by Andrew Greig
She smiled so sympathetically, I unburdened myself.
“I have not talked of these matters with many.”
“I am flattered,” she replied. “I will think on your poet’s vision when I look at the starry Heavens. I will imagine there is no one up there watching me. It is very . . . stirring.”
“But best not shared with minister or priest.”
“Indeed not.” Her hand stirred and smoothed my britches across my thigh. I was still young then, and despite my nature it had the usual effect. “Let me make my wishes plain, dear Harry,” she said, and grabbed my cock through the cloth.
I gaped at her, but my privates had their own notion. Her hand rotated, descended, cuddled my goolies through cloth.
“Felt worse,” she said. “If you ever try to influence my husband or son away from Maxwell to Buccleuch—if I hear so much as a whisper—I will tell Dand how you tried to ravish me in this chamber. He is a dear man, but maist jealous. He would likely kill you on the spot. At the very least, you would never see this house or my son again.” She stared me in the eye. “I ken for whom this cock rises, and I would make it plain. You haud wi’ me?”
I went down the stairs on legs of straw. Marie gave me a sharp look as I passed her in the passage. I made it to my room, closed the door and flopped on my pallet. I propped my bandaged hand up against the wall, as instructed.
“Keep it clean, Harry,” had been her parting shot. “Clean, you understand?”
I understood. The entire hot-trod had been as nothing compared to an hour with Janet Elliot Fleming. Had Adam her will, craft and sheer smeddum, he would have been Prince of the Borders.
I lay exhausted, scunnered and throbbing, till light failed and Adam’s voice rang in the courtyard. I did not go to join them at supper. When the boy Alec chapped on my door I called that I was indisposed. I got up to strike my tinderbox and light the lamp, then lay beneath the blankets trying to keep my various pains at bay so I might think clearly, for I sensed the crux was coming soon.
My dreams, when they came, brought pleasure and pain, fused in copulation.
The chapel bell rings out. I had forgot this is the Sabbath. The service and sermon—promises of Hellfire and copious Blood of the Lamb—will be made bearable by the excellent dinner that follows it, with more company, conversation, beef and wine than usual. Excellent!
Fear not, there will not be many more of these musings, for I must set the story down in whatever time remains. Not that it matters to the dead it celebrates and mourns. Not that any of this matters.
Nevertheless, I feel both hungry and lightened as I pad the page and take my leave for now. Though wheezing and failing, this animal is ready for more. I sense a nameless witness remains within, unscunnered and true.
Timor Mortis
Many nights and days have passed since I broke off this story to go down for Sunday Service (we must learn not call it Mass!), followed by dinner. I never ate it.
Perhaps it was the unheated chapel, or the interminable world-hating sermon, but I felt my chest fill up with congestion. It came on apace and coughing would not clear it. The coughing became a fit where I could not breathe and passed out for the first of many times. As they carried me from the kirk I was drowning in my own fluids.
Now I know they do not call it the breath of life for nothing. For days and nights I slumped propped upright on pillows, fire blazing in the grate, the kindly quack dozing in the corner while I fought to stay alive.
On one of those nights of panic and delirium, I saw and understood the look in the eyes of the man I had killed in the Langholm pend. It was terror at the knowledge of his end. My own mother’s terror had been of the Hellfires that awaited after death.
I did not want to die in fear like them. I gestured and croaked for the blue book of De Rerum Natura. I fingered and stroked it as some would the Bible, while Drummond looked on disapproving. Yet he did me the great kindness of reading aloud those passages—so lucid, rational, ungainsayable—that assert as grossest superstition fear of the afterlife.
As a true Christian, he read most reluctantly, but it was the kindest service he has ever done me. (Memo: before this day is out, clasp his hand, look into his eyes and thank him from the heart. He has been unfailingly good to me, and does not deserve my ironies.)
Listening to Lucretius’s great poem, I believed in the great blank of death, and in the world continuing without me, scarcely changed. Suns would still rise, birds sing, men and women would desire, fight and die, children throw clods of earth at each other and laugh. This room where I was dying would soon be lived in by another, then another.
Yes, I believed that, even as the fluid in my lungs rose to my throat. The terror of the afterlife was not for me.
I gestured to Drummond to cease reading. He put the book away with some relief. He put his hand on the black book. I shook my head, and that small movement brought on the dreaded cough that led to choking and drowning and I could not breathe and the room lost all colour then fell into dark.
Some time later—dawn was coming, I remember the relief of light seeping back, for who wants to die in darkness?—I was back again. For a while there was peace and silence, as after a battle.
But this had been merely the opening skirmish. Soon my breath began to fail me again. I sipped water, tried to breathe and not to cough, for then my throat closed off. Next time I would die. I knew this for certainty. I would suffocate, or my heart would stop.
Timor mortis conturbat me, indeed.
In that hour, Lucretius was of no further use to me. His calm reasoning, his classical poise, his lovely Latin verse, they could obliterate fears of Damnation and Eternity but not this animal terror of dying itself. Perhaps Montaigne, I thought, and tried to gesture to the quack—Drummond had gone, likely to sleep, poor fellow—and that brought on the cough, then the drowning, then the impending end.
And back again, for brief exhausted peace and gratitude to be here still and the world seeming lovely merely in its existence, and then all too soon the troubles and terror and fighting for existence once again. (Perhaps not so very different from the history of the world itself.)
Panic grasped me by the thrapple, I grasped him back. I knew I must die and it terrified me, yet I would not die in terror. I would not, yet I would . . .
And did not, clearly. The Christ Mass has long come and gone, and here I am again at the table, scratching away at my life as one scratches at the healing wound beneath a bandage.
Before I resume this story—and now I know my time is short, there must be fewer digressions, diversions and addenda—I want to record just this.
Though the rediscovered voices of Antiquity have offered a vision of a greater, kinder, more humane and playful life (scarcely in Scotland, ma foi, not till the hoodie craws of the Reformed Faith back away from the carcass of this my only true home!), we are not they. Their balance, calm, serene poise and dignity, such as allowed Epicurus and the Stoics to outface death itself, these we can never match. That world is as a burned-out watchfire.
Which is why, were I allowed only one book, I would choose the modest, brown John Florio translation of Montaigne. He is of our time. With his irony, modesty and wit, his owning up to human feebleness, his celebration of uncertainty and swithering, his exploration of his self as the only honest starting point, he is one of us in the modern world of the seventeenth century Anno Domini.
“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.” I would not gainsay that.
I turn the pages. “The soul, like the foot, is part of the body.” Nothing is more incendiary and hilarious—and little good it did me in my sickness. I open on another Essai.
“The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.”
Now that is more apposite to this story I resume after being so rudely interrupted.
When Dand Fleming announced that the formal feast to mark end-feud between Fleming and Irvine would be hosted by the Earl of Angus and Rob B
ell in Blackett House, my heart mistook me. Adam and Robert Bell and Helen all in one room, with drink taken. It was surely the very opposite of what my patron desired. It could not come to good.
“Long overdue,” Adam said. “Now we can have our full rights restored.”
He drank, looking calmly about the table. I was dumfountert at his self-control, and then tried to read him. Without the family feud, one barrier would be removed between himself and Helen. The feast offered a chance to meet with her. Was that enough to account for his cheer, or had he laid plans of his own?
“Warden Angus assures me we will not be unmade men much longer,” Dand said. “Apparently it awaits only the High Chancellor’s seal.”
Long may he wait, I thought, if Buccleuch is bending over the High Chancellor’s table.
Janet Elliot stared at me across the dining table, a hint of smirk about her full mouth.
“Is your hand mending, Harry?” she enquired.
“Very well, thanks to your administrations,” I replied.
“You must come with us.”
I inclined my head. “Never miss a feast.”
“It will be a chance to see your lovely cousin.”
Adam’s knee stopped jumping.
“That is always welcome,” I replied.
Adam glanced at his mother. She looked back steadily, and in that moment he knew that she knew.
“It is long past time that lass was marrit,” Dand remarked, crunching down on an apple core, then delicately picking pips from his lips. He lined them up on his plate, black and glistening, and studied them for a sign.
He put his hand, cuffed with red hair about the wrist, down on Janet’s. Her fingers curled within his. She looked at me as they got to their feet.
“Yon marriage will be another grand Borders feast, Harry—you must visit us when you come down from Edinburgh for it.”
I nodded. They left the room, already cleaving to each other. It was not quite what Epicurus had in mind. I both envied and rather despised them.
Adam chuckled quietly. I looked at him.
“She has a point,” he said. “It is time you went back to your work.”
“And your safety?” I said. “Remember, the reason you asked me to come?”
He dipped bread in the honey pot, tipped his head back to let it drip into his mouth.
“Perhaps I was not entirely myself,” he said. “Your presence here must have done me good! With Jed nearby, I shall survive a while yet.” He glanced across at me, in high good humour still. “Anyway, I may not be much longer in these parts.” His voice was casual.
“Really?”
He looked back at me calmly, then dipped his finger in the honey and licked along it. “You never know.”
“I certainly do not,” I said, and left him to his schemes and dreams.
In my room, before dawn, in writing crabbed by my injured hand, I set out my brief report. I wrote of the coming end-feud feast. I suggested that Adam Fleming was open to a shift in fealty, but that his parents were less so, despite my best efforts. After some hesitation I added that I had encouraged him in his amour, and I anticipated developments soon, though I could not be sure I would be informed of them in advance.
I looked at the missive for a long time, sensing it could set in motion things I could not foresee. My little room where I sat was cold as clay, but the door was barred and it had become familiar, almost safe. All I had done, I argued, was tell the truth in my friends’ cause, which for some unfathomed reason accorded with Buccleuch’s interests.
I struck flame and lit the candle. Then carefully folded my doubts away, melted wax and set my patron’s ring to the seal. I picked up dagger and sheath, tucked them away under my shift alongside my report, shrugged on the padded jerkin, reached for my bunnet and went out into the plain light of day.
I sit by the window under the roof of Hawthornden, dazzled. Never has the day seemed so sharp, each twig and river-sparkle so defined, each chest-breath so momentously long. I am still warm, still here.
Whatever I scrieve now merely gestures at this. The village idiot’s finger points at the city, the hill, to the distant sea, the sun in the sky and the husk of the daytime moon as he cries, “See! See!”
Then again, he is an idiot and knows not what he points at, only that he is pointing and crying.
Approaching Kirtlebridge’s single poor street, I went on by the Fortune Rigg to tether Handsome Jenny by the saddlery. I ducked into the leathery dimness where Crosier the maister and two apprentices were hard at it. I gave my name and the senior man put down his tack.
“Come in by,” he said.
In a wee back room—stove, accounts on the table, good coat hung on a nail—Drew Crosier studied me calmly. He was tall, thin-faced, eyes brown as his apron, his arms and hands tanned by his trade.
“So?”
I reached into the jerkin and handed him my sealed report.
“This to be delivered to Himself only. Soonest.”
He nodded, then put it under the lamp on the table, along with a couple of others.
“Shall be done,” he said. “Any reply and I’ll send the laddie tae the hoose wi’ a message your gear is ready for collection.”
I thanked Crosier and went back onto the street. After the “regrettable incident” (that is, attempted murder of moi) in Langholm, my patron had made this new arrangement—closer by, and safer.
I unhitched Jenny, wondering just how many agents Buccleuch employed in the Western March. I rode slowly back towards the inn, smelled good food, and on impulse called on one I hoped still my friend and ally.
The stable boy smirked, dodged my cuff, then tenderly led Jenny off to water. The yard was quiet as I slipped in the back door. In the pantry the maid in a headscarf and coif was doling curds into a row of bowls, head down in thought, or vacant: who knows?
As I neared the end of the passage, the door opened. Only once was I to catch that woman unawares, and that time had not yet come.
“Well, bonnie boy,” she said. “Come for a ride?”
How well she read me. Elenora Jarvis stood with one hand on the door, and her eyes were bright as the day beneath her sunshine-yellow coif.
“I could be.”
Her hand—work-swollen and reddened—came up to stroke my face. As we stood smiling, her palm lingered on the back of my neck.
“No high-born horsemen come by today?” I asked.
Creases appeared and disappeared at the corners of her mouth.
“Apart from yourself?”
“You tease me.”
“As you tease me. Jealous of such men?”
I shrugged. “More concern for my own safety.”
She took my bandaged hand, lifted it most gently.
“Got into another stushie, Harry?”
“I had argument with a nail. No, really.”
She lifted my hand to her neck. “You daftie,” she said. “Come and entertain me.” Her foot closed the door behind us. With my free hand I slipped the bar to.
The appetite is quicker, and the senses sharper, in the forenoon.
We sat across the table from each other in a corner of the dining hall. The curds, sprinkled with sugar, were pantry-cool and delicious. And so to business.
“Have you told Dowie Fairfax about the end-feud feast?”
“I have not seen him this last while. The big blaw-oot at Blackett House is part of the common clack.” She slurped happily, seeming unconcerned.
“And John Rusby?”
Her spoon faltered, dripping white.
“He came by yestreen. It seems I am to supply the wine. You will all be pished as collies.”
“Rusby is not someone I would care to deal with.”
“Nor I.” She leaned closer to me. “You want to mind that man, Harry.”
“Did he mention my name?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “And that of Jed Horsburgh. Said he looked forward to becoming better aquaint. He was a bit fou at the
time.”
I put my hand on hers, so warm and mortal.
“I hope he didna stay the night.”
“No for want of asking.” She frowned down at the table. “Him I can deal wi’,” she said, and slipped her hand from under mine. She got up.
“Thank you,” I said. “And not just for yon.”
“Likewise,” she replied. “Now I have an inn to run.”
She showed me out the back way. The breeze fanned loose her hair against the lowering sun. I had forgotten how much we liked each other, I thought, but did not say.
“Ca’ canny, Harry,” she murmured, then held out her hand and we shook as though swearing on a contract. “Haste ye back!” she said loudly, then turned and went within.
The stable lad left the shadows.
“You need a hand mountin yer mare, sir?”
He dodged my cuff and took my coin. I liked the boy fine, did not trust him longer than a docked dug’s tail. Keeping a sharp eye about, I began to ride back to the Fleming compound, my body pleasantly at ease, mind birling wi’ doubt.
Siccar
I had to step away from the table, stretch my legs. Elenora Jarvis, my untrusty feire, my friend. So many years unseen, most likely dead.
How can we be excused scenes such as that flurried pleasure in her office? Need we be excused?
Ways are much changed since those days, and Drummond would scarce credit the goings-on of which I write. Women have become douce-like, modest, eyes downcast as though feart to trip on their own feet, and men are penitential. The flesh is sinful and chastity rated far higher than charity. It is a wonder bairns still get born at all.
But in the Borders in those days, far from the reach of the pulpits of Embra and St. Andrews, their lives aroused by danger, uncertainty and brevity, the women and men I kenned then were . . . otherwise.
I did not get far from the Fortune Rigg when they came out of trees to surprise me. I reined in, stared at Helen and her girl Alysoun. My cousin looked weakened and pale as a reed peeled back to the pith.
