Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  I slid the long thin dagger in. Wincing, I pulled on shirt, then the dark-stained leather jerkin Jed had found me. It was thick, tanned hard as wood, yet moved with me easily enough. I had asked whose it had been; got a dark look for answer.

  In the yard, I doused my head from the bucket, washed out sweat and dust. I pulled fingers through wet hair grown long, then tied it at the back. Young Watt watched me without expression from the back door.

  I leaned over the well and looked in. There was no sign of what I carried under my shirt. When I straightened up, Watt had gone. Still, I had no doubt eyes were watching as I went to the stable for Handsome Jenny, the dandy cob mare the Flemings had loaned me. I saddled her up, took in the stirrups a notch then led her through the gates in the barnkin wall.

  Outside the walls, the world was big and fair and mine. What I had seen reflected in the well was no city scholar. I swung up on the cob, turned her head for Kirtlebridge and a woman I kenned there.

  The Fortune Rigg

  This morning as I trimmed my beard before the hazy steel mirror, I was musing on Jamie Fifth, idly wondering if my grandfather ever saw him taking the air round Holyrude, or stepped into the gutter some summer morning to let him and his courtiers pass as they hurried showily towards their graves. Was the King clean-shaven, lean or fat? Did he smile with delight at his youth and importance, or scowl anxiously, wondering whom he could trust and whom never to let stand behind him?

  I must ask my mother, I thought, if her father ever spoke of seeing Jamie Fifth. It would be interesting to know. And then I thought, My mother is near sixty years dead. Her body is bone and slime in Blackfriars kirkyard, and my razor hand stilled before the mirror. Truly I am an orphan in this world. Every one I care for is long gone. Even the man who left me this stub for a right hand lies within his rotting shroud.

  My good hand resumes its purpose. Outside my window the freed hawk hunts high over the dene, brings home its prey to none but itself.

  The wind keened through beech and birch, stripping weary leaves away. Along the Kirtle they piled at my mare’s feet, black-spotted, scarlet and sere. The same wind, hastening change and death, blew through me as I rode across Kirkconnel Lea and crossed the burn. The hairst was gathered, such as it was. The beasts were being brought in from the high pastures. The reiving season would come soon enough.

  I stayed well west of Blackett House and the Bell lands. Handsome Jenny and I threaded through woods by half-remembered tracks, came into the open at Laverockstane. I had to ask the way of a herdsman, who looked at me queerly, then directed me by the Roman camp to Allerbeck farm. And from there I took the track over Cauldwell Knowe, clinging to my bonnet in the gale. It was the long way round to my destination, but I was in no hurry, with much to ponder.

  Above all, I thought on Adam’s fixed belief that someone had been trying to have him killed. It was clear his trysting was not as secret as he’d believed, and Rob Bell had not tried to catch him out in order to shake his hand. Yet Bell struck me as impulsive and emotional, not given to indirect means and subtle planning. He was one for the shot to the head, the knife in the guts, delivered by himself.

  After recent years of terrible weather and a century of autumnal reiving, such was the poverty and desperation and wildness of the Borders, bad things could happen to a well-dressed man, aimed at his purse. And were the Flemings not still at feud with more families than they could account?

  Could be that Adam was merely ill-chancy. Could be that he spent too much time in the peel tower, sulking and ponder-ing his new father, sleepless from thinking on Helen Irvine. And yet.

  “Jed stays hard by me,” he’d complained. “I canna take a piss but he is there holding my cock. That worries me.”

  It worried me too, for Jed was neither fanciful nor a grasper of pizzels. And the kitchens of the Fortune Rigg were clean. I knew that, for I had seen them often enough at the end of day, ever since the mistress of that inn first led me by the hand up to her private quarters.

  I came down to Kirtlebridge, forded the burn, then dismounted round the back of the Fortune Rigg. The stable boy stared, then he kenned me from before, and with but a hint of smirk put her away in the furthest stall.

  I crossed the yard and went in the back way, through the scullery and the tap room and the milk parlour where the girl slapped butter, her dark head averted.

  I opened the second door on the left. Elenora Jarvis looked up from her accounts and smiled. She had candid, wide-open eyes, and showed her inner heart to none.

  “Four days in Annandale, Harry, and not called on your old flame.” She rose and looked at me more keenly, put her hand lightly to my battered cheek. I could not but flinch at the touch. “Dearie me, these loons at the Ecclefechan Inn are a rough crowd.”

  “They were but a dozen,” I said. “Easily seen off.”

  She laughed then kissed me quick and light. “I dinna doubt it,” she said, and squeezed my arm. She stood back and she was not smiling now. “Unarmed still, I see. That may be for best. I think young Fleming sent for you?”

  “He did that.”

  “How long will you be in Annandale?”

  “Till he has no need of me. I have been given leave from Embra.”

  She sat herself on the edge of the table, straightened the feathers of the quill with careful fingers.

  “They say he is become a sot, and isna right in the head.”

  I hesitated, but there was no one else to trust.

  “That is for show.”

  She nodded, smoothed again the feathers from stem to tip. I have seen men so stroke the haft of a dagger, in wonder at the potency they hold.

  “For why?” she enquired.

  I took a long breath such as made my ribs ache again, then decided.

  “He is in dangerous love, and he thinks some mean to kill him.”

  “Love is always wanchancy,” she replied. “And in the Borderlands, men live by killing.”

  “Not usually their own family,” I said. “Besides, it is Fair Helen.”

  She wiped clean the sharp tip, laid down the quill. She closed the cap of the well, a small click in that silent room.

  “Wait up the stair till I’m done,” she said. “I will have the lad bring food and drink.”

  Elenora Jarvis was a canny woman, and the Fortune Rigg inn was of good repute. When cott and peel alike could any day or night be reived, an inn was seldom harmed. Even Henry Tudor’s army had merely commandeered it and its unfortunate serving women for a couple of nights, then moved on to sack the rest of Scotland. Jamie Fifth barracked men here while they reived the reivers’ lands, yet the inn had kept its roof. Men will aye need somewhere to eat, carouse, rest and change horses.

  “Gin I be careful with my friends and make foes of nane,” she would say as she barred the doors last thing, “this house will stand long whiles.” She would bank down the fire herself, trusting none other to do it. I liked to sit at the bench and watch as she would send the stable boy off with his bread and cheese, close the shutters, cork the flagons, lick her fingers, then pinch out candle and creusie lamps. Unhurried, competent, at ease.

  I try not to think how the curve of her hip, the flight of her busy brown hands as she talked, her warm easy ways, so rhymed with my mother in her younger day.

  That summer when I was but a lad of seventeen, down visiting my mother’s people and my new student friend, she had turned on the stair, smiled and reached back to take my shaking hand. She led me as one might a lover or a son, though in truth I was neither. She bade me sit within, then took off her cowslip-yellow bonnet, hung it with care upon the newel post and closed the outer door.

  Then in her chamber, after brandy and conversation about my doings and hers, the talk of Embra and the clack of Annandale, her easy laughter and my more nervous giggles, on the wide padded sill she showed what she wanted and needed of me. And though we both guessed my nature, I was happy to be there with her and oblige.

  I sat now on that sa
me padded window seat, eating bread, cheese and cold sweet mutton. The boy had brought wine, but I drank only water, wanting to keep my head clear. The long dagger lay uncomfortably under my shift. The report for my patron was folded small within my jerkin.

  I sat and stared out into the yard. How many others had pleased Mistress Jarvis on this same seat? Few, I suspected, for consorting was dangerous, the pox widespread, and she was canny. I was educated and had travelled enough to be interesting to her, but was not of importance enough to be a threat.

  Elenora Jarvis had been blessed with good health and good looks. Of all the folk both high and low that I had met, she seemed the least constrained. She was answerable to none. Her mother and father had died in the plague shortly after she married, and the inn passed to her man. Best fortune of all, I sometimes thought as she loosed her hair, hung her yellow coif on the newel post, then reached for me, lay in her husband.

  Married women owned nothing, were always constrained and answerable, however amenable their husbands. Affairs with a wife, even rumours of amours, were perilous. Avenging husbands, brothers, fathers, even children, poured out of every closet, duty-bound to kill the lover as he climbed out the window, then the wife could look forward to lifelong nunnery.

  The only enviable woman, free to conduct her own affairs, of the heart and business, was the widow. And so, though she always avowed he was a decent man, when Alistair Jarvis, new owner and licensee of the Fortune Rigg, leaned too far from an upper window he was cleaning and fell to break his neck on the cobble below, he became the perfect husband.

  “Is it not time you married again?” I asked when I thought us well enough acquaint.

  “And lose this?” She had gestured round the little room, indicating the whole inn, her life.

  “Do you not wish to have a life companion you can trust?” I persisted. We were easy now, the flurry done, ready to chat. Soon she would have me move and sleep downstairs, as I always did. “To fall asleep with another, wake and find him still there?”

  She propped herself on an elbow, looked at me steadily in the candlelight. She put her hand to my bare chest, her fingers drummed lightly where my heart lay quiet.

  “Do not you?” she said gently.

  We said no more on the matter.

  Canny investment had brought her a share in a claret-import house in Leith, and with that part-ownership of a boat delighting in the name of Sonsie Quine. She did her own accounting, had an Embra lawyer, and made sure it was common knowledge her money was kept in the city. Though I thought her old enough to be my aunt, she was not yet thirty. She had a merry nature, could swear like a spey-wife when crossed, and flirt with the best of them.

  I miss that woman still. On nights like this I fain would talk at length with Elenora Jarvis, please her in that little snug, then go downstairs with my candle to the box-bed we cried “the dog-basket,” and there sleep sound as the small rain fell outside, feeling myself at last free of yearning, understood.

  I ate and drank slowly, watching cloud-shadows chase over pasture, woodland, scrub and high bare tops. After the Fleming household, with himself mooning in the peel tower, nursing his love and his suspicions alike, and Dand being jovial, and Janet Elliot suffering and smiling, and Jed beating me with the flat of his sword, this was an easy place to be.

  Yet there was the matter of ill food from a clean kitchen.

  I looked out upon the courtyard. Folk of the village came in, came out. A cart, near empty with brushwood, pulled by a knackered horse, led by a limping man with a nose like the landlady’s florid quill, came by and tottered on up the valley. A carriage pulled by an ill-matched pair lurched down the rutted track toward Annan and the Solway shore. Two barefoot children shepherded five scraggy yowes from one poor pasture to another. The wean laughed as the boy threw a clod at her and missed, then they both forgot the yowes in a game of mud-throwing.

  That was as exciting as it got in Kirtlebridge. I closed my eyes.

  The clatter of hooves in the courtyard woke me. Two tall men on fine roans. The stable boy ran out, took the reins. The men were lightly armed but stood looking at the inn as though they possessed it. One said something, the taller man laughed, then turned his head away, and in that turning away I had him, in both our first and second acquaintance.

  Elenora came out into the yard, in a fluster of hands and something like a curtsy as she ushered them towards the door. As they passed from my sight, the clean-shaven man laughed again, and the taller one with thin lips and elegant beard trimmed tight to his jawline put his hand easily on our hostess’s rump, as a man might something he owned.

  I sat back from the window, my heart banging like a cooper’s mallet. That same man had averted his head from me by the Kirtle days earlier, stayed in moon-shadow as I was beaten, sanctioning it.

  I knew now why he had stayed in shadow, for we had met before briefly, in Embra, on the upper stair of a tenement where I had been sent to deliver papers for my Judge. I knew not his name, but he had been calling on William Douglas, Earl of Angus, then new-made Warden of the Western March.

  She came in with my supper as light failed, went to the tinderbox and lit the lamp.

  “Important guests?” I asked.

  She paused, looked down at me, her face in shadow.

  “All my guests are important.”

  I inspected the pie she had put before me. It smelled right enough. The cup of wine likewise. I looked up at her.

  “That cocky fellow with the English beard who made familiar with you?”

  “Jealous?”

  “A little . . . anxious.”

  She near smiled, but would not look at me straight.

  “Master Dowie Fairfax serves the high heid yins.”

  “Such as Earl Angus?”

  She quivered, then was still. “Very possibly.”

  “You like Fairfax?”

  She sat down.

  “I thole him,” she said quietly. “Why do you think my inn has lasted so long?”

  After a pause long enough to silently curse my naivety, I said, “I am sorry for that.”

  “Eat your pie afore it grows cold,” she replied.

  I toyed with my knife, considered the matter. I kenned I was not trustworthy—why think her to be?

  I ate. She watched me, waited till I drank, then rose to her feet.

  “I maun work on a while,” she said. “We will talk later.” I nodded. The pie tasted as it should, as did the wine.

  She stopped at the door.

  “Make yourself comfortable. You will come to no harm here.”

  Then she was gone. I ate and drank slowly, reliving that assault by the Kirtle, the look on Rob Bell’s face as he had me by the throat, my sense of the influence of the man in the shadows. I thought and thought with eyes half shut as if to better see, but why Dowie Fairfax or his master the Earl of Angus would have spared me was a matter much deeper than the Solway.

  Late calls and clatters in the courtyard. Low laughter, then her voice.

  “Guid nicht, and come again!” She did not sound true.

  Peering down from my window, I saw Fairfax lean down from his horse, and her rise up to embrace him. He looked up at my window, so sudden I may not have recoiled in time.

  A clatter of hooves, a man’s voice sang “The Winding Road Does Call” quite fairly, then faded.

  The cook and the serving girl bade goodnight, the stable lad left. A few last clunks as she put the doors to, slid the bars, smoored down the fires for the night. Then her steps slowly up the stair.

  Elenora Jarvis stood at the door and looked at me. I looked back. She sighed, then loosed her yellow bonnet, went out to hang it on the newel post, came back in and barred the door.

  She studied my face as one might an interesting but in-complete poem. Her palm brushed my face en route to the back of my neck. Her deft fingers unpicked the ribbon, then she pulled my hair free so gently that moisture pricked behind my eyes.

  “So,” she said, “
you have come for more than my fine een.”

  I admitted I had come—in addition to a desire to see again her bonnie face and fine eyes—in part about Adam Fleming’s sickness after supping here.

  “Who dare question my kitchen!”

  “Not I. Yet none of his companions got sick.” I hesitated. “Perhaps he was poisoned.”

  Her hand stilled on my arm.

  “Perhaps he drinks too much and nurses delusions.”

  “Perhaps. Was Master Fairfax present that night?”

  “No!” She paused. “But his friend John Rusby was. He came in after the Fleming party.”

  “He was the other here today?”

  She nodded. I could not mind him well. Hefty shoulders, a swollen nose, clean-shaven, nothing else. I had been riveted to his companion.

  “Tell me more of Fairfax.”

  She lifted her head and regarded me.

  “It is said when in London he reports on the Scottish Court and spies on the English one. In Embra he brings news of the aged Queen, and spies on the King’s men. They say Earl Angus also pays him well.”

  “Which side is he loyal to?”

  She shrugged. “He is of use to many, I think.”

  “Whose side are you loyal to?”

  She laughed at that. “Mine own.”

  “Nothing by-ordinar there,” I said. “The question is what alliances we may make along the way.”

  “And I thought you had come here for my fine body,” she murmured.

  “And to enjoy your wit and good sense. And please you in whatever way.”

  “There will be nane of that tonight.” She was right, of course. “Let us talk of other things.”

  “Such as?”

  She reached for the flask, poured herself brandy and settled back into the best chair.

  “A yarn of your flight from Leyden might be entertaining.” It seemed the blether of the Borders spread faster than watchfires. “The Dean of the College?”