‘Not telling.’
Gil straightened up and put a hand over his mouth to hide a grin, just as hasty feet sounded at the house door and Morison himself hurried into the room.
In appearance, Gil had always thought, Augie Morison was a middling man — of medium height, middling thin, with middling brownish hair, his face and hands neither long nor round but in-between. He had a smile of rare charm, but it was seldom seen these days, so that only his very blue eyes were at all remarkable, unless books were mentioned. Then the whole man took fire, the blue eyes sparkled, the sparse hair stood on end as he discussed authors and titles, dealers and printers, copy-houses and sources of information, until most of his colleagues on the Burgh Council found urgent business elsewhere.
‘Guid day, Maister Mason! Guid day, Gil!’ He flourished his round felt hat at them. ‘I’m sorry not to have been here to greet you. I was called to something in the barn.’
‘No trouble,’ said Maistre Pierre, standing up. ‘We have been attempting to make the acquaintance of your bairns here.’
‘The bairns? Are they here?’ Maister Morison came round the settle to peer under it. ‘Come out of that, the pair of you. Where’s Mall? Why are you not with her?’
Reluctantly, the children emerged from the shadows, and were revealed as two little girls, aged perhaps six and four. The general air of neglect extended to them. Both wore bedraggled gowns of good brocade, identical in size, so that the taller child’s thin bare calves showed between her sagging hem and her wood-soled shoes. She peeped at her father through the tangled curtains of her long hair, while her sister scowled at the strangers. It was evident that neither the children nor their shifts had been washed that week.
‘Where’s Mall?’ their father asked again.
The smaller girl shrugged. ‘Gone to market,’ she said. ‘She didny want to drag us alang.’ She was clearly repeating Mall’s words.
‘Isn’t Ursel in the kitchen?’
‘No.’
‘Where is she?’
The child shrugged again.
‘Take your sister, Ysonde, and find Ursel. Tell her I said you were both to stay with her till Mall comes back.’
The child stared at her father in silence for a moment, then turned her head and looked at her sister, sighed, and taking her hand clopped off into the next room. After a moment they could be heard negotiating a stair.
‘I’m sorry, maisters,’ said Maister Morison. ‘The lassie that has charge of them takes her task ower lightly.’
‘Can you not hire a better?’ asked the mason.
‘They won’t stay. Now — come look at this puncheon, and once it’s broached we can sort the laidin’ over a jug of something. Maister Halyburton’s a good judge of print,’ he added, eyes brightening. ‘There was a Blanchard and Eglantyne last time, from Caxton’s workshop ye ken, and some Italian astronomy.’
‘Did you ever get Albert on Buildings?’ asked the mason hopefully.
‘Never yet, but we might be lucky,’ said Morison. He led the way out and down the steps, saying to Gil as they reached the yard, ‘Andy tells me Lady Kate’s petition had no success.’
‘Worse than that,’ said Gil.
‘How so?’ asked Morison, startled. ‘Was she harmed by it? What came to her?’
Gil shrugged. ‘Not a lot to tell. She slept the night in the arcading in the tomb, in the space that pilgrims crawl through if they’re allowed the close approach.’ Morison nodded, familiar with the custom. ‘She woke about dawn, from a dream that she could walk like any lass in Scotland, and found there was nothing changed.’
‘Oh, poor lady!’ said Morison. ‘Pray God the saint shows her his favour some other way.’
‘Amen to that,’ agreed Gil, deciding not to untangle the theology of the remark.
‘She feels St Kentigern has mocked her,’ said Maistre Pierre, giving the saint his other, more formal name.
‘What is her trouble?’ asked Maister Morison. ‘I mind she went on two sticks when we were young, but I never thought to ask, at that age — is it the rheumatics, or something?’
‘When she was six,’ said Gil, ‘and I was ten or so, there were just the three youngest ones left at home. I was at the grammar school in Hamilton, Margaret and Dorothea were with our Boyd cousins in Ayrshire, and my brothers had gone as squires to Kilmaurs. There was a fever in Hamilton — ’
‘Oh, I mind that. Con had it too.’
‘- and the three of them took it. Their nurse always said, although they had the spots the same as the other bairns in Hamilton, it seemed like they’d some other infection as well. I wouldn’t know. Anyway Tib had it light and recovered, Elsbeth died, and Kate was left with her right leg withered. It’s not numb, indeed she says she feels a knock harder than in the other leg, but she has no power below the knee.’
‘Poor lassie! God send her some remeid,’ said Maister Morison, and crossed himself.
The mason did likewise. ‘She has tried prayer and fasting and many remedies, so she tells me,’ he explained, ‘and made pilgrimages all over Scotland. St Mungo was her last resort. She is at her prayers just now, and my daughter with her.’
‘We may yet hope for a miracle, then,’ said Maister Morison, and clapped Gil awkwardly on the elbow. ‘Come and look at these books. Is she still a reader? Maybe there would be one she might like.’
Across the yard, in a small shed full of racks of barrel-staves and odd timbers, the barrel had been set up on a low platform. It was not one of the huge pipes used to transport wine, which Gil was used to seeing cut in half once empty to do duty as a bath or brewing-tub. This was a small cask, less than three feet high, neatly hooped with split withies and branded with several marks, most of them cancelled by splashes of tar.
‘I’ve the mallet and hook waiting,’ said Andy from the far end of the bench as they entered the shed. ‘Have you the tally, maister?’
‘I have.’ His master patted his chest, felt in his sleeves, and finally drew from inside his doublet a bundle of papers.
‘A pipe of dishes, with the yellow glaze,’ he muttered, leafing through them. ‘That’s what Billy and Jamesie are seeing to now, over in the barn. The sale of two sacks of wool sent by Robert Edmiston. Aye, here we are. Andrew’s writing gets worse every time he sends me. To a puncheon of books, packed in Middelburgh and laid in Thomas Tod’s ship. Item, cost of the puncheon, item, pynor fee and schout hire — ’
‘That’s Low German,’ Andy commented. ‘Porter fee and boat hire. A schout’s one of their funny wee boats for getting the barrels out to the ship.’
‘I’ve been to the Low Countries,’ Gil said.
‘Maister,’ said Andy thoughtfully, lifting mallet and hook from the pouch of his leather apron, ‘did ye say this was laid in Thomas Tod’s ship?’
‘Indeed it was. I saw it hoisted out myself, while you were in Linlithgow at Riddoch’s yard.’
‘Because it’s odd, in that case,’ Andy continued, ‘that there’s no mark of Tod’s on the wood.’ He tapped with the iron hook. ‘There’s William Peterson’s shipmark, and James Maikison, and a couple more under the tar here, and a crop o’ merchant marks. There’s ours. But I don’t see Tod’s mark.’
‘This is a well-travelled barrel,’ remarked the mason.
‘Andy,’ said Maister Morison, ‘do that again, man.’
‘Do what?’
‘Hit the barrel. It didn’t sound — ’
Andy rapped the head of the barrel with the hook, and then one of the staves, and cocked his head at the resulting dull thud.
‘It’s no right, is it?’ he agreed. He rocked the barrel, his ear close to the smooth tar-splashed planks of its head.
‘You think it is the wrong barrel?’ asked the mason in disappointed tones. ‘But it has your mark.’
‘Aye, it does.’ Maister Morison went to the door and opened it wider, to let in more light. ‘I’m wondering …’
‘You’re wondering if it’s an old mark,’ Andy prompted him.