Free Friend & Foe by Shirley McKay Page B

kind, ‘he will tell the truth. His judgement as physician is not clouded by his faith, or what you think his lack of it. If you cannot trust Giles Locke, then you were ill-advised to take me as your arbiter.’
    Andrew Melville sighed. ‘I did not mean that, Hew. I do not doubt Giles Locke. But I would have you there to see justice done for Patrick, so that he cannot say that he has been ill used. You should know, perhaps, that in my ain poor heart I pray that he is sick, for then I had not lied for him. I pray to God for help that I may judge him fairly, to give me strength and will to seek out the truth, and that I cannot do without you at my side.’
    Hew considered. ‘Yet, if Giles consents to it, might Patrick not refuse?’
    ‘It will not please him,’ Andrew owned, ‘but he will agree. For, if he does not, he will be excommunicat; the kirk will read refusal as his clear confession that he is a lecher, a defaulter and a fraud. It is a cold and lonely place for any man to lie in, left out from his brethren. And, as I ken Patrick, he will not want that. I bid you, put the matter plainly to your good friend Doctor Locke, persuade him he must come, nor give him cause to argue that I do not trust him.’
    ‘Giles is a rational man,’ Hew promised with a smile. ‘And he will not think that, if it is not true.’
    ‘He does not trust me,’ Giles concluded. ‘For that reason he sends you.’
    ‘It is rather,’ Hew assured him, ‘that he does not trust himself.’
    ‘And were it any other person,’ Giles dismissed this out of hand, ‘I might allow a modicum, of simple, honest doubt. But that man is a monolith. His ignorance is cast in stone.’
    They were in the turret tower, Doctor Locke’s consulting room at St Salvator’s college, where Hew had brought the news. He had passed on Melville’s message, which had not been well received.
    ‘He asks only,’ Hew persisted, ‘that you make a true report of what you see and find. And he has assured me he will take your word on it. He wants justice for the kirk, without prejudice to Patrick. You cannot fault him, surely, for a careful mind?’
    ‘Rather I should marvel at it,’ Giles said with a snort. ‘Aye, then, very well. I agree to make the visit, so long as you come too, to explain things to your friend – for he and I, assuredly, will find no common ground – and so long as Adamson is willing to consent to it. Which I do not think is likely; he has not consulted me. What sort of sickness is it?’
    ‘Melville says a fedity. Foeditas is foulness, in the Latin,’ Hew reflected. ‘Corruption of the body, or else of his spirit. Melville knows not which.’
    ‘The two are not so disparate, as some men would believe. ‘A fedity ,’ repeated Giles, cheering up immensely. ‘Then I shall look forward to it. We shall go tomorrow, first thing after breakfast.’
    Giles was a practitioner of peculiar tastes. The turret tower was filled with rows of curiosities, which lined each nook and cranny of its arching shelves; unguents, oils and pickling spices, astrolabes and clocks. In the recess by the window, to make best use of the light, Giles kept his dissecting table, an old flesher’s block. Hew approached it cautiously, since he was never certain quite what he would find: a poppy head or pomegranate, spilling out its seeds, or the matrix of a rabbit, with its kittens still intact. Once, Giles had a human foot, peeled back to the bone, and once the pipes and ventricles that mapped the human heart.
    This time, Hew found nothing but a box of leaves, which Giles had covered over with a sheet of glass. ‘What kind of plant is that?’
    ‘Camomile,’ said Giles. ‘But that is not the point. The leaf is but a mask, the method of disguise. What do you see below?’
    ‘Some sort of bulb or grub?’ Coming from the box, Hew heard a rattling sound. ‘A gerslouper?’ he guessed.
    ‘It is a pupa, of some sort. I wait for it to hatch.’
    ‘What will it hatch