Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  “I will keep that in mind,” I said. I touched my nose gently. “I think I shall have that horse returned, before my face is re-arranged again.”

  Much laughter at hapless me. I was offered the use of a biddable Galloway cob for as long as I stayed. No one asked how long that would be, which was as well for I could not have told them.

  Soon enough Fleming got up. He was a powerful man, with the first grey in his thick red beard and tangled hair. I thought him straightforward, uncomplicated. A man who just wanted to be left alone to his country life, his new wife, dogs and horse and adequate domain. Not a man burdened by ambition or imagination.

  He grabbed an apple off the table, munched into it and waited at the doorway for his wife. She took his arm, their shoulders and hips dipped towards each other as they went through the door.

  I was brushing down my hired pony by the stables in the failing light when she found me again. Beyond her I saw the broad back of her husband pass out through the gates, following another, taller, armed figure into the gloom.

  “I am glad you are come, Harry,” she said. “I hope you may help my son. You are such old friends.”

  “Do my best,” I said. Bending still made me catch my breath. Perhaps they had broken something in me.

  “He is . . . troubled,” she said.

  “For sure.”

  I swapped hands with the curry brush. Our eyes met across the mare’s back. Her hand lay hot on mine.

  “Do you think . . .” She hesitated. “He wants something he cannot have? He is in love, perhaps?”

  I managed to look away, following the line of the brush, aware her eyes lay on me.

  “I think he still misses his brother Jack,” I said. “And his father, of course.”

  “So do I,” she said. When I looked up, her eyes were moist but her voice was steady. She was an Elliot, great-niece to Little Bob Elliot, that thrawn and never-yielding man. “Yet the living must live on. Dand brings protection. He is a decent and strong man, and good heidsman.” She giggled low, and that false note disturbed me. “At least I didn’t have to change my name!”

  “There is that,” I said.

  “I pray Adam will come to accept him, and that he drink less deep.” Her hand tightened on my wrist. “Can you speir out what ails him? I worry that . . .” She broke off, frowning. “His father’s moods would swither like our weathervane.”

  “I will learn as much as he will let me,” I said.

  “And you will let me know?”

  “I will let you know,” I said, with little intention of doing so.

  I heard her breathe “Thank you” as I led the old mare into the stable. When I looked round, Janet Elliot Fleming was gone.

  I stalled the mare to be returned to the agent in the morn, then stood a while among the nostril-twitching dimness of horse and peat-stack, sorting through the evening. When I had got it straight in my mind, I secured the stable door and crossed the courtyard, past the family house. Watt saw me on the way, then scurried indoors.

  I went to the peel tower and on the muckle outer door beat quietly our signal from former days.

  Cloot

  A canny cloot, my father called me, affectionately enough. He meant I was a handy rag, a sponge, one who soaked up the words and manners of those around me. Such indeed was my nature. In Embra’s closes, streets, workshops, howffs, courts, kirks and counting houses, from my earliest days I heard Inglis, various Scots, French. Gaelic was murmured among the draymen, Latin poured from pulpit and law courts, the languages of the Low Countries floated up from Port o’ Leith.

  A cast of mind came with each tongue. I took them all on, with little effort, no merit about it, as passe-partout, protection, guise. And if none save Helen Irvine knew what this cloot might be when rinsed through and hung to dry—well, what of that?

  When Adam Fleming and I met at the university, we found we were ages with each other, both born in the month and year Knox died. As a girl my mother had heard that implacable man preach at St. Giles, and the experience had altered her faith. It also infected her young imagination in ways that oozed out among the sores as she lay dying—but I am not ready to write of that.

  From our second term at the Tounis College2 we shared a damp, cavernous room in a piss-rancid tenement between St. Giles and the Black Horse tavern. Our impulses likewise veered between the intoxications of prayer and carnality.

  Though the friendship between a book-intoxicated city child of artisans and a lanky, fizzing, handsome laird’s boy seemed improbable to our fellows, we spent much time together. He was giddy, inventive in ploy and song. At times he was full of tumult and energy as a burn in spate, then for days he would lie silent and dark as a moorland tarn.

  To him I perhaps brought a certain detachment and a steadiness, plus my greater knowledge of the intricacies of the city. He was tall and lean, all fire and air. I was short, compact and nimble, my signs were of plebeian earth and ever-adaptable water.

  Precious to me still is a moonlit night when restlessness sent us not to tavern or bawdy house, and certainly not to our studies. Instead, booted and cloaked, with our foppish fur-trimmed hats, we walked past the dozy watchman at the city gate as the midnight bell sounded, out into the King’s Park spread like dark sea below the mountain.

  The night was chill, with salt and gorse on a sharp wind, and the long grass was dew-sodden as we clambered through the gap between Seat and Crags. With the moon white as bone at our backs, we climbed steadily into our own shadows.

  We went without spoken goal, united by a yearning for elevation. He talked that night of all he dreamed to be. He talked without reserve or self-mockery, for he trusted me and he was still young enough to trust himself, and believed the world would bend to his dreams.

  We lost the path early on, and agreed just to climb ever upwards. That way, we reasoned, we could not get lost. Soon enough we were scrambling on loose scree, clutching for outcrops. In moonlight and through shadow, we pressed on up.

  He would go to Paris to learn about love. He would go to Rome to study poetry. We could rent a house by the Tiber, live by translation and scrivening! We would gather news and gossip, live on a retainer from the King. He said I would make an excellent spy. He outlined his grand plan to render Dante into the Lallans.

  “All of it?” I enquired as I pulled up on loose rock. “Even the interminable religious raving and cursing?”

  He thrashed up the last of the slope and joined me on a ledge. We sat looking over the city.

  “Especially those bits,” he said firmly. “After all, how suited my native tongue is to condemnation and invective!”

  The city was torn into moonlit strips—the dour Castle, the High Kirk where Reform preachers stoked hearts and minds, the dark maw of the Grassmarket and the tenements sliding down the long spine to the palace where Jamie Saxt (but six years our elder) slept uneasily amidst the ghosts of his many murdered regents, his fantasies of sorcerers.

  Leith, the ghostly estuary, the open sea, glittered to our right. Guard fires shuddered out on the May, on Cramond and Inchkeith. On Inchcombe island the abandoned monastery was a black ship with its cargo of souls, going nowhere. In the furthest distance, a watchfire flickered on Fidra. In the nearby Auld Kirk of North Berwick the witch trials were proceeding by that most reliable proof: evidence under torture. Some threescore had already been strangled then burned.

  We sat on the ledge, contemplating our native land as sweat turned to shivering.

  “Or maybe,” he said at last, “I shall go to Constantinople. I shall become an adviser to a sultan, and translate from the Persian.”

  I was silent at that “I.”

  “I am that weary of our petit wars and reiving,” he said. “Their feuds, their precious ‘honour,’ their stealing of cattle and women, and all yon keeping up the family status and lands, scheming, flattering the feckfu’ gentry.”

  “Let your brother Jack do that,” I said.

  He looked at me sharply.<
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  “Jack is a good man,” he said. “Better than I. Still, he is more suited to that life.”

  He would take no criticism of his eldest brother. He had another, who I understood had sickness of the lungs or head and was not expected to live long. He did not talk of him.

  “A quiet life of contemplation for me,” I said. “A garden, a sunlit room with table and chair, a good library and plentiful mid-quality rag paper. Someone to bring me food and look after my needs.”

  He chuckled. “Whatever they are.”

  “Whatever they are,” I agreed.

  “And as for money?”

  “I shall sell my body as needs must.”

  “Then you shall be poor indeed.”

  “And when I grow bored of study and contemplation, I shall seek release in laughter, song and wine.”

  “In that case I will join you in old age,” he said. “We will sit in your garden and I will tell you lies of my adventures, and you will tell me whatever truths you have gathered in your douce years.” He was silent, I felt his mood shift like the night wind. “Doubtless we will talk of the night we climbed the Seat, and talked of what we would be and do, and how it did not happen so.”

  I got to my feet, feeling chill.

  “We have not climbed it yet.”

  Maybe I led to impress him. In the notch of the gully it was hellish dark, my hands felt for holds. I stretched, tested, pulled up. The rock was cold and smooth as a bailiff’s demand. I came to a point where my only possible hold was a thick gorse root, studded with prickles. I felt around and found no other way. Silence from below. Only the wind speiring Whaur ye headin’ faur, my bonnie lad?

  I pulled off my cloak. My legs began to shake as I wrapped it round my fist, reached up as far as I could, gripped the gorse root hard and pulled. My boots slipped on the walls of the crack and I was hanging from that one arm. The root held. My other hand slapped around, hit on a projection. I clung as if it were a nail on the true Cross. Then I pulled up my body weight till, belly over ledge, I kneed and wriggled from that deathly crack.

  Moonlight and silence, only the wind passing over the summit above. I looked down into the blackness and called on my friend.

  “This is not a good way!”

  Silence, then: “Coming up!”

  His pant and scrape, a curse, rattle of small stones. He was heavier than I. That gorse root might not hold. If he falls, it will be my fault.

  His fair hair faint in the dark. Glimmer of his face looking up.

  “I am stuck,” he said. His voice was calm, indifferent. “I think I shall fall.”

  “Paris,” I said. “Constantinople!”

  Silence as he scraped and scrabbled. His breath was coming fast.

  “Can you reach down?”

  I wrapped one arm round the rock, curled my legs behind a boulder, reached down as far as I could. He reached up. His hand wavered, found mine, clasped hard. He looked up at my face. I had no idea if I was siccar.

  “Pull,” I said.

  And I pulled as he pulled, quick and hard. I heaved him upward till his chest came over the top. He flopped down beside me and we lay gasping in the moonlight pool.

  “You are more powerful than you look,” he said.

  “Once a cooper’s son, always a cooper’s son. Strong right arm.”3

  “Everyone needs one,” he murmured. “Thank you, mon cher.”

  We hurried up to the top, and sat on feet-polished rocks, cloaks wrapped about us against the bitter wind. Watchfires, darkness, moonlight on clouds like spilt milk on a parlour floor. The Firth heaved glittering between dark Fife and darker Lothians. The Pentland hills hung black curtains across the stars.

  It was not Byzantium or Rome, but it was ours.

  In our boarding room, his pallet was by the door, mine by the window. I looked out to see who was hollering below. In the dawnlicht I made out a man on horseback in leather jerkin and helmet. Bearded, he had a familiar country look about him. In his hand he held the reins of a second horse, a grey Galloway cob.

  He leaned from the saddle to thump on the street door. “Young Fleeming!” he bawled. “Wake yersel, ya dowzy loon!”

  “Hold your horses,” I called down, which I thought good. I padded across the floor but hesitated by the blankets where my friend lay sleeping. A Hawick man at first light, an extra horse. I shivered, then shook Adam awake.

  It was not good. His brother Jackie had been thrown from his cob at night, into a Northumbrian burn. What he was doing across the Border at night I could well guess. His followers had smuggled him back to Annandale, wet through, with a bleeding head. He was not making sense, and now he had fever.

  “I’m thinking he is no lang for this warld,” the messenger said.

  He stood in our rank scholarly room, a fighting man in full trig, boots and leather jack. Jed Horsburgh was rough, hardened, and though but some ten years older than us, he was a man as we were not. He had been part of the Fleming household at Nether Albie since a laddie, had instructed Adam in the short sword, lance and dagger.

  He was spare of speech and thrawn, in the way of Hawick folk. It was said he had killed some in the Low Countries and more in England, had even ridden with the lawless Grahams. (These matters are exaggerated by ballad singers and gossips—and what is the point of song and story if not to exaggerate our lives to the scale we believe they should be, rather than the small affairs we fear they truly are?) Yet Jed Horsburgh had seen men die at his hand, I did not doubt it. He was also a fine cattle-thief, and fiercely loyal to the Fleming house.

  Adam dressed, thrust his few necessities in his book-satchel. He took his short sword from under the bed, glanced at Jed. Jed nodded sombrely. As he watched Adam gather up hat, dagger, heavy shirt and jerkin, I thought I saw some pity.

  “It is not guid,” he said quietly, then left the room.

  Adam stood before me, bag slung over his shoulder. He looked as though he carried something much heavier.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It was a good time, Harry, was it not?”

  His hand on my arm, then gone.

  When Adam returned a fortnight later, some of his lichtsomeness had gone. The gaiety of spirit, his joking and ploys and singing, his inventiveness and fantoosherie, all that had made him a star among us, had been doused. The quickness of spirit and sympathy and fun we had loved seemed buried with his brother in Kirk Yetholm.

  I tried to take him out to the taverns, but he would not have it. He studied hard to catch up with all he had missed. I would fall asleep in my corner by the light of his flickering bougie as he bent over his books, his lips moving as he read. Increasingly his end of the table bore ledgers of accounts rather than the works of Aristotle and Aquinas. He talked more of Borders affairs. There was a flurry of letters around the time Scott of Buccleuch was abruptly replaced, as Warden and Keeper of the West March, by Lord Maxwell.4

  “But surely Maxwell raised support in Galloway for the Armada?” I protested.

  “He says he’s no longer a Catholic.” He scratched his stubble wearily. “The Maxwells can raise three thousand horsemen in a day. The King cannot ignore that. He could execute their heidsman, but only to be replaced by another. So he puts our noble Seventh Lord in charge of the West March. A canny man, Jamie Saxt.”

  I contemplated my Thucydides. The wars of Greek city-states did not seem so distant. If they appeared more noble, perhaps it was just they had better writers.

  “But your father is pleased?”

  “He is in deep clover, bellowing happily. Our family have long been thirled to Maxwell, though my brother used to urge switching to the Johnstones.” On mentioning his brother, the light in him went out. We sat in silence across the table from each other.

  “Song, sentiment and poetry are but a bag of wind,” he said at last. “Only numbers of horse and kye and hard coin weigh in this world.”

  He went back to frowning over the estate ledgers. I took his point, though we both kenned fine that if one
backed the wrong side, horses and kye and fortune could vanish as quickly as one’s head. And for all their frailty, ballad and story outlive a man—or woman, God knows!

  Weeks later found us again at opposite ends of our shared table, peering into the gloom of a creusie lamp, limited illumination indeed. Scratch of pen, rattle of rain on the window, the sigh as our peat fire burned low. His yellow hair was faintly dank, long fingers gripped deep in it. I was still stumbling through the machinations and brief triumphs of Athenian democracy. I was, in my way, at peace.

  For long moments I came to myself, and saw my life as it was happening in this room. I saw it with heavy, fond heart, as though it were a time already by.

  He threw his quill aside.

  “Numbers!” he cried. “Rents, contracts and accounts! They mean nothing to me.”

  I shrugged. “They govern the world, I am told.”

  He clasped his hands behind his neck, glared at the ceiling as though it were its fault.“Bloody buggering hell,” he muttered. “Pish!”

  I said nothing, though I rather agreed. Ever the swithering aircock, he clasped hands behind his neck and laughed at the regrettable world, his regrettable self.

  “Can the Peloponnese wars wait for an evening?” he enquired.

  “They can wait forever,” I said. “That world no longer exists, save in partial histories.”

  We did not head for the tavern but walked through town in steady rain. We splashed down past Grey Friars into the Cowgate, then Lawnmarket, passing through the minging parts of the city. He said next to nothing as we showed our passes at the gate, and I kept my counsel.

  Without the walls, we turned across the fields by rough tracks, slipping and feeling our way in the mirk. At length we heard water muttering in the rain. We skirted the Nor’ Loch and climbed the slope back onto the spine of the city, past the Watch, through the North Gate. Our boots were heavy with glaur, our cloaks sodden about our shoulders, as we clumped back to our lodgings. It had been a pointless circuit, achieving nothing. I would not have been anywhere else.