Fair Helen
Page 15
“So she says there is no truth she will soon be engaged to that bam-pot, Bell?”
He had the grace to look shifty.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There are so few messages between us. You are the only messenger we can trust.”
Nothing I could say to that.
“Do you mind my asking, but have you and she already . . . ?”
He looked away then back at me.
“Yes,” he said, then grinned. “Yes, I do mind you asking.”
“Sorry.”
“Sometimes when I see her again, at first she looks ordinary to me—a bonnie lassie, no more. The way she probably appears to you.” Fortunately, he wasn’t looking at me but into his own heart. “And then we talk and touch and listen, and something happens.” Now he looked me full on, his eyes shining. “You ken when a cloud shifts and the sun falls on a stained-glass window in the kirk? Helen lights up from within, from her soul, I swear, and she lights me too. Then nothing else is real to me but her.”
I stood feeling the wind wrastle wi’ the trees around us. “Fair enough,” I said. “Should you both untangle from each other long enough to decide to run away, I will do whatever I can to help.”
Adam smiled, reached out to clasp my upper arm.
“Thank you,” he said. “I never doubted it.”
After all, what else would I do but help them reach their hearts’ desire? Which happened to accord with Buccleuch’s wishes. That was what puzzled me, for I did not see my patron as one of our romantics. I could not grasp what he was about in encouraging this suit. Perhaps it amused him to do down Robert Bell because he was a headstrong, dangerous man, bound to Angus. Yet I doubted it, because whatever Buccleuch was, he was not petty.
Adam glanced up at the thin sun again, adjusted his bonnet in the lopsided manner approved among the more modern-minded.
“Must get on,” he said. “I will inspect the storm damage to the brig and beyond. You must go back and get that wound rightly attended.”
I agreed to go back to the house. Just before he set off downstream, I took him by the sleeve.
“Matter of interest, Adam,” I said. “How do you two arrange your trysts when you have no go-between?”
That too-long-lost smile rippled across his long lips.
“When you are in love, you will understand.”
Then he was off through the trees, eager as a sleuth-hound on the scent. I set off slowly back up the slope, threading a way through the destruction, looking round to see his progress. I saw his head come round once, checking on me.
I paused in a dip out of his sight. Listened to the wind roar in the trees. Listened to myself. Gently felt my throbbing injured hand. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but that nail had been old and rusty, and the stables were scarcely clean.
I turned to contour the slope after him, following the Kirtle but staying well above it.
Lovers
“Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte . . .” As it was with Horatius Flaccus, so with us in Hawthornden. Through night and day the sky has shredded and fallen, smooring bush and beast alike. “See how the snow lies deep on glittering Soracte . . .”
A living man once wove a pattern of words so intricate and tough it has blown across sixteen hundred years to settle around the shoulders of an old man that same white glister. Alone at my table by the window I raise this glass of cooling wine and toast that man. Timeless are lovers’ secret trysts, whether in Rome’s midnight piazzas or the banks of Kirkconnel Lea, those youthful assignations, a ring pulled from an unresisting finger.
I came cannily through the woods to the bankside, hunkered down low and stared along the burn. He was not waiting under the brig. The day was still wild, one where rain and sun chase each other across fields and hills. Not a day to lie in mud and long grass. I stared along the Kirtle woods towards Kirkconnel hamlet and had the briefest glisk of a back: fair hair.
The abandoned kirk, then. The chamber off the vestry, among the horse blankets where we had lain after Robert Bell had mashed my face but spared my life.
I crossed the brig and hurried along where the high branches of great beech trees stirred and groaned against each other, and the pools of the burn scurried with blown light. I passed a shepherd laddie driving a score or so yowes from the Lea, but no other.
I came to the kirkyard, the old stones furred with moss and lichen. The wooden crosses of the poor stood canted and rotting. My mither and faither had no better in Blackfriars. If I got back to the city alive, I vowed to put Buccleuch’s money to good use and commission a stone memorial, the first of my people’s.
I stayed tight by the burn and went lowly through the brush, the silent dead to my right. There was no one outside the Maxwell crypt, none on the nine steps up to the upper door. I wondered again how these trysts were arranged. If Bell could know of it once, he could do so again.
Fifty yards off, I cooried down by the bank, ahint another fallen pine. I lay belly-down, and listened and looked for Bell and Fairfax coming through the woods. A shower came, and then low yellow sun. Were the lovers in the kirk at all? They could be using a retainer’s cottage, a hay-byre or a stable.
Then I remembered how grey dawn had come into the room where we had lain, through a plain round window, on the gable wall. There had been a wood pile below.
My hand slipped under jerkin and shirt, adjusted my weapon for the draw, then crouched and jouked along the Kirtle bank, past the kirk to the gable wall where I was hidden from the cottages. The round window was way too high up. Behind me, across the burn, massed laurel bushes were thrashed by the half-gale. Good place to lie in ambush, I thought, the burn being fordable there.
But no ambush came. Nor sound from the kirk. I had to know. I dragged a log from the pile, propped it upright against the gable wall, put one foot to the top end, gripped the stone and stood up tall to keek through the window.
I lay aside the quill, stare out the window into my heart. Who knows why I went so canny along the bank of Kirtle, took the old trail without sound, ducked under low branches gently parted and released? I could never have protected Adam and Helen had ambush come, warned them at best.
I like to think I was doing my duty by them, regardless of the risk, for Bell would not have spared my life a second time. Yet that does not feel quite it. A game, perhaps? To show them the risks they took, when even a city boy could surprise them? To pay my friend back for catching me off-guard in the woods?
Questions I suspended at the time, as though I had averted my gaze from my own life even as I soft-footed through the mangled woods. Answers I cannot now give, even as I watch myself, still young and agile, stepping up onto a propped log and stretching up to peek unblinking eyes on the scene within.
The lovers lay on horse blankets, softened by discarded clothes.
It must be said his cock was magnificent, long and true. The thick head dark where it slipped between small, clever hands. I must have imagined the hiss of his breath, her soft giggle. Pale breasts swung gently like clappers of silent bells as Helen bent forward her lovely head. The bolt of his pleasure shot through me as I tumbled from the log.
I lay on my back, winded, staring through broken leaves at the sky, seeing them, seeing them. Her soft roundedness so far removed from the girl-child I had once kenned. His perfect root. Her fingers and his astounded face.
Back through the trees and away from all that would never be mine, I fled from that holy, terrible place.
“Fair Helen, chaste Helen” the ballad-mongers cry her. Tastes and times have changed to favour the respectable and douce, and rendered those days of quick-blooded men and women into something noble, picturesque and sexless. They do her a disservice. She was much more than fair and chaste. And he, he was blessed among men.
Wrapped in my blankets at the table by the window, I stare out where mist settles a shroud on the trees and river below Hawthornden. I might close my eyes, but it would bring no relief from seeing her, seeing him
still.
I have not let myself think on it for many years, for it brought only dismay and shame. Now I begin to chuckle, white breath chuffing into the cold air, witnessing myself stretched up on tiptoe, then falling from the log to lie on my back on the wood pile like an astonished beetle. I had never before seen how ridiculous and hilarious my fall was.
Then I think on him and her at their pleasure, and for the first time smile because they had known the sweetness of that hour, when human joy and tenderness shone in a dim storeroom as it never had in the kirk itself.
After long enough in the cask, raw spirit turns into something more rich and kind to the palate. The years are not altogether cruel to whatever lies within this skull.
Privy
After snow, the melt. It rains a great deal, the fields grow wide with water. Restless, heart swollen and aching like a bladder, I had to rise from this table, pull on my old boots, and clamber down by the river. I stood watching the grey floodwaters swirl bruck and muck away.
Straw had thatched itself onto low-hanging branches. I stood in a dwam, contemplating my heart’s high-water mark.
Something grey and black bobbed in the straw. I found a stick and poked. A drowned cat, with one torn ear and open pink mouth blackening already where the little tongue flapped in the current as though still licking. Then moisture flowed from my eyes for the first time in many years. Water seeping down my neck and rising through my split boots, I stood like an old fool weeping under the trees.
The short day’s light began to fade, and the rain exhausted itself. On black twigs, water hung in swollen, quivering drops but did not fall. I stomped soggily home and, quite wabbit, climbed the backstair to my attic room.
The damp has gone to my chest and lodged there. Drummond has insisted the girl light and tend a fire in my room. I sit at the table, happed about in blankets, coughing and sweating. I dip my pen and carry on scratching, with more urgency, aware there might not be much time.
“Come to my privy room, the light is better there.”
Janet Elliot Fleming gave orders for hot water then turned and led up the stair, swishing her long skirts.
I followed her through the bedroom, averting my eyes from the marital bed and my mind from the storeroom of Kirkconnel kirk. We went into her retiring room. It was indeed lighter, with windows on two sides, looking down over the courtyard, the door into the peel tower, the stables, the main gate where we had struggled to re-erect the palisade this morning.
She said she liked to come here to read, but I thought what an excellent place it was to watch from. She patted the padded window seat and bade me sit by her.
“You are the most interesting of my son’s friends,” she said. I blushed, shrugged. “You arrive here as a meek scholar, legal secretary, a city youth, and within two weeks you are riding hot-trod across the Border, in boots and jack, and acquitting yourself well enough.”
“When in the Western March . . .” I said.
She glanced across at me, then downwards. “And I hear you have a concealed weapon.” When she smiled, her lower lip curved away and showed fine teeth. Her skin glowed, not in the creaseless, perfect way of youth—of Helen, say—but in full ripeness. Her hazel-grey eyes—Adam’s eyes—were wide with knowledge.
“I do not normally carry it indoors,” I stammered.
“I should hope not.” She glanced down at my lap again. “I hope it is not too uncomfortable.”
There was no mistaking her meaning and I blushed like a boy. I tried to think of anything but Helen’s serene descending head and Adam’s face in ecstasy.
Janet patted my hand. “Your secret is safe with me,” she said. “I trust my laddie is still off gallivanting in the woods?”
“He is making an inventory of the storm damage,” I said, trying to adjust to this new thrust.
“Is he really?” she said. “You grew bored with each other’s company?”
“He said I should get you to look at my hand.”
She nodded and gently took my left arm. My hand was throbbing, not the sharp scratch of pain but a deeper beat. She slowly unwound the bloody bandage and turned my palm to the light. She stroked a finger up past the wrist, looking closely.
“He was right.”
Marie chapped the door, then came in carrying a steaming bowl, white cloths over her shoulder. She could not keep her eyes from straying towards me where I sat. She set down the bowl, took a quick, backward, doubtful keek, and left us to it.
Janet Elliot set out phials and salves on the sill. From her sewing box she took two needles and a candle.
“They say you stole a heretical book from Leyden,” she said casually, unspooling a fresh bandage. “Yet another accomplishment!”
“I made and took with me a copy,” I replied. “Not the same thing.”
She raised her eyebrows, lit the candle.
“Some say it is pagan and obscene. It sounds most intriguing.”
“Obscene? Ridiculous!” My anger undid caution. “The poet merely observes that all living things are animated by desire to procreate, that all existence is energy.”
“All?” she enquired softly. “As though we were animal too?”
“Yes!” I had brought these ideas back with me from Leyden like a spark saved from a fire. They had glowed in my mind secretly ever since. “All that exists is tiny particles of matter in motion and combination, ceaseless and without end. Nothing endures, everything is in flux, forever.”
She looked at me gravely, yet her eyes were lit with interest.
“I do not think our churchmen would be pleased. Your poet seems to omit God and the immortal soul from his account.”
“Yes!” I could not stop myself. “Only particles in motion, endless, dazzling energy—it is a glorious vision of things.”
She dipped a cloth in the steaming water. “This may hurt a little.” It stung like buggery. I may have yelped as she began to swab and clean my wound. “What else does your pagan poet say?”
“He says that without superstitious fears of Damnation, the afterlife, permanence or Providence, we are free to follow Epicurus.” I winced as she dabbed on some clear liquid from her phial. “We pursue pleasure—happiness, if you will—and avoid pain.”
“Not very successfully in your case,” she murmured, picking up tweezers.
“At times Stoicism is called for,” I said through gritted teeth as she explored along my cut. “What cannot be avoided must be borne. It will not last, for nothing does. Not fame, nor wealth, nor family endure.” My breath was uneven, my gut tight at the pain, but thinking and speaking helped distract me. “My mother’s last days were lived in terror of Damnation.” I closed my eyes, breathed deep. “De Rerum Natura says she did not have to add that to her torments, and I would believe it.”
Janet’s other hand tightened on my arm as I was ambushed by tears.
“Indeed, dying will be hard enough,” she said gently.
She turned my palm to the light, leaned forward to look more closely. In that absorbed, healing stoop I saw Helen’s head descending like a blessing.
“He is in love, isn’t he? With Helen Irvine.”
Undone by pain and grief and these ideas and her presence, I could dissemble no more.
“Yes.”
She dabbed carefully with a clean corner of the bloody cloth, then reached for her other bottle.
“He could do worse,” she said, “now the feud is at an end. But she is promised to Robert Bell.” Her full mouth twisted in distaste. “Nasty boy, though handsome. Not one to cross. Is that why you and Jed cling to my boy like ticks to his dog?”
I opted for silence. The white salve stung at first, then sweetened and cooled my whole hand.
“So it is she my son goes to meet?”
“I couldn’t say. He won’t let me go with him.”
She looked at me hard, but there was just enough truth in my voice to pass scrutiny. She stoppered the salve, small lines puckering across her high forehead.
I choked quietly. Amusement flickered at the edges of her mouth as she bent over my hand once more.
Then she reached for her needle again and turned it in the candle flame. My heart lurched, for I had thought she was done.
“My husband gives fealty to Lord Maxwell, and will continue to.” She squinted at the needle tip. “Despite your best efforts.”
She flicked the fine point into the pulp of my wound. The shock jabbed in my gut. No point denying my conversation with Dand the day before. I had felt he wavered when I argued for Buccleuch. He knew he had little experience of court politics, the Western March being his whole life, and he had seemed to think I was worth listening to.
Janet squeezed my bad hand and my eyes watered again as she glared at me.
“I remain an Elliot,” she said, “and I will never, ever, ally with the murderous, treacherous Scotts. We have been at feud for five generations, they cut down my father by the walls of Carlisle, and I will see Buccleuch in Hell before this house changes allegiance. Do you understand me?”
I hesitated. She jabbed with the needle, but this time I was ready for it and kept my watering eyes on hers.
“You are the head of this family?” I managed.
“I am the heart,” she said. “And I have my husband’s.”
She laid the needle aside, dabbed some clear, stinging liquid into my cut. No more was said as she calmly laid lint, wrapped bandage and made good. It was very queer sitting in her private chamber as she treated me. I thought back on the oriel window at Crichton, and my patron’s very different blend of charm and subtle, chilling threat. I wished people would stop taking me aside.
“I am sorry to hear how your mother died,” she said. She laid her hand on my leg. “Truly. Living and dying are hard enough without invented terrors.”