‘Michael’s likely in the Douglas lodging,’ said Lowrie. ‘Socrates and I can go see.’
‘And then,’ said Gil reluctantly, ‘I’ll need to talk to the brothers. I’ve a notion one or two might have something useful to tell us.’
‘- and that’ll make a nice change for them, a civil learned young man to talk to, they aye like a new ear for their tales, the souls, and if that’s you done here, maister, I’ll see to covering him and a couple of candles the now till he softens and we can make all decent — ’
Lowrie paused at the doorway, cast a sidelong, reluctant glance at the corpse in its pool of lamplight and crossed himself.
‘It’s an odd thing,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been at the hunt, I’ve witnessed a many stags unmade and lesser game cut up, but this is no the same at all.’
‘No,’ agreed Gil. ‘It’s no the same at all. Say a word for him when you get the chance,’ he suggested, miming counting his beads. ‘It helps.’
The young man nodded, and swallowed hard.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Thanks, maister.’
Out in the yard, the rain was heavier. Lowrie ducked his head in a brief bow and hurried for the hall door, and Millar led the way to the fore-stair of the Deacon’s lodging. Socrates, following Lowrie, checked at the threshold and emitted one staccato bark. Gil looked back from the stair and gestured, and the dog obediently padded off after the young man.
‘Not locked,’ said Maistre Pierre as the latch rattled.
‘Oh, no,’ agreed Millar, pushing the door open. ‘We lock the outer gate by night, ye ken, and the hall door, and the back yett as Sissie said, but we’ve no locks to our own doors, save for the Douglas lodging, a course, and the boy has that the now.’
Naismith’s apartment was both commodious and clean. The door admitted them to an outer room fashionably and expensively furnished with a handsome court-cupboard, four leather backstools and a table with carved legs. In one corner of the room stood a tall rack of shallow drawers, bundles of papers showing at their open fronts. Wall-hangings of verdure work made the place comfortable, and on an embroidered linen cloth on the table sat the remains of Mistress Mudie’s collation: a wooden platter with the crumbs of an oatmeal bannock, the leaf wrappings of a green cheese, an apple-core. Windows facing on to either yard were stoutly shuttered, but a grey light fell through their glazed upper portions just under the thatch.
‘And the bedchamber’s yonder,’ said Millar, nodding at the far end of the room. ‘Now I’d best get down to see to the Office.’
‘Mistress Mudie keeps house for the Deacon as well as for the brothers?’ Gil asked. ‘Alone?’
‘Aye, and for me.’ Millar grimaced. ‘She’s a good woman, and she loves caring for the old men, it’s no just a duty, and she’s a good housewife, wi two-three kitchen hands under her, though you’d never think it the way she goes on about the cooking. Her talk doesny bother the brothers,’ he added, with a wry grin, ‘the most of them canny hear her.’
‘I have no doubt she is a good woman, as you say, but her tongue would drive me raving wild in a day,’ said Maistre Pierre.
‘Your semly voys that ye so smal out-twyne Maketh my thoght in joye and blis habounde,’ remarked Gil. Millar grinned again, then hastily rearranged his features in solemnity. ‘So the Deacon left just before you did,’ Gil continued, ‘and came back late. How did he get up the stair last night? The moon’s at the quarter, but it was full cloud. I’d need of a lantern myself, out in the street, even with the lights on the house corners, and in the yard here it would be like the inside of a barrel.’
‘Oh, he’d a la — lantern,’ said Millar, pausing on the doorsill. ‘It’s here. He’s brought it home with him.’
‘His own lantern? You can identify it?’
‘Oh, aye.’ Millar waved a hand at the object where it sat on the court-cupboard. ‘Well, it belongs to the bedehouse. You can see, it’s got the badge on the handle, and all.’
Gil went over and lifted the lantern. It was a well-made and well-worn specimen, of tooled brass set with pieces of mica. The shutter was fastened by a neat clasp whose pin was attached by a fine chain, and the handle was smoothly shaped and ornamented by a small shield with a heart on it.
‘Douglas?’ said Maistre Pierre. ‘The Douglas arms? The same which you wear, maister?’
Gil looked attentively, for the first time, at the embroidered badge on Millar’s cloak.
‘The Douglas arms, with a difference. A heart on a shield,’ he said, ‘and an open book below it. Was it a Douglas founded the place?’
‘The shield should be chained to the book,’ said Millar, distracted, ‘and LP on the pages of the book, to signify the House of Leirit Puirtith, but the stitches aye wear away. It was James Douglas of Cauldhope was our founder, near sixty year since, as a house to support ten poor learned men. We pray daily for his soul and his wife’s.’
‘I never realized that,’ said Gil. ‘That must have been my godfather’s sire — or his grandsire, indeed. Ten, is it? You don’t have ten staying here now, do you?’
‘No, no,’ said Millar anxiously. ‘There are si — six bedesmen. And I’d best leave you now, maisters, and go and lead them to Terce. I’ll come back as soon as they’ve right started.’
‘We must not delay the Office,’ agreed Maistre Pierre, and Millar hurried off down the creaking fore-stair. Gil set the lantern back on the court-cupboard and prowled round the chamber, opening the shutters so that the damp air stirred and more light fell on the well-swept boards under their feet. Maistre Pierre laid the dead man’s purse and belt on the table and looked about him.
‘He did himself proudly,’ he commented. He moved to the rack of papers and drew out a bundle. ‘What are all these, I wonder? The accounts of the bedehouse, I suppose. I wonder where he wrote? I see no pen or ink. Perhaps in the inner room.’
‘This does not add up,’ Gil said. His companion nodded, peering at the papers he held. ‘He was moving about up here two hours before midnight, with a locked door between him and the place where he was found dead this morning. He must have been killed almost immediately after he was heard here, but where did it happen?’
‘His keys were on him. They could have been used to open the door.’
‘But how did his killer get out again, through the locked door?’
‘Perhaps it was one of the old men. Or Millar, or that talking woman. Who else has a key?’
‘I hope the boys may find something to the purpose.’ Gil turned his head as a sound of shuffling feet rose from the yard. ‘And there is Naismith’s bedchamber to search.’
Chapter Three
The inner chamber was half the size of the outer, most of the floor space taken up by a free-standing box bed positioned to avoid the worst of the draughts from the windows. It had a counterpane of the same verdure tapestry, and a matching curtain was drawn back on its one open side.
‘Is that the kind of piece madame your mother has sent?’ asked Maistre Pierre, following Gil into the room, ‘or is it a tester-bed with pillars? The canvas was still over the cart when I left this morning.’
‘It’s this kind,’ said Gil rather shortly. He was aware of his friend eyeing him sideways again, but concentrated on studying the rest of the chamber. There was a painted chest with a businesslike lock by the bedside, a rug made of two goatskins lay crumpled beside it, and a tall desk stood next to one of the windows, the inkhorn and pen-case Maistre Pierre had missed resting on a shelf beside the writing-slope.
‘The bed has been slept in,’ the mason said, ‘this one I mean, I have no doubt of that.’
‘Nor I,’ said Gil.
Indeed, he thought, it could hardly be clearer. The sheets were creased, the counterpane rumpled, and the blankets had been flung back when its occupants — occupant rose before the dawn. He pulled back the bedding, and drew each layer up over the mattress until all was straight, then looked about him. A pair of slip-slop shoes sat neatly by the foot of the bed; a furred brocade bedgown hung on a nail in the bedpost above them.