by Andrew Greig
When dusk came, I took to the road and headed north. The Hunter moved across the sky, owls and their prey were my only company through those starry hours. I did not allow myself to mourn, or think of anything except my goal. My legs were weak, the night was bitter, but anything, including death, was better than the pit from which I had come.
My secret purse, and much craft and caution, in three days brought me to the city gates at dawn. Though longing tugged my heart, I gave them the by, and passed instead the day sleeping in the woods of Holyrude, below the Seat where in another life two young student friends had scrambled to the top by night and opened their hearts to each other.
The night was moonless, but I knew the way well enough, and dawn found me in the small rain in Port of Leith, reaching into the lining of my jerkin as I walked greasy quays in search of the Sonsie Quine, trading into Antwerp.
Captain Jan Wandhaver broke the seal, read the note and glanced up at me. His eyes were sea-blue and clever, mismatched in his brown turnip of a head.
“Mistress Jarvis no longer owns this vessel,” he said.
She had come by a fortnight back, and on the spot sold her share of the boat and wine business to him. A knock-down price, for she was in urgent need. She had sailed with him, hidden in the bilges.
“Do you know where she has gone?”
“After Antwerp?” He shook his head. I believed him. Not because he was necessarily honest, but because she was canny.
“She had marks on her face and was damaged . . . elsewhere.” He glanced at my hand, the blackened stumps. “She asked me to carry you away if you came. For her I will do this.”
I sailed without regret, for none dear to me remained alive in Scotland. The crew was but four and they spoke little. I spent days on deck, sheltering behind packing cases, eyes gripping the horizon. Nights I bedded down among the cargo, which was mostly fleece and hide, tight-packed, stinking of life and death, being not fully cured.
I went up on deck one morning to find we were sailing upriver past the Isle of Dogs. I complained to Wandhaver and said this was not what I had expected.
“Extra cargo, son,” he said and winked.
We tied up at Southwark. The first couple of days I was fearful of being found out, and skulked and sulked below. On the third evening I could bear my own company no longer and went ashore.
The inn was in a slurry-filled street behind the waterfront. I found a quiet corner, thought to try English beer, willing to forget myself. A crowd of players came in, a couple of the lads still in rouge, with painted, pouting lips. Several I recognized from that gaudie night at Crichton Castle. They brought their swirl of energy, jokes, gossip, flirtation, anxiety and songs. Among them were the senior men, the hefty, imposing one, and the quiet man with lustrous eyes.
He hailed me, waved me to their table. It was just what I needed, to dissolve myself in drink, wit and make-believe. In the hubbub, he leaned close to me.
“So how did it end, the story of your troubled friend?”
“Badly.”
“You surprise me,” he said, dry as unsugared sack. “Some detail, perhaps?”
Something about him made one want to tell all, like a confession but without any judgement made at the end. His listening was its own absolution.
He bought me Rhenish wine—the beer was pish—and I told him how it had gone since we last met. Then he bought me port and I poured out what was left of my heart. Whatever I said, he soaked it in, then waited. The man was a sponge. His listening minded me of Buccleuch, except I sensed it was not earthly power that this man sought. Nor did he seem especially bent on Heaven.
“Those not already dead,” I concluded, “will be soon enough. Or scattered, exiled, dispossessed.”
“No ghosts?” A quick sideways keek at me. “Did you see any ghosts?”
“None.” I explained that in the Borderlands the living were frightening enough.
“Pity,” he said. “We can do ghosts—always makes them shit their pants.” He leaned back in his chair. His eyes wandered off and I feared I was losing his interest.
“Was your friend’s stepfather really trying to kill him?” he enquired casually.
“No. He had been very close to his mother.”
“Of course.”
“His brother, then his father had died—the latter in suspicious circumstance. He didn’t want to be heidsman, but he hated to be passed over. He was . . . troubled in mind. And in love.”
The senior man nodded. “Thought as much.”
Not a sponge, I thought, more a blotting pad. The drink—we were on brandy now—was turning my brain to pigswill.
“I can get you free entrance for tomorrow,” he said. “We are more reliable on our second afternoon. It’s a comedy, of sorts.”
I thanked him, but said we were sailing on the morn’s tide. In any case (this I did not say) I preferred to read plays rather than attend them.
“No matter,” he said. “The next one will be better.”
He smiled to himself, thanked me for my story, and turned back to the company. All were lively, many witty, some musical, a few romantic. I drifted and forgot myself, forgot the past, the deaths of all I held dear, as I was swept forth on a tide of conviviality and drink.
We heard the various bells chime a staggered midnight. The senior men looked to each other. “Rewrites!” they chorused, then left us to it.
I awoke face down on rancid fleece, with an actor’s prompt of Love’s Labours Won folded in my jerkin. The Sonsie Quine was heaving and moments later so was I, hurling beer, wine, port, brandy, venison pie, from the pit of my stomach over the rail into the gurly sea.
When even bile was emptied out, I clung to the rail on shaking legs, vacant, evacuated, searching into the grey for the coastline and my second life to appear.
Hawthornden
Yestreen I watched an elderly packman come up the drive with his living on his back. He came to the side door and slipped his load. He straightened up, swung wide his arms, looked around, relieved the carry was over. Then his head dropped. He looked lost and dead done before he raised the energy to put on his selling face and chap on the door.
I felt for him then, and now. What a sair fecht it was this morning to climb the four flights from the kitchen to this wee room. The destination achieved, the story near told, I felt at first relief and lightness, and then—now—great weariness.
That man travelled in knives, polishes, trinkets and household gee-gaws, and sold them with snatches of stories and song, and passing display of his injuries and wounds from ancient battles. Need I say more about our brotherhood?
Through near-on three decades I wandered through Europe from one patron to another, from Church to Law to Politics to Business, whatever trade needed a man with a good hand and many languages. I finessed wills, edicts, summaries and histories, corrected translations and checked galley proofs, amended sworn depositions. I have been scholar, private secretary, amanuensis, clerk, librarian.
What can most of us say of our lives but we have worked, been paid and eaten? I have stood a respectful distance from high men and petit scoundrels, ready to receive instruction or give advice (seldom heeded). When I moved through the Low Countries, it was in hope that one evening I would enter a well-run inn, and know at once by the homely ease, a certain smell, a brightness in the air and the glimpse of a yellow bonnet, that Elenora Jarvis had remade the Fortune Rigg.
It never happened. And everywhere I asked as I drifted through the years to Italy (keeping well clear of Rome) for news of a tall, fair son of Borders gentry, most likely a soldier. But Buccleuch was right, Adam Fleming was never seen again. Very likely they caught him within a few miles of Kirkconnel Lea, and his bones lie in some peat bank or bog. Yet they never found his horse, which would have taken more to dispose.
But it was widely reported that on a street in Milan a certain John (Clapper) Bell fell into violent argument with another Scotsman. The struggle was fierce and brief before Bell
coughed up his life in the dirt and the other man fled.
It might have been him. Certainly the story still lingers, though as we have learned that does not make it true. Though some folk tales say otherwise, I doubt if Adam ever came back to Scotland. It would have been insanely dangerous, and he had nothing to come back for.
When the Auld Hag finally died, Jamie Saxt united the Crowns, and as Buccleuch and even I had foreseen, that quickly put an end to the old reiving ways. Earl Angus reverted to Catholicism, was exiled to France an ill man, soon died.
Buccleuch was given a free hand. He promptly hanged many of his old comrades of the great raids, including those who had helped him free Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle. Dand Fleming was among them, protesting his innocence to the last. (Janet Elliot was not killed or ravished—I think Scott did rather admire her—and ended her days in a Flemish nunnery.) Others were exiled, a few bound themselves to Buccleuch. Most, including the Irvines, lost their lands and their followers. Within five years, none but Buccleuch and the King could raise armed men in any numbers.
Peace of a sort then came to the Borderlands. The peel towers and their balefires at the ready fell into disuse, inhabited only by pigeons. Most of the heidsmen’s strongholds were razed, their stones used to build farm cottages and byres. I hear Nether Albie is but a wee farm now, not a stone of the peel tower standing.
I have never known whether to think of Adam Fleming slipping from his horse and dying of his wound in a ditch near the Borderline, or growing old somewhere in Europe, on an army pension perhaps.
I never found out, and now never will. So I am at liberty to picture him as reported by the aged, sottish stableman at the Fortune Rigg. He claimed—and for the price of a drink, still does—that as a lad he saw Adam Fleming towards the end of the day of the shooting of Fair Helen Irvine, riding the Kielder way into a low red sun, clutching his side like a speared Christ.
I like to think (as some folk tales also say of the Christ) that he survived, went to another country, found work, met and married a good woman, had children and kept his incendiary thoughts to himself. Whatever happened, he was not heard nor seen again on this earth.
In my long lamplit nights, I see him on the roof of his tower, bouncing a tennis ball and acting the daftie. I see him sprushed up to go courting. I mind his breathing presence at my side during our night in the kirk, his hand coming over my arm. My last image of him is not of our hurried, bloody parting in the woods. It is, typically, something I never even saw—a tall figure riding uncertainly into the red sunset, clutching his wound.
Grave
Last night as I lay wheezing in the dark, the door scraped, a lamp flickered, and she came to me. She bent over me, her breath sweet, and my fetid garret smelled of river-willow. The ever-shifting whoosh of water and the reeshling of leaves came from her lips as they moved.
She leaned closer, till there was only her eyes looking into me. The lamp flickered, and in the depths of her eyes I saw gold flecks gleam. As what passes for my soul stood still, they began to drift, then swirled by some nameless current they poured into the black hole at the centre, to coalesce a bowl of light that overflowed without end into the dark.
“Fear not,” she whispered in my ear.
It was as though I had been waiting all my life—or at least since my mother breathed her last—for these words, and something amiss in my understanding of De Rerum Natura was made right.
Since that final visitation, whatever my approaching end holds, whenever it comes, my heart is whole and lichtsome. Naught affrichts me, for the incorruptible has kissed me atween the een.
I came back home, of course I did, once all were safely dead.
I met William Drummond at an Embra gathering, recognized him as my dead friend Fowler’s nephew, and quoted the opening lines of The Cypresse Grove to him. This led to an invitation to come to Hawthornden. Somehow I have never left.
A few months later I stood in the kirkyard as the rain dragged its murky shift across Kirkconnel Lea. I asked the sexton’s laddie where the keys might be for the vestry. He shrugged. In any case, the lock looked rusted solid. Or the Maxwell vault below?
“Nae Maxwells aboot here.”
It seemed in my long absence the parish had been amalgamated, and the wee kirk left abandoned ever since. It may have had too much of the Old Faith, or too much death about it. It was much reduced, practical folk needing good stone for building houses and byres.
I asked where Helen Irvine’s grave might be.
“The lady in the story, wha died?”
“Aye,” I said. “That one.”
He stopped among the seeding thistle and long grasses, parted them with his foot.
“They say she bides here.”
I looked down at a grey, unmarked stone, shaped like a coffin for a child.
“There was a heidstane, whiles, like,” the lad said. “But it was broken aince, and the next carried awa.”
By the remaining Bells, I supposed. Understandable. On the way here I had been shown Blackett House, a decent dwelling hard by their ruined stronghold and peel tower. The survivors must have made their peace with the new disposition.
I looked down at the moss-speckled stone, thinking not of what lay below but the one I had known, strong-willed and helpless as an imprisoned queen looking out at a world that cannot be hers.
An anonymous stone, and ballads and stories inaccurate or untrue—it seemed fitting, for few, if any, had truly known Helen Irvine.
“Ye kenned her?” the lad asked.
“Aye.”
He stared at me, then down at the glove I wear in company to cover my right hand. His eyes widened, he stepped back a pace.
“Are ye her beau, as hackit Bell tae pieces?”
I had to smile at that, and the boy turned and fled.
Alone I climbed the stone steps up to the vestry door. This is where they had emerged, where I had cried warning and she had flinched across her man and so died. The river was loud hard by, and the laurels still spread dark green where the shot had been fired and Bell and Fairfax met their bloody end.
My legs shook so. I sat on the topmost stair, leaned back against the door and looked my fill.
I did not return to Kirkconnel Lea again for some ten years. In the calm, douce order of Hawthornden, my thoughts shied away from it and all I had known there. Then when the leaves began to fall and fly last year, Drummond had one of his private soirées of music and recitation and flyting.
In a late hour, a skinny, intent youth stood to hitch the small pipes under his elbow. The drones locked onto their implacable threnody, summoning Fate and Doom, wind keening through broken walls, empty moor and dank forest, the skull and hourglass we Scots inscribe on our tombs to counter any pious suggestion of the life to come.
Most satisfying. I leaned forward in the shadows, much drink taken, and drank more. Then the chanter cut in, thin and high, and from the first few notes I knew what it must be. The lad opened his mouth and sang, his eyes fixed, like all true singers, on some further place.
O gin I were where Helen lies!
Night and day on me she cries;
And I am weary of the skies
Of fair Kirkconnel Lea.
Curst be the mind that thought the thought,
Curst be the hand that fired the shot,
When in my airms burd Helen dropt,
Wha died for sake of me . . .
I wept. Drummond alone noticed, and let me be. I wept at the grave truth of the singing, and at the sentimental guff of the words, with their chastity, noble sacrifice and sighing. This will not do. Besides, there was no mention of the others there, nor of the absent ones who made it happen.
I lay awake that night by creusie lamp, my right hand on fire. In the lamplight or with my eyes closed, it made no difference as those faces, scenes, delights and horrors paraded afresh before me, unburied. No brandy, no prayers, no wit and wisdom from Lucretius or Montaigne could silence or honour them.
I took him to the uninscribed grave and told him what I wanted. He gave me a queer look.
“I dinna like it,” he said. He looked into my face, at my gloved hand. “Are you he?”
My smile makes some uneasy. I hefted my purse in my good hand.
“I will need a legal undertaking,” I said. “A signed document, to be executed after my death, which will be soon.”
Like the lad a decade before him, he backed away. I trickled gold onto my palm, and that held him.
“One third on signing,” I said. “The remainder will come from my executor, once it is done.”
He stopped. Licked his lips.
“Yon’s an awfy lot of money for a plot and a stane,” he said.
“It is completely deleerit,” I agreed. “But it pleases me. Foreby, it will give folk something to talk about for a lang while.”
When I got back to Hawthornden, my right hand no longer burned. The next morn, heart swollen and girning like a pregnant sow, I wrapped up well and sat down in my rime-ridden garret chamber, and began.
And whiles the mason’s chisel has chipped away. Round Christ Mass a note came to say it was done. Another grey, small, coffin-shaped stone now lies in the sexton’s yard, awaiting my death and internment by Kirkconnel Lea. It is twin-companion to hers, except it is inscribed in the name of the one I loved all my life and could never have:
