She shook her head. ‘I hadn’t — I was going to — there are several beds in the house that would be suitable.’
‘Your mother’s bed?’
She crossed herself at the mention of her dead mother. ‘My father sleeps in that.’ She sighed. ‘Red hangings will be very smart, and I expect the men can set it up easily once the painters are done. Perhaps we should get the hangings out of their canvas now and air them.’
Gil whistled to the dog as they reached the pend which gave entry to the mason’s sprawling house.
‘I’ll leave you here, sweetheart,’ he said, handing her the packet of the bedehouse documents. ‘We need to talk, but I must get this matter out of the way as soon as I can.’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘Do you want to leave Socrates with me? He can play with John in the kitchen till you come back.’
The children running in St Catherine’s Wynd broke off their chase and nodded when he asked for Veitch’s landlady, grinning and pointing at the building beside them, and one boy who seemed to be their leader shouted up at the windows, ‘Haw, Widow Napier! Mistress Napier! Ye’re socht!’
‘Who seeks me?’ returned a shrill voice. A shutter two floors up was flung wide, and a white-coifed head peered out. ‘And you bairns should be away hame for your noon bite by this, the lot of ye!’
‘We’re to get one last game, Mistress Napier,’ called the ringleader. ‘You’re het, Davie Wilson.’
Gil identified himself as the children scattered again, and the widow peered suspiciously down into the wynd.
‘You’d best come up, sir,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s yon stair there, two up and at your left.’
The building was a timber-framed structure with a skin of boards, and a peeling figure of some saint painted near the stair door might have been St Nicholas, patron of children, students and sailors. As he picked his way cautiously round the turns of the stair Gil reflected that not only the presence of the patron saint of sailors might make John Veitch feel at home here; the building creaked like a carvel in a gale.
‘And what’s your business wi me, maister?’ demanded the widow in her doorway.
‘I think you’ve a man John Veitch lodging wi you,’ said Gil, halting a couple of steps below her landing so that his head was level with hers. She was a skinny little woman, clad in decent homespun with a clean white linen headdress. One hand clutched her beads for protection.
‘Is John a friend of yours?’
‘I knew him when we were boys,’ said Gil. ‘I blacked his eye a couple times.’
She relaxed a little at that.
‘Aye, well, he’s no here the now,’ she said in her shrill voice. ‘He’s at his sister’s, where they’ve no their troubles to seek for, you’ll maybe have heard.’
‘Is that right?’ said Gil, hastily revising his approach to this witness. ‘No, I’ve not heard. I’m sorry if he’s got troubles in the family. I only came by to ask his pardon for no meeting him last night — no, the night before that it would be now.’
‘Night afore last, maister?’ she said, staring at him. ‘I wouldny ken about that.’
‘Oh,’ said Gil. ‘I’d trysted wi him for the Compline hour at a tavern up the High Street, and I never got there till near an hour after it. Likely he went on somewhere else,’ he suggested.
‘Oh, very likely,’ she agreed, nodding hard. ‘He’s no here the now. Are you a writing man, maister?’ she speculated, eyeing the pen-case hung at his belt. ‘You could leave him a scrape o your pen if you wanted.’
‘That would be kind, if you’d pass it on.’
‘Oh, no trouble. And while you’ve your pen and ink out, maybe you’d scrieve a wee thing for me and all?’ she said hopefully. ‘Come away in, then, maister, and get a seat.’
The widow’s message was for her sister in Dumbarton, a list of disjointed statements about members of their kindred. Perched on the stock at the edge of yet another bed, its curtain draped over his back, bent nearly double to lean on the stool she had offered him as a writing-surface, Gil made notes in his tablets, then selected a piece of paper from the small store he carried in his pen-case, flattened it out, weighed it down with the beaker of ale she had insisted on pouring for him, and began compressing the string of facts into the smallest space he could manage while she assured him that her sister’s neighbour’s son would be able to read it for her, or if not, then the priest would likely oblige. ‘Though I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully, ‘she said Sir Alan read her the last one, a year ago, and when I saw her at Yule she hadny heard the half of what I sent by it.’
‘I’ll write as clear as I can,’ he said. Behind his heels, under the creaking frame, lay a low truckle-bed, covered in a worn checked plaid, along with a bundle of unidentified timbers fully as long as the bed. Presumably the widow let out one bed and slept in the other, he speculated, copying his note about her sister Christian’s son Will’s new apprentice. ‘Did John say where he went the other night when I missed him?’ he asked.
‘No, no, maister, he never said, but I’m thinking it was some kind of mischief,’ she said tolerantly, ‘for the pair of them came in here after daylight, having hid in a pend from the Watch, so they tellt me, and John had his boots wet as wet, it was a mercy he had his seaboots wi him and could put those on when he went out again and his friend got a bit sleep. There’s his good ones still hung up filled wi moss and rags, but he wasny that worried. Sailors gets used to wet feet, he tellt me.’
She pointed at the window, where a pair of sturdy leather boots hung in the opening.
‘Good boots,’ said Gil, eyeing them. ‘They’re never local make, though.’
‘No, he said he got them in some foreign place. Spain, or Portingal, or the like. They’ve both got all kinds of foreign stuff about them.’
‘They?’ said Gil. ‘Has he a friend lodging wi him? He never said.’
‘Oh, aye.’ Relaxing further, she confided, ‘I’m right glad he brought him here. It brings me in a bit more coin, for I never like to ask strangers to be bedfellows.’
‘I’m sure that’s wise,’ said Gil solemnly. ‘I wonder, is it anyone I know? His brother William, maybe?’
‘Oh, no, it’s no his brother, he’s no like him at all. Dark-headed, and a great black beard. It’s a fellow called Rankin Elder. Off the same ship, they tell me.’
‘Is that right? Well, likely I’ll meet him if I catch up with John. And does John have my cloak, would you know?’
‘Your cloak, maister? What like is it?’ she said, peering at him.
‘A black one, with a collar, and braid on it.’ He finished the letter. ‘What name shall I put at the foot, mistress?’
‘Sybilla Thomson,’ she said promptly, ‘relic of John Napier. A black cloak wi braid and a collar, sir? No, John’s got nothing like that. He’s got his boat-cloak, but that’s brown, just the brown fleece.’ She reached past him to draw aside the curtain, revealing the interior of the bed. Striped blankets were neatly folded back and a greyish sheet was stretched over the bolster at the head. Two scrips lay at the foot, neither one big enough to hold the bulky folds of material which made up a bedehouse cloak. ‘He must be wearing his cloak, a cold day like this, and the other fellow the same. There’s all they brought with them from Dumbarton, maister.’
Down in the street, he put the widow’s small coin in his purse, making a mental note to give it to St Nicholas at the first opportunity, and walked on to the end of the wynd. It petered out into a narrow track between a diminutive chapel and two leaning sheds, and suddenly debouched on to the riverside. He looked up and down the banks, and at the gold-brown water of the Clyde, the same colour as Alys’s eyes, chattering over the sandy shallows in midstream. The biting wind whipped at its surface, raising silvery ruffles. Under the bank, where the water was deeper, one or two small boats were tied up, their oars presumably gone home with their owners, and several larger craft had been dragged out on to the opposite shore. There was a cormorant drying its wings on the sternpost of one. On this shore, a well-trampled path led downriver along the bank.