As Mistress Callender’s outer door closed behind me, I realized that it was well into the afternoon, and, moreover that I was extremely thirsty, so I crossed the street and bought a drink from a stall opposite. As pies were also on sale, I had one of those as well, after some altercation with the owner about the English coin I had offered him. He also treated me to a harangue in broad Scots which, although I could understand little of it, left me in no doubt that all Sassenachs were the sons of the Devil and that hanging, drawing and quartering was far too good for them. Restraining my natural impulse to land the unmannerly brute a punch on the nose, I did the next best thing and smiled beatifically, thanking him copiously for his great compliments to the English race. (Mind you, I couldn’t really blame him. My fellow countrymen can be arrogant bastards when in the company of foreigners, and the busy messengers riding between the castle and the abbey were running true to form, jostling the natives to one side and shouting at them to get out of the way.)
Suddenly, I found Maria Beton at my elbow. She had seen me from a window and had crossed the street to know what Mistress Callender might have said. She didn’t put it into so many words, remarking merely that she had come to buy a pie for her supper, but once the purchase was made, she was in no hurry to leave.
‘And what, if anything, did you learn from my neighbour?’ she demanded truculently.
There was, however, an underlying note of anxiety in the question, and a tense frown between the eyes, that I found hard to explain. And when I answered that I had learned nothing of significance, she let out a breath almost like a sigh.
‘Well, I cannot stand here all day,’ she said and prepared to depart. Halfway across the street, she turned and came back. ‘If my cousin’s diary should come to light, I will immediately send word to the castle. You are returning there now?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Almost at once.’
She nodded, and I watched her until she had once more disappeared inside the Sinclair house. Then, following Mistress Callender’s instructions, I made my way to the Grassmarket to find John Buchanan.
Fifteen
While I had been in the Widow Callender’s house, the sky had grown darker, and now I could see black clouds shouldering their way across the hill that rose up behind the abbey at the other end of the town. There was suddenly a sullen look to the afternoon and I noticed people pulling their caps more firmly about their ears, the itinerant street sellers beginning to look for the shelter of nearby doorways. As the last rags of sunlight disappeared, I realized yet again, if anything even more forcibly than before, how far I was from home; how alien this bleak, grey city seemed to me after the soft, rolling hills of my native west country and the small, smudged towns and villages that nestled in their folds. I was once more gripped by panic that I was trapped in some dream from which I could not awaken, and was caught for ever, like a fly in amber, unable to get free.
‘Saint Margaret,’ I prayed fervently. ‘child of Wessex, come to my aid. Saint Dunstan, Saint Patrick, assist me now.’
I kept repeating the words foolishly, and after a while meaninglessly, as I walked blindly through the Lawnmarket, oblivious of the surrounding booths with their bales of chequered cloth, bright among the paler silks and linens, and the stalls where butter and cheese were displayed, until a man barged into me with a muttered oath of annoyance and brought me to my senses. Regardless of passers-by, I stood stock still and took a deep breath.
Gradually, peace and common sense returned. I felt comforted by some inner presence as I recollected that I was not alone, but in the company of several thousand fellow Englishmen, camped in the valley below the city, at the foot of the castle rock. Moreover, my friend (if I dared to think of him as such) and patron, the Duke of Gloucester, was only quarter of a mile distant, perhaps less, in the castle itself. What possible harm could come to me while I had his protection?
And yet I could not quite suppress all uneasiness. I kept remembering the strange warnings I had received from the ‘Green Man’ that suggested I was in some kind of danger; and from there my thoughts inevitably strayed to the depictions of this weird figure in Master Sinclair’s house. Was there any connection, or was it just a coincidence, a part of the same nightmare?
I was growing morbid again. I drew a second deep breath, sent up another short prayer to my three Wessex saints and, with a sense of renewed purpose, strode forward through a maze of little alleys, described to me by Mistress Callender, into the Grassmarket.
It was a busy, thriving place which, again according to my erstwhile hostess, had been granted a royal charter five years previously to hold a weekly market, making it one of the busiest quarters of the city. But slicing through the friendlier, commercial smells of spices and fruit, vegetables and meat, together with the less exotic aromas of the open drains and cess-pits of the crowding houses, was the familiar, but gut-churning stench of rotting corpses. For the Grassmarket was also the place of execution, and the bodies of three felons, in various states of decomposition, were dangling from the gallows; never a pretty sight, but one from which, like most people, I had learned to avert my gaze with practised ease. Only the nostrils remained offended.
It had started to rain by now, not the torrential downpour promised earlier by the gathering clouds, but a steady pitter-pattering on the cobbles that washed away some of the dirt and excrement, yet not hard enough to send the scavenging wild dogs and cats scurrying for shelter.
I stopped at one of the stalls and asked for Master Buchanan’s direction. Five minutes or so later, after a good deal of shouting and gesticulating, after sorting out which particular Master Buchanan was meant, and, finally, after being spat at for the bastard Sassenach I so obviously was, I found myself knocking at the door of a solid, two-storey house near the West Port.
My summons was answered by a little maid with a soiled apron over her grey worsted dress and a general air of untidiness that suggested there was no mistress of the establishment, only a bachelor master. I had not enquired whether John Buchanan were married or no, but my guess was proved to be correct when I was at last shown into his presence by the flustered young girl who had failed to understand a word that I was saying. Only my continued shouts of ‘Master Buchanan!’ had eventually produced the desired result.
The man who rose to greet me in the front, downstairs parlour, from behind a table littered with papers, was clad in funereal black from neck to toe and wore a large and ostentatious mourning ring on one of his fingers. I judged him to be around thirty years of age, blue-eyed, with shoulder-length brown hair; good-looking without being handsome. In short, the sort of man who would be passed in the street every day of the week without exciting a great deal of notice.
‘Master Buchanan! Sir!’ I bowed, but not too low. ‘Do you speak English?’
He raised thin eyebrows. ‘Tolerably well. Are you one of our English conquerors?’ There was a slight sneer as he said it. I was so patently not someone of any great importance, but, equally obviously, I was one of the hated enemy, so what was I doing there?
I hastened to explain, making my story as brief as clarity would allow for my own sake as well as his. It was the third time I had repeated it that day. He heard me out in a frowning silence that grew more oppressive by the minute and which lasted for some thirty or so seconds after I had finished speaking.