A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  God forbid, thought Will, without a troop of men. Two. And possibly a wheeled gun.

  After they had broken fast and Will Elliot had ridden off, Mintie left off from her work, the feeding and cleaning and tasks that kept Powrieburn turning quiet and smooth as a greased wheel. She fetched the agreed price from the bound and locked iron coffer, afraid at how little it left.

  Still, she plunked it down in front of him, allowing some of the coins to spill forth to let him know what they were – a brace of them were bonnets, worth forty shillings each, the rest were shillings of the late king, with saltire, thistle and crown stamped proud on them. Batty’s eyebrows went up.

  ‘Five pounds, English, as agreed. No testoons.’

  ‘So I see,’ Batty said mildly and stirred the coins with one of his knitting needles. ‘I had no doubt of it – now put it back and deduct what you think is fair for my keep for another day. Perhaps two. Unless you are weary of my company.’

  Mintie was not – was, in fact, relieved if a little puzzled, for she didn’t think he was staying for love of the Powrieburn company, even her own. But she took the money back to the coffer, hearing the click of his needles as he knitted his endless sock, with the dog’s head on his knee, it cocking an eye and an ear, as if listening to Batty as he crooned like a sick crow.

  ‘Sing and play, Thomas, sing and play along wi’ me. And if ye dare to kiss my lips, sure of your body I will be…’

  * * *

  That night they spent as they had the others – playing Primero by the light of a tallow candle and the built-up fire, flushed with the heat at their front and chilled with the bite of increased cold at their backs.

  Mintie, wrapped warmly in a blanket, half drowsing, watched Batty knit with his one hand and his waggle of needles, while he hummed about True Thomas and now and then winked at her mischievously to show that he had no cards to speak of, but was talking them up to bluff her mother.

  She liked it, was aware that Batty soothed the loss of her father for her mother and everyone else in Powrieburn – herself included. She sat and listened to the mice scutter in the corners and the wind mourn in the eaves, sounds as soothing as Batty’s tuneless humming, and all of it a lullaby of Liddesdale. Once, snapped back to wakefulness by Batty’s sudden laughter, she was confused and thought her father was there again, wanted to run to him, to tell him about Agnes and her babe.

  But it was Batty, making her mother laugh with old tales of a German trickster. Mintie wondered, with a sudden sharp pang of coiling emotions she could not untangle, if Batty was wooing her ma.

  The next morning Will Elliot appeared, looking patched as hung mutton in the cold and wearing perplexity on the brows under his hat. He did not even dismount, but simply nodded to Batty as the pair of them talked in the yard.

  ‘It was as you said. If I were a canting priest I would accuse you of deviltry and have you burned for it, so close to the mark were you.’

  ‘Ach,’ said Batty, stroking his beard thoughtfully. ‘So you say. Well – is a Bill to be made on me?’

  ‘Not by me, nor the Keeper,’ Will declared vehemently. ‘I would not serve it and he knows that. Nor does he have enough men to spare to take you down, Batty.’

  He shifted, as if the saddle spiked him uncomfortably, for he did not like to speak ill of his employer and master, the Lord Hepburn.

  ‘I have it in mind that he will come at you sleekit, all the same,’ he went on, rushing the words from him as if they staled his mouth. ‘I would get you gone, Batty, and soon.’

  ‘Why would he do such a thing?’ Mintie demanded, appalled by what she had heard, and more so because she was aware that somehow she had brought it down on all their heads.

  ‘He would prefer me closeted,’ Batty said and glanced warningly at Will, who was about to argue that the Keeper would find Batty’s death easier and more final.

  It came to Will then that the ostler boy, poor innocent Wattie, was as mired in all this because Mintie had pretended to be him. Perhaps no one at Powrieburn was safe… there was a secret to be kept and Will, sick at heart, was not even sure he himself had not been marked by the Keeper. For the moment, he thought, I am the Keeper’s man; if there comes a point when he thinks that has changed…

  He was sure all of that was known to Batty, and they shared the brief, wordless exchange of it in a mutual nod before Will turned and rode off. Mintie saw Batty suck in his breath and then let it out in a long sigh.

  ‘Well,’ he said, falsely bright, ‘all is done and done. If you fetch me the remainder of that five pound, English, I will be gone and gone.’

  Powrieburn’s women wrung their hands and dabbed their eyes, and though Mintie was sad to see the back of Batty Coalhouse, she found their reaction surprising and put it down to the fact that his presence had been a comfort against retribution from the Whithaugh Armstrongs.

  Wattie, of course, did not understand why he was being sent away, even after being told, while Bet’s Annie, scowling furiously, all but accused Mintie of being jealous.

  Over all of it, though, was the question Mintie needed answering, the nail-nag irritation that would not let go, so that she stood at the stirrup of the Saul and looked up at Batty even as he awkwardly said his farewells.

  ‘What is worth all this?’ she asked. ‘And why?’

  Batty checked in his reining round, frowning down at her.

  ‘For what we have seen. Think on this, Mintie – shod geese and slipshod horses. Best if you say nothing of what you work out, all the same. Best if you never work it out at all. But the Keeper and the Laird of Hollows cannot depend on folk being witless.’

  Then he turned the Saul’s head and rode out of the yard, his laugh trailing behind him like a banner.

  * * *

  He rode north and east a little way, following a faint sheep track round the hunch of Tinnis Hill, deliberately avoiding the main routes but headed back to Berwick, five pounds in coin snugged up on the Saul’s haunch, with the nagging annoyance that he had perhaps not earned it entirely.

  Yet the doings of the likes of Hepburn and the Laird of Hollows were no concern of his, he argued. There were strangenesses at Hollows, for sure – the geese driven there were for no everyday dishes and had replaced ones already sent. Hollows was feeding more folk than it was used to and finer bred than any in the Borders.

  Andra’s forge was busy too, fixing horses whose shoes had been sucked off by the ground and bad weather of this part of the world, which is why no Borderer horse – the Saul included – had shoes at all.

  That confirmed the fine folk at Hollows, and the fodder wagons revealed that horses were there in large numbers – had not Mintie been puzzled over a lack of horses for sale in Liddesdale?

  They were all at Hollows, it appeared, with their fine-bred riders – English garrison men from Carlisle or even further south, Batty was certain, as well as gathered Armstrongs from both sides of the Divide, plus their supporters. It appeared to Batty that the Laird was mustering with a pack of southern English and a great deal of the sort of horses you would need to mount a raid. The Armstrongs could put two thousand men in the saddle, armed cap-a-pied, in a day and a bit, and it would be no great surprise if they turned out in the service of the English. Half of them would be English anyway.

  For why was what nagged Batty. There was war and the English were fresh from ruining a Scots army at Solway Moss, so the coming spring would brew the whole matter up anew. The English Deputy Warden, Wharton, was stirring up the Borders for Fat Henry in order to keep all those fine light horses out of the reach of the Scots and setting old feuds alight – Armstrongs against Scotts, Grahams against Armstrongs…

  Yet this was particular, a large planned Ride in a season when Riding was done with – the depth of winter was no raiding time. Batty shook his head. He knew there was no good in it, but rode with his chin down and his shoulders up, trying to convince himself that it was no business of his.

  He was so turning it this way a
nd that that he did not notice the riders until a flash of weak winter sun flared off a lance point into the corner of his eye, bringing his head up and the Saul to a halt; Batty squinted at them.

  Two men, riding easy and steady. Armed, one with a long lance slung to the back of his arm, and almost certainly both armoured with padding and leather. They would have latchbows too, Batty thought, though not guns; most Borderers mistrusted guns. Yet they were hardly going about some ordinary business.

  Batty turned the Saul more north, riding into the eastern lee of the stark, bleak mound of Tinnis, where the snow was patched more thickly; it took him only a moment or two of twisting backwards, grunting with the effort, to see that he was followed.

  He was not so worried all the same, for he had a good head start and the Saul, though yellow-toothed, was not entirely past the business of running. He fretted on the certainty that they had been watching Powrieburn and seen him leave and was afraid for the ostler boy; he hoped these men were more intent on hunting him than Wattie, who would be like a mouse to questing owls.

  Mind you, he added fiercely, the boy bliddy deserves a slap for what he has done to my stirrup; he shifted in the saddle, irritated by the leather having been notched one hole lower on his left side than his right. It unbalanced him, but he could not stop, nor reach down easily to change it.

  They rode on, the men behind neither speeding up nor slowing down, though Batty was sure they were after him. He could not quite understand it – until the other pair appeared ahead and slightly to his right, making him check and curse. Driven, by God, like a plodding milcher into a field.

  He looked around – the clear way out was a dart directly east, between the pairs before they closed, but that would be the intent and they would shut their jaws on him before he could get clean away. Though he hated to admit it, they would outrun him if they got that close, because the Saul was too old for seriously mad gallops over uneven ground, twisted with snow-covered bracken and studded with fetlock-turning tussocks.

  So he turned the other way and started up Tinnis Hill at a slant, to take the sting out of the climb. He headed through the deeper snow in its shadow and up into the brush and willow scrub that led to the great round crown of it, seeming as bare as a bald man’s nap, but deep with tangled winter moorland and drifted with snow that came up to the belly of the Saul.

  He glanced back once and grunted with the satisfaction of seeing the riders meet and stop, seeming to argue. Not happy about heading up to the Faerie hill, he thought, where steel-clawed wee horrors would tear them from the saddle into pats of meat and soak their Faerie hats in the blood that gave them their name – redcaps.

  Batty had been up the Tinnis before, chasing Ill-Made Wattie Bell who had robbed a Crozier farm in company with four others. Bell had been the last of them gathered up by Batty and thought himself safe up on the Faerie hill, believing only he had the iron in him to do it.

  He had been right surprised, Batty remembered, coming back from some outing to find Batty sitting in his cunning wee hidey-hole cave near one of the Faerie wells, whistling about the Queen of Elfland and pointing a dagg at him. All the iron had leached out of him then and he had come quietly enough – had scarce even made a grunt when he was hanged weeks later.

  For all that, even Batty could not prevent himself glancing round, fearful as some beldame for a second, before catching himself and shaking his head.

  ‘Faerie, by God,’ he muttered to himself and the Saul. Then he checked the wheeled flint and the priming on his daggs, one by one, as he turned the blowing horse in slow, plodding arcs up the hill; he planned to go on over it, and rode on until the Saul started in to wheeze with the effort of ploughing uphill through the snow.

  He was considering halting entirely when the Saul did it himself – suddenly enough to make Batty sway. Alarmed, he saw that they had ridden to the edge of a drop which looked solid thanks to the snow but was a steep gill, as if someone had taken a Jeddart staff to Tinnis and slashed a cut in it.

  He peered and marvelled. Two hundred feet down, he thought, and a slope with more steep than slant, choked with stunted gnarl and brush. He heard water at the bottom of it, a beck laughing its way through the ice that was trying to choke it.

  ‘Sharp,’ he told the Saul admiringly and patted the beast’s neck. The long rough coat was winter-friendly, but made for overheating, and Batty knew the Saul was all but done up and wondered if he could rest a while; he was not entirely free of sweat and pant himself.

  But not here, he thought, turning the horse south. Mayhap we can fool them, you and I, by skirting this beck and gill and doubling back the way we came, hidden by the bulk of Tinnis and a long, thin scar of stunted brush which was so thick even the bare branches were a fence to vision. He halted the Saul and lifted his left leg to take the weight off the stirrup, reaching round awkwardly with his only hand to get to the leather and raise it a notch.

  At least we can lose the annoyance of this, he thought—

  The Saul went sideways, at the same time as Batty heard a thunderous roar and a deep bell clang. He had time to realise that the ambuscade had been well ordered and the last part of it had been a man hidden up on Tinnis. A man with iron in him to sit alone on Tinnis and iron on him in the shape of a long gun.

  Then he and the Saul spilled on the ground, the horse with a harsh grunt, and Batty’s shout was drowned by the crash of undergrowth and the air hoiking out of him as he hit.

  In a whirl of images he saw the horse rolling on his back with all four feet in the air, saw the dissipating spurt of egret-feather smoke from the bracken and scrub, heard the echoes of the crack.

  Shot, by God, he thought – then he felt himself sliding and knew, with a horrible, sick certainty that he was going over the edge of the gill.

  The men were moving in packs like dogs, wary and ruffed, looking this way and that while the smoke swirled. Black that smoke, and greased with the stink of old lives, all the carts and pots and benches people had coveted.

  They did not covet them now, only their lives, shivering as they stood with shit on their legs, watching the Armstrongs and Bournes pillage everything.

  The Laird sat his horse and watched a shivering man and his trembling wife, though he did not see them and only turned to the screaming to make sure no one was being killed. As few deaths as possible, he had ordered, and did not care for any disobedience.

  Embers flew firefly trails in the dark. A shape, mounted, rode up and knuckled his steel cap; the Laird recognised Dandy Bourne of Clartyrigs, trailing riders as grim and armed as himself – and a woman.

  The Laird stirred; this was what he had waited for.

  ‘Megs, yer honour,’ Dandy said. ‘With a babe, as you said we’d find.’

  He signalled and Megs held out the basket for the Laird to take, which he did, peering in. He pinched out a spark landing dangerously close to the fuzz of red hair and saw the rosebud mouth squall. It wailed. He nodded to Megs and she scurried off; he looked meaningfully at Dandy, who blinked back like an owl.

  ‘Away, lads – Dandy, set your men free. Shake loose the border and plunder as ye will. Remember my tithes, mind… And if you take any of Buccleuch’s sheep, check them for scab. That goes through a herd like wildfire and I dinna care for Scott scabies spoiling my ain.’

  He looked down at the shivering man and his trembling wife, both torn from their house in nightshirts.

  ‘Jock’s Dandy Scott,’ he said, and the man turned misery up at him; his beasts were already vanishing and the inside of the house was being thrown out into the yard for people to plunder – chests, chairs, pewter plates, all of it.

  ‘Wicked Wat wilnae be pleased,’ he went on amiably, ‘at someone so careless with doors as yourself. Nae matter – you are in good company, for a score of your kin for miles aroon are so treated.’

  He leaned down. ‘Tell Buccleuch he kens where to find me – if he has the stomach for it.’

  He turned away, listening to the sw
eet sound of the baby Queen of Scots wailing while scores of Armstrongs and Bournes and others went off to steal cattle and sheep and everything else they could from his arch-enemy, Wat Scott of Buccleuch.

  He had done it. He had carried out Fat Henry’s lunatic plan and stolen a Queen. Now all that was needed was to keep that secret until the babe had been spirited south to England.

  The Laird rode into the moonless night, his men a hedge of Jeddart staffs around him, and wondered why he shivered at the memory of Batty Coalhouse’s stare. Then he shook it from him; Coalhouse and everyone else who might have seen what was in and around Hollows would not be a problem soon enough.

  * * *

  There was a sour feeling round Powrieburn, sauced by the vanishing back of Batty Coalhouse followed shortly after by the pinch-faced Wattie, his feet slung into unaccustomed brogues laced up round his ankles for the walk, and swaddled in a cloak gifted to him by Mintie’s mother. He was on his way to his Crozier relatives in Bellsyetts, which everyone hoped was a safe enough distance.

  Mintie doubted it, but said nothing, just as she swallowed any comment on the cloak gift, particularly as she remembered it on her father and the lump that brought to her throat stopped her speaking entirely. So she watched in silence as Bet’s Annie fussed and her mother promised Wattie he could return ‘as soon as this unpleasantness is by us’.

  Her voice was soft and steady, but Mintie saw the tremble in her hand and the waver of her smile and knew her mother was not nearly as strong with this as she was making out.

  No one was. The thought of what Mattie of Whithaugh and all the Armstrong kin they could call on might do brought a sullen horror on them all, not to mention that they had seemingly angered the Hepburn Earl of Bothwell, Keeper of Liddesdale and their liege lord for Powrieburn, no less.