The Merchant's Mark

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘They’re both daft-like names,’ said Kate. ‘Wynliane and Ysonde.’ And how, she wondered, had such a gentle soul managed to get away with naming his daughters out of the romances, instead of after their grandmothers in the proper way? There was a strong current of determination, she recognized, under the gentleness.

  ‘Aye,’ said Babb, striding onwards down the hill. ‘Wynliane.’

  ‘There are simples for a rotten ear,’ said Alys, clicking her tongue in annoyance. ‘And for the rheum, indeed. Poor poppet. So what do you have in mind?’ she asked again.

  ‘The house, for one,’ said Kate. Alys nodded. ‘The yard. Those men will sit about all day playing at dice if they’re not put to work.’ Alys nodded again. ‘The bairns. I asked Jennet this morning and she says there’s barely a stitch in their kist that fits them, and little more in the wash.’

  ‘And with the rest of the day?’ asked Alys, the smile flickering again.

  Kate looked at her, then at Babb, occupied in coaxing the mule past an assertive cockerel on his midden. ‘I thought,’ she said airily, ‘we could ask about a bit, see if we can learn anything about Billy Walker and the man with the axe. Maybe even have a drink in the Hog.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said Alys.

  ‘Oh, no, my doo!’ said Babb. ‘Back in that nasty place? Do you want the other pole cut down and all?’

  ‘I’ll go without you, then,’ said Kate.

  ‘You will not!’

  ‘Indeed aye!’ said Ursel, stirring a pot over the fire. ‘There’s store of linen in one of the presses up the stair, we can easy stitch them shifts.’ She paused for thought, her spoon suspended over the kale. ‘I’ve a notion there’s a bolt of woad-dyed and all, that would make wee kirtles to them. Better for them running about in than Wynliane’s good brocades.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Alys. ‘We can cut them out after dinner.’

  Kate was only half attending. She had two of Maister Morison’s books in her hands, a printed Bevis of Hampton and a handwritten collection of long poems, and was leafing through them. The printed book had occasional pencil marks in the margins, which somehow seemed very personal, but the choice of tales in the other book gave her a strange feeling of looking right into the man’s mind. She could visualize him, sitting over these books like the reader in Chaucer’s poem. How did it go? Here it was, indeed, and the page well-thumbed. In stede of reste and newe thynges, Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon; . . . thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed is thy look. What else had he copied? The whole of Sir Tristram and a portion of Greysteil were followed by an extraordinary poem which seemed to be English and involved babies stolen by wild animals, and then by Lancelot of the Laik. None of the humorous or bawdy tales which went around in such collections, no sign of Rauf Colyer or the Friars of Berwick. But alle is buxumnesse there and bokes, to rede and to lerne. Morison was clearly a romantic, through and through.

  And yet a brief glance at the account book lying open on his tall desk had revealed still another side of the man. Details of load after load of goods from Irvine or Dumbarton or Linlithgow, with exotic ladings and amazing prices, showed a trim profit on every barrel.

  ‘Aye, well, mem,’ said Jennet from the kitchen doorway. She cast a glance out into the yard, where Babb and several reluctant men were weeding or shifting rubbish, and the two little girls were constructing an elaborate maze out of shards of pottery. ‘I washed them both as best I could last night, but they could do wi a bath.’ She grimaced. ‘And their hair needs a good seeing to, mem, if you tak my meaning. We’ll likely need to cut it and all, afore we’ll can get a comb through it.’

  ‘It’ll take all of us to bath them,’ Ursel warned. She put the lid back on the pot and turned away from the fire. ‘Wynliane screams till she boaks at the sight of that much water. That’s how they’ve no been washed right for months.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alys, ‘we must start the bath heating, and then get to work on the house.’ She craned to see past Jennet as the yett swung open. ‘Who is this? Someone with a horse?’

  ‘Three folk,’ said Jennet. ‘Is that Maister Gil’s Matt? Who’s he got there on the crupper?’

  ‘And here’s that Mall Anderson,’ said Ursel, swelling with indignation. ‘The cheek!’

  Firm footsteps on the flagstones by the door heralded Matt, who dragged off his bonnet and ducked in a general bow.

  ‘Brought ye a nourice,’ he said. ‘Name’s Nan Thomson. Widow woman. Raised five. Great hand in a house and all.’

  His passenger’s voice floated in from the yard. ‘My, that’s a fine building. What’s it to be?’

  And, after a pause, Ysonde’s reply, almost civil by her standards: ‘It’s the Queen’s palace. Can you no see that?’

  Anything Mistress Thomson might have said to this was lost in an explosion from Andy as he recognized the third arrival at the yett.

  ‘Mall Anderson, what are you doing in this yard? Get your thievin’ shiftless face out of my sight afore I slap it for you!’

  ‘Fetch Mall in here,’ said Kate urgently, setting the books aside. ‘I want a word with her.’

  ‘I’ll get the bairns out of the yard,’ said Alys. ‘I want to try physicking that ear. Ursel, have you tartar of wine?’

  Mall was propelled into the kitchen by a furious Ursel, with Andy exclaiming angrily behind them. Ignoring them both, she stopped in front of Kate, wringing her plump hands in her apron. There were tear stains on her face, and her lip quivered.

  ‘Oh, mem,’ she pleaded, ‘what’s this they’re saying about my Billy? Tell me it’s no true, mem?’

  ‘Oh, my dear lassie,’ said Kate, with a rush of sympathy. ‘I’m afraid it is. Billy’s dead, Mall. He was slain in the night.’

  She was aware of Alys pausing in the doorway on her way out to the children, but all her attention was on the girl in front of her, who had collapsed in a wailing heap, flinging her apron over her head. Amid the racking sobs words could be made out.

  ‘I tellt him no to do it, I begged him to leave it! He wouldny listen to me. Oh, my Billy, my dawtie, my dearie!’

  Andy abandoned his indignation, heaved the girl up and set her down beside Kate. Ursel, in grim practicality, dragged away the apron and forced a mouthful of aqua vitae down her throat, which made her choke but stopped the wild sobbing, and Kate took her hands with a sudden recollection of Augie Morison clasping her own hands not an hour earlier, and said earnestly, ‘Mall, if you tried to persuade him against it, you did your duty by him. Now tell me all about it. Who put him up to it? It was never his own idea.’

  Mall nodded, gulping, and freed one of her hands to scrub at her eyes with her apron.

  ‘Tell me what happened to him, mem,’ she begged, sniffling. ‘Was it one of the household took him? How did he dee? Tammas constable wouldny tell me, he just said he was found . . .’

  Kate bit her lip.

  ‘He was taken redhand in the night,’ she said carefully, ‘here in the house, breaking into a lockfast kist. We questioned him, but got no sense of him.’

  ‘No, you wouldny,’ said Mall, shaking her head. Subdued like this, with the cockiness all gone out of her, she seemed much more reasonable than her lover.

  ‘So we bound him, and shut him in the coalhouse for the rest of the night,’ Kate continued. ‘Now, Mall, he was man alive when Andy here shut him in.’

  ‘And cursing,’ put in Andy.

  ‘He can curse like a mariner,’ agreed Mall, and her lip quivered.

  ‘But when Andy went to fetch him out this morning, to see if he’d tell us any more before we sent for the serjeant, he was lying dead.’

  ‘How?’ the girl whispered.

  ‘It looked as if someone wi an axe went at him,’ said Andy bluntly. Mall stared up at him, open-mouthed. The high colour receded from her face, leaving two patches of red flaring on her round cheeks; then she put up her hands to cover her mouth. A thin high wail escaped from behind them, and she began to rock back and forward
.

  ‘Some more usquebae, I think, Ursel,’ said Kate.

  ‘It’s no usquebae,’ said Ursel, pouring out another small measure. ‘It’s the good stuff, come from the Low Countries.’

  She pulled Mall’s hands from her mouth and administered the dose with efficiency. Mall choked on it, hiccuped a couple of times, and began to weep again, but when Kate said, ‘What can you tell us about the man with the axe, lassie?’ she shook her head and said coherently enough through the sobs:

  ‘Aye, it must ha been him. It must ha been him. I never heard his name, mistress. Billy said he cam from Stirling, or Edinburgh, or one of those places. He speaks strange-like.’

  ‘How, strange?’ asked Kate. ‘Is he maybe no a Scot? Could he be foreign?’

  Mall sniffled. ‘He might be. I never heard anyone foreign speaking.’

  ‘Mistress Mason’s French,’ said Andy.

  The girl considered this briefly, and shook her head again. ‘No, I canny tell. He doesny sound like Mistress Mason, but that’s all I ken.’ She scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Oh, my dear, my Billy. Oh, if he’d never met that man.’

  ‘When did he meet him?’ Kate asked gently.

  ‘Yesterday.’ Mall stopped to think. ‘After the noon bite.’

  ‘What did he tell you about him?’

  ‘Oh, he’d no need of telling me. I heard it all.’

  With careful questioning, she produced an account of how, after the household had eaten, she had slipped away for a tryst with Billy. Ursel exchanged a glance with Andy at this, but neither said anything. Waiting for her sweetheart in the hayloft of the stable, down at the end of Morison’s property next to the mill-burn, Mall had heard voices on the path beyond the fence.

  ‘So I keeked out,’ she said, ‘at the eaves where the swallas fly in, and I seen Billy out on the path by the burn, talkin wi this big ugly man. A grim-lookin’ chiel.’

  The man had been all dressed in black, with a long-hafted axe, and a silly wee bit beard. He had told Billy that some task was not yet finished; Billy had claimed he was paid only to open the yett, and had done more than that already.

  ‘What yett?’ demanded Ursel. ‘This yett here?’

  ‘He never said. No here, I dinna think, no this one. But Billy said, if he’d kent what he’d have to do he’d never ha taken the chiel’s money.’

  The man with the axe had pressed Billy to complete the work, threatening to tell his master what he had done already.

  ‘He didny want to,’ Mall assured Kate, wiping her eyes again. ‘He tellt me after, it didny seem right. But I think he was feart what the man wi the axe would do to him, no just for him telling the maister. The man said he cheated him, and he never did.’

  ‘What was he to do?’

  He had been instructed to tell the Provost at the quest that afternoon that he and the other men had been got out of the way when the barrel was opened. Kate, listening, decided the two must have been talking for some time before Mall heard them; the stranger already seemed to know a great deal about Billy’s part in the day. Billy had objected, saying it would get his master arrested, and the man with the axe had laughed.

  ‘It fair made my spine creep,’ said Mall, remembering. ‘Then he said, That was the point, to get the maister out the road, and Billy was to get the key to his kist and all. So after,’ she closed her eyes, and tears leaked under her lashes, ‘he tellt me to get the key. And if Andy hadny sent him off –’ Andy snorted at this – ‘it would ha been easy, and he’d never been taken, and never . . .’ She scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Where is he? Can I see him?’

  ‘The serjeant took him away,’ said Kate gently. ‘There has to be a quest on him.’

  ‘Up at the castle?’

  ‘He was mighty cut about,’ warned Andy. ‘You’d maybe no want to see it.’

  ‘I want to say farewell to him,’ said the girl. ‘And when I think just yesterday . . .’ Her face crumpled again.

  ‘What else did Billy and this man say?’ Kate asked. ‘Did they say what Billy had done already? Did you hear anything about what the man wanted him to find?’

  ‘Just the rest of the treasure,’ said Mall, ‘that he said was in the barrel.’

  ‘There was no –’ began Andy.

  Kate shook her head at him. ‘The rest of it?’

  ‘Aye. He kept on about that, and Billy kept telling him he kenned naught about it. He said, he said,’ Mall shut her eyes to think better, ‘You tellt us it was in the barrel already. You can find the rest of it, wee man. Then he laughed.’ She shivered. ‘Made my skin creep, so he did,’ she admitted again, and dabbed her eyes with her apron.

  ‘That’s why Billy was so certain there should be another bag hid in the house,’ said Kate thoughtfully. ‘And you never learned his name, or anything about him? He never mentioned any other names?’

  Mall shut her eyes again, thinking.

  ‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘No that I recall. I canny mind clear.’ She sniffed, and managed a watery smile. ‘Oh, aye. There was one orra thing. He was saying the Baptizer wanted his goods and gear back, and Maidie would help him. Was that no a strange thing to say?’

  ‘The Baptizer?’ Kate repeated. ‘St John Baptist, did he mean? Was it a joke, maybe? Was he talking about the man whose head was in the barrel?’

  ‘Maybe he was.’

  ‘And who might Maidie be?’ said Andy.

  ‘Oh, his strumpet, for certain,’ said Ursel grimly.

  Mall shook her head. ‘I wouldny ken.’

  ‘Have you kin in Glasgow, Mall?’ said Alys from the doorway to the stairs.

  The girl looked at her, while the question sank in. ‘My sister dwells in Greyfriars Wynd,’ she said drearily. ‘I lay there last night.’

  ‘I think you should go to her now. Andy, may one of the men take her there?’

  ‘No need to disturb the men, when they’re working,’ said Ursel grimly. ‘I can leave the dinner for now, mistress. I’ll see her to her sister’s door.’ She untied her apron and took her plaid down from its nail on the back of the door, saying with rough sympathy, ‘Come, lass. You’ll be best wi your kin the now.’

  ‘And Mall,’ said Kate urgently, ‘don’t say aught about the man with the axe.’ Mall, halfway across the kitchen, turned to stare at her. ‘Not to your sister, nor anyone else, unless the Provost himself.’

  Mall’s pale eyes grew round again. Her hand went up to cover her mouth, and she nodded emphatically as Ursel drew her from the kitchen.

  ‘Well!’ said Andy.

  ‘Well!’ said Alys.

  ‘How much did you hear?’ asked Kate.

  ‘From the hayloft onwards.’ Alys came forward, her smile flickering, and sat down beside Kate on the settle. ‘She may have more to mind Billy by than she bargains for, poor lass, if they trysted in a hayloft.’

  ‘And what’s this daft stuff about the Baptizer?’ said Andy. ‘What’s he mean by that?’

  ‘The Axeman’s maister, surely,’ said Kate. ‘Some kind of by-name, I suppose. Could it be a priest? Someone who baptizes people? Is he from Perth, maybe, or is there a church of St John hereabouts?’

  ‘Could it be the Knights of St John?’ suggested Alys.

  ‘You mean, the Axeman is from Torphichen?’ Kate frowned. ‘There was no cross on his cloak. And would the Knights kill, in secret like that?’

  ‘They would kill,’ said Alys, ‘but not like that. Either more secret, so that nobody knew how or who, or else quite openly.’

  Kate eyed the younger girl speculatively, but said nothing. Andy said, ‘And was that Matt Hamilton in the yard, my leddy?’

  ‘It was, with a nurse for the bairns.’

  ‘A good woman, too,’ said Alys approvingly. ‘She held Wynliane for me to wash her ears and put drops in them – oh, they were bad, I’ve never seen such a crust on a bairn’s ears – and she paid no attention when the little one was rude. I left her just now singing to them.’

 
She turned her head as footsteps clopped on the stairs, and Ysonde appeared round the curve of the spiral and stepped into the kitchen with her sister and their new nurse behind her. Seeing Kate, Ysonde made her way directly towards her and announced gruffly, ‘This is Nan. She’s come from Dumbrattan – Dumbarton,’ she corrected herself, ‘to mind us for a bit. She kens stories.’

  Nan Thomson bobbed a brief curtsy and smiled at Kate.

  ‘You’re Matt’s Lady Kate, mem, aren’t ye no?’ she said. ‘He’s tellt me about you.’

  She was a bulky, black-browed woman in a widow’s headdress and a worn homespun gown, but she had a comfortable bosom and capable hands, one of which was curved round Wynliane’s shoulder at the moment.

  ‘I can see there’s plenty for me to be doing,’ she added.

  ‘Has Matt explained?’ asked Kate.

  The linen headdress nodded. ‘We’ll see how we all get on, mem,’ Nan said firmly.

  Introduced to Ursel and Andy, she gave them both a friendly smile, and then gathered up Ysonde’s hand and announced, ‘We’ll see you all later. These two good lassies are going to show me their chamber where they sleep, aren’t you, my poppets?’

  Ysonde stuck out her lower lip and nodded; Wynliane peeped up at her and turned obediently back to the stair.

  ‘She looks a good worker,’ said Ursel once the footsteps had died away into the hall.

  Alys’s eyes danced. ‘Matt got a very hearty buss when he left. I think they know one another well.’

  ‘Andy,’ said Kate, ‘tell me again how you found Billy.’

  Nothing loth, he sat down on a stool and launched into what was clearly becoming a well-practised recital.

  ‘I went to the coalhouse, like you tellt me, my leddy, to fetch him in to see if he’d changed his story at all, afore we called the serjeant. And the first thing I noticed, the bar wasny on the door.’

  ‘Where was it?’ Kate asked.

  He halted, clearly not having considered this before. ‘Laid on the ground at the side of the door,’ he said after a moment, gesturing with his left hand. ‘And I thocht to mysel, I thocht, Oh, our man’s away, he’s got out while we was all sleeping. The next I noticed was the marks on the door, like someone’s hand. So I opened the door, and what I saw –’ He stopped abruptly. ‘I’ve been on a battlefield, my leddy. I’ve seen the kind o thing afore. But this was, this was – and a man doesny expect to meet it in his own yard.’