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it is not at all a certainty.’
    ‘I’m not happy,’ Gil admitted, ‘but there is too little to go on. Better to let him take the fellow up, I suppose, while I ask questions further afield.’
    In the hall-chamber the apothecaries were packing up their equipment, a set of wicked little knives, the basin in which the cataplasm had been mixed, the packets of strong-smelling herbs which went neatly back into the leather case. Robert Renfrew, holding a bowl of blood, stood aside for the Serjeant to enter and his father looked up from his herbs and said:
    ‘Aye, Serjeant. It’s murder right enough. Have you arrested the fellow?’
    ‘In good time,’ returned Serjeant Anderson, sailing towards the bed. ‘Poor Danny. A good lad, so I believe.’ He removed his hat briefly, and replaced it, then nodded at the mummers still seated in a row where Gil had left them, four of them numb and silent, the other young champion now sobbing into his hands. ‘Aye, fellows,’ he went on. ‘A bad business, a bad business. It just goes to show what following your heart can do to a young man.’
    Maister Renfrew closed down his case and fastened the strap. Its lid was ornamented with the same sign as hung over his door, the sun rising out of a mortar.
    ‘He’s brought the craft into disrepute,’ he said grimly, ‘and I’ll see him hang for it.’
    Gil turned away from the doorway and moved across the hall, towards the seated prisoner, but before he had taken two steps there was a hammering at the house door, an urgent voice shouting, ‘Let me in! Let me in! Is Nanty there?’
    The two journeymen guarding the prisoner looked at one another blankly; Morison emerged from the hall-chamber, Andy Paterson the steward could be heard clumping up the kitchen stairs, but Gil himself was nearest. When he opened the door the woman on the other side of it almost fell in out of the twilight, still saying, ‘Is Nanty here? Let me see him! What’s ado?’
    ‘Christian!’ exclaimed the prisoner.
    She straightened up, looking round for him, and hurried to his side. ‘Our Lady save us all, Nanty, what’s amiss here? They tellt me – they tellt me – it’s never true, is it? A man dead, and by your hand?’
    Bothwell looked up at her, his face working.
    ‘Danny’s dead,’ he said. ‘It wasny by my hand, Christian, I swear it, but he’s dead none the less.’
    She stood over him, some of her fears allayed, and set a hand on his shoulder. She was a stocky woman, older than her brother, dressed in a decent gown of woad-blue worsted, the ends of her linen kerchief knotted behind her head, her apron stained with the different colours of an apothecary’s stock-in-trade. She had come out without a plaid.
    ‘You don’t need to swear it for me, my laddie,’ she said, with fond untruth. ‘I’d never ha believed it, whoever tellt me it. But what’s ado then? Why are you bound like this?’ She turned, looking round the chamber, and her eye fastened on Gil. ‘Is it you that’s in charge, sir? Why is my brother being held?’
    ‘There’s a man deid, Christian,’ said Wat Forrest’s quiet wife. Barbara Hislop, that was it, Gil thought.
    ‘He pysont Danny Gibson,’ said Maister Wilkie bluntly, ‘no matter what he swears on, for we all saw it happen.’
    ‘But how?’ she said, staring at him. ‘You all saw? How would that happen, in front of a room full of people, and none of them raise a hand to stop it?’
    ‘All sudden, it was,’ said Mistress Hamilton. ‘We’d none of us a suspicion, till he fell down in a fit.’
    ‘It must ha been something in the flask, Chrissie,’ said Bothwell, swallowing hard, ‘but whatever it was I never put it there.’
    ‘Aye, and what flask?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got your flask here.’ She put a hand under her apron and drew out a small pewter flask, which she shook. ‘You left it below the counter, I’d just found it when Girzie Murray from the Fishergate cam in by the booth and said you