The Merchant's Mark

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Gil Cunningham still maintained, after it was over, that ordering up books from the Low Countries had been a good idea.

‘In spite of all that followed?’ asked his sister Kate tartly.

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Maister Augustine Morison, merchant-burgess of Glasgow and Gil’s companion in the venture. ‘Though if I’d been forewarned what it would get us into, Gil, I’d maybe have thought twice that morning before I sent Andy out to look for you.’

‘Indeed, aye,’ said Kate, with a sardonic expression.

Gil grinned at that.

On the morning in question, his friend’s steward Andy Paterson had run him to ground in the sunny courtyard of the sprawling stone house called the White Castle, not five doors up from Morison’s Yard, where the French master mason who owned the house was holding forth on a subject close to his heart.

‘It would take little to build on a fore-stair,’ he pronounced, waving a large hand at the narrow wall of the range that fronted the street. ‘It is but to break a window open a little and bring the stairs down there. The door of that storeroom is not important, we may cut through from the next chamber and get access that way. What do you think, Gilbert?’

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