St Mungo's Robin

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Gil Cunningham worked out later that at the moment when the dead man was found in the almshouse garden, he himself was eating porridge, salted by a furious altercation with his youngest sister.

He had come down in the dark after Prime annoyed with himself for sleeping late, to find her in the hall of their uncle’s house, bright in a fine scarlet gown, the neck and sleeves of her shift embroidered to match it. She had found a taper and was lighting all the stumps of last night’s candles.

‘Tib!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you were staying down the town with Kate.’

‘Not another hour,’ said Lady Isobel, setting the taper to the last wick on a pricket-stand, her vivid little face pettish in the blaze of light.

‘How ever not?’

She shrugged. ‘Kate spews if you so much as mention food, and you’d think nobody else ever went with child, the way Augie Morison behaves around her. And those brats of his, a body couldny stand to live with,’ she added.

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