The musty smell was stronger here, with a foxy overtone which made her gag, and a definite recollection of a mews she had once been shown. She was unsurprised when Bel pulled open one of the drawers beneath the bench to see it crammed with rustling linen bags, each neatly labelled in the same beautiful hand as in the account book. Arbella’s herb collection also rivalled Mère Isabelle’s.
‘Did you gather all these?’ she asked, bending to look at the labels, but Bel gave her a pitying look, closed the drawer by bumping it with her hip and reached to open another. Over their heads feathers ruffled, and both girls looked up; following Bel’s gaze Alys found she was being watched by round pale eyes, peering from the shadows above the window. ‘An owl?’ she exclaimed. ‘Can it be an owl, here in the house?’
Bel nodded, glowered at the creature, and with some ingenuity extracted something large and rectangular from the drawer she had touched, using her skirt to shield it from — yes, certainly from the owl’s gaze.
‘They are everywhere,’ Alys said. Bel nodded again, clutching her prize under the folds of blue wool, and jerked her head to summon Alys into the outer room. Kicking the door shut behind them, she set the great account book carefully on a little prayer-desk by the head of the bed, then smoothed down her skirt and mimed someone holding a bird, stroking its feathers, simpering with affection. ‘It’s your grandam’s pet?’ Alys guessed. Bel nodded, but turned to the book. Opening the leather-bound boards, she leafed through the pages until she found the most recent entries, and stood back in triumph.
The accounts were very clear, and gradually drew Alys’s thoughts away from the presence of the owl. The movement of coin, in and out of the coaltown, was meticulously itemized. The coal was tracked with equal precision. The numbers added up, marching down the pages, each line a distillation of some man’s labour in the dirty, sweaty dark of the mine. I am fanciful, Alys told herself, turning back leaf by clearly inscribed leaf. It must be the effect of kneeling before the book like this, as if it was a prayer-book. The dog sat tall beside her, his chin on her arm, almost as if he too was reading the elegant writing.
Bel touched her hand to get her attention, and when she looked up sketched Arbella’s wired headdress and upright stance, then folded her hands as if in prayer.
‘She prays over the book?’ Alys guessed. Then she thought, how silly, it is such an illogical fancy, but Bel nodded, unsmiling. How did she guess what was in my head? she wondered.
Two years back, in ’91, a flurry of extra work was recorded. A winding-shaft and its shelter, yhe new over wyndhous, was carefully accounted for, along with the wood to build the gear and a heavy hemp rope. Joanna’s dowry and inheritance being put to the good, thought Alys, and yet they don’t seem to use the shaft. There was no mention of Matt’s death. She turned further back, and became aware that the figures were changing. Comparing the Lady Day accounting year by year, when the returns on the winter’s coal would have come in, she could see that the profits were not so good in recent entries as the earlier ones. She detected no abrupt change when Murray came to the coaltown, nor when he was promoted to grieve, though both these events were noted.
She turned more pages. The death of the younger Adam Crombie, Beatrice’s husband, was signalled only by a record of the extra work needed in 1484 to clear the roof-fall. Studying the numbers which lay on the page before and after it, she came to the reluctant conclusion that business improved after his death, and then slowly deteriorated to the present figures.
Why should that be so? she wondered. Was it a question of the control of the business, or of who had a say in where the money went? What difference had it made when the younger Adam died? She heard Beatrice’s voice in her head — My man never liked to have much to do wi’ the pit, Our Lady succour him. Presumably matters went better when Arbella had sole control.
She turned back through the book, considering the implications of this. But even if her suspicions were correct, there was no need to poison Thomas Murray. Unless he had uncovered the same facts that she had recognized. Murray had questioned Isa in the kirk in Carluke, she recalled. But Sir Simon at Dalserf had no knowledge of him, had presumably never met him.
‘Does anyone else look at these accounts?’ she asked Bel, who was still watching her intently. The other girl shook her head, and pointed firmly in the direction of the drawer where the book had been stowed. ‘Not Thomas, not anyone else?’ Another shake of the head. She turned a leaf, and registered the same change in the figures in March of 1477. The year Arbella’s own husband, the older Adam, had died. And what has Gil discovered? she wondered. How did the man die, sixteen miles from here, too far to bring the body home? I would bring Gil back if he died in — in — in Paris, she thought.
Bel was becoming restless. She put a hand out as if to redirect Alys’s attention to the most recent accounts, but did not touch the book.
‘I will not be long,’ Alys assured her. ‘I have seen nearly enough.’ She turned more pages back with care, one and then several together, and there it was, the information she was sure she would find, laid out on the page in complex looping letters. ‘Bel,’ she said slowly, ‘do you know whose hand this is? There’s half a year in a different writing.’
Bel shrugged, and pointed to the date: mcccclxx. Alys nodded.
‘1470. Before you were born,’ she agreed. ‘Or I. No reason you should know. I wonder where your grandam was, that she couldn’t keep the accounts herself.’ She looked closer at the slanting columns crawling down the page. ‘It was someone who could scarcely add up, whoever it was.’
Bel peered over her arm at the loops of writing, and put out a pointing finger at the same moment as Alys recognized that the curling scroll near the foot of the page was in fact a name. Under it a double line had been ruled, with a chilling finality.
‘Gulielmus,’ she made out. ‘That is William.’ Bel gave her a withering look. ‘And the surname is — is — Fleming. William Fleming. Was that David Fleming’s father, I wonder? I know he worked here.’
Bel shrugged, then turned her head sharply as voices sounded in the hall, and footsteps approached rapidly. Socrates got to his feet, head down, staring.
‘Alys? There’s a laddie out here asking for you.’ Phemie halted in the doorway. ‘Says he’s got a word from your man.’
‘From Gil?’ Alys jumped up and came round the end of the bed. ‘Is he safe? Who — is it Patey?’ Behind her Bel was closing up the book and lifting it off the prayer-desk, and a faint annoyance crossed her mind — I wanted more time at that — but word from Gil took precedence.
It was indeed Patey out in the dim hall, hung over and disgruntled at being sent on again from Belstane, ducking in a graceless bow and pushing Gil’s own set of tablets at her. The dog’s nose twitched as he identified the familiar scent.
‘Oh, he’s taken no harm,’ Patey agreed, ‘other than by sleeping snug in the kirk loft in Walston, while I lay wi’ the rats in a alehouse where I wouldny keep pigs, however good her ale might be. So he would have me ride on home and then they sent me up here to seek you, so you might as well look at what he’s sent and I hope it was worth it, mistress.’
Alys was already moving to the open door, drawing the tablets from their soft leather pouch, turning the thin wooden leaves to find the message intended for her. Here it was, in French, in his clear, neat letter-hand.
My dearest, she read, and her stomach swooped at the words, the man we sought died on the twentieth of March in the year we knew of. He ate dinner with others, and drank alone from a flask he had with him. Later he fell from his horse in a swoon and struck his head, and died without speaking again.