‘It’ll take all of us to bath them,’ Ursel warned. She put the lid back on the pot and turned away from the fire. ‘Wynliane screams till she boaks at the sight of that much water. That’s how they’ve no been washed right for months.’
‘Well,’ said Alys, ‘we must start the bath heating, and then get to work on the house.’ She craned to see past Jennet as the yett swung open. ‘Who is this? Someone with a horse?’
‘Three folk,’ said Jennet. ‘Is that Maister Gil’s Matt? Who’s he got there on the crupper?’
‘And here’s that Mall Anderson,’ said Ursel, swelling with indignation. ‘The cheek!’
Firm footsteps on the flagstones by the door heralded Matt, who dragged off his bonnet and ducked in a general bow.
‘Brought ye a nourice,’ he said. ‘Name’s Nan Thomson. Widow woman. Raised five. Great hand in a house and all.’
His passenger’s voice floated in from the yard. ‘My, that’s a fine building. What’s it to be?’
And, after a pause, Ysonde’s reply, almost civil by her standards: ‘It’s the Queen’s palace. Can you no see that?’
Anything Mistress Thomson might have said to this was lost in an explosion from Andy as he recognized the third arrival at the yett.
‘Mall Anderson, what are you doing in this yard? Get your thievin’ shiftless face out of my sight afore I slap it for you!’
‘Fetch Mall in here,’ said Kate urgently, setting the books aside. ‘I want a word with her.’
‘I’ll get the bairns out of the yard,’ said Alys. ‘I want to try physicking that ear. Ursel, have you tartar of wine?’
Mall was propelled into the kitchen by a furious Ursel, with Andy exclaiming angrily behind them. Ignoring them both, she stopped in front of Kate, wringing her plump hands in her apron. There were tear stains on her face, and her lip quivered.
‘Oh, mem,’ she pleaded, ‘what’s this they’re saying about my Billy? Tell me it’s no true, mem?’
‘Oh, my dear lassie,’ said Kate, with a rush of sympathy. ‘I’m afraid it is. Billy’s dead, Mall. He was slain in the night.’
She was aware of Alys pausing in the doorway on her way out to the children, but all her attention was on the girl in front of her, who had collapsed in a wailing heap, flinging her apron over her head. Amid the racking sobs words could be made out.
‘I tellt him no to do it, I begged him to leave it! He wouldny listen to me. Oh, my Billy, my dawtie, my dearie!’
Andy abandoned his indignation, heaved the girl up and set her down beside Kate. Ursel, in grim practicality, dragged away the apron and forced a mouthful of aqua vitae down her throat, which made her choke but stopped the wild sobbing, and Kate took her hands with a sudden recollection of Augie Morison clasping her own hands not an hour earlier, and said earnestly, ‘Mall, if you tried to persuade him against it, you did your duty by him. Now tell me all about it. Who put him up to it? It was never his own idea.’
Mall nodded, gulping, and freed one of her hands to scrub at her eyes with her apron.
‘Tell me what happened to him, mem,’ she begged, sniffling. ‘Was it one of the household took him? How did he dee? Tammas constable wouldny tell me, he just said he was found. .’
Kate bit her lip.
‘He was taken redhand in the night,’ she said carefully, ‘here in the house, breaking into a lockfast kist. We questioned him, but got no sense of him.’
‘No, you wouldny,’ said Mall, shaking her head. Subdued like this, with the cockiness all gone out of her, she seemed much more reasonable than her lover.
‘So we bound him, and shut him in the coalhouse for the rest of the night,’ Kate continued. ‘Now, Mall, he was man alive when Andy here shut him in.’
‘And cursing,’ put in Andy.
‘He can curse like a mariner,’ agreed Mall, and her lip quivered.
‘But when Andy went to fetch him out this morning, to see if he’d tell us any more before we sent for the serjeant, he was lying dead.’
‘How?’ the girl whispered.
‘It looked as if someone wi an axe went at him,’ said Andy bluntly. Mall stared up at him, open-mouthed. The high colour receded from her face, leaving two patches of red flaring on her round cheeks; then she put up her hands to cover her mouth. A thin high wail escaped from behind them, and she began to rock back and forward.
‘Some more usquebae, I think, Ursel,’ said Kate.
‘It’s no usquebae,’ said Ursel, pouring out another small measure. ‘It’s the good stuff, come from the Low Countries.’
She pulled Mall’s hands from her mouth and administered the dose with efficiency. Mall choked on it, hiccuped a couple of times, and began to weep again, but when Kate said, ‘What can you tell us about the man with the axe, lassie?’ she shook her head and said coherently enough through the sobs:
‘Aye, it must ha been him. It must ha been him. I never heard his name, mistress. Billy said he cam from Stirling, or Edinburgh, or one of those places. He speaks strange-like.’
‘How, strange?’ asked Kate. ‘Is he maybe no a Scot? Could he be foreign?’
Mall sniffled. ‘He might be. I never heard anyone foreign speaking.’
‘Mistress Mason’s French,’ said Andy.
The girl considered this briefly, and shook her head again. ‘No, I canny tell. He doesny sound like Mistress Mason, but that’s all I ken.’ She scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Oh, my dear, my Billy. Oh, if he’d never met that man.’
‘When did he meet him?’ Kate asked gently.
‘Yesterday.’ Mall stopped to think. ‘After the noon bite.’
‘What did he tell you about him?’
‘Oh, he’d no need of telling me. I heard it all.’
With careful questioning, she produced an account of how, after the household had eaten, she had slipped away for a tryst with Billy. Ursel exchanged a glance with Andy at this, but neither said anything. Waiting for her sweetheart in the hayloft of the stable, down at the end of Morison’s property next to the mill-burn, Mall had heard voices on the path beyond the fence.
‘So I keeked out,’ she said, ‘at the eaves where the swallas fly in, and I seen Billy out on the path by the burn, talkin wi this big ugly man. A grim-lookin’ chiel.’
The man had been all dressed in black, with a long-hafted axe, and a silly wee bit beard. He had told Billy that some task was not yet finished; Billy had claimed he was paid only to open the yett, and had done more than that already.
‘What yett?’ demanded Ursel. ‘This yett here?’
‘He never said. No here, I dinna think, no this one. But Billy said, if he’d kent what he’d have to do he’d never ha taken the chiel’s money.’
The man with the axe had pressed Billy to complete the work, threatening to tell his master what he had done already.
‘He didny want to,’ Mall assured Kate, wiping her eyes again. ‘He tellt me after, it didny seem right. But I think he was feart what the man wi the axe would do to him, no just for him telling the maister. The man said he cheated him, and he never did.’
‘What was he to do?’
He had been instructed to tell the Provost at the quest that afternoon that he and the other men had been got out of the way when the barrel was opened. Kate, listening, decided the two must have been talking for some time before Mall heard them; the stranger already seemed to know a great deal about Billy’s part in the day. Billy had objected, saying it would get his master arrested, and the man with the axe had laughed.
‘It fair made my spine creep,’ said Mall, remembering. ‘Then he said, That was the point, to get the maister out the road, and Billy was to get the key to his kist and all. So after,’ she closed her eyes, and tears leaked under her lashes, ‘he tellt me to get the key. And if Andy hadny sent him off — ’ Andy snorted at this — ‘it would ha been easy, and he’d never been taken, and never …’ She scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Where is he? Can I see him?’
‘The serjeant took him away,’ said Kate gently. ‘There has to be a quest on him.’
‘Up at the castle?’