‘She got out of it, man. She breathed clean air afore she died.’
Drummond nodded, without looking round, and turned away to greet his brother with a curt nod and a word in Ersche. Gil went closer to the ruin, gazing in at the doorway. The thatch, he supposed, would have burned most completely at the point where it first caught fire. If the fire had been set, presumably that would be at the eaves somewhere, within reach of the person responsible, whereas if it had begun from a spark flying up from the peat fire the higher parts of the roof would have burned first. Or would a firesetter have thrown a burning brand up on to the roof? No, Steenie had talked as if the eaves caught first. The collapsed layer of ash and bracken leaves draped over the internal structures of the house told him nothing useful, and the smell of damp ashes was overwhelming. He stepped back, and found the younger Drummond at his elbow, velvet bonnet in hand.
‘I am thinking,’ said the young man, ‘you are Maister Cunningham, that is Mistress Alys’s man.’ Gil admitted this. ‘I tell you, maister, she is our heart-friend so long as she lives for last night’s work. She and your man Steenie carried water the night long and she helped to dress burns and wash the dead.’ He turned his face away briefly, then went on, ‘Can you tell me where is — where is Davie?’ he ended in a rush, going scarlet.
‘He’s in St Angus’ Kirk,’ said Gil. Jamie sighed in relief, and crossed himself, the bright colour fading already. ‘Sir Duncan sent his clerk to say he can stay there.’
‘Then there is things we would like to tell you.’
‘My wife bade me talk to you,’ Gil said, nodding.
The dead, it seemed, were laid out in Patrick’s house, on the southern side of the yard, and the most of the visitors were there or in the yard itself. Seated by the hearth in the other longhouse, his back to the tall loom with its half-worked web of bright checks, Gil listened to Jamie’s account of the fire and the death of his grandmother while one of the younger granddaughters offered him usquebae and oatcakes, and the other watched at the door.
‘But it was the fire itself killed her,’ he said as the tale ended, ‘not a direct injury?’
‘That is so,’ agreed Jamie. ‘The cailleach had no injury, thanks be to Mary mild and Angus.’ Gil waited. ‘My cousin Iain,’ Jamie said at last. ‘He is dead, poor laddie, when the beasts ran over him out of the fold.’ He pointed, out and across the yard, at the lower end of the other house. ‘He was a changeling, poor bairn, he neither walked nor spoke, it’s a mystery how he got there when his mother says she was putting him safe by the wall away from the flames.’
‘Could he crawl?’ Gil asked.
‘He might have crawled so far,’ admitted the prettier of the girls.
‘What are his injuries?’
‘Dreadful to see,’ said the other girl, who seemed a little younger. ‘There is bruises all over him, and a great gash here,’ she drew a hand across below her ribs, ‘and not a mark on his face. I was there when they washed him.’ Her cousin made a small distressed sound, and she put her arm round her, murmuring in Ersche.
‘Do you know where he was found?’ Gil asked.
‘It was his mother picked him up,’ said Jamie, ‘and bore him up into the yard. Will I be asking her?’
‘Not yet,’ said Gil. ‘May I see him? I’d want to look close.’
‘Aye, you would,’ said Jamie darkly.
The younger girl left her cousin and slipped out, to return in a moment saying, ‘There is nobody there just now but Ailidh. If the gentleman were to be quick it would be good.’
Across the busy yard with its subdued conversations, the other house was similar in size and shape to the weaver’s, as if the two had been built at the same time, but it was furnished differently, and the chill smell of death overlaid that of the dried plants hung in the roof and the brews in the row of dyepots by the wall. Directly before the door Mistress Drummond was laid out in her shroud on several planks set across two barrels; at the foot of the makeshift bier stood a cradle, draped in clean linen, with the dead child reposing in it as if he slept. The oldest granddaughter was kneeling by his head, her beads in her hand, but her lips were still, her eyes distant. She looked up as they entered. The two younger girls stayed outside.
‘Maister Cunningham wishes to see the harm that came to the boy,’ said Jamie quietly.
‘Harm enough,’ said the girl, rising. She bobbed to Gil, and bent to draw back the linen. ‘But it was only the beasts, surely? No blame to them, poor creatures, they were terrified. Or else the — Those Ones, that took him home again. No blame in either case.’
‘No blame,’ agreed Gil, kneeling in his turn.
‘Then why must you be disturbing him?’
Why indeed? Gil wondered. ‘Because,’ he said, feeling carefully along the spindly limbs, ‘Davie Drummond is accused of this death as well as the fire, and — ’
‘Och, her!’ said Ailidh. Her brother spoke sharply in Ersche, and she made an equally sharp retort and went on in Scots, ‘She was outside herself, with the fire and my grandmother’s death already, and then Iain, the poor soul. No need to pay her any mind, surely?’
‘I think Sir William will want to ask questions,’ said Gil absently. The wound on the belly might have caused the child’s death, but none of the others seemed severe enough. He touched the little pale face gently, ran his palm behind the curve of the head, fingers pressing gently at the scalp under the pale frizz of hair, and stopped.
‘What is it?’ demanded Jamie. ‘What have you found?’
‘Jamie!’ said one of the girls urgently from the yard.
‘I think,’ Gil began, ‘his skull — ’
‘What are you doing?’ demanded a shrill voice in the doorway. ‘Leave my boy alone, whoever you are, have you no notion of respect for the dead? Under his own roof, at that?’
Gil and Jamie tried to speak at once, both stopped to let the other continue, and Caterin took full advantage of the hesitation and stormed into the house, pulling at her nephew’s arm, haranguing him in Ersche. Gil might not understand the words, but her meaning was clear. He apologized, drew the linen back over the small corpse and withdrew in good order to the yard, where several of the neighbours were coming to see what the trouble was, exclaiming and shaking their heads with shocked murmurs as Caterin explained in a rising torrent of Ersche. The two younger girls had vanished.
‘Ailidh is right,’ said Jamie in some embarrassment, drawing Gil down the slope from the door. ‘She is outside herself still. What had you found? Is his skull broke?’
‘I think so,’ said Gil. ‘Skull and scalp both, I believe, though I’d want longer to make certain of it.’
‘Will I get my uncle to make her allow it?’
‘Show me the fold and the gate first.’
The fold below the byre, at the lower end of the longhouse, was a substantial walled structure of field stones, with a hurdle gate standing open, the bar which would hold it in place lying at the wall’s foot. The enclosure was trampled and spattered with animal dung, as was the gateway. The younger girls had taken refuge down here, out of sight from the door of the house.
Gil studied the area carefully. Now he had seen the corpse it was not hard to pick out the place where the child’s body had lain, the imprint of thin shoulders and legs, the marks of his mother’s bare feet where she had bent to lift him.
‘Who penned the beasts last night?’ he asked. The cousins looked at one another.
‘My father, it would be,’ said the pretty girl.
‘Does he go shod?’
‘Brogainn,’ said Jamie, ‘like mine.’ He held out one foot in its soft deerskin shoe, laced up his ankle with scarlet braid.
‘Only his is laced with leather,’ said the plainer girl.
‘Husha, Nannie! Why do you ask it, maister?’
Gil bent to look closer at the prints which interested him.
‘See this,’ he said, pointing. ‘There is a bare foot there, and another, and the cattle have gone over the top of it. Someone was down by this gate before the beasts were let out.’