Fire & Faith

by Steven Veerapen

  ‘If not vengeance then what? Madness?’

  ‘Arnaud, think on what we have seen in the past. Those slain for vengeance, yes, and malice. And out of lust, or else some mad desire bred in the evil mind. What we might have here is something else.’ Danforth’s eyes shone as he spoke, his heart beginning to race. ‘A murder of politics.’

  As he turned to lead Martin out, Danforth jumped at the hulking figure standing in the doorway. How long had he been there?

  ‘Simon Danforth and Arnaud Martin?’ asked the man, his voice gruff. ‘Are you the men?’

  ‘We are,’ said Danforth, straightening up. The sudden appearance had shaken him, and it would not do to look frightened or nervous. ‘You must be the depute of the guard.’ The man’s shadow had fallen across them, cast by the brighter torchlight of the outer hall.

  ‘I am that.’

  ‘Where’s the captain?’ asked Martin.

  ‘In Holyrood in charge of the governor’s guard. I’m Alexander Forrest. Brother to late provost of this burgh.’ By his expression Danforth saw that he was supposed to be impressed. He did not rise to it.

  ‘Then pleased we are to meet you, Mr Forrest. Though we are less pleased with the security of this place.’

  ‘Is that so? Hold on whilst I pull ten fresh soldiers out my arse. Or perhaps you’d like to guard all the entrances and exits with a paw-full of men?’

  ‘I meant no criticism,’ lied Danforth. ‘Forgive me. I mean only that it is most unfortunate that this … grisly … murder has happened under the roof of our sovereign lady.’

  ‘Under the roof? No murders under this roof,’ said Forrest. His hand balled into a fist and he laid it on his hip. Close, Danforth noted, to his sword hilt.

  ‘No?’ asked Martin.

  ‘No. Yon corpse was found outside the walls, by the loch.’

  ‘Who found it?’ asked Danforth.

  ‘The gardener.’

  ‘I see. Mr Fraser, when he was here – did you have much traffic with him?’

  ‘No.’ Forrest’s face had turned stony, but his hand had relaxed.

  ‘Did anyone?’

  ‘Not that I know. No more than anyone else. He ate in his room – in the room he lodged. He was only here one day. Mind you …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, it’s tattle. Nothing, most likely. But on the night before we found him – he was found in the morning – some of the servants said he was a madman. Wandering about. Rambling.’

  Danforth turned to Martin, the word ‘poison’ pulsing through his mind with such force he wondered if the other two men might hear it. Looking back at Forrest, his face as calm as he could make it, he said, ‘was this inside the walls?’

  ‘Aye. Since the servants don’t wander about outside at night.’

  ‘I see. Mr Fraser, could he have wandered out?’

  ‘He wasn’t a prisoner, sir.’ The word was delivered with a trace of sarcasm.

  ‘Tell me, do you have any Italians lodged in the palace? In the dowager’s service?’

  Forrest looked stumped. ‘Italians? I don’t … aye, there’s a gaggle of musicians. From Venice, I think. Bassano is one of them.’

  ‘Do you trust these men, watch them?’

  ‘Why should I watch them? I’m not interested in music. It’s not my job to spy on a troupe of good folk who make the dowager merry, for God’s sake.’

  ‘We are not your enemies,’ sighed Danforth. ‘Mr Forrest, we wish only to know what happened to our friend. For his Grace the cardinal’s sake as well as the dowager’s. And the queen’s.’

  ‘Well, friend,’ said Forrest. ‘Maybe it is that the depute of the queen’s guard needs no strangers, no outland men, interfering with his work. I’ve a job of work to do here, sirs.’

  ‘Then,’ said Martin, and Danforth had time to worry as the younger man fixed his own hand on his hip, ‘maybe it is that you should be doing it. Else we would not need to involve ourselves. You might start by ensuring that her Grace’s food is tasted. And the kitchens watched, however many are in use.’

  Danforth expected a rage of abuse from Forrest. He seemed the type. However, instead the big man shrugged. ‘You do what you like. You cardinal’s imps always do.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Danforth, trying to sound conciliatory, ‘you could show us where the body was discovered? And take us to this gardener? Is he within the palace?’

  ‘He has his own lodge outdoors. And you won’t see much tonight.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because night has fallen.’

  Danforth cursed his own stupidity. Of course it was now dark. Even with a torch there would be little left to see. Another night might not hurt. Then again it might. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘We shall retire for the evening then.’

  ‘Guthrie’ll show you to your chamber.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Danforth, wincing.

  ‘Here, we’ve been on the road most of the day,’ said Martin. ‘Any chance of us getting some supper?’

  ‘You can say to Guthrie,’ said Forrest, already beginning to walk away. ‘Not my job to entertain guests.’ He paused. ‘That all, gentlemen? I can’t bring you a hot posset later, or tuck you into your feather beds?’

  ‘Not quite all,’ said Danforth. ‘With your leave – you might let … whoever you let … know that the corpse ought to be sealed in some coffin or chest. It will soon turn, and then even that door will not relieve the palace of the reek. There are, I should imagine, carpenters and joiners here? Or some other appropriate mechanicals? Then, perhaps, he can be conveyed to Edinburgh, when servants are free to take him. His house is near to the Greyfriars. The parish will receive him.’ Lamely, he added, ‘the cardinal will see to any expenses.’

  Forrest gave him a long look but said nothing. Eventually he gave what might have been a nod and strode away. Martin made to follow the depute, but Danforth stayed him with a hand. He waited until he heard the clunking boots soften and disappear. ‘Well he’s no friend to us,’ said Martin, giving the empty space Forrest had occupied a sour look.

  ‘The friendship of some men has to be won. If it is worth winning. Listen, Arnaud: we shall take ourselves to that blasted Guthrie fellow and find our lodgings. Yet I warn you: be wary what passes your lips in this palace. Inwards and outwards.’

  ***

  With much grumbling about having to decamp to other quarters, Guthrie showed them to what was normally his own chamber, on the ground floor in the north range. As he had said, it was just off the corridor they called Thieves’ Row, which ran parallel to the top of the quadrangle. Danforth crossed the barren little room and pushed open the wooden shutters with a sigh. No great leaded glass here, he thought. On the wall was the outline of a cross, presumably taken down by Guthrie to be set up in his new quarters. Danforth traced the outline, his finger coming away dirty. Palace living was not quite the luxury it was above stairs. He looked down over the lawns, inhaling the cold evening air and watching it burst outwards in a satisfying funnel. Ahead was the loch, black in the starless sky, but wobbling here and there with pale reflected moonlight.

  Martin was speaking. ‘Hmmm,’ Danforth asked, cracking his back before scraping the shutter closed.

  ‘I said I’ll die here myself if I can’t eat.’

  ‘I merely suggest we eat only what we see others eat. Out of prudence. For safety’s sake.’

  Martin had flopped into a hammock suspended from two hooks nailed into the plaster, his travelling pack squashed in at one end. Its twin hung against the other wall, with Danforth’s pack – mercifully still tied shut – on the floor beneath it. Danforth eyed the hammock with distaste. It was the stuff of soldiering, not service. ‘Royal service, right?’ said Martin, rolling from side to side and bouncing off the wall. ‘The devil burst it.’

  ‘If you think that service is all feather beds and jewelled fans, you have another think coming, you young fool. Even his Grace does not pamper his servants. If you pamper servants, you
will soon find that they would rather lie in their beds all day than get out of them to work.’ There, he thought; that might go some way to curing Martin of his fascination with high living.

  ‘Aye, well … it’s a sign of a great person if their people live in greatness.’

  ‘Blast it, Martin – why is it always an answer to everything with you?’ Martin smiled up, sweetly malevolent, like a naughty child. ‘At any rate,’ Danforth went on, ‘we shall have far too much to occupy us than to spend our days in rest. I daresay that you might sleep on the head of a pin when we have finished working through this business.’

  Alertness pulled Martin upright. ‘What shall we do tomorrow, then?’

  ‘That,’ said Danforth, stepping to his own hammock and unfastening his cloak, ‘is for us to decide now. To plan.’ He shook the cloak loose and began unbuttoning his doublet. ‘One: I wish to inspect where this corpse was found. There might be little to see now, but there might be something of value. Two: I wish to speak to the gardener. The one who discovers a corpse usually has the sight burned into their mind. Three: I wish to visit the town and discover what the common rabble thinks of Hamilton of Finnart.’

  ‘The town?’ asked Martin. ‘I … well, this sounds like a great deal to do on a short day. I’ll go to the town. I mean you know how quickly the days pass in winter, one minute it’s the morning then it’s afternoon and night again. If you want, that is. I’ll do it.’ Danforth watched Martin babble, but the younger man didn’t seem to want to meet his eye. Instead, he had become interested in ensuring the hooks of his hammock were well fitted.

  ‘Very well,’ said Danforth, gingerly sliding into the suspended cloth. ‘Since it animates you so much, you might go back into town. Cast about for rumour, for report. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Aye. Aye, I’ll do that.’ Martin eased up onto his elbows, pushed away from the wall, and blew out the candle that sat on a box in the centre of the little cell.

  Danforth closed his eyes, trying to make himself as small and weightless as possible. To his surprise, the body of Fraser did not crowd into his thoughts, the grey face did not loom up at him demanding justice. Instead, he began to wonder what it was that seemed to be drawing his friend to Linlithgow. As Martin did not seem willing to volunteer the information, he could only surmise that it was nothing good.

  8

  The town of Linlithgow clung to the palace like a suckling child. Martin had walked down after leaving Danforth fussing about in the courtyard, asking the staff of the palace if there was a library which he might commandeer as an office. Privately, Martin had been worried that the older man might make have decided during the night to accompany him, but instead he had sufficed himself with ill-concealed looks of suspicion and a gruff warning to watch himself. They had parted by the fountain, and when Danforth had stalked off, Martin had taken the opportunity to covertly splash and wash his face and neck, before producing a hidden comb and slicking back his hair. He had his own mission to complete.

  For what seemed like an age, he had sauntered the market cross, watching the burgh slowly rouse itself. Stalls were set up, tables set out, and children set to work touting for business. Snatches of singing helped waken the place, giving it an air of jollity as shafts of sunlight speared the ground. Martin hummed to himself as he surveyed the faces, none familiar, and fended off questions from the more civic-minded of the burgh folk: ‘what news, sir?’; ‘what brings you hither?’; and of course, when the livery was spotted, ‘is the cardinal free? Might we bury our dead as good Christians?’ Above the town, smoke rose from a multitude of chimney holes, rising in columns to be flattened by the wind. The sight brought back the image of his mother’s house ablaze, the roofbeams collapsing, the sound of horses screaming in the yard. He turned his face away, looking again to the crowds. His mouth made a little moue and he looked at his shoes as a young married couple sauntered by, their hands clasped. Everyone but him. At the first mention of marriage every lass fled him. It wasn’t fair. He looked up again.

  None of the faces was the one he sought. As the sunlight intensified, bringing little heat to the chilly air, he began to suspect he might have to do some work. Besides, the mission he was bent on … it was wrong. He knew there was something tainted about it. And yet he could not resist it. The town had pulled on him, the desire to see her face and hear her voice. Perhaps, he smiled to himself, he had been bewitched at the age of eighteen, and the traces still sparked in his veins. As he traced his finger along one of the wooden boards on the cross itself, a soft voice intruded on his disappointment.

  ‘Arnaud? Arnaud Martin?’

  He turned, hardly daring to hope. There, within touching distance, stood Marion Muir, the woman he had loved since the autumn of 1539. The woman he had hoped to marry. The woman who had married someone else and been taken as wife to Linlithgow.

  ‘Marion,’ he said, his voice husky but his face breaking into a grin. ‘I didn’t think to see you here.’

  ***

  Danforth stood on partly-frozen ground to the north of the palace, the sun sending just enough light for a thaw. He had turned his back to the pewter spread of the loch and bent to the ground. ‘About here?’

  ‘Aye,’ said the head gardener, his arms folded. Danforth’s eyes scanned the ground, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. He rose, his eyes trailing up the hill which led to the palace. From here only the north range could be seen, his and Martin’s chamber window to the right on the ground floor, peeking out over some sculpted bushes. Directly next to it on the right one of the four corner towers stood proudly. It was a tall building. Above the ground floor was the floor of the king’s chambers and great hall; then the queen’s apartments; then the royal nursery; and at the top the high guard posts. To leave, the gardener had led him out of the old, disused gatehouse on the eastern range, next to the pool of stinking sludge that marked the open refuse pit. Perhaps Fraser had come out that way. At any rate, where he stood now – where the body had been found – was the back of the building, facing only the loch. No one would be looking out at much here.

  ‘Master Gardener, this part of the place is … somewhat shielded from view. Do you have much work to occupy you here?’ The gardener, his face hidden behind a heavy beard, narrowed his eyes. He raised an arm swathed in the dun of his uniform and pointed. ‘The great gardens lie off the western range.’ Danforth waited, expecting more. The man had a taciturn air about him. Ordinarily it would be a thing he might have respected, but at present it was an irritant.

  ‘I see. And so you conduct your business there.’

  ‘I direct my men t’attend the gardens there, aye.’

  ‘You have many men?’

  ‘Passing fifteen. Big gardens.’

  ‘And very fine, I am sure.’ No response, no smile. ‘Where do you keep the tools of your trade?’

  ‘Secure.’

  ‘Yes, I am certain. But where?’

  ‘Over’n the gardener’s barn.’ He pointed vaguely in the direction from which they had come. ‘Under lock and key.’

  ‘Do you have, I take it, some …’ Danforth fought for the right words. ‘Some large cutting … implement. Such as might have sheared … cleaved Mr Fraser’s arms from his body?’

  ‘Hold on, sir,’ said the gardener, ‘just whit are you accusing me of?’

  Danforth sighed, sensing a lost cause. ‘I accuse no man. I simply wish to find the weapon which struck off the man’s limbs.’

  ‘Well you’ll no’ find it in my barn. Locked, as I said. I check and check again that barn before I retire. And if any man took anything he’d be the one with his arms chopped off. By me.’ His eyes suddenly widened. ‘Not that I could … I meant only a jest.’

  ‘I take your meaning,’ said Danforth, shaking his head. ‘The morning after the death … everything was accounted for, every tool in its usual place? Nothing amiss?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ The gardener briefly chewed on his inner cheek, the brown thatch quiveri
ng. ‘No, nothing. I would have remembered special that day, what with the news and the suspicion and the fear and that. I’d remember.’

  ‘Very good, Master Gardener. Well, it is as I thought. After such a time, there is little the ground can tell us. No secret note scribbled in haste, no bloodstains. Was there much blood on the ground?’

  ‘No, sir. You can see, there was so little blood come out of the body that what there was has been taken by the wind and the snow.’

  ‘Yes. I meant to ask you,’ said Danforth, reaching into his doublet. ‘Can you tell me where this might have come from? Is there anything remarkable about it?’ He held up the twig with the little leaf he had taken from Fraser’s body, twiddling it between his thumb and forefinger. The gardener leant in, eyebrows knit. Then he sniffed it.

  ‘It looks to me like it might have come from one of the garden’s shrubs.’ He gestured back towards the palace. ‘We plant them all around the place. They keep their leaves during winter. You know, stay green, give some colour. Most of them are in the gardens by the western range. You can’t see them from here.’

  ‘Are they poisonous?’ asked Danforth, the thought just occurring.

  ‘No. If a man was fool enough to eat them he might puke them up or have a bastard of a gut-rot. But not poisoned.’

  ‘Are there any poisonous leaves or berries or anything such in the gardens here?’

  ‘I …’ The gardener fidgeted, looking away. ‘Some foxglove, some wolfsbane. Her Grace the dowager is partial to the colours. But you’ll no’ find them blooming now.’

  ‘I see.’ Danforth replaced the twig. He turned with a jolt as some birds rose up, squawking, from hills on the other side of the loch and descended to skim the surface. He felt a blush creeping at the fright. ‘It is a pretty place.’

  ‘It is that,’ said the gardener, a smile finally threatening.

  ‘Tell me, that gate we came through, in the eastern rooms. Is it guarded?’