Read Online The King's Corrodian by Pat McIntosh - Free Book Online

lifting him now.’
    ‘Ah.’ White crossed himself too, bent his head and muttered a prayer. Everyone said
Amen
, and he closed his book on the crow’s feather again, and said to Alys, ‘I should be present, if you’ll forgive me. He was one o my pupils.’
    ‘I’ll stay here,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll meddle wi nothing.’
    Jennet, who would have clearly preferred to go and watch the excitement, cracked open the shutter of the window next the door, and peered out as the two friars left.
    ‘They’re a’ running across the yard,’ she reported, ‘going out-by. Is that where the bit was that burned down?’
    ‘Likely.’ Alys crossed herself, murmuring a prayer for the young man whose life had ended in flames and terror, drew a deep breath and addressed herself to Albertus again. She had just caught sight of something useful – ah, there it was. Indeed, yes.
De putrefactione
, was the heading: Of Putrefaction.
Mors & vita ab igne fiunt
… Death and life come from fire. Extrinsic fire, approaching a body – the similar element which exists in the body … As she had found with other alchemical writings, the passage did not really explain what she wanted to understand, but it provided a new way to think about it. She groped for her tablets, drew the little stylus from the case and began to copy what she read, speculation whirling in her mind.
    ‘They’re a’ coming back the way,’ Jennet reported, an unknown length of time later. ‘Oh, Our Lady save us, they’re bringing the corp. You can see it, mem, it’s covered ower wi a cloth but you can see where it’s a’ curled up. Where will they take him, I wonder? They’ll no can wash him, his skin would all peel off wi the water like peeling an orange.’
    ‘You ken a great deal about it,’ Alys said, distracted. Processional singing floated through the open shutter, deep-voiced and sincere, one of the penitential psalms. The singing was not as good as at Glasgow, where they had the resource of the College to draw on for voices, but the grief was unmistakable.
    ‘My sister Bess helped the layers-out, after that row o houses got burned down in Ru’glen last year. She tellt me all about it. Gied her quite a turn, it did, when the skin cam off the first one she took a cloth to.’ Jennet craned to follow the procession. ‘Aye, they’re taking him direct to the kirk. He can lie there till they coffin him, I’ve no doubt. Be an orra-shaped coffin, so it will,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘They never soften, see, if they’re burned.’
    The community vanished into the church. It was probably Sext by now, Alys considered; Gil would be at a loose end if they had taken the body with them and he had nobody to question. She half hoped he might come and find her, but he did not appear, and she applied herself to copying Albert’s solid Latin prose.
    She had just finished when the librarian returned, taking up his post at the writing-desk with a silent, resentful glare. Brother Henry followed him, and then several young men, very subdued, who all drew copies of the same text from the shelf by the door and looked about them for places, except one who drew out his eating-knife and began to clean the ash from under his nails. Brother Alexander, seeing this, drew a sharp breath and hurried across to him.
    ‘Put that away! We’ll ha no knives in here! There’s no need o sharp knives in a library, it’s no the place for it,’ he ordered, his voice trembling with outrage. The young man looked at him, then down at his knife.
    ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said in Latin, and put the blade away. ‘I forgot.’
    ‘And
you
’ll need to go now,’ said the librarian, turning triumphantly to Alys. ‘There’s no room. The desks are all wanted.’
    ‘Very well, sir,’ she said, and curtsied again. ‘I hope I may come back tomorrow?’
    ‘We’ll see about that,’ he retorted, came round the desk and almost snatched the volume she had been working from.