A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  ‘There was fancy,’ the man snarled, and Will, blinking in the snow-whirl, realised he was done for, though at the same time he thought it was strange how many there were in the yard, and some mounted…

  The man grinned, yellow and gapped, then gave a lurch and a choking sob; a great gout of black vomit steamed out down his beard and he dropped buckler and sword to grip the bloody sliver of metal sticking out of his chest.

  Bewildered as the man who suffered it, Will watched the sliver suddenly vanish, sliding through the blood-slick fingers the man tried vainly to grip it with; released like a straw mommet, he fell in a heap, and then Will saw the horse, a snorting Galloway nag on top of which perched a boy with a bloodied lance and a feral smile.

  ‘Ho, ho – enough I say. Enough…’

  The booming voice brought everyone struggling in the yard to the sense of too many men they could not account for. There was a stepping back, a wary lowering of weapons; the sudden moment of silence was broken by a clatter of hooves and a shrill scream.

  ‘Davey Graham – leave off stabbing folk. Leave off, I say.’

  The horsebacked boy reined round, a sullen pout spoiling his old grin while greasy blood coiled slowly down the shaft of his raised lance.

  ‘That’s better – mind you, you have accounted yourself well. Has he not, lads?’

  Voices barked and growled assent, and Will finally saw the speaker, tall and thin, with a halo of tow-coloured hair on his unhelmeted head and a curve of yellow beard like a Turk’s golden scimitar. He looked like Batty, Will thought bemusedly.

  Bewildered, Will struggled up, staggering a little. Now there was only the wheeping snow wind and the moans of the hurt and the distant lowing of an unhappy milch cow.

  ‘Which of you is Batty Graham?’

  There was a stir then and Batty hirpled out of a throng which parted before him, revealing several men on the cobbles. He was breathing hard and had blood on his cheek.

  ‘I am Batty Coalhouse, if that’s who you mean?’

  The old man leaned on the crupper of his horse and nodded.

  ‘You are Batty Graham, son of Bella Graham of Netherby. She was kin to me and I am kin to you. I am Dickon Graham of Netherby, son of Lang Will. That there is Arthur of Canobie and Fergus of the Mote, a brace of my many brothers. The other is Tam Graham of Kirkandrews, also kin.’

  ‘What brings you here?’ demanded a new voice, and Dand Ker stepped up, his beard and hair swirling in the wind. ‘This is no matter of yours.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  Dand told him and Dickon stroked his beard a moment, while subtle shifts showed everyone not on a horse that the mounted men had them neatly penned and needed only to lower their lances. The wee boy called Davey looked at Dand as if choosing a target.

  ‘You are a Ker and so of no account. If you are clever, you will be silent.’

  It was an iron dismissal and Dand bridled at it. That is a mistake, Will thought.

  ‘This is a hot trod,’ Dand persisted, ‘seeking Batty Coalhouse, a murderer, and the Land Sergeant of Hermitage, his accomplice.’

  He flung one hand behind him.

  ‘Here is Hen Graham, another of your kin, to tell you how he comes from the Keeper of Liddesdale—’

  The fizz of powder in the pan gave Dand an eyeblink warning that his mouth had run him down a closed road. The bang of the matchlock pistol was loud, the flare bright and the foot-long barrel of it kicked into the air like a salute. But the range was too close to miss and Dand went backwards three yards and skittered over the cobbles in a half-circle. Those nearest backed away, wiping bits of his blood and brains and bone off them.

  ‘You are Armstrongs,’ Dickon Graham declared, waving the reek from his pistol shot and speaking as if the name was a bad taste. ‘Hunting a Graham. Now you have found more than you cared to and will hang for it.’

  ‘No, no,’ squeaked Hen desperately. ‘I am no Armstrong. I am Hen Graham from Hermitage, here on the Keeper’s orders—’

  ‘Liar,’ Will growled, finding his voice at last, and Batty stepped into the echo of it, looking quizzically up at Dickon.

  ‘It is gratifying to find I have kin after all this time,’ he said wryly. ‘And timely, no doubt of it, so that I am Batty Graham if that is what it takes. Does this mean your five other brothers are waiting to welcome me with open arms?’

  Dickon grunted and scowled down at him.

  ‘You are a by-blow of a German bastard,’ he said flatly, ‘but you are our by-blow of a German bastard, and as long as there is a lick of Graham blood in you, that Name will never let a bloody Armstrong spill it unchallenged.’

  Batty looked at Will and neither could fathom what the other thought other than relief. Suddenly Will found he could no longer care, or hold his sword up, or even rise, so that when Batty half fell onto the cobbles beside him, he knew why.

  They sat there, with the wind bleating like a lost sheep and spraying snow in everyone’s eyes, while Dickon had the Armstrong men disarmed and sent out riders to bring back the scattered beasts.

  ‘I thought they had shot you dead,’ Will said eventually, and Batty stirred as if from sleep, looked wearily at him and then waved his hand at the nearest rag-bag corpse.

  ‘Not me, but a sad loss all the same.’

  It was then that Will saw the four legs on that particular corpse; he felt suddenly – and strangely, considering all the blood spilled and lives lost – struck dumb with sadness at the sight of the brindle dog sprawled dead.

  In the end it was Bet’s Annie, shawled and with her arms folded, who stood looking down at them and shaking her head so that snow spilled off it.

  ‘Get your arses up off the wet,’ she ordered as if talking to bairns, and meekly they obeyed, struggling to do it. Bet’s Annie scornfully held out a hand and Batty, unashamed, took it and was hauled up and into a fierce embrace.

  ‘Silly auld fools,’ she said, gripping Will equally hard. Then she turned as Dickon walked up, leading his horse. Behind him came the boy, like a small parody.

  ‘Well, what shall we do with the ones taken, Davey-boy?’

  He did not even look round and the boy, well used to this, simply replied without looking up.

  ‘Hemp them.’

  Dickon smiled and nodded admiringly.

  ‘This is my son,’ he said to Batty and Will, as if they could not already have guessed as much. He turned to the boy.

  ‘Aye, tree and rope as your grandfaither tells us all,’ he went on, stroking his beard and grinning. ‘Lang Will is a byword for harsh, even in such a land as this.’

  He glanced slyly at Batty.

  ‘What say you?’

  ‘I offer my thanks for your timely rescue,’ Batty said, flat and hard as a whacked blade on a stone, the smoke of his breath seeming more scorched than any other. ‘Even though I have been back a few years and never had so much as a cheery wave from any of you before.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Dickon answered uncomfortably. ‘Your kin at Askerton watched out over you, so we knew when you were in real danger.’

  ‘Knew when I was of use to pull the beard of the Armstrongs of Hollows, more like,’ Batty answered, and Will grew alarmed, for this was not only staring the gift horse in the mouth, it was pulling out the teeth to inspect them. Dickon had lost his grin now.

  ‘I add my thanks to your boy,’ Will flung out hastily, and tried at one and the same time to be generous and still hint that he had had the matter under control the entire time.

  The boy nodded matter-of-factly, but there was enough lad left in him to beam with pleasure. He will be pleased of the dark, Will thought, which hides his blushes. There are few boy-blushes allowed to pass in Netherby, I suspect.

  Dickon laughed and clapped his hand on the boy’s considerable shoulder.

  ‘Big enough to manage horse and lance, big enough to Ride,’ Dickon declared. ‘You can never be bloodied early enough.’

  ‘Aye,’ the boy replied, ‘it was a fair str
oke. But not my blooding. That was last year when I was ten, da, as you well know.’

  ‘Ten,’ Will echoed weakly.

  ‘Aye,’ Dickon said proudly, then closed one eye and looked slyly at Batty. ‘That’s Graham for you. I see by the wee spoil you made of your own here that there’s a fair amount of grayne blood in you. We welcome you.’

  ‘Late,’ Batty replied flatly, ‘but welcome this night. Why this night, mind you? How did you know that we were hard-pressed here in Powrieburn?’

  Batty saw Dickon struggle with the lie that nothing that went on was missed by the Grahams of Netherby, but then he shrugged and truthed it out.

  ‘Your kin at Askerton, the Land Sergeant there,’ he replied, then frowned. ‘Also a great many of foreign folk tramping up and down between Hollows and God knows where back across the Border. None of them are decent Names, but southrons all. The latest came yestreen – a score, well armed and well paid by the look, escorting a fancy carriage full of plush and decent springs and nothing else – empty as a Monday morning church.’

  He shook his head at the very idea of such a contraption.

  ‘They had a sick man they left at the Auld Tavern, saying they would pick him up on the way back and that it would only be a few days. Their captain was grumbling about the weather, which was sticking his fancy cart in every patch of soft between Netherby and York. And because those who were supposed to meet him were sieging a Batty Coalhouse in some place called Powrieburn.’

  Will and Batty exchanged looks; they remembered the comments they’d overheard about finishing the business and getting to Netherby. And how Hen Graham had hushed them on the subject.

  Batty said as much and Dickon nodded.

  ‘They left in the night, saying they could wait no longer,’ he went on. ‘They went on to Hollows and we followed for a bit, then came here.’

  He broke off as other riders came up, coiled ropes over their shoulders.

  ‘I hope you have not hanged Hen Graham,’ Will added, alarmed.

  ‘Not at all,’ said the new rider, his face blood-dyed by torches. ‘Cannot hang kin. I came to find out what you wanted done, brother.’

  Dickon grinned and clapped Davey-boy on the shoulder.

  ‘Davey-boy says we should hang them all but Hen, and our da would agree – how many are there, Fergus?’

  ‘A good dozen, Hen Graham included. Some of them are cut about a bit and one’s blind,’ Fergus of the Mote replied, and nodded admiringly to Will and Batty. ‘There are five gone to Hell besides. You gave good account, for sure.’

  ‘A dozen,’ Dickon echoed and cocked a sly glance at Batty. ‘My question remains, Master Batty – what would you have us do?’

  ‘You can’t hang them,’ Will interrupted sternly. ‘Turn them to me and—’

  He broke off, because taking them back to Hermitage for justice was hardly an option when the Keeper of Liddesdale was up to his lace collar in the business. Frustrated and feeling foolish, he flapped a weak hand.

  ‘He is right,’ Batty declared, to Will’s astonishment. ‘You dare not hang them, and even your da, Lang Will of Arthuret, is not daft enough to do so, for the Laird of Hollows would never forgive nor forget. Pulling a few hairs from his beard is one thing, but blood feud is another. Bad enough that I am up to my armpits in feud with the Armstrongs – but I am a disgrace to the Graham and so can be ignored when it comes to the bit.’

  He winked and smiled, but the chill in it made Dickon look away.

  That was the bare truth of it, and Will wondered how the Grahams would take it. They had neither men nor weapons for a bloody feud with the Armstrongs; and once begun, such affairs could stretch generations unless one side was markedly stronger than the other. Inevitably, they became a struggle not of pride but of survival, and the Grahams were not as well set up for such an affair as the Armstrongs – but Will knew the mountain of stiff pride in the Names that would never wish to admit it.

  Will should have known better. A bigger mountain owned by Border Riders was the size of their practical and when that tipped the pan, pride could wait. He saw Dickon recover some of his calm and turn to his son.

  ‘Mind this lesson. Here is a master Graham at work, for that is just what I had decided myself. We will keep them for a while and then ransom them back—’

  ‘Hand them back, more like,’ Batty replied, and Will saw that Dickon did not like that – he had expected better of his clear Graham embrace of Batty than to have it shrugged carelessly off as if of little account.

  ‘Netherby,’ he said, before things started in to boiling. ‘Hen Graham.’

  Batty turned to him, remembered.

  ‘Dog Pyntle,’ he countered.

  Hen Graham was sullen and fearful, yet buoyed by the surety that he would not be harmed in any meaningful way by those he shared a kinship with. This gave him enough courage to shake his head when asked about the carriage at Netherby.

  Dog Pyntle, on the other hand, was a moaning, shivering wreck, his face clotted with half dried blood which no one had bothered to clean from him, and the eyes shot from his head, which he turned this way and that as people spoke, lost in the dark forever.

  ‘Dog,’ Will said sternly. ‘You know me.’

  ‘Is that Will Elliot? Oh God, has enough not been done to me? I am blinded, Will. For the love of Christ’s mercy, leave me be.’

  ‘What is the carriage for, Dog?’ Will demanded. ‘Tell me and I will see to your wounds. It may be just the blood in your eyes.’

  Which was a flat-out lie, since everyone was staring into the raw holes where they had been.

  ‘Carriage?’ Dog repeated, then moaned.

  ‘Shush, you,’ Hen Graham shouted, and a sharp crack spilled him to the cobbles with a cry. Fergus of the Mote sucked his knuckles and scowled down at him.

  ‘Another word from you and I will choke them all from you with hemp,’ he growled. ‘Kin or no.’

  ‘Oh, God take my pain,’ Dog moaned. ‘Help me, in the name of Christ…’

  ‘The carriage,’ Will persisted.

  ‘For the babe,’ Dog groaned. ‘For the wee bairn…’

  Hen made a noise and then lost the power of speech completely when Fergus kicked him up in the cods. He rolled, gasping and retching, while Dog, bewildered and afraid, turned his head this way and that at the sounds.

  ‘Bairn.’

  Batty’s voice was a slap in Dog’s bloody face and he knew who it was at once. There were mangy curs who could learn cringe from Dog Pyntle, Will thought.

  ‘The bairn they stole,’ Dog moaned. ‘The wee Queen. On Fat Henry’s instruction. They are taking her to London to be wed to the wee prince. Don’t hurt me more, Batty, for the love of Christ.’

  There was a moment when no one could believe what they had heard and looked from one to the other.

  ‘The wee Queen Mary?’ Dickon demanded and gave Dog a kick as emphasis. His head lolled and he shrieked and nodded.

  ‘Christ in Heaven,’ Will said weakly. ‘What have we stepped in?’

  Chapter Eight

  Near Hollows Tower

  The next morning

  Morning was a sketch of landscape unfolding under a broken sun, snowed to flawlessness with no people in it bar the cavalcade winding through it and no other seeming life besides puffed birds.

  If there had been green left in the trees, the night’s driving sleet and cold had twisted it all off, leaving them damp, black claws that sucked up the dark of their own shadows.

  The men were not happy with the cold, nor the great sprung coach which had been wrestled with curses and sweat all the way up to Hollows. It was no more than box suspended on chains for smoothness, but it was monstrously heavy and had already got stuck twice in the time it took to travel the short way back to the rutted mud street of Canobie.

  They were also fretted by the place and the strangeness. The mewling of gulls was only part of it, for it seemed to Wharton and the men from further south and inland that they sound
ed like crying children. There should not be gulls, they thought, with no sight of the sea.

  Mintie knew, all the same. The Solway was not far off and the gulls were sweeping inland, driven in by bad weather and the promise of more of the same. She felt like a gull herself, hatched on a cliff’s edge and raised by rocks.

  The bairn mourned as if in answer to the gulls and she turned to where Agnes nursed it, all soothing sighs and coos. They exchanged glances and Agnes tried a smile which fell between them.

  She had come into the undercroft later, to where Mintie hugged and rocked, knowing what happened and lying to herself that she had not come earlier because the bairn could not be left.

  The truth was that she had come down right when Hutchie was grunting on her like a tup on a ewe; he had heard her, and for a moment her heart had almost stopped. She had been too afraid of Hutchie, knew that she might well have been where Mintie was, save that she was ‘too milky’ for his taste. When the babe slept and Hutchie was drinking and shouting with others, Agnes came with a bowl of hot water, which she knew Mintie would need.

  It was not hot enough, nor was there scrub enough, but Mintie did it until Agnes caught her wrist and stopped her scraping herself to a raw wound.

  The carriage had arrived in the night, a great grinding of wheels of the coach; there had been shouting and banging, and Mintie, as if through a slow-lifting fog, realised that the Laird now had his promised money and that Wharton would be moving the wee Queen south. Then he and the elder Wharton would proudly present the babe to Fat Henry, for the reward and advantage that would result.

  Agnes argued for the inclusion of Mintie, thinking she was saving her from worse, not knowing that Hutchie Elliott would be coming with them; when Mintie saw him, smiling as if they were handfasted, the fire in her should have melted the ice-white teeth of him to blackened stubs.

  Now she lurched in the rocking box with Agnes and the babe, hearing men curse as they levered the fat iron-rimmed wheels out of the slushed snow and mercilessly lashed the sweating Mecklenburg horses.