A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  ‘This is too slow,’ she heard someone complain.

  ‘Then go faster,’ Wharton snapped back.

  He was past worried and galloping into frantic, Mintie thought. With the last kernel of her that cared, she had heard the mutterings from the men about reports of armed Scots coming down on Hermitage.

  It would be the Regent, the Earl of Arran, equally frantic and sending what men he had to find out what had happened to the royal bairn and how she had come to be stolen so easily, and who had taken part in the ruse of a Ride that had assisted the abduction. The Armstrongs would be suspect at once, and sooner or later the Keeper’s part in it would be unveiled. And slowly, slowly in the deep midwinter, an army would be gathered to wave at Fat Henry and demand redress and return.

  So Wharton and his English wanted to be gone. There was not an Armstrong in the riders flanking the carriage, Mintie saw; they were all English retainers of the lords persuaded by Wharton to lend themselves to this enterprise for the reward in it, with no Name that mattered along the Border. She saw it through a dull veil and could not bring herself to care much.

  Wharton, hag-ridden by the idea that matters might fail at the last, that the Scots forces, though hardly an army, could overtake them before they reached the safety of Carlisle and beyond, was gnawing his knuckles to the elbow joint.

  He remembered his father on the day he had gone demanding – not asking – for money to pay for mercenaries to assist in the enterprise of stealing a queen. Scathe was one of the elder Wharton’s many skills and he was free with it, even on his son.

  ‘You are not stealing a Queen,’ he had growled back. ‘That will be done by others. You are merely sent to fetch her, boy. Any decent carter could achieve the same and at less expense.’

  He had made it clear, too, the fate that failure would birth even for his son, and Wharton shivered at the memory of it, hoping folk took it for cold. The best thing his father had ever done for him, Wharton thought, was send him to Court in London, and despite a mountain of debt and a surety that he was poxed, Wharton never wanted anything more than to be back there now.

  The appearance of the rider, stark against the mantled snow, made him blink and squint to see if it was real – he had a moment of panic at the idea of Faerie, for he had heard all the tales while lolling indolently at Hollows.

  It was real. A man on a hipshot Galloway nag, sitting all unconcerned and doing… something.

  Knitting, Wharton saw with astonishment. With only one arm.

  A figure appeared at Wharton’s elbow, and he turned to see the frowning face of Sir John Otley, his vein-threaded cheeks raw with cold and swaddled almost to the eyebrows.

  ‘Who is that there?’

  ‘I believe,’ said Wharton as languidly as he could manage while his heart thumped, ‘it is the one-armed man sought by the Lord of Hollows.’

  ‘This?’ Otley’s scorn dripped like the ice melting off his furred collar. ‘This is what the Hollows Man could not find or deal with?’

  Behind him, William Patten looked uneasily left and right and saw only virgin snow. He was a sometime scholar and secretary to the Earl of Arundel and had been leant to Wharton to put some legal on the affairs at Hollows. The Hollows Man was a good name for the Armstrong chief, he thought, a big black spider who sat in his stone finger and wove webs, sucking dry anything he caught as if it would fill the void in him.

  It would not fill such a void, of course, any more than whores and drink and gambling would fill the one inside the younger Wharton. Patten glanced at the man, seeing his fretting tension, and wanted to warn the youngster that things may not be as they seem; he had been around politics and armies enough to know that. He knew also that pointing it out was futile; these sneering well-born had already made clear what they thought of an ‘ink-fingered clerk’ and his opinion.

  Patten was no soldier, but even he could see that the one-armed man was too calm, too at ease in the face of a score and more armed men. There had to be something more to it.

  Batty was feeling good with the world, even though the bruising ache of his stumped arm, a memory of the dislocation, made knitting awkward and painful, and his leg thumped with pain after only a short ride. He had come out of Powrieburn with only a scratch on his cheek and had found two of his lost daggs on the bodies of Francie Bourne and Dand Ker, so half right was all good by his tallying.

  Besides, he had all these English by the throat, even if they did not know it yet.

  ‘What want you here?’ demanded Otley, and Batty tucked his rickle of sticks and wool down the neck of his jack and smiled out of the raw scars on his face.

  ‘To rise with the sun,’ he said mildly. ‘To enter the night.’

  ‘You may have done the first,’ Wharton retorted, ‘but I doubt you will enjoy the second.’

  Otley haw-hawed at that, and Wharton felt pleased with himself, but Batty’s smile only broadened, thrusting up the knife of his beard.

  ‘It is all up with this enterprise,’ he said flatly. ‘The Keeper is surely taken, the Earl of Arran is at Hermitage with an army, and if you do not hand the royal babe to me and go your way, you will hang for it. All of you.’

  There was more lie and hope than truth in what he said, but Wharton did not know that, nor the men behind him, who started in to muttering; this one-armed man should not have known anything of the enterprise, never mind the whole of it. Wharton did not like the panic he felt. Yet it was a fat old man with one arm… what could he hope to achieve? He asked it aloud, and Batty nodded, as if it was a reasonable question requiring a sober answer.

  ‘Well, I cannot fiddle a tune as I would like, nor clinch a woman proper in a jig, nor even lace a pair of brogues,’ he admitted.

  His voice dropped an octave, grew chilled as the air.

  ‘But when I fill my only fist with pistol, my lord, I can shoot the cods from under a midge at two hundred paces.’

  Wharton was blanched with respect, but Otley narrowed his eyes and sneered.

  ‘Can you shoot a score and more with the one pistol?’ he countered.

  In the rear, Hutchie looked right and left, eyes narrowed, for he was the only one here who knew the Border way. The men who surrounded him looked formidable, with their metal breastplates and helms, long lances tipped to the weak sun. Two of them had matchlock guns, long affairs needing a forked iron rest to take the weight of the barrel. The rest had the English longbow, equally lethal and faster-firing too.

  But Hutchie doubted that the muskets were primed and the slow matches were wrapped against the wet. The longbows were unstrung and coddled with wraps against the damp, while neither was any use from the back of a horse.

  He shifted, using his legs alone to back the Galloway as far as he could, then began, gently and slowly, to rein it round. Those next to him scowled and one said something which Hutchie could not understand, the accent being thick and English.

  In front, Batty seemed to consider Otley’s question seriously, then patted the two loaded holsters in front of him.

  ‘I have three,’ he pointed out, and Otley laughed, though it was uneasy now.

  ‘Besides,’ Batty declared with a lofty wave of his hand, ‘I have these also.’

  There was a sharp crack, like a branch breaking under too much weight of snow. Next to Hutchie, a man’s horse staggered, gave a squealing grunt as if it had been kicked in the belly by its neighbour – then fell sideways, clattering into two others.

  More cracks, almost at once; men and horses spilled, the column shattered into mad plunging, rearing and shouting. Hutchie dragged his mount’s head full round and raked it with his heels, while something vengeful whoomed past him and hit on the breastplate of a bewildered rider with a dull whang of sound, knocking him clean out of the saddle.

  Batty filled his fist with pistol, while Wharton and Otley and the others at the head of the column looked frantically right and left, in time to see the pristine snow erupt. On signal, as the hidden caliver-men in the tree
s opened fire, the shrouded Grahams burst from their snowholes, roaring heat into them and cold stiffness out.

  They stumbled and leaped down on the chaos of Englishmen, slashing and shrieking. Wharton saw one spring entirely off the ground, smack into a rider and knock them all over, horse included, in a whirl of legs and arms.

  Otley dragged out his sword, waving and shouting, but Patten levered himself off his mount and stumbled to the lee of the carriage, knowing what these men had come for and that the carriage was the safest place to be – there would be no shooting or fighting near the royal babe.

  Batty saw Hutchie, a fleeting glimpse through the throng.

  What he had said to Wharton had not been entirely true – he could not play the fiddle at all, and when he took a woman by the waist, one-handed or not, he was fairly sure of the dance by that point. Nor was he as good a shot with a pistol as he had made out. If he wanted to hit a midgie’s cods, it had to be only one hundred paces away – but he could hit the broad running back of Hutchie Elliott with his eyes closed.

  He fired, the wheel whirred reassuring sparks, the pan flared into smoking life – and the man called Otley surged into the line of it, waving his ridiculously feeble court rapier and yelling, until the fat lead ball blew his head to shards of bone, blood and brain.

  Cursing, Batty stuffed the smoker in his belt, feeling the barrel burn as he hauled out another from the saddle holsters. The horse he rode was not the Saul, all the same, who would not turn a chin hair at the sight and sound of blasting powder; it stamped and snorted and shifted so that the second shot went into the pack, and if it hit anyone at all, Batty did not know of it.

  It did not hit Hutchie, that was certain, for Batty saw him, leaning low on the horse’s neck and flogging it unmercifully through the gripping snow, heading back to Hollows.

  Wharton, dazed and afraid, finally thought of hauling out his own sword, only to end up gazing down the barrel of Batty’s third pistol.

  ‘Eighty-four,’ Batty said with an evil smile. ‘Knock or draw.’

  There was a little white needle and something grey-slimed lodged on Wharton’s sleeve – he saw with a sickening lurch that it was Otley’s bone and brains. With that part of his mind not still gibbering, Wharton realised the one-armed man was quoting Primero – eighty-four was a massive overstated boast of what points he might hold in his hand, and he was inviting Wharton to challenge or throw in his hand.

  Wharton threw in and then threw up.

  Will Elliot was on foot and shivering stiff from hiding in the snow – Christ, how did these half dressed Grahams manage that so easily? He let them leap and shriek and do their work, wanting no part of it and trying not to look or listen to the bloody screams. They would hold their killing hand from Armstrongs, but these were English and all English could be slain, in the worst ways possible; Will could hear that the Grahams knew some of the worst ways.

  He made for the carriage just as the driver was dragged off, bleating. The mad grinning Graham who did it worked his arm like a forgeman at the bellows and the blood flew up in gobbets; the whole area around was clotted with red, stark against the snow.

  Someone wept from inside the sprung-boxed affair, and Will shouldered aside the man who was making for the sound, scowling at him until Davey-boy, all fired eyes and blood lust, blinked some sane recognition and grinned like a fox in a coop, before darting off to collect a horse. The looting had begun.

  Will wrenched open the carriage door and the whimpering grew to a shriek. He saw the man who made it, hunched on the floor and covering his head with his hands. Agnes, holding a bundle close to her, looked defiant, and with a lurch of relief Will saw Mintie sitting beside her.

  ‘They are here,’ he bawled. ‘Safe and sound… Shut up, you.’

  The last reduced the whimpering man to sobs.

  Batty rode up, leaning down from the saddle to peer in, his lean creased face taking in what he saw. Will dragged the sobbing man out and the sight of the bloody slush finally choked all sound from him, so that he lay in it and shivered.

  ‘Mintie,’ he said, nodding. ‘Agnes.’

  He tapped his iron hat with the barrel of the dagg, knuckling his forehead politely as if they had well met on a pleasant winter ride.

  ‘That’s mine,’ Mintie said suddenly, seeing Davey-boy leading a horse, and Batty saw that Dickon’s son had Jaunty, probably tethered at the rear of the carriage.

  ‘Off,’ he said companionably, and for a moment it looked as if the boy would defy him – but then he scowled sullenly, slid off the back of it and tossed the reins contemptuously up at Batty.

  ‘There,’ Batty said easily, smiling at Mintie. ‘All is rescued.’

  It was then he saw her eyes, sunk deep in her face and the light in them no more than wary creatures peering from caves. He saw the blood on her dress and cut laces and the way she held herself, and knew, with a lightning stab from crown to heel, what had happened to her and who had done it.

  Mintie saw that he knew. He can tell just by looking, she thought, how ruined I am.

  And the tears came at last.

  Andrascroft

  That evening

  They left the English, stripped to the marbled flesh and lip-gaping wounds, for the Armstrongs to find once Hutchie had stumbled back and gasped it all out. Not one of the soldiers was alive.

  They left the fancy foundered coach and the whimpering man called Patten, his piss freezing his breeches to him as he curled up in it, but they took the big Mecklenburg horses, for Davey-boy had taken a fancy to them. Patten would, once unfurled from his fear, tell what had happened after Hutchie had run off.

  Wharton, whey-faced, shivering and with slime all down his front, was eventually led away from staring at what had been Sir John Otley and joined Hen Graham and the Armstrong prisoners taken at Powrieburn; they would be huckled back to Netherby. Dickon would usher Wharton politely on to his da, which would be as much punishment as beating him unmercifully for a week.

  So they came down on Andrascroft, much to the alarm of a band of travelling folk, Egyptianis as they called themselves. There were six wagons and a cart, six men, four women, innumerable weans and even more dogs. Their leader called himself Seb Bailzow and styled himself, with an elaborate scarlet and green bow, Count of Cipre.

  No one cared for the Egyptianis much and the feeling was mutual – in some parts of Scotland you could be hung just for being one. Yet the late king had favoured one of them, a certain Johnnie Faa, with a Writ of Protection – and they were in the Debatable, which had no law, so their safety depended on how useful they were.

  Dickon was minded to be generous while Andra and Eck fixed the cracked shaft of one of their wagons. Davey-boy had barebacked one of his new prizes and had tired of the Mecklenburgs even on the short ride to Andrascroft; his da, Will Elliot saw, was pleased about that.

  ‘By God,’ Dickon exclaimed when Davey-boy announced he had traded with the Egyptianis, ‘I am glad of that, for you looked like a pea on a four-legged marrow. There is nothing so useless as a big-arsed horse with shod feet in this country.’

  Then he eyed the boy gravely and asked what he had traded it for. Davey-boy presented the caliver with a flourish, and even Will had to admit that it was a fine-looking gun, all silver and ivory inlay from muzzle to stock.

  ‘Christ’s bones,’ Dickon had exclaimed with wonder, ‘yon is a fearsome engine. A lord’s gun, no doubt of it.’

  Snaffled from the ruin of Solway Moss, Will Elliot thought to himself, by clever folk with an eye to such a business and timing their arrival to perfection, so that they could plunder the litter of discarded arms without fear of becoming prey themselves.

  It was certainly a lord’s gun, possibly Turk to begin with, and if the lord ever set eyes on it again it would no doubt go badly for the new owner, if only because the lord had thrown it away and so it glared proof of his cowardice. But Davey-boy was beaming, and even though his da distrusted guns, in common with other Border f
olk, he was pleased that the boy had bartered with Egyptianis and come out of it well.

  Batty never saw much of the Count of Cipre and his brood, being too busy leading a stumbling Mintie to a warm place near the forge where she could rest. Then he drew Agnes aside and asked what she knew he would ask. She told him, rocking the bairn as much to comfort herself as it, and watched his face grow into something that made her shrink.

  Then he nodded and unsaddled Jaunty and the horse he had borrowed, groomed them, fed them, and told Will and Dickon that Mintie would rest here the night and go on to Powrieburn in the morning. He did not say why, but everyone saw the face on him and thought he had blood in his eye and kept quiet.

  Dickon wanted to be away back to Netherby, for this was too close to Hollows, who might take vengeance when they woke up to matters – but one of the Egyptianis was a rare exponent of the fiddle and so he decided to stay and listen a while; they could ride well enough in the dark, and some would stay to escort Will, Agnes and the bairn to Hermitage.

  Batty sat and brooded while men jigged, and all the time Agnes watched, joggling the bairn in her arms while matters were sorted out all around her.

  Like a slow match, she thought, as she watched Batty. Burning down…

  Bella knew what had happened and folded Mintie and her daughter into her as if into a down coverlet, stripping Mintie of the stained clothing and burning all of it, for she knew Mintie would never wear it again. She left a dress of her own, which though faded and patched was at least clean; Agnes knew it was one of the only two she owned and the other was already on her back.

  In the end, soothed and balmed and wrapped, Mintie slept despite the wild music and the wheeching, while Agnes looked at the bruise of shadows under her eyes and wondered if what had happened would break her friend, or whether she had true iron in her.

  Will Elliot knew too, in the end – or at least suspected it from the way everyone behaved. He did not ask, merely spoke fact to Batty, softly where none but the pair of them could hear – he would ride with some of the Grahams to Hermitage in the morning and hand the babe back to the men he hoped were gathered there. If they were not there, they would ride on to Edinburgh, for he would not hand the babe to the Keeper for any reward.