A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  Mintie did not know the young man working the hammer and anvil at all, which puzzled her, but he nodded politely enough, set the hammer down and wiped a hand down the stained front of his leather apron.

  ‘I am Geordie’s Eck,’ he declared with a smile. ‘Wed on to Andra’s girl, Agnes, this year. He bids me to make you welcome.’

  Mintie was stunned. She had known Agnes all her life, though did not see her often and only when Andrew Crozier brought her to Powrieburn along with his farrier’s tools, for her father would not take horses into the Debatable to be shod unless he had to. Such horses, needing shoes at all, were a station above the usual Marches mounts and so even more valuable.

  Married? She is younger than me, Mintie thought.

  ‘Where is Andrew?’ asked Batty, while Will was thinking that Andrew was well informed as to who was coming up on him and from where. Which was no surprising revelation about a man living where he did.

  ‘In back,’ Geordie’s Eck said, jerking his head for emphasis and then grinning at the sudden mad ratchet of cackle and honk that erupted. ‘Shoeing geese.’

  ‘Have you a stirrup strap?’ demanded Will Elliot. ‘Or leather to make same?’

  He glanced bitterly at Mintie and added, ‘Mine broke.’

  While they fell to discussing it, Mintie followed Batty through the cruck lean-to covering the forge fire, out into the yard formed by a protective huddle of mean houses. It was a riot of geese, though there were only eight of them, being driven – with difficulty and protest – down a stick run, through hot pitch, then sand and grit and, finally, cold water to soothe and fix the mess on their feet.

  They did not like it, and it took the combined efforts of Andra, his wife Bella, and a brood of four boys, all noisy, tumbling, laughing pups who got in the way more than helped.

  The Goodwife straightened when she saw them, tugged her soiled apron and shoved a stray grey tendril back under her cap.

  ‘Mintie Henderson – good to see you. How is your mother? Why are you dressed as a laddie?’

  ‘She is with me,’ Batty declared, as if that was all that was needed.

  Bella looked uneasily from him and back to Mintie, while the geese flurried and stretched their necks with a honking series of cackles which all but drowned the conversation. The last of them flapped indignantly through the run and the boys cheered.

  ‘We are out with the Land Sergeant at Hermitage,’ Mintie added, ‘looking for news of my stolen horses and the man who killed my father.’

  Her voice, to her horror, caught at the end of this, and Bella, having heard of her tragedy and then forgotten, flung a hand to her mouth and was at once crease-faced with concern, gathering Mintie into the stale sweat smell of her, patting her like a dog. They went off towards the nearest of the cruck houses, leaving Batty with Andra, who made a last show of scattering his boys with good-natured curses for their cheek and noise.

  ‘Did you see the man?’ Batty persisted, and Andra blew out his cheeks and made a play of thinking, as if a man riding hard and trailing a superb specimen of horseflesh arrived at his door every other day.

  ‘Aye, I might have seen the man – the horse anyways. I wondered why the Fyrebrande was in the Debatable with someone I did not know well. But who are you? Will Elliot is known here, but you are a stranger to me.’

  ‘Batty Coalhouse,’ he replied, and Will Elliot came sauntering through, dangling leather like a dead snake and in time to hear the last – and see the blanch on Andra’s worn face which showed he was no stranger to the name.

  ‘Andra,’ Will said and nodded.

  ‘Land Sergeant Elliot,’ Andra gave back awkwardly.

  The long moment persisted, filled with the mutter of outraged geese and the shrill of quarrelling boys.

  ‘Did you wonder enough about the Fyrebrande and this chiel,’ Will persisted, ‘to inquire where he went with another man’s horses?’

  Andra had the grace to lower his eyes, then he shrugged.

  ‘No business o’ mine,’ he answered determinedly and Will was hardly surprised. Saw nothing. Heard nothing. Do not know the man. It was the litany of the Border.

  ‘Did you see which way he went at least?’

  Andra waved a loose hand in the direction of north. Will thanked him politely enough, then went to fix the leather on his stirrup. Batty watched Mintie come back out of the cruck house and thought she had a strained look – but a smoke-reeked hole like that would make anyone blanch.

  The inside of the howf never bothered Mintie, though she marvelled at how people could live in such a dark, stinking place and never want to at least change the rushes. The smoke from the pit fire was allowed into the thatch, to kill the vermin, rather than be sucked out of a sensible roof hole, so the place was an eye-stinging, lung-burning blue mist – yet light enough for her to see Agnes on a bed of stained blankets.

  She was well enough but near her time, and Mintie only managed to stammer a few trite phrases, mesmerised by the greatness of her belly. When she stumbled clear of it, the vision of that swell stayed with her.

  A child. Agnes was pregnant and a year younger than herself; Mintie found her hands on her own flat stomach and could not speak for the thoughts tumbling in her, all at once revulsion and wonder.

  Will Elliot fixed his stirrup and then hauled his back and breast out of its sack, making a great play of it, while Batty sat his horse and smiled. When Will had fitted it on, with Mintie’s help, he clapped his iron helmet on his head and climbed aboard his nag, scowling truculently into Batty’s grin.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If I am to stick my head in a crowd of armed Armstrongs at Hollows, I had better look the part.’

  ‘Just so,’ Batty agreed mildly. ‘Mars himself, no doubt of it. By God, someone will be tempted to try a shot at yon lobster shells you are wearing, just to see if they are proofed.’

  ‘The bugger with Mars,’ Will grunted, adjusting his new stirrup leather and trying not to look at Mintie to see her reaction to his oath. ‘I wish only to look like the Land Sergeant of Hermitage and give them some thought on who they are shooting and the consequence of it.’

  They rode in a mourn of windsong on the white-patched rolling hills, skirting the rimed woodland, heading for Canobie and on to Hollows, lair of the Armstrongs and site of the strongest fortalice in Eskdale.

  All the way, Mintie thought of Agnes and how, not so long ago, they had spent a day making straw dolls and cradling them. Now both of us have changed, she thought – she has gained husband and bairn, I have lost a father. Is this what it means to grow up?

  She was so lost in it that she did not realise Jaunty had stopped for a good minute, and when she looked up they were at Canobie’s brig and looking across the patched snow and the half frozen tumble of the Esk to something new.

  A mill had been built where nothing had been before and they all stared at it for a long time. Mintie turned to Batty, feeling something strange and tense in the man, seeing his glazed stare. He was looking at the slow-turning waterwheel, but Mintie was sure he was seeing something else.

  ‘A mill,’ Will said and then glanced sideways up to where the great nail of Hollows Tower struck arrogantly into the sky, perched above a loop of the Esk and with the new harling on the stone-built part of it as bright as the snow itself.

  ‘In stone,’ he added and shook his head. ‘No fixed raisings, by God. The king had his snook cocked by these Armstrongs right enough.’

  Mintie knew that the present laird’s father had started the tower in timber – though it had been burned out under him by the English. He had thought his own king would be more considered and helpful over it, and so, arrogantly, he had started rebuilding it and broke off only to attend a meeting with the young King James, thinking that the deed being done, the royal boy would simply stamp his seal on the matter.

  Johnnie Armstrong had arrived flaunting a finery of clothes and entourage which outdazzled royalty – and outraged a seventeen-year-old boy-king with bad sk
in and deep-rooted fears, only recently freed from the prison grip of other flaunting lords, the Douglases. So the young King James had ordered Johnnie seized.

  Mintie had heard that Johnnie had pleaded the conditions of the truce, then offered half the blackmeal rents he took – a sum so vast it had only made the spotty youth of a king more wrathful, so that he swore Johnnie Armstrong would hang. Arrogant to the end, Mintie had heard that Johnnie’s last bitter laugh into the petulant glare of King James had been on how foolish it was to expect ‘grace from a graceless face’.

  Now Johnnie’s son, it appeared, had no less arrogance or riches. The Laird’s Jock, now Laird of Hollows himself, had denied King James the Armstrong horse for war – which meant a deal of others who all owed the Armstrongs stayed away as well. The king’s army had been defeated and the king himself was dead of shame, so that thirteen years after Johnnie Armstrong had been hanged, the Name had its revenge. That was a cold and relentless vengeance any man would have to consider when dealing with the Armstrongs.

  With only a child on the throne – and a female one at that – Hollows was being finished in stone quarried from the nearby rock, with enough left over to build a mill. It was clear what the Laird of Hollows thought of matters in Edinburgh.

  ‘Corn or wool?’ Will mused. ‘I hear grinding, but not tilt hammers walking cloth, so I am thinking corn.’

  Mintie heard Batty shift, with a shudder like hare shaking itself free of a weasel stare.

  ‘Neither,’ he answered. ‘It corns right enough, but not grain.’

  He pointed.

  ‘See that? Three stone walls on the lower floor and one of wood. That’s the weak wall.’

  Will stared for a moment longer, while Mintie was simply bemused. Then the import hit the Land Sergeant and he jerked as if stung.

  ‘Powder. It is a powder mill, by God’s hook.’

  ‘It is.’

  Mintie looked from one to the other and finally asked, at which Batty shifted and turned to her, his face grim as a headsman’s axe.

  ‘It corns black powder, mills it into grains fit for calivers, pistols and larger. If it were not winter and the wind blowing from us, you would taste the stink of it, like the Earl of Hell’s hall. That will be the sulphur. That big pile, all nice and clean white, is actually dung with snow on it, which is how you get the saltpetre. That store yonder probably houses the charcoal. One to three to nine gets you powder, all perjink and according to the Liber Ignium.’

  Mintie did not know much Latin, save that which came up in legal documents, but she could make a lunge at it and, hesitantly, came up with ‘flaming book’.

  ‘Book of Fires,’ Batty corrected. ‘It has the recipe for powder in it and was writ by Auld Nick himself, some say, in order to visit Hell on God’s good earth.’

  ‘You know a lot,’ Will pointed out suspiciously and Batty nodded.

  ‘I do, for it was my task, ingenieur like my da afore me. I know every gun from a Cannon Royal to a Rabinet – which is the Spanish sizing. There are twelve of them, less for the French and sixteen for the English. I know bombards, petards, and how to cut a slow match to the second.’

  ‘Is that what cost your arm?’

  Mintie had blurted it out before she knew it and clamped her lips afterwards until they went bloodless white.

  Batty turned and showed his teeth at her in what might just as well have been snarl as smile, then waggled the stump of his missing arm.

  ‘In a way. If you survive them, such mistakes are instructive.’

  Then he widened the grin until his beard end almost touched his nose.

  ‘But it was not black powder that did this. It was Maramaldo.’

  Mintie did not know who or what a Maramaldo was and did not pursue it; neither, she noticed, did a thoughtful Will.

  Will said nothing but thought long on it. He had known the German who sired Batty had been a mercenary, but not exactly what – an Ingenieur was a skilled prize for any army, a man who knew powder and how to site the big guns for sieging, and how to blow up walls, or undermine them if he could not. His estimation of what Batty had seen and done went up a few notches.

  ‘Why are they dressed so curious?’ Mintie asked, seeing the workers pausing and staring back at them suspicious and wary. They had kertches on their heads and shuffled in wooden pattens in the snow, their hose and shirts loose; they looked to freeze, she thought, and said so.

  ‘No iron on them, on belts or shoes. Sooner freeze than spark,’ Batty answered and Mintie realised the significance. In a few more minutes she had learned that the powder store was called a magazine and was probably the little shed to the left. It was only little because the bulk of it was underground for safety and would be packed with milled cakes of black powder.

  That kept the stoor down, for sometimes Auld Nick leered and caused even the dust to blow up, for no reason at all other than devilment. Those milled cakes would be gently teased – corned – back into grains and dried, the result being a fine powder that would not separate back into the parts it was made from.

  ‘It will bang and not fizz,’ Batty ended, and then, musing softly and almost to himself, added: ‘It is a rare thing, a powder mill. I do not think there is another in all Scotland.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Will said with ironic admiration. ‘By God, you can walk some muscle onto your wits listening to you, Batty Coalhouse. Now tell us what we do about them.’

  He pointed to the riders no one had noticed, ambling soft through the snow and coming from the direction of Hollows. A good ten, with upright Jeddart staffs winking sharp leers to the weak winter sun and scowls clapped low on their brows.

  ‘Steady and quiet,’ Batty said, seeing Will edge a hand to his hilt. ‘Mintie, get behind us a wee bittie if you please. Keep your face lowered under your hat.’

  She saw him, casual as smiling, rest his sole hand on the cantled pommel, an inch from the curving butt of the horse-holstered dagg; a slide of cold went down her, from neck to the crack of her buttocks.

  The riders were soft-hatted, but padded with jacks and leather; Will Elliot eyed the Jeddarts they carried with a sour look, for one similar to them had taken off two toes of his left foot and four years had not dulled the memory of the pain.

  Eight-foot iron-bound shafts, they had a spear point and a thin sliver of blade on one side, with a hook on the other. In capable hands, they could be deadly on foot or on fast horse – and the reivers of the Borders were, if nothing else, some of the finest light horsemen in the country, which was why rival kings sought them.

  The man riding at their front wore only a bonnet, cocked at an angle on the forehead of his brosy face. He was bluff and round, with russet hair and beard, a doublet of striped red and darker crimson, plain hose, and his big knee boots folded down to the ankle. A black cloak swathed him, the white fox collar of it coddling his big chin.

  The Laird in person, Mintie thought, for she had seen him once or twice in her life when he had ridden out to Powrieburn for horses. Her da had treated him politely enough, but Mintie had seen that he did not like the Laird of Hollows much; she was suddenly glad she was swathed to the eyes in cloak, with a hat pulled down to her brow. She was afraid of being looked at by him, as if the act of him singling out a body was the kiss of death.

  Which it may well be, she thought with a sudden chill.

  The light grace and unarmoured style of the Laird of Hollows made Batty a little easier, though he never took his eyes from the man, nor his hand further than an inch from the saddle holster. Yet he nodded polite greeting and had it coldly returned.

  ‘Land Sergeant Elliot,’ the Laird declared expansively, turning to Will. ‘You are some way out from Hermitage and lightly entouraged for a hot trod, I think.’

  ‘No trod,’ Will replied, feeling the prickle of sudden sweat break out along his spine at what he had originally intended to bring – a hot trod meant a manhunt and every rider at the Laird’s back was a Debatable outlaw who had experienc
ed being so hunted at one time or another. I was probably in the pack chasing them, Will thought, feeling their eyes like claws. He was glad now that he had never brought men with him.

  ‘We have a Bill, nevertheless,’ he went on, pushing it like an uphill boulder. ‘On one Hutcheon Elliott – two “T”s – who has murdered the Master of Powrieburn and stolen a horse called the Fyrebrande.’

  ‘I had heard,’ the Laird said, stroking his beard with a fine-gauntleted hand. As if he was some considering judge, Will thought bitterly to himself, instead of an outlaw baron. Yet an outlaw baron with all the powers of judge, jury and hangman in the Debatable, he corrected a moment later, which it was always best to keep in the forefront of your mind.

  ‘I am sorry for Powrieburn’s loss. I hear that the daughter, Araminta, is much favoured these days as a result.’

  Mintie held her breath and the Laird’s eyes swung to Batty, resting like brief lamps on her as they passed.

  ‘I hear also that one suitor has been rebuffed,’ the Laird continued mildly. ‘To death. You must be Batty Coalhouse.’

  ‘Unless you are familiar with another one-armed man,’ Batty replied flatly, ‘then it is me myself.’

  ‘I have Sorley Armstrong up at my hall, drinking and weeping into his mug about the loss of his cousin, Fingerless Will of Whithaugh. A father in Whithaugh also weeps, and sisters and mothers too. Clem Armstrong may never walk or ride again.’

  He stopped and was clearly waiting for Batty to put some sort of case, but when nothing came back at him, his eyebrows rose a little, which was volumes from him.

  ‘Sorley tells of ambuscade and how he fought like a tiger,’ the Laird went on, ‘despite being attacked by others from the house and even though he and his kin had arrived in friendly fashion and meaning no harm. He has come to me seeking redress.’

  Batty shifted slightly, but Mintie saw that was only so he could rest his hand lightly on the side of his saddle holster; his little finger, spatulate and hairy, was snugged up to the butt of the pistol, and Mintie watched the Laird’s eyes flick to that, then back to Batty’s face. He did not seem annoyed or angry, simply amused, and that tightened the flesh on Mintie’s arms.