Free A Pig of Cold Poison by Pat McIntosh

nodding.
    ‘Something else to think about,’ he said cryptically, with a flick of the eyes towards Alys as she retreated to their bedchamber. ‘A good thing, I think.’
     
    ‘It’s a puzzle,’ said Wat Forrest, looking sourly at the painted flask. ‘It’s pyson right enough, and strong pyson at that as Frankie said, for it slew a couple sparrows and a seamew that fancied the bread and all, much the same way as poor Danny.’
    ‘The same way,’ Gil repeated.
    ‘Well, allowing it was smaller creatures,’ said Adam.
    ‘Aye,’ agreed his brother. ‘It acted much quicker, wi no seizures, they just fell over and twitched a time or two, even the seamew, that’s a lusty bird.’
    ‘ I haue brought a remedy with me that is the grettest poyson that euer ye herd speke of ,’ Gil said thoughtfully.
    ‘You have?’ said Wat quickly. ‘Ha! You’re at your quoting from books again. Find me a book wi this in it, then, for as to what it is, Gil, I’ve no more notion than when I started.’
    ‘Have you decided what it isn’t?’
    ‘Oh, we’ve started a list,’ said Adam.
    They were in the Forrest brothers’ workroom, a powerful-smelling place lined with shelves. A wall of pottery jars, each carefully labelled in the neat script taught at the grammar school, faced an array of mysterious pieces of glassware and metal tubes. There was a scrubbed and much-stained bench in the middle of the room, and a small charcoal burner gave off a welcome heat but was not, Gil suspected, there to warm the occupants although the day outside was bright and cold, the wind biting. At the other side of the chamber, by the window which gave on to the shop, Wat’s quiet wife Barbara Hislop, niece of the late Andrew Slack, was working at something in a lead mortar between trips into the shop itself to deal with a customer. It was amazing how much of the Upper Town needed rice or nutmegs or digestive lozenges this morning.
    ‘There’s a few substances you can set aside immediate,’ Wat said helpfully, ‘that never take the form of a liquid, or else demand heat to liquefy them. Then there’s the colour, which is like watered milk, that lets you leave aside those that are said to be green or yellow or the like, and the smell, for I’d think there’s no smell from the flask, though to tell truth I haveny got that close to it. No strong smell, we’ll say. And we’ll do without proving it by taste, for I’ve a wife and a bairn to think of.’ The wife looked round at this; they exchanged a glance, and she smiled slightly and addressed the mortar again.
    ‘So we’re no much forrard,’ said Adam.
    ‘We know now it’s poison in this flask, the one that was in Bothwell’s scrip,’ said Gil. ‘If we knew what it was, it might tell us who put it there, but there could be other ways to find that.’ He nodded at the bright thing sitting innocently on the workbench. ‘Knowing where the flask itself came from would help.’
    ‘Well, from Araby,’ said Wat.
    ‘We had a dozen, as I tellt you,’ said Adam. ‘There’s seven still on the shelf yonder,’ he pointed at the furthest rack, ‘and we need to go through the book and check, but I think the other five’s accounted for, gone out holding one preparation or another for the gentry trade.’
    ‘That’s assuming they’re still in the houses they went to,’ Gil observed. ‘If you let me have a list, I’ll see to tracking them down.’
    There was a pause, in which the brothers looked at one another.
    ‘I could see to that,’ said Barbara Hislop in her soft voice. ‘I delivered the most of them, after all. I could call by each one and ask if it’s still there.’
    ‘Aye, that’s the way,’ said Wat in relief. Gil, recognizing that confidentiality was a requirement in other professions than his own, nodded with some reluctance.
    ‘Maybe you’d do more than ask, mistress,’ he suggested. ‘If you could try to set eyes on each one, and make a note of it, that would be