Mall looked up through her tears. ‘Who else could it ha been, sir?’
‘Any of the household, I should have thought,’ said Knollys impatiently.
‘None of the other men was marked,’ said Gil. ‘And whoever it was would certainly have blood on him, from what I have heard.’
Mall covered her face and moaned at the words, but James nodded his understanding.
‘And why were you to get the maister’s key?’ asked Blacader. ‘You realize what a sin you are confessing? To conspire to rob your own maister like this?’ Mall nodded, and mumbled something into her hands. ‘What was that? Answer me openly, Mall.’
The girl kept her head down, but lowered her hands enough to be heard: ‘He wanted Billy to seek for the rest of the treasure. He kept on about it, how there should be another bag of it, though Billy kept saying he kenned nothing of any treasure.’
‘How did he ken that?’ asked Angus. ‘This axeman — how did he ken so much?’
I would like to know that too, thought Gil.
‘He never said.’
‘Is there anything else you should tell us, daughter?’ asked the Archbishop.
Mall, slightly reassured by this form of address, raised her head enough to look at him sideways.
‘No, maister,’ she whispered. ‘I dinna think so.’
‘Well,’ said the King. ‘Mall, you have appealed to me for justice for your man, and as it happens, justice has been done.’ She stared at him. ‘The man with the axe is dead, killed in a fight with Maister Cunningham here.’
She turned her head slightly, to glance at Gil, then returned her gaze to her monarch.
‘But there must be justice for you too, Mall,’ James continued. He looked at her as sternly as Blacader had done. ‘And for your maister. You must see that.’
She nodded, and whispered some affirmative. Blacader gestured, and Dunbar, with a resigned expression, came forward to help the girl to her feet. She bobbed a low curtsy to the King, and the rest, and turning to go came finally face-to-face with her master. He looked up at her from where he knelt, with an earnest, pitying smile, and almost automatically she bobbed to him as well. Morison acknowledged the curtsy, and sketched a cross.
‘Guid save you, my lassie,’ he said. ‘Our Lady guard your rest this night.’
She whispered something, and Dunbar led her past him and out of the room.
‘Well, Maister Morison,’ said the King. Gil, aware of the elderly Blacader shifting on his padded stool, found himself thinking, Christ aid us all, he’s indefatigable. ‘Come closer, maister, and tell us about Linlithgow.’
Morison, shuffling forward on his knees, stopped and stared open-mouthed at his monarch.
‘Linlithgow?’ he said blankly. ‘I–I mean, what did you wish to hear about it, sir?’
‘What passed the last time you were there?’
Morison paused, casting his mind back, and glanced at Gil.
‘Well, we — we took my goods off Thomas Tod’s vessel at Blackness,’ he said, ‘and took the cart back to Linlithgow. It was ower late to set out by then, we’d never have made Kilsyth in daylight, so we ran the cart into William Riddoch’s barn, by the arrangement we’ve for three year now, and Billy Walker, Christ assoil him, slept under the cart and the rest of us lay at the Black Bitch by the West Port.’
‘The rest of us?’ questioned Blacader. ‘Who was that?’
‘Me myself, and Andy Paterson my servant, and Jamesie Aitken my journeyman.’
‘And how did you lie that night?’ asked the King.
‘Well enough,’ said Morison wryly. ‘Since I’d no notion what was waiting for me. Oh,’ he said, grasping what was meant. ‘We lay in the one bed, the three of us. I was at the wall, and Jamesie next me, and Andy at the outside, since he’s up and down in the night.’ Several of his older hearers nodded in sympathy at this.
‘May I ask something, sir?’ said Gil. The King gestured in reply. ‘Augie, tell me, when was Billy alone in Linlithgow? Had you lain there the night before?’
‘Aye, we had,’ Morison nodded. ‘He’d plenty time alone in the burgh. I let them be to drink or talk as they liked, I knew they’d not get ower fu or into bad company …’ His voice trailed off and he smiled ruefully. ‘Aye. While I went about to get a word with one or two friends I have in the place.’
‘And did you see him at all while you went about the town?’
‘I caught sight of all three of them now and then.’
‘Was he talking to a big man in a black cloak?’
‘Linlithgow’s full of men in black cloaks,’ said Angus, grinning over the King’s shoulder.
William Knollys inflated himself and stretched his neck like a cockerel about to crow, the light gleaming on his gold satin plumage. ‘Are you implying, my lord, that the Knights of St John are involved in this? That one of our brother knights slips about by night slaying unlawfully?’
‘Not the knights,’ said Gil, almost to himself. James glanced briefly at him.
‘Not me,’ said Angus, still grinning. ‘It was you said it, my lord St Johns, not me. I’m saying Linlithgow’s full of men in black cloaks, no more than that.’
‘I never saw Billy talking to such a one,’ said Morison to Gil. Knollys subsided, glaring at Angus. ‘Maybe Andy or Jamesie saw, you could ask them.’
Gil nodded.
‘This man Billy,’ said the King, ‘that the lassie wants justice for. Why did you keep him? Had he been a good servant?’
‘Not a bad servant, sir, anyways,’ said Morison, considering the matter. ‘He was pert, but they can all be pert. A good enough worker, a good carter, understood the old mare well. Understood barrels and all, with his father being a cooper.’
Out in the High Street it was raining, though the gibbous moon sailed in broken cloud above the Dow Hill. The torchbearers in the escort the King had ordered for them made a great difference, Gil found, striding down the hill behind them with a bewildered Augie Morison at his side. Two other sturdy fellows in helm and breastplate followed, keeping a watchful eye on the shadows.
There had been little more of use said after Augie’s revelation about Billy’s parentage. The Treasurer had shown signs of wishing to interrogate him further about Linlithgow, but the King, yawning ostentatiously, had announced, ‘Well, gentlemen, as you said a while since, it’s ower late. We’ll have this cleared away the now.’ A wave of relief swept round the crowded little room, and he smiled slightly. ‘We’ll be up early for Mass, after all. In the chapel here, my lord?’ Blacader nodded. ‘And after it,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I want a game of caich before we ride. Maister Cunningham, you look like a fit man. Do you play caich?’
‘I do, sir,’ Gil had said, slightly apprehensive. The quarry must feel that way, he thought now, when a twig cracks in the undergrowth.
‘You’ll gie me a game? Good! In the caichpele off the Drygate here — you ken?’
Gil knew it. It belonged to one of the canons, who found the steady supply of pence from the tennis-players and spectators of the town made a valuable income. He had played there a few times, but he and his opponents among the poverty-stricken songmen generally used an improvised court in Vicars’ Alley, with two sloping roofs to be the pents and chalked marks on St Mungo’s north wall, renewed every time it rained, for lunettes. The scorer had to have sharp eyes.
‘Good,’ said James, and rose. Gil and the two elderly statesmen rose too, perforce. ‘I’ll meet you after Mass, say about Terce. And now we’ll have you seen home, maister. Where do you lie the night?’
‘David Cunningham’s house — the Cadzow manse in Rottenrow,’ supplied Blacader.
Gil shook his head. ‘I’m bound for Maister Morison’s house in the High Street,’ he said. ‘My sister is there, and maybe Mistress Mason, keeping an eye on the bairns.’
Morison, still kneeling at his feet, put one hand over his eyes. William Knollys looked round sharply, with the arrested expression of the stag who hears the hounds.
‘What does the lady there?’ he demanded. ‘Surely Maister Morison has servants of his own?’