Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [42]
Such were the reasons why Nicholas in the past had been allowed to enter the spectacular stronghold of William Sinclair, Earl of Caithness, now presided over by his son. And in his turn, it had suited Nicholas in those years to cultivate this valuable acquaintance, because the Sinclairs were close to the Crown. Indeed, Betha’s elder, unfortunate half-sister had been married for nearly three years to the Prince Alexander, Duke of Albany. That is, Sandy had two little half-Sinclair sons, as well as a third occasioned by chance.
Nicholas had not mentioned to Wodman where he was going. He felt that it would only have worried him.
On the other hand, after the oysters, he had no intention of travelling alone. It had not been difficult to persuade a work-party to alter its schedule and accompany him to Roslin, even at dusk. Builders were always visiting the unfinished chapel at Roslin, and he knew some of them anyway, from the times when he had been building himself. It made the journey short, because there was plenty to gossip about, and he had had their saddlebags packed with good ale.
By day, the easiest way to the castle was the low one, through the deep gorge and over the bridge by the waterfall that gave Roslin its name. In wintry darkness, a band of lightly inebriated masons chose the high path which skirted the valley and, passing hamlet and chapel, plunged down to the keep from above. The path did not go all the way: just before the castle doors, a chasm had been cut in the rock, offering monitored access by means of a high, vaulted bridge with a fifty-foot drop. There was also a turreted gatehouse with guards in it.
Boisterously delivering their charge to the bridge, his companions were abashed, not to say offended, to hear their gentleman Nicholas de Fleury, of lovable conversation and good fame, denied entrance—would ye credit it?—to the bloody castle? Some of them actually crowded into the gatehouse and tried to argue, but they were only chapel bairns, with no influence. At the final rebuff, after consultation, they put up a spokesman to invite Nicholas to pass the night in their cabins. Then, further inebriated by his acceptance, they all set off back up the slope, singing, with a man with a lantern in front.
Nicholas remembered the cabins, put up when the new church of St Matthew was started, and since grown into a small village for the wrights, the masons, the plasterers who were slowly perfecting it, at a speed dictated by the input of interest, money and indeed whimsy by the reigning Sinclairs of Roslin. The nave, not yet started, was meant to be ninety feet long, positing a church as big as St Giles. They had been building for thirty years and had got the choir nearly done, all forty feet of it. As they got to the top of the path he said, ‘Lights! Is someone working?’ And someone else said, ‘It’ll be Big Tam and his cutters. Ye mind Tam? He built ye Beltrees?’
He remembered Tam, too. Thomas Cochrane, master mason and architect who, for him, had transformed a crumbling keep into a handsome building, which Nicholas had relinquished, and which had subsequently been bought—deliberately bought—by David Simpson. Since then, it was said, lavish additions had been made, but not by Tam Cochrane. Nicholas wanted to meet Tam Cochrane again, and when he said so, his companions rollicked with him up to the church and deposited him there, with instructions to join them all later. Then they went off downhill, taking his horse. They had all started singing again, but he had stopped. Someone he thought he knew stepped out from the wooden wall that protected the building, and then went back inside without greeting him. When he walked slowly forward, stumbling over the rubble, he found the access door in the wall still ajar. He went in, and stopped in the fretted dark, feeling the building itself staring down at him. Then he moved forward to the deeper dark of the