‘It seems unlikely that it was your brother who killed him,’ said Gil. ‘The signs tell me a different story.’
‘It’s kind of you to reassure me,’ said Agnew, and drained his glass. ‘Now, can I tell you anything else?’
All six of the bedesmen were seated in the pool of candlelight round the fire in the hall, discussing the morning with Maister Millar. Gil stood at the open door for a few minutes, studying them.
Despite the livery they were far from identical. (But why should they be identical? he thought.) Of the two who used sticks Anselm was frail and scrawny, with his spectacles still sliding off his nose; Duncan was big and bald and wore that flourishing moustache. There was the stooped Cubby with the trembling-ill, his hand shaking badly as he listened to Millar explaining why they needed to find the Deacon’s cloak, and Barty with his head cocked anxiously to catch the words. There was Humphrey, with his blank smile. The sixth was another lean white-haired fellow, taller than the others, who was sitting slightly aloof from the circle and looking on with sour amusement. As Gil watched, this man glanced round, met his eye, and rose and moved stiffly to meet him.
‘Salve, magister,’ Gil said, pulling off his hat and bending one knee like a schoolboy.
‘Salve, puer,’ returned Maister Veitch.
‘I’m sorry to see you here in this place, maister.’
‘No need, Gibbie, no need. I’ve been well cared for till now, and the danger we were in’s been averted.’
‘What danger, maister?’ said Gil. ‘What can you tell me?’ He looked about him. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk, sir, and I’ll see if Mistress Mudie can give us — ’
‘Sissie has her hands full,’ interrupted Maister Veitch, lifting one of the row of lanterns from the shelf by the door, ‘and I’d as soon no drink anything the now, for reasons you’ll well understand when you come to be my age, Gibbie. No,’ he went on, opening the lantern, and set light to the candle within from the one set ready on the shelf, ‘come to my lodging out this rain, and you’ll listen to me. You’ll be looking for Naismith’s enemies, I assume? There may be more than you bargained for. Millar’s a good man, but he’s too much faith in other folk’s goodness.’
‘Is that right, sir?’ said Gil. He followed his old teacher out into the dripping garden. ‘So who would you suggest might have killed him?’
‘Anyone inside these gates, for a start,’ said the old man bluntly, opening his door.
The little house was a commodious place for one person, smaller than the Douglas lodging but significantly bigger than Millar’s chamber above the hall. The outer room contained a chair, a settle and two stools round an empty hearth, and a small desk for a scholar stood against the opposite wall, with five books on the shelf above it, and an inkstand and a stack of paper lying ready. The door to the inner chamber stood ajar in the fourth wall.
‘I’ve begun work on that study I always wanted to make,’ said Maister Veitch, and cracked his cloak like a blanket to shake the rain off it, so that the candle flames danced wildly. Hanging the heavy swathes of cloth on a peg behind the door he bared his head, revealing a thick white thatch receding at the temples, and flourished his velvet bonnet at the settle before hanging it on another peg. ‘Hae a seat, Gibbie.’
‘The Early Fathers?’ recalled Gil, and got an approving nod.
Seated in his own great chair, marking off his points on gnarled fingers with the same gestures he had used when expounding the mysteries of Latin declensions in the dusty schoolroom in Hamilton, Maister Veitch set out his view of the situation in the almshouse.
‘He’d set each of us against him,’ he said in the scholarly tongue, ‘all six of the brothers, for different reasons, long before yesterday’s announcement. Sissie, whatever she says, had no reason to love or respect him. Millar, a good man and a good scholar, had a very different vision for the bedehouse from the one Naismith followed. And I regret to say the fellow’s dealings with my kinswoman Marion have been far from honest.’ He paused, one forefinger on the other, then moved on to the thumb. ‘Which I suppose,’ he added in Scots, ‘wad gie me the mair cause to dislike him, though I know I didny kill him.’
‘But what had he done to them all?’ asked Gil.
Maister Veitch began his count on the other hand.
‘As to Duncan Fraser, I’ve no idea,’ he admitted. ‘He’s forgotten all his Latin beyond Paternoster and Ave, you’ve likely noticed, speaks only the Scots tongue he spoke as a boy, somewhere beyond Aberdeen or Tain. The rest of us canny make out a word he says, poor fellow. But if you mention Naismith’s name, he turns purple, so we’ll assume there’s ill feeling there.’ He paused, considering. ‘Cubby Pringle with the trembling-ill — he leaves down crumbs for the birds, which was always worth a laugh from the Deacon, but there’s worse. Cubby was put out of his parish after he spilled the Blood of Christ over the Bishop’s Easter cope. He’s done more penance than he needs for it already, but Naismith cast it up at him as a joke every time Cubby spoke to him.’
‘They’d never wash the wine out of a cope,’ said Gil thoughtfully. ‘I take it the thing had to be destroyed? And that was attached to Maister Pringle’s name?’
‘Precisely.’ Maister Veitch paused again. ‘He made a mock of Anselm in the same way, about a matter Anselm takes seriously.’
‘The ghostly brother at the Mass?’
‘Oh, you’ve heard about it, have you? Aye, Anselm’s aye on about it. He claims to see him far more often than the rest of us, claims he actually talks to him — I’ve no seen him at all, myself — and he lets us all know. He’s childish, poor fellow. And Barty and I both had a serious difference wi Naismith about the way he uses the bedehouse’s income.’
‘Ah,’ said Gil.
‘It’s only since I was here,’ said Maister Veitch, ‘maybe a year, that we’ve tried to discuss it wi him. Till then I suppose he assumed none would notice.’ He smiled a thin teacher’s smile in the half-light. ‘Anselm’s beyond matters like that, we’d no ken if Duncan did notice, and Cubby’s too good a man to be aware of it, like Andro. Barty says he’d had his suspicions, and once I began asking about this and that we uncovered more and more.’
‘Per exemplum?’ Gil prompted, and got another approving glance.
‘There was a silver crucifix when I came here,’ his teacher said. ‘There was still plate in the hall two year since, Barty says. The meals we’re served are wholesome enough, Sissie sees to that, the good soul,’ he grimaced, ‘but we get meat less often and it’s cheaper meat these days.’ He spat at the empty grate in the small hearth. ‘And that’s another of his penny-pinching decisions — we’ve no to get a fire in our own lodgings now. He said it was for safety, and I suppose in Anselm’s case or Humphrey’s that might be true, but we all kenned what he was at.’
‘Where is the money going?’ Gil asked.
‘Into his pocket, we assumed,’ said Maister Veitch. ‘And only yesterday he called us all thegither and announced, among other things, that he would be taking back — those were his words — all our books, since old men ha no need of books, in order to sell them for the bedehouse funds.’ The indignation quivered in his voice. ‘Those books by the desk are mine, dear-bought over a lifetime, and Barty’s two are his. There’s a many missed meals behind each one of them.’
‘Your books? What did you say to him?’ asked Gil in dismay.
‘We tellt him they were ours,’ said Maister Veitch bitterly, ‘but he reminded us that the brothers hold their property in common. I kent that, but I wouldny ha accepted the place if I’d no been assured that books was a different matter. I’ve had time, this past year, to make a start on the Early Fathers, I’ll no see it snatched away.’
Gil eyed his teacher with sympathy. After a moment he said, ‘And yet the man was a clerk — he could read, I think.’