Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [293]
The High Street itself was full of stalls, but she pushed her way past them to the Old Tolbooth, and the expensive booths rented yearly from the burgh Provost, Great Dozen and deacons. Mostly the same traders leased them, but after the Martinmas reshuffle, it always took time to locate everybody. Sometimes they even moved to the town tenement by the kirk style, which had a pair of booths to rent out, and a tavern below. She hoped to find Wodman here.
There were about thirty small chambers, some on the north side of the old public building, and some on the south. Others had been constructed underneath in the vaults, and some were tucked into landings and crammed under the stairs. There were five booths and a desirable cellar fitted into the bellhouse. Sometimes they held back one or two cells for a prison. The privies were old, and luxury goods and documents didn’t drown out the smell, so that even in winter, the fleshers’ offices were almost welcome. She poked her head in most of the doors, and had a clack with Isa Williamson and Hector Meldrum, a sergeant of the mace who lived in the Canongate and rented the small cellar here, not being able to afford the four pounds Isa paid. Another of the dear booths had gone to Drew Bertram, the younger brother of Wattie, which didn’t surprise her, as Wattie was Provost this year. The stairs were crowded, and so were the crames. She had to fight all the way up to the bellhouse loft to see Henry Cant, another of Wattie’s fellow merchants and kinsmen (by marriage) who profitably shipped on the Marie. She did some business with him, while people came in and out, and pigeons banged on the window, knowing he’d feed them and not knowing he’d cook them as well.
The Cants were like that: prosaic. Originally merchants in Ghent, they finally settled in Flanders and thus become Cants rather than Gaunts. No one knew whether they were originally Scottish or not: like the Bonkles and the rest, they lived and married on both sides of the Narrow Sea. As well as the Bertrams, the Cants were closely connected to the Prestons and the Napiers and the Rhinds. Thinking of Efemie, and the Bonkles and the Knollys family and Lord Avandale; looking at Henry, natural son of Thomas Cant, and young John Ramsay, Janet Napier’s slick by-blow, Kathi sought to understand, yet again, why illegitimacy mattered to some people and not to others.
The truth was that if you were lucky, like Julius, and were proclaimed as a bastard from birth, then there was really no problem. The trouble came with people like Nicholas, whose mother had maintained to the death, helplessly, insistently, fruitlessly, that she was innocent. Nicholas did believe in her innocence, as he had believed, against all the acids, the birth-date she had given him. He had been badly hurt by the blackening of her name—and his own—by the St Pols and their fellows. When, for the sake of his family, he had deliberately stopped seeking to vindicate her, it could not have been easy.
To that extent, then, Julius’s campaign was justified. But against that, Nicholas had already faced that difficult choice and had made it. And even if he were wrong, it was now very apparent that proof of Sophie’s innocence simply did not exist. The whole search was only causing more heartache, in making more and more clear how determined the St Pols had been to shed Simon’s wife and her son. A child weaker than Nicholas would never have broken out of his class. And paradoxically, she supposed, it was Julius he had to thank for it.
She hadn’t found Wodman or the other person she was hoping to find, although she glimpsed Dr Andreas, official chaplain