We left the castle, reversing the route by which we had entered earlier that same morning; descending the steep stairs by the Portcullis Gate, past the Constable’s Tower to the rugged forecourt that gave on to the town outside.
Donald led me down the main street a little way and then pointed to a house on the right-hand side as we stood with the castle at our backs. It was one of the newer timber-built dwellings, but differing from its neighbours in that it had no outside staircase. The first storey window, like many others, hung out over the street and, I reflected, it must have been there that Aline Sinclair had sat in preference to the solar so lovingly provided for her by her husband, at the back of the house. Watching for the lover whose name began with J? Writing her secret diary and plotting the death of that same husband? I suddenly felt cold, and it had nothing to do with the general chill of the day.
‘I’ll be leaving you then.’
Donald’s voice broke in on my reflections and made me jump.
‘Oh … Yes. Very well, then,’ I said. ‘If His Grace asks for me, you’ll tell him where I am?’
‘I’ll tell him.’
The squire gave me a brief nod before striding away, uphill towards the castle. I looked after his retreating form for a minute or two, vaguely disturbed, but not knowing why. Then I gave myself a little shake, crossed the street and knocked loudly on the door of Master Sinclair’s house.
Thirteen
Before I had time to knock twice, however, the door flew open and the gaoler’s son emerged, helped on his way by a pat on the back from the woman who was holding the inner latch. They both started at the sight of me, the boy glancing up with a shifty, white-eyed look of uneasy surprise, his companion giving me a haughty stare of enquiry.
She said something, plainly a question, at which the lad turned and muttered in the same tongue. Then he slid from under the woman’s hand and raced off in the direction of the castle as fast as his legs would carry him, not even pausing to look back over his shoulder.
‘Mistress Beton?’ I asked.
I wasn’t sure that I would get a comprehensible reply, but after only a second’s hesitation, while she sized me up from head to toe in a somewhat unnerving manner, the housekeeper nodded.
‘You must be the Sassenach young Archie was just telling me about.’ She spoke perfectly clear, if heavily accented English, but in the correct, slightly stilted way of someone speaking a foreign tongue. ‘My lord duke has sent you to try to find Mistress Sinclair’s diary. I am right?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed in some relief.
Whatever Master Sinclair’s purpose had been in sending the gaoler’s son ahead of me — and I recalled how he had appeared to be asking a favour of the gaoler himself — it had certainly saved me a long and involved explanation. Perhaps that had indeed been his object, but somehow I doubted it, and couldn’t help wondering what message the boy had really brought to Mistress Beton.
The housekeeper held the door wide and beckoned me inside with a brief motion of her head.
‘Come with me, if you please.’
There was no deference in her tone, and I guessed that quite apart from what the boy had told her, she had summed up my social standing as no better, if as good, as her own. Women are cleverer than men at that sort of thing. (Adela and Margaret Walker could always distinguish at fifty paces or more if a female was a gentlewoman or not, and whether she merited a curtsey or a mere nod of the head.)
I followed Mistress Beton along a narrow, stone-flagged passageway, where an open door to our right showed the interior of what was a comfortable, well-furnished parlour, to a smaller chamber at the back of the house. This, too, showed signs of luxury with painted beams and ceilings, cushions piled up at one end of a high-backed settle, two colourful tapestries hung on a north-facing wall and windows of oiled parchment, one of which stood wide, revealing a little garden. This latter was a mere patch of ground, maybe three or four yards in both directions, but it was neatly kept and pleasant to look at, with two beds of herbs and an apple tree in one corner, spreading its leafy branches against one of the enclosing walls. This, I decided had to be the solar mentioned by Master Sinclair and made by him for his wife — who had spurned it in favour of the overhanging window in their bedchamber.
‘Please to sit down, Master.’
Mistress Beton indicated one end of the settle — the bare end, naturally — then sat down at the other, nestling into the bank of cushions with something of a sigh. She made no attempt to offer me anything to drink, which, if whisky was all she had in the house (as was probable) was just as well. It was a liquid neither my stomach nor my brain could take. She regarded me expectantly, but made no effort to break the silence, sitting with her hands folded quietly in her lap.
It was my first chance to view her properly, and I saw a tall woman, too tall for her sex, almost the same height as myself. But there was nothing scrawny about her, either, as you sometimes find with people who have outgrown their strength in youth. She was deep-breasted and well-fleshed and would probably, if she ever married, give a man pleasure in bed — provided, that was, that the lights were out. For the most striking thing about her was her plainness of feature.
It would be too unkind to say that Maria Beton was ugly, but, having conceded as much, it would be no more than the truth to state she was one of the least attractive women I had ever seen in my life. She had a broad, square face in which sat an equally broad nose flanked by smallish eyes of an indeterminate hue and fringed with sandy lashes. Eyebrows of the same colour were almost invisible. I was unable to guess how old she was, although I learned later that she was my own age — or the age I should be in two months’ time — thirty.
She flushed under my scrutiny, but still said nothing, simply waiting expectantly. I cleared my throat awkwardly, realizing how rudely I had been staring.
‘Mistress Beton, you were with Master Sinclair, I understand, when the diary first came to light. Indeed, I believe you were the person who found it.’
She nodded. ‘If you have seen and talked with Master Sinclair in prison, as Archie informed me that you have, then you will know this for the truth.’
‘But you had no idea what was in it.’
‘Not then. I know now, of course. I have had speech with Robert. He has told me.’
‘Robert?’ Then I realized she meant Rab Sinclair. ‘You call him by his baptismal name, Mistress?’
She seemed somewhat confounded by my surprise.
‘You may not have been told,’ she answered with dignity, ‘that I am … I mean that I was kin to Mistress Sinclair. Aline was my cousin in the third degree. Therefore I am also kin to her husband.’
‘Nevertheless, you are his housekeeper.’
The naturally high colour of her cheeks deepened almost to crimson.
‘You are a Sassenach,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You do not understand these things. But if it upsets your notions of propriety, I will refer to him as Master Sinclair.’
Her fluency in the English tongue was greater than I had at first thought it. But I was becoming sidetracked.
‘After you had discovered the diary and given it to your mas- to Master Sinclair to read, what was his reaction?’
‘He seemed extremely distressed. Disturbed beyond all measure. A man who had received a desperate blow.’
‘You didn’t ask him what was wrong?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘If he had wanted me to know, he would have told me. I do not pry into other people’s affairs. Their business is their own.’
I set my trap. ‘You didn’t, later, read it yourself?’
She turned her limpid gaze on me. ‘I am unable to read, Master. I was never schooled in my letters.’