his fingers. ‘We left Edinburgh on Monday, played at Linlithgow that evening and Falkirk on Tuesday evening, reached here yestreen.’

  ‘And now he’s deid,’ said Marriot in round-eyed regret.

  ‘No if you saw him on Tuesday, lass,’ said the tenor next to her. The lute-woman closed her eyes and crossed herself, and the man in blue velvet, without looking at her, gripped the neck of his instrument so that his knuckles showed white in the candlelight.

  ‘I don’t see what you mean,’ said Marriot, reluctant to be balked of her drama. ‘He could have dee’d after I saw him.’