Candlemas Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the wall. The box chair, disconcertingly, was bound with leather straps. It was not a place where Hew could find comfort, with or without the presence of the surgeon, and he jumped a little at the opening of the door. There he saw not Sam, but Isabel, his wife.
    She was loosely, but modestly, dressed, in a grey kirtle and gown, and a little lace cap, to cover her hair. In the light of the lantern she looked very pale. Her voice, when she spoke, was serious and strained. ‘Roger says that you have come to help. How I wish you could. But my husband will not talk to you. It is hopeless, I fear.’
    â€˜Come,’ he encouraged her, ‘nothing can be hopeless. What has he told you?’
    â€˜That he is responsible for a poor man’s death, and fears that he may hang for it.’
    Could it come to that? Hew believed it could. For surgeons had been hanged for recklessness before, where they endangered life. ‘He telt you he felt himself to blame for it? Did he tell you why?’
    â€˜He will not say, at all. And reason cannot move him to confide.’
    From above them came the cry, tremulous and shrill, of an infant child. Unconsciously, her hand was drawn towards her breast. ‘That is my bairn. I must go.’
    â€˜You have a new-born child?’
    â€˜She is ten days old. I should not have come, to show myself to you. I have not been kirked.’ The taint of her childbirth was fresh still upon her, she meant. She had not been cleansed. She smiled at him. ‘This day is Candlemas, the feast of the purification. I find that sad, and strange. But we do not count it now.’
    It occurred to Hew that Roger had arranged for this. He did not reappear. But doubtless, he had hoped to provoke Hew into pity for the surgeon’s wife. If that was his intention, he had calculated well. For Hew could not dispute that the design had worked.
    He told himself the candlemaker also had a wife, and reset the balance, calling on her next. She had rebounded from the horror of her husband’s death with a strange resilience. ‘I expect,’ she said, ‘that ye have come to see himself.’
    He echoed her, ‘Himself?’
    â€˜My husband, Jock,’ she returned complacently, ‘in the nether hall.’
    â€˜I saw him at the shop.’ And that had been enough. He would not look again.
    â€˜Aye, not like this. Come away and see. It will ease your mind.’ She took him by the hand, as though he were a child, and led him to a room at the back of the house, where the candlemaker lay, flat upon a board, with a strange, seraphic wonder staring from his face. His cheeks were soft and plump, coloured with red lead, and his hair was tinted yellow, neatly trimmed and combed. He was stripped of his clothes, but his nakedness was bound in acres of white cloth, sprinkled with fresh herbs.
    He asked her, ‘Did you wash him yourself?’
    â€˜Why would I not?’ There was fondness in her smile. ‘Would you have me leave him to a stranger?
    â€˜No, by no means. But it must have been hard for you.’
    â€˜Not hard at all. Look at him, now. Handsome is he not? He was a stubborn man, and not, some wid say, an awfy pliant one. But he bent, good as gold, quiet as a lamb. And never did I see a more bonny- looking corpse.’
    Bonny though he was, Hew could not stomach Jock for long, and he edged her back into the other room. There she was boiling something greasy in a pot. It was all, she declared, Sam Sturrock’s fault. ‘He never should have opened up that vein.’
    â€˜Did you advise your husband against it?’
    â€˜Advise?’ She laughed at that. ‘There was no advising, wi’ Jock. He wasna one for advice. And he would not be turned, from where he set his mind. His headaches plagued him cruel, and he got it in his head that the cure was letting blood. I cannot tell you why. But it was the surgeon’s job to free him of the fallacy,