Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  Lads poured wine from jugs. I drank cannily, for that wine would strip rust from an ailing gate. I signed to Jed I was going inside to find something better. He nodded and never took his eyes off John Rusby, lounging at the top of the steps by the doorway, one hand on sword hilt, the other thrown wide, grasping the hitching rail. As I passed him, I was awarded a glance from his void eyes, then he went back to studying the courtyard.

  At the bar I found a man with a barrel he claimed came from the Highlands. I sampled a faintly piss-yellow uisge beatha, which in fact came from a rough corner of the Place Below. I was asking after brandy when I heard an oath, then a sharp yelp and snarl from Philby.

  A couple of Bells were laughing as they kicked him towards the door. Thud on one flank, bang on the other. The grey lurcher staggered, then fled for the door. I followed on, with several behind me.

  It happened very quick, as it was meant to. John Rusby stepped from the rail into the doorway, drew his short sword, slashed and laid bare Philby’s hindquarters. The dog screamed, fell over bleeding in the dirt, tried to struggle to its feet.

  Adam ran cursing up the steps and grabbed Rusby by the throat. With his other hand he pinned down the sword arm. Rusby leaned back easily, looking past Adam to the crowd, to Robert Bell who stood unarmed beside his brother, calmly watching. Philby was trying to drag himself away, bleeding and screaming. Without thinking I pushed forward, reaching inside my jerkin, then had my arms clamped from behind. Another Bell put his dirk to my side.

  “Dinna fuckin move, son.”

  The crowd made some vague roar like the sea as John Rusby’s free hand reached for his dagger. Though Adam was unarmed, self-defence would be the plea.

  A force surged up the steps, smashed Rusby across the head, sent Adam spinning away along the hitching rail. Jed drew his sword and advanced on Rusby.

  “A square go, whoreface.”

  “My fight!” Adam yelled, but two of his family held him back, and more closed round him. Philby staggered by me, his grey flank hanging open, blood streaming. I saw Rob Bell hesitate, and then behind him more men rode into the yard, armed all. Troopers, yelling for order. By their yellow flashes, they were Buccleuch’s men, charged by the Keeper to keep order in Liddesdale. Behind them rode Will and Dand.

  But nothing was going to stop Jed and Rusby. They slashed, parried, jumped back. This was not a pretty bout learned in schools, but expert, dirty and desperate. They clashed again, Rusby’s sword arm was forced high. His other hand came up with the dagger. Jed whirled, broke the grip just as the dagger slashed open his leather jerkin, showing pale stuffing, then darkening. His sword point dropped, he staggered to the right. Rusby rushed him, Jed’s sword came up and buried itself in the man’s groin. One scream, then Jed finished him off.

  Neck near-severed, Rusby’s sightless eyes turned towards me, then he dropped.

  The dismounted troopers were on Jed. Three made to lead him away, blood running out through his jerkin, but armed Bells blocked their passage. Rob Bell pushed through to confront the Captain.

  “Give us this man!”

  “What do you propose to do wi’ him?”

  Bell hesitated. “Protective custody.”

  The Captain looked down from his horse, pistol casually in one hand.

  “I wonder how long he would live.”

  “We are acting for the Warden and the King’s Peace.”

  The Captain was lean and so hardened that when he smiled you could strop a blade on his cheekbones.

  “Aye well, we are come on the Keeper’s authority, and Ecclefechan is his ground. We will take him. Anyone who resists will be arrested.”

  Bell glanced at Clapper, at his own supporters. They were plenty and their blood was up, but only some were armed, and most were stuffed to the thrapple, and clumsy-fou. Fine for a hanging mob, but poor match for a dozen mounted troopers.

  Yet he was Robert Bell, and none crossed him. Had he sword or pistol to hand, I believe he would have taken down that Captain, but he had made a point of being unarmed, an innocent spectator.

  “We will hae justice done syne!” he cried, then went inside with his gang, a face on him like the Deil’s punchbowl.

  Adam seemed dazed and his head bled where it had banged the rail. Dand pushed through and clasped his arms round him.

  “We’d best awa, son,” Dand said. “Here is no safe. I’ll get our men.”

  Jed was swaying yet still standing as they bound his hands and tied him to a horse. He raised his head, nodded to us, then turned away with the Keeper’s men.

  It was then, at the corner of the courtyard, under the stables’ overhang, I saw a face I knew. Obscured under a bunnet, wearing drab grey, but even in failing light I could not miss the long jaw fringed with a tight English beard. Dowie Fairfax seemed intrigued but not dissatisfied as he turned away.

  Laughter came from inside, laughter hard as millstones. Then a scream that rose, faltered, regained and was crushed under more laughter. I pushed inside. The logs glowed red in the wide hearth, and on them something long and grey and four-legged writhed, tongues of flame rising from its flanks, muzzle and ears streaming fire. Then the body flopped, the fat ignited and the corpse was mercifully wrapped in flame.

  Outside in the freezing twilight it took a lot of vomit to banish that smell, that taste polluting the roof of my mouth all the way down to my soul.

  My hand shakes as I write, and it is not my age. Some scenes are so rank they besmirch even the innocent onlooker.

  When the minister talks of Hell (as he does most Sundays, trying to scare us into Heaven), that is what I see—the last moments of Philby, the stench of burning hair and melting flesh, the laughter of men turned to demons.

  We have done these same things to men and women in my time in the name of true religion, but I have seen no end more obscene and pitiable than that of the harmless, faithful lurcher, dying in agony amid the laughter.

  I can write no more today.

  The Cypresse Grove

  Last night Drummond and I sat up late in his study, a prime ash log settling in the grate and the brandy well-rounded. Once in a while neither of us can bear our solitude—his amid his busy family life and letters, mine at my table, wandering in the garden and fields, everywhere alone.

  He is half a generation younger than I, in his late middle years, and I like to say things that will shock him out of his patient deference to my age. I sometimes think he rather enjoys being scandalized, to hear uttered what he would not let himself think.

  In dowie mood and heavy heart, I said rude things about our present King Charles, ruling the Kingdoms from the South, discarding Parliament, set on heading the Church just as the Auld Hag had. But he was not Elizabeth. He was not even that clumsy, cunning Jamie Saxt that lived to marry the Kingdoms and put an end to the Borderlands of my youth.

  Drummond protested all monarchs are God-appointed, and to be spoken of respectfully.

  “Some awfy poor appointments,” I murmured into my fiery glass. “And it seems He keeps changing his mind about what faith each should follow.”

  “There is but one Faith,” Drummond said hotly. “It is the Church that lost its way and needed reformed, not the Creator. Your beliefs are of their time, Harry, and that time is gone.”

  He likes to think in my heart I still follow the Old True Church. He imagines me slipping away in early hours to secret places where recusant priests still intone the Mass, and heretical women kneel to kiss the feet of the Virgin. Drummond is a poet, and thus a romantic. And because I am his long-term guest, I just smile enigmatically.

  “I honour the Reform for its aim that each reads and thinks for himself,” I admitted.

  “Indeed!”

  “And now all must think the same, and follow the same Prayer Book.” Drummond made no reply. I knew he was unhappy with the fervour in our land, though he took the King’s party. “Reform may have banished corruption,” I continued.“It would also banish wit and laughter, music and
dance and kindliness.” And fornication, I did not add.

  Drummond was about to chide me, but drank deep and lay back in his seat, dazed. He stared at the fire, his mood changing. Excess drink did not take him well. The ash log shifted, burning slow and pure.

  “I love my good wife and children,” he said. He paused. The candle glittered in his eyes. “But aince I loved more.”

  “I know,” I said. Once or twice a year we strayed this way, especially in the month of her dying. “You wrote about it most beautifully.”

  “The Cypresse Grove,” he said. He was pleased I remembered, then his mouth shaped bitter. “I would burn it all to have her with me now.”

  “I do not doubt it, mon cher,” I replied. I knew exactly what he meant. I said the same myself inwardly each morning when I sat down at my table. “But the work remains, and will outlast us all,” I said.

  He grunted. It’s no consolation, I know.

  The fire whispered within the log. His Bruges timepiece clicked on the mantel shelf. Words I had not anticipated came to my mouth.

  “Drummond, I am not long for this world.” He began to protest, I raised my hand. “These past months I have been writing my best recall of those events at Kirkconnel forty year syne.”

  “A true history of Fair Helen!” he said eagerly.

  “Scarcely that! It contains remarks and asides of a personal and philosophical nature you might find offensive, for it is written in the spirit of Montaigne and Lucretius, not Tacitus. I have written it for myself, but now I find . . .”

  I could not say it, appalled by my own vanity at this late stage. His hand fell on my arm.

  “Old friend, I shall read with one eye open and one closed to your foibles.”

  “Not now,” I said. “Later. When I am not.”

  And so it was agreed these pages, together with my few books, and my oft-resumed, never-completed translation of De Rerum Natura into English pentameters that for forty years have stubbornly refused to flex for me, will be for him to execute as he may choose. May those shy beasts disappear into the deep forest of his library, and dwell there undisturbed!

  I woke this dawning to find myself alone in the study, with grey ash in the grate, and a blanket happed about my shoulders.

  Now once more I am at my table, full and warm enough, though my breathing labours and I cannot clear my chest. The end will come soon. I have been wrong before, but this time I think not.

  Truly, I do not deserve William Drummond of Hawthornden. I must finish this for both of us.

  Flitting

  “For sure I will kill him!”

  Adam prowled around his bolthole in the peel tower, sack in one hand. Into it he had been throwing old bones, tennis balls, a rug, a chain collar, anything that had been his dog’s.

  “Bit late for that,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Rusby? No—his master. Rob Bell will ding no more.”

  I began folding blankets. Adam had announced his intention of moving back into the house. Dand’s raw anguish and concern as he shepherded us out of that awful place had been undeniable. He had acted like a father, not a usurper.

  “I am not sure this was Bell’s doing,” I said.

  “Why, man, he stood and smiled! Did nothing to stop the fight!”

  It was true. All night I had replayed the sequence of events from our arriving at Blackett House to our hasty flight from the horrors of the Scabby Duck. Like Adam, I had at first assumed a conspiracy on the part of Bell, perhaps with the Warden. Certainly Rob Bell had been conspicuously unarmed. Earl Angus had called off coming with the party in Langholm, keeping back Dand and others who might have protected us.

  “Rob Bell is headstrong and fearless,” I said. “He may be sly, but he is not subtle. And who could have controlled and foreseen that outcome?”

  “They meant to have me killed, and then plead self-defence!”

  That had been my first and second thought. But Jed had been armed, and all knew he was Adam’s guard. Surely they would have foreseen he would have intervened?

  “Cui bono?” I murmured, picking up an old muzzle and leash and dropping them in the sack. “Remember our legal studies, old friend. Rusby is dead, and Jed is in gaol and will come to trial in due time. Who benefits from that?”

  He stared out the window slit. He looked stricken, old before his time.

  “None that I can see.”

  “Nor I,” I admitted.

  Perhaps it was just another pointless fight and death that had no meaning or cunning plan behind it. Things happen. Men carry swords, get drunk, clash and react. It was said the great Maxwell–Kerr feud had begun over the theft of a sow.

  Adam stood helpless with the sack in his hand.

  “My dog is deid,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I asked that they quickly cremate him. He was not a bonnie sight.”

  The tears bobbled and ran till his tongue licked them from the side of his lips. I stood at his side with my own griefs.

  “Mind this,” I said. “If the Keeper’s troopers had not intervened, the Bells would have strung up Jed for sure.”

  “You still think I should ally with Buccleuch?”

  I held up my hands. “I am just saying.”

  “And I am just the son,” he said. “In any case, my mother would never have it.” He brushed his hand across his face, gave me a queer smile. “May be I’ll no bide in these parts long.”

  Better marry than burn, the severe saint wrote (the translation in the King’s Bible is crisp but slightly skew-whiff). As I took my leave I thought: Better elope than kill.

  I met Snood in the doorway, grappling with a bundle of brooms and staves and firewood.

  “Give you a hand,” I said.

  “Aye.”

  I took a load and followed him up to the roof. I minded stepping through that doorway to see Adam stotting his tennis ball and playing the drunken daftie. That seemed long syne, though it had been but weeks.

  At that moment, with the fresh Border wind shaking my hair, I yearned for the clash and stour and stink of the city. I wanted days of scrivening, drafting and copying, and nights spent on the town among my own kind, those not-quite folk who live by their wits and wit, flirting, singing, flyting to the midnight bell. Or in my smoky room toying with The Nature of Things, trying to make the metre run both regular and pleasingly various. Which is as hard as trying to understand the hearts of men and women . . .

  I turned, startled by the clap of wings. Three doos swooped and fought for the seed Snood scattered. They were pure white, streamlined, alert and very hungry.

  “Homers,” Snood grunted.

  The blind bard kept pigeons? These their descendants?

  “Sorry?”

  Like many country folk, he looked at me as if I were the daftie.

  “You tak them to wherever, then they fly hame. Here. For guid com.”

  He was quite the blether today.

  “These are not for the table?”

  “Na. Jist sport. Himself attends them.”

  First I’d heard of it. Pigeons for sport. What next—tom cats trained for choirs?

  “How long has Himself—Adam—been doing this?”

  Snood shrugged, all his brain power concentrated on the birds at his feet.

  “A whilie.”

  I left him to it.

  Alfornought Hill

  What memories cling yet, like a bairn that won’t let go its mam? The wintry chittering of pea-sticks in the Bonshaw garden, the blood-dark of haw berries among thorns shook in the wind, glister of burns as light drained from the haugh, the slow march of flat clouds over Tinnis Hill. Above all, fair Annandale seen from Alfornought, the dale below wide and fecund as a green lover’s thighs sprawled on a hillside, offering all that men want, fight for and cannot keep.

  The morn after the end-feud feast I happed up well and went for a long ponder-daunder upstream, among the knowes and denes. I needed to be away, outside and walking. The day was grey but brigh
t, the wind snell but in at the back of it a hint of growing things. It sieved through the gorse, went rattling through the trees. I grasped down a twig, put my thumb to the first buds. Not sticky yet, the sap safe deep down. It would rise in due time and nothing could stop the light returning. And retreating again.

  I let the twig spring back to its own devices and followed the burn up the brae, across a dene, into a narrow cleuch, the land rising. Over a pass and into a desolate glen. In the distance, the hill of Alfornought. From up there one would get an overview of Annandale, and an overview is what I sought.

  Crops and good pasture yielded to scrub, then rough pasture to heather, low and blasted. I gained a high sheep path that wound and mounted, dipped across scree and finally into a burn-cleft not far under the summit.

  I sheltered a while there, watching bog ooze into its beginning as burn, the buzzard holding steady in the wind with tiny adjustment of wings. At my back, twa–three days’ ride off, was Embra, where my parents lay in Blackfriars and I lived by translating men’s thoughts and desires into fair hand. Before me spread Annandale’s long slopes of green, gatherings of woodland, burns, smoke rising from the farms. Liddesdale to the left, black-avised and secretive. Away to the right, Nithsdale, where Maxwells and Johnstones fought to the end.

  When I lifted my eyes just a little from tracing the Kirtle, there was the Solway, and above that not massed clouds but the misty hills of the English Western March.

  I turned, looked behind me. No distance at all, the great hills piled up above Moffat, the Devil’s Beeftub, then on to Crichton Castle and Embra.

  Between these kingdoms lay the low green corridor of Annandale.

  I shivered and dug in my pooch for oatcakes and cheese lifted from Mrs. Smeaton’s kitchen. Far over the southern horizon, beyond where the grey and blue were most pale, lived all Adam and I had talked of when we were young—the Continent, haven of painters, poets, players, high music and free-thinkers, warm days and wine of quality. I had already seen enough to know this not entirely true, that it could rain and free-thinkers were persecuted, but still it held out promise of a better, sweeter life.