Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [292]
She still climbed the ridge regularly to her own house, which was officially outside the burgh, but not far from the Hamilton mansion in the Cowgate. She had told Robin what she was doing. As she expected, his first instinct was to forbid her; his second, one of well-concealed bitterness that he could not do this in her place. His third, of course, was to agree. If she hadn’t told him, he would always have wondered whether she had been afraid to put him to the test. Robin of Berecrofts was a grown man with a disability, wonderfully managed, and there were few things not within his tolerance now. His friends knew what they were. Paradoxically, that fact in itself was the one that wounded him most.
She liked the Cowgate. It used to be full of rubbish and dung, but as the city spilled outside its walls, tumbling down from the ridge to the long ravine on this, its south side, the richer families and wealthier churchmen began to build on both sides of the stream, and rakers came morning and night to clear the droppings of the town cattle, on their way up the slopes to the Burgh Muir, leaving a clear way for the through-burn that cleansed it. The slopes themselves were being built on as well. Apart from the vast sprawling complex of the Blackfriars, houses were beginning to spring up in the wynd of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Field, and the ways that led to the south and the west. The Clerk Register’s house was on the rising ground at that end of the Cowgate, close to that of James Liddell, where Julius obediently spent so much of his time.
All in all, it was a good place to collect information. You never knew who you would meet, from Nowie Sinclair to the Abbot of Dunkeld, who had the richest single house in the street; or from the Master of Soutra to a Cant or a Bonkle or a Cochrane. Then there were the household attendants like herself, to every degree, from the kitchen maids to the stewards and chamberlains who managed their masters’ affairs, including their personal buying. By now Kathi knew, as they did, the best place to go for a pendant, or a piece of red leather, or a casket, or a new supply of fine shoes. As one familiar with Flanders, she was allowed by the lady Mary to place direct orders abroad. Sometimes, the Princess and her sister would prefer to interview the suppliers themselves, and they would be brought to the house—trim, well-doing men and women, not at all shy—to display what they had, and explain it. It was something the King especially enjoyed. His officials might clinch the transaction, but James liked to preside in his closet, animatedly discussing the merits of this chain or those bolts of rare cloth with one of his familiar suppliers, and perhaps treating the man—or goodwife—to some ale, and a suitable gift when a feast day came round. He enjoyed a bit of genuine argument, but he always drove a hard bargain, of course, in the end.
Today, she was going to the Tolbooth, with a commission which she had been saving for a day when key people, such as Andro Wodman, ought to be there. He had lost his brother John recently; snatched away on the verge of a bishopric, and was only now returning to the consular duties he shared with her uncle. He was also returning to the orbit of Julius’s crusade to legitimise Nicholas. As a former Archer and employee of Jordan de St Pol, Andro Wodman must be at the top of Julius’s rota by now.
The quickest way to the crown of the ridge was to climb through the burial ground of St Giles, in summer as crowded with notaries and their clients as with graves. In winter, only the custom-built shelters were occupied, but the barking of dogs came from the homes of the Provost and curate of the church, and the drone of children’s voices from the school. She passed Tom Swift’s big house, which her uncle