by Robert Low
The little Mary, Queen of Scots, opened her bright eyes and yawned her rosebud mouth sleepily up into Mintie’s stricken face.
Powrieburn
Later that night
Towards dawn the door splintered, a great sliver flying off the inside of it, leaving the wood bright as moonlight in the crusie-lit dim. The men outside heard it and gave a hoarse cheer, quickly hushed by a snap of voice.
‘We need this ended, Hen,’ growled another. ‘We are already late for Netherby and it is snowing now, by God.’
‘Silence on that, you blatherer…’
There was a pause, then the voice both Batty and Will knew belonged to Hen Graham raised itself a little.
‘Surrender now and hand over Batty Coalhouse, who is Billed for the murder of Will Armstrong of Whithaugh. The women of Powrieburn will not be harmed. Are you listening, Mistress Mintie? If you do not, it will be March law, which is to say the Law of Deuteronomy.’
There was the bang of a shutter from upstairs and the scrabble of leather on slick, sliding cobbles as men scattered from the expected blast of the caliver. Instead, they got Mintie’s mother and the peppershot of her scathing was almost as harsh, seemed to swirl the flakes of snow.
‘Mintie is safe gone, ye hempie-deedit kithans,’ she shrilled, a sound to ruche up armflesh like a nail on a slate. ‘Ye custrin yaldson… ye will hemp yer necks for this, so ye will, and the Land Sergeant of Hermitage will stand witness to it.’
‘Ah, well,’ sighed Batty, ‘there ends our wee surprise.’
‘Shame,’ agreed Will with a tight grin splitting his beard, ‘but, my, she can curse, can she not?’
There was a pause after Mintie’s ma’s blast – spoiled a little by the sound of her bursting into hysterical tears at the end of it – then Hen Graham cleared his throat.
‘Are you in there, Will Elliot?’
‘I am, you two-faced hunchbacked wee rat,’ Will answered mildly. ‘And by the time I am done, you will swing. There is no Bill on Batty Coalhouse that is perjink, since I never made it and I am the only one who can.’
‘The Keeper did,’ blustered Hen, as men muttered uneasily. ‘And since you stand with a black murderer, then you are as guilty. Set to, you men!’
‘Who are you to give orders to Armstrong men?’
The voice was deep and thick with truculence, but Hen Graham did not need to struggle long for a reply; someone else cut through his bluster.
‘He is the Keeper’s wee dog and of no account at all,’ it declared, and both Will and Batty knew it at once as Dand Ker.
‘But I am of account,’ Dand went on, soft as plague breath, ‘and if you want to argue the bit, speak again, Hen Graham. I warn you, though, I will have so many teeth from your head for it that beldames will have to suck your meat soft from now until the day you no longer eat.’
There was a silence, then Hen recovered his saw-whine.
‘Nothing meant by it,’ he muttered, and you could hear the uncertainty in his attempts at firmness, the fake depth and shredded dignity; Will grinned at Batty in the shadow-dancing dim.
Then Dand told them to set to and the ram splintered the door again.
Hollows Tower
That same night
Mintie tried, but it was clear the joy of bairn was all over Agnes, smearing her grief and unlikely to be wiped away by the truth.
‘They have stolen the babe,’ she whispered, a repetition that was making no difference. ‘A Queen, Agnes. The mite will have to go back to its own in the end. You must know that.’
This last speared Agnes, so that she looked up from her bliss, frowning.
‘I am caring for her. The Lady of Hollows said so.’
Mintie glanced to one side, where the Lady of Hollows, too normal and too bright, sat talking with her ‘ladies’ in a brittle banality which fooled none, least of all herself.
‘The entire land will be out hunting this bairn on behalf of her ma,’ Mintie declared. ‘Who is the Dowager Queen Mary of Guise, if you need reminding. The Lady of Hollows is neither here nor there next to her, and when wee Queen Mary goes back, the Lady will swing for it. Her and her Laird.’
‘It appears to me that you are upsetting this wet nurse.’
The voice made Mintie jerk and stare up into the agate eyes of the Lady Margaret of Hollows. Red-rimmed they were, the cheeks beneath them planched and on the wither; she might seem dry as an old stick, Mintie thought, but she moves swift and does not creak at all.
‘It seems to me,’ the Lady went on coldly, ‘that you need to be elsewhere, or you will curdle the bairn’s dinner.’
Someone sniggered at the back of her, and Mintie, recovering as best she could, rose up and smoothed her hair, a gesture that gave her a measure of confidence. This ‘lady’, she thought to herself, is more fearful than I am, more lost than this bairn. Her proud, golden Laird is not the man he was, if ever he was that at all, and she is living beyond the means of her heart, trying to keep up appearances of an era beyond repair.
‘They will come for you and the stones of Hollows will not save you,’ she said levelly. ‘What were you thinking to steal a Queen? If the babe is harmed—’
‘The bairn will not be harmed,’ the Lady retorted harshly, then flapped one ringed hand. ‘She is only to be wed, that’s all. To a prince, no less. Bringing peace to the land before war ruins us all. It is for the greater good.’
Mintie did not understand the greater good, only saw folk jigging about for advantage and profit for themselves. She said as much, and from the sag in her, knew that the Lady of Hollows had seen it too.
For all that, the Lady drew herself up and had one of the fornicatrices fetch Hutchie Elliott. When he slouched in, the Lady indicated Mintie with a haughty, dismissive wave.
‘Take this girl to the undercroft and place her there for safekeeping.’
Hutchie smiled his dazzling smile, winked at the gauds and then took Mintie by the elbow out of the room and down the wind of stairs, down and round and down into the dark.
She knew what he would do in the dark of the deep undercroft, knew it as she knew the saw-rasp cry of geese as they fork the sky, knew it as she recognised an individual horse by the way it whinnied. She wanted to scream. She tried to scream. But her throat closed around the sound, so that the ‘no’ came out strangled and faint.
‘Shush, wee Mintie,’ he said, as soft as if he soothed a trembling lamb. She felt metal on her neck and saw the wink of his knife.
‘Please,’ she said and was appalled at the fear in her own voice. ‘Don’t hurt me.’
‘Just in case,’ he said and grinned his white grin, startling in the undercroft dark.
‘In case you decide to draw blood on me, like last time,’ he whispered, as if calming a child.
He pushed Mintie against the rough stone of the wall, tomb cold and so thick it swallowed noise, so that the hand on her mouth was not needed and he took it away again. Then he showed Mintie the knife, a small eating one with an antler handle.
‘You drew blood on me once,’ he said. ‘I could kill you for it, but I won’t if you do what I say.’
His free hand took her round the shoulders and the knife hand vanished; Mintie felt the looseness and knew he had cut the lacings of her kirtle. He drew the knife back and caressed her cheek with it, ran it up to remove the kertch, pins and all, so that her hair fell free to her shoulders. Mintie trembled then, felt more naked than a moment later, when the top of the kirtle slid from her shoulders and exposed her breasts. Cold and terror nubbed the ends like an invite and she tried to cross her arms on her body’s betrayal, but he would not let her.
She was shaking hard, but too terrified to weep, though a moan broke from her when he forced the kirtle down, then sent the petticoat to puddle at her feet. She wore no smallclothes, so the lie of menses would not work.
‘Wait,’ she said and started to flail, weak with panic.
‘Hush,’ he said, harshly now, and there was a sensation tha
t her mind ran hard to catch up with. When it did, she put her hand to her neck, where the knife had touched. It felt sticky. She looked at the bright red smear on her hand. Her blood.
Her blood. She looked down and saw more of it on her crumpled kirtle, and her mind wavered as if it was no more substantial than a haze of heat. Never get the stain oot o’ that, she thought, not proper. Ruined it is.
In that instant everything came into sharp focus, as if God had brightened the lens of the world. Ruined like me, she thought. I am fifteen years old, and this is the day of my death.
She felt his hands on her naked breasts, but it did not seem quite real. She saw the blade wavering, winking its edged leer out of the corner of her eye, felt the scrape of the wall on her bare back.
But that was only her body. The rest of Mintie had slipped away, up the curl of stone stairs, up and round and up into the rafters of Hollows and beyond, away out of this place, out of time.
There she watched, suspended and detached, feeling neither fear nor panic, seeing it as she had once seen the two-headed calf at the Lammas Fair, or the mummers in the play. She felt only a slight pity for the girl she saw, backed to the cold stones while Hutchie Elliott fumbled at the lacings of his breeks.
When he struggled his hose to his knees, he pushed Mintie against the wall with his body, tried to get it in her, standing there. When that didn’t work, he turned her around, face to the wall, but that worked no better, and he growled then, pushing her to hands and knees.
That worked. The pain was only a faint thing, as if it did not belong to her at all. After a while of it, he turned her over and put it in her again. He moved fast, his face staring at a point beyond her head, at the rough stones of the wall. He seemed detached, almost disinterested, and she saw the little pewter medallion on a chain round his neck, swinging in rhythm, back and forth, back and forth into her face.
He suddenly kissed her, but would not look in her eyes.
‘D’you like this, wee Mintie?’ he demanded, and from her eyrie she was amazed. What was this? He is treating me as if we were courting, she thought, like he thinks we would be together after this.
With a shock, she realised that this for him was courting.
He froze once, at some noise real or imagined, and put his hand over her mouth and brought the knife back into it.
‘Hush, now – keep quiet.’
Eventually he took his hand away and pushed her to the floor again.
She lost her sense of time after that and did not even know when it slipped away, leaving her in the undercroft like a sealed tomb, like something out of a tale told round a warm fire to frighten bairns.
She knew when it stopped and he left her, panting and pulling his breeks up. Mintie got her own clothes, though the kirtle was ruined with blood and could not be re-laced, so she held it round her with the wrap of her arms. They did not feel like her arms. Nothing felt like it belonged to her, save the slow, insidious realisation of the pulse of pain.
Hutchie smoothed his hair and grinned his white grin.
‘Told you I would take you,’ he said, then put the eating knife to her arm and pushed the point in just enough so she could feel it.
‘Not so proud now, wee Mintie,’ he said. ‘Know who is master now.’
He stepped back from her, exposing the stairs, and she almost fell, almost lost the use of her legs at the idea of bright. Sun. Air.
‘Say nothing,’ he ordered, looking her in the face for the first time. He licked his thumb and rubbed at the blood on her neck. He smoothed her hair.
‘I am away soon,’ he said. ‘Away with the English when they take the bairn south to Fat King Henry to be wed to his son. Say nothing of this to anyone when I am gone.’
She felt sick at the sound of herself, at the whining-dog eagerness to please.
‘I won’t. I promise.’
‘Och, I will miss you when I am away, wee Mintie,’ he said, almost cooing. Then he kissed her on the lips and swaggered away.
Powrieburn
Around the same time
The undercroft stank of dung and fear. The truth is, Will thought, that it reeks only of animal because my arse muscle is strong. It would not have mattered much to the stink if he had shamed himself, for it was so pungent that he stood at the rearmost of the beasts crowded into the walkway between wall and stall and breathed through his mouth.
The rearmost beast was one of the brace of milchers and he had heard Bet’s Annie cooing to it, calling it ‘beautiful Maggie’. Maggie, with her smeared hindquarters and desperate, lowing panic, was anything but beautiful, Will thought.
Batty watched the horse next to it, which was standing in the open yett gate and trembling at every booming smash on the splintering outer door. The noise was almost under its nose, and for all it had been the late master of Powrieburn’s placid riding horse, the gelding was snorting and trying to back off, only to bump into the beast behind. It did not help that the dog danced at its hooves, birling and barking alternately.
Only the Saul, wheezing and too weak for all this, was in his stall, and Batty turned to soothe him with quiet murmurs, while checking the winding on his dagg. He never soothed the other beasts, though; for this desperation to succeed needed all the beasts the opposite of quiet.
The bar broke in two with a rending crash and the great double doors of Powrieburn swung wide. Beyond, dark shapes, panting and feral, hung on the ram, while others crowded past them, expecting to have to break the inner iron-grilled door.
Batty fired the dagg, a great fizzing boom of white smoke and noise. He dropped it and barely had his hand on his sword hilt when the bellows and roars from Will Elliot, the smoke and the flame and the mad barking finally reached the point, like a slow match on a charge.
The beasts, snorting and squealing, sprang forward for escape through the already opened grille of the yett, through the broken door and into the snow-slush yard – and over anything in their path. The maddened dog rushed through with them, biting and snarling.
Will Elliot saw Batty lurch out of the Saul’s stall just as the shitty end of the last bawling cow trundled past; he balked Will’s own rush and the pair of them crowded through the yett door almost shoulder to shoulder.
Batty was first, hopping nimbly over a limp bag of rags on his way out into the courtyard, swinging his stiff leg, his sole fist filled with the basket hilt of a notched sword.
Will did not see the bag of rags, stumbled over it and almost went on one knee, and was cursing and rising when he saw the face, twisted unnaturally to one side and the one eye left to it showing a cracked bewilderment.
The beasts had not been kind to Francie Bourne, Will Elliot saw, swallowing the bile at what hooves had done to him. He would win no more Truce Day shoots.
Out in the yard the wind was snell and swirled the snow. Figures danced and shouted; torches flickered. Something went off with a bang and a flare in the dark, and Will’s heart lurched at the thought of Batty down and himself being left with all these shadows.
Someone staggered towards him cursing, and he slashed, feeling his blade catch, seeing the man reel away screaming and holding his neck where something blacker than the night spread like a stain.
Will heard Batty then, roaring in the dark, and where the voice was, sparks flew from ringing steel.
‘You bastards – meddle with me, is it? Who dares meddle with me?’
Will started towards the sound and a shadow came out of the night, forcing him to turn and shoot the latchbow in his left fist. The bolt took the man square on his metalled jack and the range was close enough to knock him off his feet and all the wind from him. Will heard the frantic, high, wheezed whimper and felt a savage joy – that has cracked a rib bone.
Someone else came at him, and he hurled the bow, so that the man flung up one arm and had it smack the bone of it; cursing, he reeled away, only to let yet another move in.
This one was big, in battered pot helm and leather jack padded with straw a
nd badly used, so that wisps of it stuck out and made him look like a mad scarecrow. He had greasy black hair spilling out from under the helmet, dripping with the sleeting snow, and his beard was a tangle, pearled like a lady’s hair with a net of melting-ice gems.
The sweat-reek rose from him like steam, he had a scar down one cheek and another across his nose, which was bent sideways like a badly-made gate. The wound was so recent it wasn’t yet healed from the scab. When it did, it would become one more in a patina of nicks and little pocks.
Will danced with him, seeing the yellow bared teeth and the two missing on the left side, the incongruous little dangle of pearl earring, as if it compensated for everything else and made him a fine-faced courtier.
Nothing would do that. His was the face of a man who had lived fight and raid all his life, with the hands that held the buckler and broadsword scarred and scored from countless other battles. If I cut one off, Will thought, it will fight on with just the memories of its own wrist.
They clashed and circled and lurched like a fool’s parody of lovers in a wedding reel, and the man snarled from out of his ugly, hair-shrouded face. Their blades sparked; Will feinted, twirled, struck the buckler and wrenched the man’s arm sideways with the blow, but the counterstrike spoiled his plan and he had to hirple backwards.
They traded blow on sword blow for a bit, until Will thought the man used to the rhythm – then he birled on his good foot, shoved a shoulder in the buckler and stabbed downwards with the sword.
It should have taken the man in the instep, the shoulder shoving him off-balance at the same time. Instead, Will found air – then the world sprang out of the side of his eye and slammed stars and moons into him.
He found himself on his arse in the wet, looking up at the ugly face while his own burst with pain and he tasted blood on his teeth; if there was a new dent in the buckler that had fisted him to the yard’s cobbles, it would not be noticed.
