Time and Tide (37 page)

Hew saw glasses that distorted what was in plain sight, and glasses that made sense of images distorted, glasses that made one of many,
others, like the multiplier, that made many out of one. A dozen small figures, arranged in a circle, viewed through a cylinder, fused into a whole. He bought the multiplier as a gift for Giles, and turned to leave the shop. And there he stopped aghast, to catch his face reflected in a common looking glass, plain and undistorted, hung above the door. In the midst of these illusions, it took him by surprise.

‘What is it that you see?' the shopkeeper asked shrewdly, his last and finest trick. Hew was lost for words. What was it that he saw? A young, fair scholar's face, a little thin and thoughtful, growing grave and pensive, showing signs of age. Who was he, after all? What was it he was doing there? He saw his own life plainly in a glass, his family, hope and friends, his training in the law, and saw it scatter in confusion, no more closely centred than he had ever been. What compulsion drove him? He was, as he assured himself, his own man to the last. And yet he had no notion what that really meant.

Hew hurried to the inn, and finding Robert Lachlan in a stupor on the floor, he woke him with a kick. ‘Do you want to stay with me, and see this matter out?' he demanded bluntly.

Robert answered cautiously, ‘I might.'

‘Get up, then,' Hew instructed. ‘We are going home.'

On a grey November evening as the light began to fail, Hew and Robert Lachlan came riding from the west to the clock tower of St Salvator's, inscribed in darkening skies. St Andrews never looked so fair, thought Hew, as on arrival and departure, where wild winds swept and scattered waters from the bay and drizzled soft white spray on walls of yellow sand. Robert Lachlan, for his part, was less impressed. ‘Is this it, then? The great metropolis? Three streets?'

Three streets, in which a world converged and bowed before the hollow, windswept arches of its old cathedral church: the broad and leafy South Street, the townhouses and colleges, the kirk of Holy Trinity and mercat with its cross; and deeper lined within, its crisscross of baxters, thieves and whores, philosophers and fisher wives, clergymen and cooks; their cloisters and courtyards, their dinner bells and boats. ‘What did you expect?' asked Hew.

‘Well,' said Robert with a sniff, ‘for sure, it isna Ghent.'

‘But Ghent is a huge city. You forget that this is Scotland. I think you were away too long,' Hew smiled.

‘Or mebbe,' Robert countered, ‘not long enough.'

‘Where is it you are from?' his master asked.

The soldier shrugged. ‘A wee place in the west. You would not have heard of it. I will not go back there.'

‘Have you no other friends?'

‘I had a sister once. She would not know me now.' Robert said dismissively. ‘I will stay here for a while. Perhaps I will find work.
Your man Robert Wood may want a miller still to work his mill. I could be a miller. It cannot be hard.'

‘I do not recommend it,' answered Hew. ‘If you will, I could let you have land.'

‘And what would I dae with that? Grow neaps, and cabbage kale?' The soldier shook his head. ‘I thank you, but I do not think so.'

Robert proved ill-fitted for a servant in the town, for his manners at St Salvator's were awkward and restrained; he could not wait at table, and he would not help the cook. Nor did he fare much better with the doctor on the Swallow Gait, for Meg received him sceptically, and he fell out with Paul. ‘What sort of man is that?' asked Meg, ‘you bring home as a friend?'

‘An honest one,' insisted Hew.

‘I fear,' whispered Giles, ‘that your brother has acquired a new friend for Dun Scottis. Yet we must be thankful, he is back at all.'

Robert lodged for two nights with Maude Benet at the haven inn, but on the third she told him that the house was full. ‘I do not want him here,' she said to Hew, ‘he drinks too much,' which seemed an odd objection, from the keeper of a tavern.

‘He has shown no sign of violence, as I hope?' asked Hew.

‘He has not. Yet he is melancholy in his cups. He is the sort of man who drinks when he has nothing else to do, from idleness. And I have seen too many guid men thrawn by drink, to want to see another one,' she answered enigmatically.

And so, for want of better plan, Hew took Robert home to Kenly Green and left him there with Nicholas, who took to him with quiet grace, and did not seek to judge. Hew returned alone, to report to Andrew Wood. He found the coroner at home in the tolbuith in the mercat place, where he fulfilled his offices when he was in town.

‘I heard,' Sir Andrew greeted him, ‘that you have brought a man with you from Ghent.'

‘Good news travels fast,' noticed Hew.

‘Do you intend to keep him?' Andrew Wood inquired.

‘He will go where he will, for he is not a lapdog to be kept.'

Sir Andrew answered tetchily, ‘When are you to learn? The man is your servant, and a servant is to keep, or dismiss, as you decide. I advise you to dismiss him.'

‘I had a notion, once, that he might work for you,' Hew confided.

‘And why should you think that?

‘I thought that you had set him, to spy on me.'

Sir Andrew gave a narrow smile. ‘Regrettably, you overstate my power. I would I had such influence,' he said.

‘Do you mean overseas?' asked Hew.

‘I mean, over
you
,' the coroner replied. ‘The man I set to spy on you was beaten to a pulp, by your servant, Robert Lachlan, at the Groote Kerk in Campvere. He wiped your bloody sword upon my servant's coat.'

Hew exclaimed, ‘Sweet heaven! Then he meant to kill me!'

‘Not at all,' the coroner demurred. ‘His orders were to watch, and keep you safe. His error was to let things go so far. For he was on the boat with you, and saw your indiscretion with the little whore; your weakness for such women, as I feared, distracts you. My man thought you deserved your lesson; which was not a judgement he was free to make. Yet you may be assured he would not have let them kill you. What he had not foreseen was that you were so supple with your sword, or should be so savage in your own response.'

‘It was instinct,' Hew excused himself, ‘and nothing more. I do regret the hurt I did the man.'

‘Your instinct, then, is sound and quick, and should not be a matter for regret, for it has served you well. My own man fared more badly in this matter. George Hacket found him wounded in the street, and had him hanged, precipitate, for the blood that Robert Lachlan had smeared upon his coat.'

‘Oh, my dear God,' murmured Hew. ‘Then the poor wretch was hanged for my sword?'

‘You need not waste your tears on him. For he had failed his task.'

‘Aye, but to be hanged for it . . .!' Hew said, ashen-faced. ‘And
yet,' he countered suddenly, ‘If Hacket hanged him for it, how is it that he lived to tell the tale?'

Sir Andrew laughed. ‘There you have caught me out. Aye, very well, Hacket did not hang the man. He kicked him up the arse and sent him home to me. And for all the use he is to me, now banished from Campvere, he may as well have hanged.'

Hew groaned. ‘I cannot tell the falsehood from the truth!'

‘Indeed,' the coroner remarked, ‘As I may sometimes think the same of you, without corroboration of a close intelligence. All such reports were thin, since you went south from Vlissingen. I heard you were in Antwerp, with the Prince of Orange; the devil only knows what you did there.'

‘It is the devil's tale,' smiled Hew, ‘that takes us somewhat crooked from our proper path.'

‘Then we shall hear it presently, and move on first to Ghent. Yet tell me, if you will, how you did find the prince? In spirit and in health?'

‘I found him quite remarkable. You know he has been shot?'

‘So we have lately heard,' the coroner acknowledged. ‘So close a violation of the person of the prince has sent a tremor that reverberates throughout the crowns of Christendom, except, of course,' he ended with a smile, ‘that of our own King James, who has not been told of it, for fear that he would piss himself.'

Hew felt a prick of sympathy for James. ‘Yet as I understand it,' he mentioned in defence, ‘he saw his own grandfather blasted by pistol shot, when he was a mere bairn of five, and watched the old man, in the throes of his agonies, give up his life through his bowels. Then it is less remarkable to find these terrors now awakened, in a young man of sixteen.'

‘Though there is truth in what you say, it is the counsel of a sad, reflective heart,' Andrew Wood returned, ‘and such soft indulgences do not assist the king. For now the time is ripe for him to cease to be a bairn, and set aside his night terrors, and wild and frantic fears, that he may take control, and take a firmer grasp upon his crown. You are mistaken, I assure you, if you consider that I do not know
his worth, or that, for all his weaknesses, I do not take his part,' he concluded quietly. ‘No more of that; the whole town holds its breath, and waits for your report upon the windmill. Then what have you to say to us?'

Hew told him the story of the Flemish miller's gift. ‘Maude Benet spoke the truth,' he verified at last, ‘when she reported he was
not himself
. For though she saw it slanted, though a dark perspective glass, she saw into his heart, reflecting back, distorted, the words of Jacob's prayer. For he was Jacob Adams, a Scot, St Andrews born. His circle ended just, and as the windmill turns, it brought him to his close, where he had first begun.'

‘And so,' the coroner summed up, ‘the windmill, all along, was meant for us?'

‘It was,' acknowledged Hew. ‘Nor was there ever ill intent. For those attendant horrors we have witnessed through the town we brought upon ourselves, by force of our own greed.

‘The baxters and the millers, and your brother, Robert Wood, are locked into a chain of close and common bondage that circumscribes the town, where every link is fragile, taut and strained. The balance of their power became so delicately strung, one puff of wind unsettled it. Whoever had the windmill, had power over the land, power over the elements, and power over the town. He could turn the town itself, in the blowing of the wind. Which promise was enough to persuade a man to kill for it.'

‘The question is,' said Andrew Wood, ‘which man?'

‘As I suspect, the baxters. Who else should profit quite so much from power over the mill? Who else would force famine, sullying the grain, forcing up the prices of the bread? Who knew the grain store lock was broken, and that Gavan Lang had planned to catch the fish?'

‘There are no secrets at a mill,' reflected Andrew Wood. ‘And what is known to one is known to all. The baxters hide behind the banner of their gild, and keep their knowledge hidden in a multitude of locks. I cannot hang them all, else we shall have no bread. No matter, as I hope, you will flush them out, and they will start to feel the close
heat of their fires. Nor shall they hope to profit from their sins. The windmill will be put to common good, and held in common interest for the town, and known as Jacob's windmill, the Flemish miller's gift. The millers of the town shall work it each in turn, and no man shall make profit, more than his own share. Though I suppose there is a chance that Jacob's father, Jacob Adams, will appear to press his claim, his kinship to the miller will be hard to prove.'

‘I do not count that likely,' answered Hew. ‘For I can find no trace of Jacob, or James, or of any man called Adams, who is living in the town, who is of an age to have been Jacob's father. I have spoken with the man from the kirk of Holy Trinity, and he thinks it most likely that the family moved away, avoiding the scandal of a bastard birth. His parish records do not stretch so far, and he himself has only been here for the past six years.'

‘You are forward, sir, in making these inquiries,' the coroner observed, ‘before you came to put the case to me.'

‘I wanted to be able to submit a full report,' Hew acknowledged quickly.

‘Indeed. Then may I trust, that you hold nothing back?'

‘You have my word,' said Hew, ‘that you have seen into my heart, as I, I do believe, have seen a glimpse of yours.'

‘Perhaps,' allowed the coroner. ‘Yet no more than a glimpse.' He allowed himself to smile, briefly and elusively. ‘Our paths will cross again. And you will know me better, as I think.'

The news spread quickly through the town that the windmill had been promised for the common good. And so it had appeared to Hew, until a few days later, he bumped into Bartie Groat. The old professor greeted him, expressing his delight, effusively and fluidly, through his pocket handkerchiefs. ‘Hew! My dearest man! How very glad I am to see you safe restored from Ghent. I hope you will please me, by stepping in at suppertime, for I have long been longing to listen to your tales.'

‘You do not mean tonight? The pity is . . .' Hew floundered, while
he thought up an excuse, but Bartie Groat outwitted him. ‘I know you do not care to take your dinners in the hall, and so I have arranged for something in my rooms, and you can have no notion, Hew, how much I have looked forward to it, for I was born in Flanders, as you know, and I have not been back there since I was a boy. According to Giles Locke, you met the Prince of Orange. The
Prince of Orange
, no less! Then will you not indulge an old man's whim?'

‘Aye, very well,' sighed Hew.

‘Splendid! Come at nine, when the students are in bed, and we shall have canary sack, and we shall have a pudding, and a trotter pie,' Bartie Groat enthused.

Bartie's quarters were above the dinner hall, and smelled of old mens' undershirts, cough syrups and kale. The pie was cold and heavy, and the wine was thin. The evening drew on, inch by inch, in mournful reminiscences, as Bartie wondered whether such and such a street or house or tree stood still there in its place, each hint of deviation moving him to tears. When Hew could stand no more, he said, ‘The hour is late. I cannot keep you longer from your bed.'