The Rough Collier

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When the peat-cutters came to report the dead man, Gil Cunningham was up in the roof-space of his mother’s house, teaching his new young wife swordplay.

He and Alys had ridden out from Glasgow to Belstane earlier in the week, planning to stay for a few days so that Lady Cunningham could get to know her daughter-in-law better, and relishing their escape from his duties about the Consistory court and hers in her father’s house. In fulfilment of a promise he had made eight months ago, Gil had persuaded Alys into the attics at the first opportunity, where they had flung wide the shutters to let the light in along with the wide view of Carluke town and the hills of south Lanarkshire beyond it, and cleared an area of the dusty floorboards by shifting the kists and lumber of several generations of Gil’s Muirhead forebears. They had progressed, in three days, to practising with an old straw target and a pair of wooden swords out of one of the kists.

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