Turn of the Tide

by Skea, Margaret

  ‘Yet when I went to Kilmaurs, I found him changed, less William’s man.’ Her hand fluttered under his fingers. ‘You will say when I must cry him home? And in good time?’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Should I send the now?’ He was searching her face, trying to draw out a sense of how she really felt.

  ‘A week or two maybe. Tell him I won’t make his wedding, but a wee sign of intent would be welcome.’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’ he began.

  ‘He has long had more thought on Sybilla Boyd than you might have supposed. And I don’t think biding in the same house will have cooled him any.’

  Munro thought of the expression on Archie’s face as Sybilla squeezed past William, his admission that he stayed at Kilmaurs to protect her. ‘Marriage wouldn’t do him any harm, or so Kate would say.’

  ‘You were lucky in your choice.’

  He heard the real affection in her voice and so tried one last time. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to bide with us, even for a little while?’

  She shook her head, her voice vehement, ‘I’ve told you no.’

  He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and stood up.

  ‘Don’t go yet. I didn’t call you to talk of death just, though it is likely my most pressing concern . . . I was thinking May is aye a fine month.’

  He knew that her abrupt change of direction was deliberate and that the seeming inconsequential remark would have a point to it.

  ‘Mother?’

  Her eyes, though washed out, danced.

  ‘If you don’t tell me what your game is now I’ll have to go.’ It was a shrewd move.

  ‘There is a box under the bed.’

  He hunkered down and lifted the edge of brocade that swept the floor.

  Hoisting the small oak chest onto the bed, he thought – she has heard of the roof. ‘We don’t need . . .’

  ‘This isn’t about need.’ She was fingering the clasp. ‘They say the King and his new Queen are expected shortly and May a fine month for a celebration.’

  He shook his head, gave a half laugh.

  ‘I had thought it might be a fitty thing for you to take Kate to see the Queen’s entry.’ She halted his withdrawal. ‘To leave the bairns awhile would do no harm. Indeed, it may be what is needed.’

  ‘I don’t know if we could.’

  ‘I have done my share of grieving and home isn’t always the easiest place for it. The loss of a child . . .’ A single tear formed at the corner of her eye, slid down the side of her nose. ‘It will always be with you, but the pain of it will dull. She paused, as if to draw strength to continue, ‘Blame is a poor bedfellow: A jaunt may help you both.’ She traced the lover’s knot on the lid of the box. ‘I know your roof hasn’t bankrupted you, but it will have made a dent that isn’t so easy to fill. Open it.’

  Two drawstring pouches lay in the base of the chest, the outline of coins stretching the soft kid leather.

  ‘One will be yours soon enough. Why not now? That I might share some of Kate’s pleasure in the spending of it.’ A wistful note crept into her voice. ‘I didn’t have the chance when Queen Mary came, but that isn’t a reason to keep others back.’ She pulled herself further up in the bed, a spasm crossing her face. He placed one hand under her arm, lifting and tilting her so that he could raise her pillow.

  ‘One more thing,’ she gestured to the large kist under the window. ‘There is a dress: burgundy and silver and scarce worn.’

  ‘Kate isn’t . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean for her to wear it. Forbye the fit, it’s hardly fashionable, but there is a breadth of material in it that should provide the makings of a fine gown. Something new is aye welcome.’

  She looked past him to where the last rays of sunlight slanted onto the rush floor, criss-crossed with shadows cast by the window bars, and weariness settled on her like a layer of dust that had been raised in the passing and now fell again. He stood up and caught the flash of a bird swooping past the window. As he bent to kiss her she tapped his cheek with a cold finger. ‘I won’t be long a prisoner and I have a notion that I shall enjoy to fly.’

  Chapter Two

  He arrived home bringing with him both the proposal that they make for Edinburgh for the Queen’s entry, and the burgundy gown. At first, Kate was adamant. ‘I have lost one bairn and can’t think of leaving the rest’.

  Agnes was equally firm. ‘I have looked after all your bairns and you before them. If I can’t be trusted to watch them for a ween of days, I don’t know who can.’

  ‘You see?’ Munro, thinking of what his mother had said, risked rebuff by catching Kate around the waist and spinning her like the top he had once bought for Robbie. Strands of her hair escaped from her cap, the pomander that dangled from a ribbon at her belt swinging wildly. Dizzy, she collapsed against him and he wrapped his arms around her. Lest she took flight he said nothing more, only began to draw circles on her back with the tip of one finger, while with his other hand he stroked her hair.

  It took Kate three evenings to unpick the pearls which dusted the mitred sleeves of the dress that Mary had sent, that she might re-use them on the bodice, which she pinned and tucked and corsetted and re-cut into a long, narrow point. The remainder she set aside for outlining the waist and trimming a new cap. She added a double ruff to the shoulders and a hanging oversleeve that came far past the end of her fingers. The timely arrival of a pedlar allowed her to buy a set of tiny silver buttons to match the lattice-work that trimmed the full skirt. Daringly, she altered the neckline; the décolletage softened somewhat by a lace frill. Even so, Agnes sniffed when she saw it and Kate herself, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, wondered if she had perhaps cut it a little too fine. When it was done, they took it to Mary to let her see the result.

  It was the first time that Kate had ridden out since Anna’s death and she betrayed her nervousness in every twitch of the reins. But lifting her face to the sun and relishing the breeze that ruffled her hair, she relaxed. The horse Midnight having been sold, she rode the one that Munro had bought the previous autumn, its coat, now that it had shed the winter shagginess and had been both well fed and well groomed, gleaming copper in the sunlight. The newly fashioned dress, carefully wrapped, straddled the saddle in front of her.

  Mary was complimentary, ‘I knew fine you’d make a job of it,’

  Kate revolved, her fingers slipping to the lace at her chest.

  ‘And don’t worry about that neckline. They have been lower before and I dare say will be so again, but you have nothing to fear from the sight of your throat. Come closer that I may see the buttons.’

  It was the fourth week of April when a pedlar brought the news that the King’s fleet was expected within days. Munro left immediately to ride to Edinburgh to seek accommodation, contracting to take two rooms on the third floor of a house on Merlyon’s Wynd. His first thought, though a mite optimistic, had been to try the High Street, perhaps even to stretch to a balcony. But generous as his mother was, her money hadn’t been any match for that of the lords and earls who flooded into Edinburgh to await the return of the King and his young bride, and who competed for lodgings to match their station.

  ‘We are lucky to get even these,’ he said as he led Kate down the narrow wynd and up the flight of stone steps to the low door. She ducked to enter, rubbing her finger against one of the iron diamonds that studded the dark oak, noting the sharpness of the point, not yet blunted from repeated painting. Inside, they climbed up a stair that clung to the wall, emerging onto an open landing with timber rails and a pitched roof. A second stair dog-legged up to an even smaller doorway set in the corner, the timber treads creaking and groaning as they climbed so that she said,

  ‘No risk of surprise visitors then.’

  The door opened straight into the main chamber, which ran the full depth of the house. A narrow window at the far side, set in a triangular alcove, spilled a shard of sunlight across the centre of the floor. Munro waited, saliva f
looding his mouth, as Kate leant her elbows on the stone sill, pressing her nose against the glass. She moved to the bedchamber and swung the door back and forwards. It was made of broad planks about eight inches wide, curiously put together: on the one side the planks set vertically, on the other horizontally.

  ‘Why d’you think . . .’ she began, sliding her thumb up the edge.

  ‘It’s to avoid warping.’ He wondered if she concentrated on the door to save commenting on the rooms.

  And then she was beside him, linking her arms around his waist. ‘We are here. That is what matters and I don’t expect to spend over long inside. She moved to the bed and pressed down firmly on the centre of the mattress, then pulled back the coverlet to examine the sheets. ‘Or not by day, at least. It doesn’t sag and the sheets are clean. What more do we need?’

  Munro woke first. Daylight slipped into their bedchamber like a wraith: grey and insubstantial, filtered through the grime and soot that coated the outside of the windowpanes. He had little idea of the time and lay without moving, allowing his mind to drift. Beside him Kate stirred, then slid from the bed to go to the chamberpot, tucked into the corner behind a wooden screen. He stretched and yawned, lying back against the pillows, his hands behind his head. As she moved to the window her hair, caught in a caul, curled and sprung on her back, rich blue-black against the white of her shift. He travelled the outline of her body, past the narrowing of her waist and the spread of her hips, need rising in him. ‘Kate?’

  She turned and lifted her arm to push a strand of hair from her eyes, her shift tightening against her breast.

  ‘There aren’t cattle to feed, nor lambs to check, nor bairns to distract . . .’ He heard her breathing quicken, ‘And I’m not hungered, or not for food, the now.’

  When they woke again, though the light hadn’t altered, noise from the High Street surged through the close, the volume rising and falling in waves. Kate lay, her head tucked into Munro’s shoulder, one arm thrown across his chest. In the background expected sounds: the rumbling of cartwheels on the cobbles, the creaking of axles, the click-clack of wooden pattens, a pedlar, calling his wares up and down the street. The scuffling and cursing as stallholders set up for the day: flinging back shutters on the lucken-booths, dragging tables onto the street, hanging bells in doorways. A jangle of accents and languages: Scots, French, Gaelic, even the occasional burst of English. Kate sensed an extra excitement.

  She shook Munro.

  He muttered and turned and sat up, rubbing his eyes. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The noise. It may be nothing but . . .’

  ‘Of course there’s noise. This isn’t Broomelaw.’

  ‘There are the noises I looked for, but it doesn’t sound . . . she cocked her head to one side and searched for a word to describe her feeling. ‘It’s the voices.’

  He reached up to pull gently on a curl that had escaped from her caul. ‘You didn’t expect to hear only Scots?’

  She refused to be distracted. ‘It isn’t the languages. It’s . . .’

  ‘Intuition?’

  ‘You may lie all day if you please, but I’m for finding out what’s going on.’ She was out of bed, twisting her hair into a knot, stepping into the dress hanging over the screen. ‘The King and Queen may have arrived.’

  ‘They won’t come without warning.’ He lay back, ‘James may have slipped away quiet, but he won’t return without suitable fanfare.’

  She was struggling with her fastenings, so that Munro, taking pity, padded across the bare floorboards to tug at the strings, nipping her waist tight.

  ‘Forgiven?’ His breath was warm against her ear.

  ‘If you’re quick. For I’m not for waiting.’

  Emerging into the wynd that led to Edinburgh’s High Street, Kate lifted her skirts high. Beside her, Munro lifted one eyebrow.

  ‘I won’t have my new gown ruined for the sake of a wee bit sight of my stockings. Or not at least till the Coronation is past.

  ‘It isn’t the stockings I’m looking at.’ His grin was wicked. ‘Rather the ankles.’ He brought his brows together in pretended thought. ‘Shapely still, though I suspicion there may be a slight thickening. . . .’ He sidestepped, but not fast enough, as her foot flashed out and caught him neatly on the shin. He rubbed at the spot with his other foot. ‘You didn’t warn me I might need the protection of my boots.’

  ‘You didn’t warn me I came to be insulted.’

  ‘Glad you came then?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She looked down at the cobbles dipping against the edge of the pavement, and with the toe of her shoe poked at the gutter, where a mess of vegetable peelings mingled with the rotting remains of fish bones and wood ash. And among them the ribcage of a crow, his wing part splayed, slivers of white bone visible through the sodden feathers. His head was twisted to the side, staring fixedly at the sky from the empty eye socket, the beak open as if for one last indignant squawk. Kate’s hand flew to her mouth. Not that she wasn’t used to the sight of a dead bird. On the contrary, it was common enough on the open moorland, but this bird, unlike those at home, swiftly picked clean by other scavengers, had lain over long and maggots crawled at the corner of its mouth.

  ‘Dust and dirt I expected, but not this glaur.’

  ‘It doesn’t say much for the street cleaners, I admit.’

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘Don’t look so sceptical. There is a contract for the cleaning of all the paving. It’s to be kept smart till the royal entry is past. Maybe they haven’t got this far yet.’

  ‘Or maybe they’ve no idea what clean is.’

  As they emerged into the sunlight from the dimness of the close, Kate, courtesy of Mary’s thoughtfulness and her own skill with a needle felt perfectly at home amongst the crowds of well-dressed ladies that paraded between the Castle and the Canongate and dallied at the stalls that lined the broad street. Fingering the nap of the velvet she hoisted the hem a little higher.

  Munro slipped his arm around her waist, his fingers counting out the pearls that circled it. ‘Glad you came?’ he repeated.

  Her answer: to lean into him as far as the width of her skirt would allow.

  They sauntered towards the Tolbooth and she spent a happy hour browsing among the riot of colour that was the cloth market: the deep plums and reds and burgundy velvets, the tawny and gold brocades, the blue and silver satins. She lingered longest at a stall piled high with bales of shot silks, irridescent at her touch. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have brought me,’ she said, turning them backwards and forwards in the light.

  ‘Should I send you home? It wouldn’t please Agnes.’

  She let the cloth slip, the colours rippling through her fingers, and lifted her eyes. ‘No. They’re pretty to see but I won’t grieve for the lack of them, or . . . only a little.’

  Reaching the stalls that sold more mundane offerings, she by-passed the plain linens and white-bleached cambrics, but halted again to finger the woollens. She dismissed the coarse heavyweights, but hesitated over a fine weave, the colour of standing corn. Behind her a yawn, quickly stifled.

  Taking the edge of the cloth in both hands, she pulled at the bale unravelling enough that she could rub it between her fingers. It was fine and soft, without even the hint of scratching. ‘D’you think this would suit your mother?’

  ‘Belly wool, the best. Soft enough for a babe.’ Kate smiled at the young stallholder. ‘It’s for a grand-dame I thought it.’

  The girl changed her pitch. ‘Warmer than some twice the weight.’ Her voice was eager, ‘And home-spun and dyed and woven. I don’t sell foreign stuff.’

  Kate ran the cloth through her fingers again. ‘It would be a fitting thank you for the gown,’ she said, as much to herself as to Munro, who stood behind her, shielding her from the jostling and pushing of the crowds. ‘D’you think?’ At the last, when it was paid for and roughly wrapped and they had turned away, Kate glanced back to see the girl, who had protested, mouth drooping, that she didn’t
make so much as a bawbee on the sale, dance a little jig on the cobbles.

  ‘Did I pay too much?’

  ‘You did fine and the price fair to all, I reckon, though,’ he squeezed her waist, ‘I’m not an expert on cloth.’ He shifted the parcel more comfortably under his arm. ‘Have you seen enough?’

  ‘For the now, perhaps.’ An expression of dismay, quickly masked, flitted across his face and she laughed up at him, tucking her arm through his. ‘I may not be here again and wish to make the most of it. There are the jewellers and the haberdashers and . . .’

  ‘And fleshers and brewers and bakers . . .’

  As if she took him serious, she continued, ‘Those too, and souters and baxters . . .’

  ‘There are sights other than shops.’ He had fallen into the trap she set for him, but tried to recover some ground. ‘And we will have time for a few.’

  ‘Four days,’ she said, ‘. . . time for them all.’

  The first cannon shot came as Kate placed the cloth for her mother in law in the chest in their bedchamber, so that she dropped the lid with a bang. Munro was lounging on the settle in the main room and she flew through to him, her eyes shining.

  ‘They must have arrived.’ She was running a brush through her hair, smoothing it into a coil, replacing her cap. ‘Come on!’ She pulled at him and he allowed himself to be dragged to his feet.

  The sound of cannon fire was all around them now, coming from the castle as well as the port, the smoke that accompanied each bang hanging in a pall above the battlements. The High Street seethed with people, as if the whole of Scotland packed Edinburgh to welcome their new Queen. Caught in the surge, they were swept up the hill towards the castle. Munro fought to keep a grip of Kate and tried to work his way across the heave of bodies towards the Grassmarket, intending to skirt round and tunnel their way down to the Cowgate and thence to Holyrood.

  Someone dunted him sharply from behind knocking him into a fat burgess who glowered and trod heavily on Munro’s foot. He had a face as round as a neep and a similar colour: purple mottling, as of an over-indulgence of claret, spreading across his cheeks and bleeding into a jawline as pale as a babe’s. A scuffle and a shout and one moment Kate was clinging tight to his side, the next her arm was wrenched from his, and she was carried to the left, her capped head now sucked towards him, now away. Each movement increased the distance between them, the surge of people carrying her like a piece of flotsam tossed on the tide. He fought to follow in her wake, pushing and jostling, struggling to keep sight of her. In front of him a woman swayed, then crumpled. Instinctively, he put out his arm and caught her, the dead weight making him stagger. He was holding her up and elbowing people sideways, all the while bawling for space and air. A young lad took her other arm and between them they propelled her towards the edge of the street and stumbled against a doorway, hammering for entrance.