A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  ‘Who do you fear most, Leckie?’

  His wife looked sourly at him.

  ‘We will find out,’ she said.

  Carlisle – the Scotch Gate

  Not long after

  The physicker was in a scramble when the door was pounded. He was also in Ganny, and so near that point of whimpering release that he had started to babble about love and white marble, as he always did; the thunderous noise jerked him out of his trance and out of Ganny.

  ‘Christ, Christ – we are undone.’

  ‘You are undone,’ the boy declared viciously, and hauled up his hose. ‘Do yourself up – I will answer it.’

  ‘No, no,’ the physicker wailed, clawing his hose up and trying to find his fat breeches. ‘Wait, wait – oh God—’

  His head was full of fire and hot irons, for the physicker was not a man of the medical – though he knew some aspects of it – but a priest from a dissolved priory far to the south. Father Ridley of St Mary Merton in Surrey had been looked on askance at the best of times, for his ‘unhealthy’ interest in cutting up perfectly good small animals before they reached the pot, ‘just to see how they worked’, and brewing up potions, ostensibly for use in treating the sick.

  That would have been bad enough when the hordes fell on St Mary Merton with hard words, torches and sticks. But Father Ridley had another weakness, and Ganny was spirited away before the full wrath of the Suppression Act consigned them both to a pyre.

  Now, at last, he was sure they had been found out, was trembling and trying to be brave when Ganny came back, his arms full of basket and his beautiful face full of frown.

  ‘Don’t,’ Father Ridley said automatically. He loved the beauty of Ganny, his Ganymede, and had run off with him when the boy was eight. Ganny could not remember another name now and three years had not yet ripened the delicate beauty into the harsh beard and sinew of youth that Father Ridley knew, sadly, would turn him to pastures new.

  ‘A babe,’ Ganny said in his pipe of accent, his voice full of wonder. ‘A man pushed it at me and babbled something about not wanting it, then hared off down the Shambles like a cat with a burning tail.’

  Ridley blinked once or twice, stared at the basket, then back at Ganny as if the boy had performed some marvellous trick.

  He looked so ludicrous, standing with the failing remains of his erection poking beneath the shirt, his hose puddled round his ankles, that Ganny laughed.

  Snapped, Ridley darted to the basket, and the familiar babe gurgled at him, then started to wail.

  ‘Christ in Heaven, no, no,’ Ridley said and snatched the basket, darting for the door, half falling over his hose and realising what he was about to do. Appalled, he dropped the basket and the babe screamed. Ganny collected it, scowling blackly at Ridley.

  ‘Oh Christ, fuckpishshit,’ Ridley said, hauling up his hose and hopping. He would run back to the German and give him babe and a piece of his mind – by God, the man and his wife were leaving this day, mayhap they had already gone…

  In a fever, he was struggling into his breeches, the babe wailing and screaming, when the thought struck him that the last thing he wanted to be seen doing was rushing through the streets with a babe in a basket. Especially one that was wailing – though that, mercifully, had ceased enough to let him think…

  The wailing had ceased.

  Ridley whirled to where Ganny, bouncing the creature gently in his arms, was feeding it from a contraption of bottle and gut nipple. He stared, open-mouthed, at this apparition.

  ‘She was only hungered,’ Ganny declared, then looked at the babe fondly. ‘Weren’t you, little ’un. Just hungered. Well, by God, you will think your ma has the biggest dugs in Christendom by the time you have sucked all this milk up.’

  Ridley stared.

  ‘Where did you learn this?’ he demanded and Ganny scowled.

  ‘Don’t,’ Ridley pleaded. ‘It will leave a mark.’

  ‘I had four sisters and two brothers, all younger than me. Two were babes no older than this.’

  And your ma was less of a Goodwife and more of a whore, Ridley recalled, while your da was a drunk – so the task would fall to you, even at that tender age.

  He sat down suddenly, realising that it was all too late to go after the German and that somehow he and Ganny had been stuck with a baby. He looked at Ganny, cooing away, and knew the boy had been struck by the child; jealousy rose in him, even when he knew how foolish it was.

  They would flee north where priests were less hunted. He wondered if he could get rid of the creature on the way without upsetting Ganny…

  Chapter Ten

  Powrieburn

  St Valentine’s Day (14 February)

  The courtyard was the same, without the bodies nor the blood, and the rain lisped down from a pewter sky as cold as a witch’s tit. The earth was a manged dog, leprous and mottled with mud and patched snow, the trees clumped and bare as poor hair; along the gills and burns the reeds whispered, and the willows clacked bare branches like wry applause.

  The bastel door had been patched, Batty saw, though it would need replacing in full and by more expert hands if it was to resist another battering. The rooks were the same as before, rising and smoking through the damp air, rasping away.

  No dog, he saw and felt sadness for the loss. It was not the only one and Batty wondered if a month would have balmed her much.

  Bet’s Annie came out, all shawl and folded-arm grim. Her nod was welcoming but lacked smile; men are not liked in Powrieburn now, Batty thought, and his heart sank. Not balmed at all, then…

  ‘She is fetching fodder,’ she said, nodding towards the store and then hesitated as Batty levered himself off the horse; she took the reins with a sudden gesture, as if ashamed of her previous lack of smile.

  ‘Be easy with her,’ she said, leading Batty’s horse into the comfort of the undercroft; later Batty would go in and murmur to the Saul, but for now…

  For now there was Mintie and her summons. Batty did not think she wanted the borrowed horse back so badly, or to insist the Saul be removed from eating Powrieburn’s winter feed.

  The store was solid drystone capped with a thatched roof weighted with rope and flat, heavy rings of stone. Inside, it smelled of summer, and Batty stilled in the dim of it, to allow his eyes to catch up and just to breathe it in.

  Meadow hay, he thought, with wildflowers and clover in it, cut from a field that had never seen a plough. It was a marvel to him, thrawn cynic that he was, that it was still here at all, that the grizzled, dark-souled reivers could smoke folk from a house like shelling crabs, slaughter them, steal all the livestock they possessed, and all the goods they could lay hands on – and yet not burn winter feed.

  For the loss of winter feed was sure death to beasts, and beasts was what everyone depended on. What everyone stole from each other.

  Mintie, in the dark recesses of the place, heard him and felt a rise of panic which she quelled savagely. It had been recent, her return to the world, and she knew the day and hour when she had woken to the urgency to tend to Powrieburn, unveiled as if from some dream. Yet her new resolve wavered in the face of Batty, that seamed, bearded face; smiling or not, it was a man.

  ‘Mintie,’ he said with a nod, and she speared the fork into the hay and then stopped to push a stray wisp of hair back under her kertch, wondering what to say, where to begin…

  ‘Master Coalhouse,’ she said. ‘You went without your five pounds English.’

  ‘Hardly earned,’ he replied levelly. ‘Since the Fyrebrande is still in the Laird’s stable and…’

  He stopped, not wanting to mention Hutchie Elliott, but the omission was loud as a shout.

  Mintie felt the blood thunder up in her ears, a rush of sound like pouring water. Suddenly she was back in Hollows, feeling him, feeling the pain of him, seeing the pewter medallion swinging back and forth, back and forth…

  The pain. She had not felt it then, so why now? Was it a memory she had buried? A memor
y of a memory? A fable – had there been pain at all? Had it been, God forbid, a pleasure for her? That was the only way you could get a child, she had been told. If you fetched off. She knew the feeling, had experienced it the first time riding bareback on Jaunty in the blaze of a summer sun pouring on her skin like honey. She had felt it since, using her sinful fingers. She knew the difference – had she felt that at Hollows and buried it?

  Batty’s hand touched her shoulder, that old reassuring gesture – but she twisted away from it and stepped back, so that it fell limply between them. The sadness in his face then made her ashamed, want to explain.

  ‘I didn’t…’ she began and then stopped. Didn’t what – fight hard enough? She had not fought at all, she had grovelled and begged.

  ‘I am not offended,’ he lied, and she blinked back into his concerned face.

  ‘Lose it,’ he said suddenly, urgently. ‘Lose it or he will have his way with you every day for the rest of your life, Mintie. Put it behind you and get back into your life—’

  ‘I am with child.’

  The words clattered out like china falling on cobbles. There was silence, broken only by their breathing, the smoke of it mingling and vanishing.

  ‘Is that why you called me?’

  She was surprised; he had not asked – as everyone else had asked – if she was sure. She was sure, as sure as when she felt any other black humour descend on her, from winter snotters to summer chills. Something dark was in her and she was sick with it.

  He saw it in her face, waited for her answer.

  ‘The road is dangerous alone, I am told, so you must take me to the Solway Coast,’ she said, tilting a defiant chin, an echo of the old Mintie returned enough to make his heart glad even as the request settled coldly in him like sea haar.

  ‘To where?’ he asked, though he knew most of it already.

  ‘There is a woman there, near Graitna…’

  Her voice fell away, and he looked at her until she dropped her eyes. He remembered other times, when women in the camps had come to his ma with similar requests. He remembered what they had looked like after, all drawn and sunken-eyed and sick; one, he knew, had gone mad and hanged herself, the loss being too much to bear. More than one had died of fevers afterwards.

  He said as much, harsh as a metal file, and watched her flinch, then right herself and come back on the same gait.

  ‘Will you go with me?’

  Her voice was defiant, filled with the implication that she would go anyway, but she had called him all the way here from Berwick, him in particular, and not just because of the protection he would offer on such a journey.

  Will Elliot would have done it, he knew. He had met Will only a week ago, found him sitting in Berwick’s Old Brig Tavern one day when he had lurched in to fill his one fist with more drink, as he had done since the day he had quit Powrieburn and the whole festering boil of Liddesdale.

  The aftermath of everything had seemed unreal, a calm as sudden as the storms that had swept everyone. Will had arrived back empty-handed, the trail of babe and Egyptianis gone cold. The Regent had not been happy, but had decided on silence, decided to wait for the inevitable haughty announcement from Fat Henry that wee Queen Mary was in his hands and about to be wed to his Prince Edward and they could like it or lump it.

  Nothing had come; and even allowing for delays and deliberations, the time was stretching to where the Regent was beginning to wonder – and the fretting mother, Dowager Queen Mary of Guise, was growing less inclined to be politically patient and more inclined to start howling to her French relations about kidnap, murder and the ineptitude of Scotland’s nobility.

  Will had suffered a lot of that, passed down from on high. He had been glad to escape from under it, if only into the scowl of Batty Coalhouse.

  ‘What news, then?’ Batty had asked heavily, after a suitable ritual of buying and tasting in a quiet corner. The Old Brig Tavern was a favourite with the drovers, an evil-smelling bunch of hard drinkers reeking of woodsmoke and wildness – yet carved above the fireplace were the words ‘Wisdom and science which are pure by kind, Should not be writ in books but in mind’, and that hint of fineness in a place like the Old Brig gave Batty pleasure.

  ‘The Fair Earl is fled,’ Will reported laconically. ‘Only to Bothwell, mind, where he is trying to avoid being looked at too closely by the Regent and the Auld Queen.’

  Batty merely nodded as if he had known that. Hepburn, Keeper of Liddesdale and Earl of Bothwell, had always been a byword for treachery. ‘Fair Earl’ had been given to him for his looks, all golden and handsome, though they had faded ever since he had been imprisoned for two years back in 1529 for ‘harbouring robbers’. He was hot for Fat Henry – or his money, at least – which did not prevent him being the scourge of Reformist preachers, for he was a fierce Catholic.

  He was also a cunning political and knew when to lower his gaze and his head.

  ‘Which leaves Hermitage and Liddesdale in your charge,’ Batty noted shrewdly, and Will shook his head moodily.

  ‘Scarcely. Maxwell is in the Regent’s bad books as another of Fat Henry’s friends, so he isn’t permitted in Hermitage lest he fortifies it for himself. Scott of Buccleuch may get it, but not yet. So it is left to me for now.’

  ‘I would have thought you would relish this,’ Batty said, squinting at him. ‘A rise in station, no less.’

  ‘Until they appoint another,’ Will answered shortly. ‘Wicked Wat Scott of Buccleuch, no doubt – the Scotts are growling for it, so that they can be all legal when they visit revenge on the Armstrongs for what the Hollows Laird did to them.’

  Batty had heard that the Armstrong Ride to scare the court into moving the bairn – and allowing it to be more easily stolen – had fallen hardest on the Scotts. The Laird of Hollows, unable to pass up the chance to swipe at old enemies, had burned a deal of them out and stolen horses and cattle. Yet the reiving in that was an old tale, which the Scotts would revisit on Hollows and its dependants in turn when they could. So the world turned, ordered by God and the Devil in tandem.

  ‘No matter who takes the seat, it will be all up with me – who wants a Land Sergeant prepared to turn on his Keeper?’

  Batty had no answer to the truth of that and so said nothing and supped instead.

  ‘Every time one looks at me they will see those bodies everywhere,’ Will added, his eyes back on that snowy road with Wharton’s men scattered like winnowed stooks, the Grahams dragging shirts and boots off them. Some had not been properly dead, but were not even given the grace of a knife. All had been left to freeze, including the English lord, Otley.

  ‘Just so,’ Batty agreed with a dismissive wave. ‘Hard times and only a wee lick of what will come in the spring, when Fat Henry turns his army north. Which he will do, even in the teeth of the French threatening invasion in the south. He hates the Scots even more than before, which is a considerable feat we have achieved.’

  Silence closed them off like a yett.

  ‘How is the lass?’ Batty asked eventually, and Will shook his head.

  ‘Sore, in mind and body. Hutchie Elliott broke into her and broke something in her, that’s sure. She will not speak to any man now, let alone one with that cursed surname, no matter the spelling.’

  ‘You have tried,’ Batty answered, and it was less a question and more a bleak, sad statement of fact. It spilled from Will then, like rot. How he had gone and fetched and carried, tended livestock and repaired the door, all in the hope of seeing her, of soothing her. But she would not speak nor stir to even look.

  Hutchie was with the Laird of Hollows, the pair of them still untouched and now untouchable, since the Regent would need the Armstrongs for the coming war and was inclined to forget if not forgive. Unless presented with red-handed evidence that they’d a stolen Queen, of course.

  ‘All is over and done with,’ Will ended bitterly, ‘and everyone served with their reward. The prize for Mintie and me is bitter.’

  Minti
e and me, he had said; Batty knew love when he saw it. Knew it too when it was doomed. He could not say that, nor that he cared for Mintie himself in a strange way, for her spirit and the loss of it.

  He stared into his mug of ale and thought on bodies, stripped and scattered. And what would come in the spring, worse than anything Will could think on, even though he was no stranger to hot trod and night reiving.

  This would be a vengeful old Fat Henry at war, and Batty knew that well enough, had seen his fellow monarchs, the French and the Holy Roman, wage the same and even been part of it. The memory of rubble and flames, shrieking and corpses made him blink and grip his emptied mug until the leather buckled.

  Then Will had gone off and left Batty glowering and nursing drink in a corner of the Old Brig – until word had come from Mintie that he was wanted back at Powrieburn. Even then he had wondered why – and now the truth stood in front of him, pale as poor milk and with her chin tilted defiantly.

  ‘Will you go with me?’

  The question wrenched Batty. He looked into the whey, anxious face of her and knew she would go alone if he refused, knew that she had called for him because he was the least threat of a male she knew. So he agreed and saw the relief wash her and her attempts to hide it by forking up more hay.

  ‘By God, you have a mountain to barrow into the undercroft,’ he added lightly. ‘Must be the Saul, eating his fat face off.’

  Mintie managed a wan smile at that. The Saul was healing well enough, but it would take a long time and he would not be the mount he had once been. She said that, watching Batty intently and swearing she could see another line or two crease the grim sadness.

  ‘Ach,’ he said heavily. ‘I know that well. Keep the five pounds English and the Saul safe and warm for the rest of his days. If I can visit him now and then, that would be fine, but I do not insist on it.’

  She knew why he had offered that last and bit her bottom lip to stop her weeping. She did not want to feel the way she did about Batty, or Will, whom she knew now had come time and again out of concern; she suspected Will wanted to woo her, and the thought settled like a cold sinking sick into the black bile humour that lurked in her, that must be got out of her before…