Free The King's Corrodian by Pat McIntosh Page A

nobody had asked this before. Mistress Buttergask stared at Alys for a long moment, then raised her eyes to the window, her fingers moving as if she was telling her beads.
    ‘The length of three
Aves
, maybe,’ she said eventually. ‘Or four. Proper ones, no the ones you say when you’ve left the dinner too near the fire.’
    Not long then, thought Alys. Well under the quarter of an hour, but longer than I had assumed.
    ‘And then what did it do?’
    ‘Why, he rose up, and flew away northward. No fast, mind, I never saw his wings flapping or nothing, he just kind a floated off the way a buzzard does.’
    ‘Could you still see the flames and the red eyes?’
    ‘No, well, I never saw the eyes, would I, if he was flying away. And the wee flames had stopped and all, now you ask me.’ She nodded. ‘Likely they blew out when he flew off.’
    ‘You’ve been blessed,’ said Alys, hoping to offer some comfort. ‘There’s not many of us allowed such a vision. It’s a dreadful warning.’
    ‘That’s what Rattray said,’ the woman admitted. ‘Likewise that he wouldny ha believed me telling it if he hadny seen it himsel, but men are like that, are they no?’
    Alys smiled in agreement, though she had never yet tested Gil in that way.
    ‘Is he in Perth the now?’ she asked.
    ‘No.’ Mistress Buttergask deflated slightly, then recovered and said with faint defiance, ‘He’s out o the town the now, a week or more. At his other house. Wi his wife.’ She crossed herself. ‘She’s doted, poor soul. She’s older than he is, a good few year. She canny be left alone now, the servants has to wash her and that. No a happy thing.’
    Their eyes met. Alys put a hand out and touched the other woman’s wrist.
    ‘That’s hard,’ she said. ‘For everyone. Is he good to you?’
    Mistress Buttergask turned her own hand to grasp Alys’s a moment, then gestured around her.
    ‘He feued this house to me,’ she said simply. ‘It’s my own – I could sell it the morn.’
    ‘That’s generous.’ With a need to change the subject, Alys suggested, ‘Might I see the window where you looked out?’
    The chamber above was low, with a slanting roof where panels had been fixed to the rafters of the house, and furnished with a box bed, a settle and two carved kists, the bed-curtains and window-hangings in red dornick with bright flowers embroidered on it. There was a man’s doublet hanging on a nail near the bed, a pair of well-trodden pantofles half under the bed, a good furred gown thrown on one of the kists. Roileag scurried about the place, her claws rattling on the polished boards, snuffling in corners and under the bed. Alys crossed to the window and peered out, past the crucifix and the woodcut of the Visitation which protected this view.
    The window was set into the eaves, with a low sill, and offered a clear view of the roof opposite, of the red tiles with the blackened portion near the ridge, of the absence of any way into the convent or the house from this side. Alys could see nothing which offered more information, though she pressed her brow against the little panes to look up and down the line of the priory wall.
    Mistress Buttergask was chattering on in her ear, pointing out the direction in which the Devil had flown, the way he had risen up from the house roof, where the moon had been.
    ‘And your friend saw it all as well,’ Alys said, drawing back into the chamber.
    ‘Aye, indeed he did. Well, he was here at my side,’ the woman qualified, ‘just in time to see – to see
him
towering ower the wee house like a great hawk, and then to watch him flee away. I’d to tell him about the flames and the red een and that. But he saw it all, so he did.’ She paused a moment, and sighed. ‘It’s been right strange, these past two weeks, what wi Faither Prior and then my lord Bishop wanting to hear the tale, and a man of law to write down all I said, and then the neighbours wanting to hear it and all.’
    ‘None