Authors: Shirley McKay
Time and Tide
Time & Tide
Shirley McKay was born in Tynemouth but now lives with her family in Fife. At the age of fifteen she won the Young Observer playwriting competition, her play being performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. She went on to study English and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews before attending Durham University for postgraduate study in Romantic and seventeenth-century prose. An early treatment for her first novel
Hue & Cry
was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. Her second novel,
Fate & Fortune
was published in 2010.
Time & Tide
is the third Hew Cullan Mystery.
A Hew Cullan Mystery
Shirley McKay
This ebook edition published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
First published in 2011 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
Copyright © Shirley McKay 2011
The moral right of Shirley McKay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-043-2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Chapter 6. A Glass Perspective
Chapter 10. A Miller and his Son
Chapter 15. In the Body of the Kirk
Chapter 20. Soldiers of Fortune
Chapter 21. The Spinsters of Ghent
Chapter 23. The Flemish Miller's Gift
With grateful acknowledgement to James Watson of Culross, the ScotlandâVeere Organisation, Esther van Engelen of the Romantik Auberge de Campveerse Toren (open as an inn for the last 500 years); and especially to Peter Blom, municipal archivist of Veere and Paul Veenhuijzen of Earlshall, for keeping alive the spirit of the old
entente
.
Thanking thame maist hertfullie of their gude ancient lufe . . . Beseking thame that they will continew thair gude will towart us . . . the maist mutual ancient lufing affection quhilkis we haif born aither towartis utheris of auld tymes
.
Campfeir
[to]
the gude tounes of Scotland
, 1578
St Andrews, Scotland
October 1582
Before he learned his letters, Jacob read the wind. He could not recall a time when its patterns made no sense to him, clearer than his catechism, whispered as a child.
â
What is thy only comfort, in life and in death
?
â That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own.
Jacob read the wind, and cursed it when it dropped to lank and irksome stillness. When it turned against him, he was unprepared. It was not as if he had not understood. He knew precisely what this wind required of him, yet he could not rise to it. The waters came at last to blast upon the quietness, and Jacob knew, for certain, he was not his own.
â I am not my own, but belong to my saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
He had no hope of Christ in the bowels of the black ocean. It caught the little bark and tossed it like a winnower, blowing dust and thundering, threshing out the storm.
Joachim had been the last to die. He had died before the storm broke. And Jacob had stitched Joachim into a folded sheet of sailcloth, weighed down with lead shot, before tipping the dead boy into the sea. Jacob's hands were thick and woolly, like a pair of gloves. He had struggled to sew up the seam. It was a blessing that the boy had died before the storm. Jacob saw his mother still, weeping by the river Leie in Ghent. He knew the family well, and had given her his handkerchief. But Joachim's mind had turned, like all the rest.
Jacob had restrained him in the hold, and all through the night had listened to his howls. The pity was it was not Joachim's fault. Jacob had allowed the boy to gorge himself on sweetmeats, leavening his last hours with the captain's bread. He heard him howling still, though Joachim had been dead for several days.
Jacob had acquired the captain's cabin, where he wrote to Beatrix after Joachim died. It took a little time, but he had time enough.
Tell Joachim's mother that
, he wrote, and crossed it out. He knew that Beatrix would make sure that Lotte learned to read, and so he wrote the child a letter of her own, and sealed them both with wax from the captain's candle stub. He found a wooden pepper pot, and placed the scripts inside, together with his book. The letter of its creed he had by heart. He let the candle drip to make it tight around the bung, carving the direction on the surface with his pocketknife, Beatrix van der Straeten, begijnhof sint Elisabeth te Gent. He considered for a moment whether he should set the casket on the open sea, or keep it in the stronghold of the ship, closed in the ocean's grasp. In the end, he kept it there, knowing it was all the same. He placed it in the captain's kist among the listless instruments, and lying on the captain's blanket, Jacob closed his eyes. Better to die quiet, and the ship might let him shelter for a while. He thought of Joachim sleeping on the seabed, where the little fish swam silver through the slack seams of his shroud, making streams of water from his eyes. He thought of Beatrix, fearless, with no breath of hope. He cursed the airless ocean, weeping for the sands. Yet when the wind picked up, he was not prepared for it. He climbed up on the half deck and cried out, choked and raging, not ready yet to yield so easily to death.
Jacob found the wheel, with little hope of turning it. Tobias was dead, and Jacob on his own could not hope to guide the vessel through the storm. Though he read the wind as clearly as a book, he had never been a mariner. He could not take in the spret sail, lower the foresail, bear up the helm or haul the tack aboard, or any of the things he had heard the first mate cry. He no longer felt his
fingers in the wrenching wind. Vast waters bellowed, engulfing the deck, and Jacob was knocked from his feet. He clung to the mizzen mast, sodden and blind. He could neither veer nor steer her, rocking through the storm. She was cradled in a trough, where she drank in sheets of water, lapping up from either side. Jacob, drenched and sobbing, sought to scoop them out. He could not clear the decks as fast as she could fill them; and so at last he climbed, exhausted, to the stern, preferring not to drown inside the body of the ship. Yet he found he could not drop into the blackness of the sea. He turned the wheel again, and prayed his old adversary the wind to be a little kind to him. And for a moment, God â or was it yet the wind? â appeared to hear his prayer; the hull began to roll and the fickle gusts rebounded, taking up the sail. The ship was blasted on the waves and blown about its course, with a sudden list and lurching that washed the water out. Jacob gave thanks; to God, after all. And it was Christ his saviour, as Jacob understood, who lit the castle ramparts shadowed on the rock. Far off in the distance, he was coming in to land.
It took a while before he realised what the shadows meant. He came to shallow waters, in the darkness of the storm. The landing craft had long ago been lowered to the sea. Before the early fishermen set out to cast their lines, Jacob would be washed up on the strand, wrung out in the wreckage of the ship. He belonged to his saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, for he had no spirit left in him to fight. He looked back at the mizzen mast, and felt it sag and spring. The bark began to fracture as she bore down on the rocks. And then he saw his cargo, braced above the hold, and understood at last what he should do. He found her fixed and fast, unflustered by the wind, though high above her flank the topsails flapped and furled. Jacob crept inside to listen for the crack.
And she was still and dark inside, quite dry, and so familiar in her warmth that when he closed his eyes he almost could forget the lurching of the ship, the howling of the wind he had often sought for her. And though she yawned and creaked a little, still
she did not stir. She smelled of grease and timmermen when Jacob closed his eyes, so that when at last it came he almost did not mind.
An Ill WindÂ
The twa extraordinar professouris affirmis . . . they ar not subject to live collegialiter to eat and ly within the college.
Commission of Enquiry, St Andrews University, 1588
Hew Cullan kicked aside the broken slates as he turned briskly through the entrance to St Salvator's, his hat and gown dishevelled in the wind. He crossed the college courtyard and hurried to the hall, setting straight his cap. He was, he was aware, a little late; and yet he knew the hall would wait for him. The scholars rose expectantly to see him take his place. They would have gaped like louns to catch him at the chase, darting through the tennis courts in primrose-stirruped slops. Masters, they well knew, could have no other lives.
And for the regents in their midst, who had the daily care and teaching of these boys, this was true enough, reflected Hew. His own place was a sinecure:
magister extraordinar
in law, in a college that could boast no legal faculty. He played little part in its domestic life or discipline. The appointment of professors in the laws and mathematics had left no impression on the core curriculum, grounded in philosophy and arts. Hew gave lectures to the college once or twice a year. As second master, he was sometimes called on to officiate, in the absence of the principal, anatomist Giles Locke. When, as often happened, they were both engaged, on some more pressing business of the Crown, the third professor, grumbling gently, set aside his sums to step in to the breach.
This third professor, standing at Hew's side, reached across to nudge
him, breaking through his dreams. He plucked a withered fragment from Hew's sleeve. âAcer maius, or, to many, platanus,' he commented. âThe greater maple, commonly, and falsely, called the plane tree or the sycamore.' The mathematician opened out his palm, showing Hew the seed, the winged fruit of the sycamore. âYou are sprouting wings. What as a bairn I chased round dizzy in the wind. We called them
locks and keys
, or
whirlijacks.
'