A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  Still, it didn’t matter to Clym what the Laird’s reasoning was, for his coin was sound – no poor testoons in it at all – and besides, Clym would have done it for much less because it was Batty Coalhouse and because of Ill-Made Wattie Bell. The day Batty had taken Ill-Made Wattie and had him hanged was the same day the man had been out delivering much needed succour – drink and oats – to the Bairns.

  Clym had thought that unfair then and had not changed his opinion, especially since Batty had gone on to rout out other Bairns with his fouled Bills and his big spinning-wheel daggs.

  He looked up at the drip of Tinnis, the glower of gathering pewter promising storm over it, and wondered if Batty knew who Ill-Made’s friends were. And if he knew how many times Clym Hen Harrow had visited Ill-Made in his wee hidey-hole, spending the night with good drink, all snug, warm and dry up on Tinnis Hill and not bothered at all about the Faerie.

  It was a good hole and if Batty did not know of it, Clym Hen Harrow would be surprised. And if he was not using it, Clym Hen Harrow would give up drink for a month. Well – a week, at least.

  Black Penny Davey came up then, the brindle hound leashed tight in his hand, though the smell of the blood was making it whirl and whine. Black Penny looked expectantly up at Clym, who shook his head and looked fondly at the dog.

  ‘Not yet, Penny,’ he said. ‘Keep a tight leash on Beauchien there and don’t let him chew on any of the Armstrongs, else there will be words said.’

  The others laughed; the Armstrongs loading their stiff or groaning kin onto the carts scowled, and Beauchien whipped the ragged stump of a tail and danced on the end of the leash.

  Higher up, among the dripping trees, Batty hunkered in the rowan and whin, watching the men stack his work on the carts. He felt no remorse, felt no more than if they had been logs cut and left for carriage. The only thing he felt was curiosity and a sharp thrill of wariness at the sight of the white head.

  Clym Hen Harrow. He knew the man and his Bairns well enough – so he has been set on me, he thought, him and his slewdug. He remembered the beast, with its sliced tail and torn lugs, straked lip and old, badly knitted scars. It was as ugly a beast as the man who held it, Black Penny Davey, so called for the pennyroyal he used to keep the fleas off the beast.

  Beauchien. Batty recalled the name and smiled. It might be ugly as old sin, look as if it was sewn together from three or four other dogs entire, but it was worth five pounds English for the nose on it.

  Mayhap I should offer to buy it with what Mintie owes me, he thought with a grim smile, for it is certes that they will put it to the smell of me and track me up Tinnis. Clym hates me because of Ill-Made, who was his friend.

  He looked at the sky and nodded quietly to himself; the ache in his joints, the strange, oppressive calm and the lowering dark of the clouds all gave him satisfaction. A storm was coming and even Beauchien would not follow scent in the pissing rain.

  He had time yet and would make good use of it.

  For a long time more he watched them, sitting on their horses and seeming to laugh and take their ease while watching the Hollows men take the one-armed away; but Batty was sure Clym was sporting himself to be seen, giving Batty the message that his time on Tinnis was limited, for the Bairns were coming for him.

  He watched them ride off, heading for Andrew’s forge, and wondered if the folk there were in danger – then decided not. Clym would shelter, ask questions and be skilled in extracting what he could from the innocent answers. Batty tried to remember if he had said anything to Bella or Agnes that would lead Clym and his Bairns to the hidey-hole.

  Agnes mayhap, he thought in the end. I have said nothing, but she has been to Powrieburn, and though none there know the place of it, I may have mentioned Ill-Made’s hole in the hearing of Megs or Jinet. That pair had little in their heads but gossip, he thought and sighed. Besides – Clym might know of Ill-Made’s Tinnis hideaway, them being such good friends…

  He would have to leave the hidey-hole once the storm was done. Then a thought struck him, feral and vicious, and he hunkered back and stroked his matted beard with his one grimed hand and, eventually, smiled.

  Powrieburn

  At the same time

  The women were easier these days, for it was now late February and everyone knew it was the lean time, so bad that Rides were forgotten.

  Michaelmas to Martinmas was the Riding time – the end of September until the start of November, when the fells were dry and the cattle strong enough to drive and the moonless nights clear. The dead of winter meant foul weather, weakened cattle and, worse still, weakened horses. It was now weeks past Candlemas and the days were short and dark, oats dear, and no one wanted to be out and about.

  Save Batty Coalhouse and me, Will thought, standing politely and aware he was dripping all over the Powrieburn floor. The women were welcoming enough, as they always had been, but this time Bet’s Annie moved them away to the other end of the house, while Will sat opposite Mintie and studied her.

  She seemed smoke to him. All cinders and grey ash. Her eyes were stone when they had colour at all, and he remembered them as blue, with a wee touch of amber in them. Yet they held his gaze, seemingly blank and set deep in the pit of her face, but with menace all the same, despite the wee lick of false colour in her cheeks and lips.

  Bet’s Annie would have done that for her, he knew, for Mintie no longer cared. Yet the effect was not what Bet’s Annie would have wished; her face reminded Will of a knife in a nosegay.

  ‘There is news,’ he said, and she sat and waited for it, saying nothing.

  ‘From Hollows,’ he added and saw the flicker at that, sighed with the weary drag of all of it and ploughed on.

  ‘Batty took the Armstrong men, the ones he and the Grahams had for ransom here. Batty cut off every left arm and sent them to Hollows on the back of blind Dog Pyntle.’

  The eyebrows went up at that a little and she blinked. Well you might, Will thought angrily and his voice was bitter.

  ‘If a peddler had not chanced on Dog Pyntle, blinded as he is, he might well have plootered his way into the Esk with them.’

  Still nothing, and he shook his head at her, exasperated and afraid.

  ‘Eight men are maimed, Mintie,’ he said, cold and flat as bad charity. ‘Two, I hear, are dead, and if the Laird of Hollows Tower exerts himself to complain, I will be charged with making a Bill on Batty.’

  ‘The shadow of that hideous strength.’

  Her voice was soft, gentle as doves and distant; Will blinked at what was said all the same, not knowing it and saying so.

  ‘Lyndsay’s description of the Tower of Babel,’ Mintie said softly. ‘The shadow of that hideous strength, six mile and more it is of length.’

  It was from Lyndsay of the Mount’s Dialog and Will had begged a copy from the man when he had arrived at Hermitage, travelling as Lord Lyon of Scotland on a mission to England. Taking the Garter geegaws of the late King James back to Fat Henry – collar, statutes and garter itself, on the orders of the Regent – though what difference that would make to matters was something Will couldn’t see.

  Lyndsay, a pompous man in an ill-fitting hat, had been anxious to convey the Regent’s regard, equally anxious in his sharp reminder that the Regent of Scotland was impatient at the lack of result in Will and Batty’s attempts to locate the missing queen.

  There was more and Will had listened to it and nodded, though he was really mulling over the revelation that matters were now leaking out in the open if the likes of Lyndsay knew of the bairn’s disappearance. He would have been told because he would be trying to find out if the court at London held her in secret, with Fat Henry waiting and gloating for a perfect moment to produce her, wed on to his wee son.

  Sir David Lyndsay did not inspire Will much with the notion that he would not be telling Fat Henry all he knew within an hour of arriving in London. A wee man puffed up with poetical and inclined more to his role as Scotland’s Makar than that of premier
herald. Proof of that was how easily he was diverted from scathing Will’s shortcomings by a request for his Dialog.

  At least Mintie had read Will’s gift, and the memory of his fawning to get it was tempered a little. It also recalled more news…

  ‘Scott of Buccleuch was at Hermitage to welcome wee Davey Lyndsay,’ he told Mintie, then added as lightly as he could: ‘He will become Keeper of Liddesdale and my time there is now measured.’

  Even in the pewter reaches of her mind, Mintie’s sharpness could not be dulled. The Keeper of Liddesdale was a Warden in all but title, she knew, his sole duty to clamp down on the Debatable. Now Wicked Wat Scott had taken on the mantle of it and was clearly making a move to keep it for himself and strike back at the Armstrongs, whom he hated almost as much as he did the English. In return, the current Laird of Hollows hated only one man more than Batty Coalhouse and that was Wicked Wat Scott of Branxholme and Buccleuch.

  It was a cake of black powder, with Batty, the aptly bynamed Slow match, burning down to it – and Mintie knew all that, gave it away when she raised her eyes to Will’s face. He saw… something there. Sorrow? Regret?

  ‘Aye,’ he nodded to her, trying to fan the faint spark into some flame of true interest. ‘Scott has now taken the duties of Keeper until a new one is appointed – or the old one sneaks back into favour. Either way, there will be a new Land Sergeant, I am certain, before midsummer. One who doesn’t care for Powrieburn or Batty Coalhouse. One who will not be able to divert that hideous strength, Mintie.’

  Now he leaned forward, reached out and grasped her wrist, heedless of what she might feel for that, or that it transgressed the unsaid boundaries they had set up.

  ‘Call him off, Mintie,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Leash Batty Coalhouse before you bring ruin to him and Powrieburn both.’

  She tore her wrist free, and for a moment there was fear and anger chasing each other across her carefully constructed face, so that the powder on it cracked and turned her into a parody of wrinkled age.

  She drew back and got up from the table, conscious only of the burn on her wrist, as if fired. Once she had been soft and golden, her womb like rose water; now her mind was a well where she peered up at the world in each droplet’s clear tremble.

  The thunder banged like a clap of hands and everyone jumped; Megs shrieked and Mintie looked at him with eyes like black embers.

  ‘Justice,’ she said, and he recoiled at her fierceness. ‘I will have justice.’

  She walked away from him like a wraith, up the steps to the house.

  ‘Put him out, Mintie,’ she heard him call as she moved like a drift of lambswool, away up the last ladder to the roof space, hearing the hiss of the rain like a writhe of adders.

  ‘Put out the Slow match, or he will fire the Border and burn us all to Hell.’

  Near Tinnis Hill

  Last day of February

  The storm had betrayed him, come late to necks and heads of men and horses – and the nose of the spooring dog; Batty heard it, baying like a mourn for the dead, dragging Black Penny and the men with him onto his trail.

  The stunted cripple of trees was thinning, leading to a meadow; in summer it would be a place of wildflower and clover where bees and butterflies flitted, but now it was a long, dark wasteland of withered grass which would have sucked the shoes off Fiskie if he’d had any.

  Batty didn’t like the open of it, headed Fiskie across at a spraying trot to where the trees thickened up again; he found a burn in his way, with a slight sheep path along it. The path followed the twisting bank, narrow and climbing up and down, which was nothing at all to Fiskie, and Batty marvelled, even as he felt a pang for the Saul, who could never have gaited this as smooth and breathlessly.

  The dog split the night again with its howl and Batty paused, half turned to the sound, then urged Fiskie down the tussocked slope and into the burn; a waterhen beat out of the tangled broom, fleeing across in a ruffle of feather, spray and outraged cackle.

  Fiskie did not like the water, not the cold of it nor the stoned bottom of the burn, where his unshod feet slipped and caught. The water came up to his belly, up and over the spurs of Batty’s big cavalry boots, and Fiskie tossed his head with annoyance.

  Batty forced the nag to the task, no longer marvelling – the Saul would have picked a way along this, sure as sheep; a pity, he thought sadly, that when the sense is finest, the legs and wind have to go.

  The baying snapped his head up. Save for that bloody old slewdug, he added bitterly, whose nose is full of ancient cunning enough to track me through mud and mire and whose legs and wind seem undimmed.

  They moved slowly, for Fiskie was shy of the footing and the burn was spated and cold, so that the rush of it made him wary. The cry of the dog grew louder and they moved on, Batty pushing aside the overhanging branches of the trees. He knew that a dog as good as Beauchien would pick up the scent once it had been established where the prey had come out of the water, but was reasonably sure no one could track the telltale scrape of moss on rock in the moonless dark.

  The thunder growled, distant and angry. Come on, you bugger, Batty thought. Rain.

  The burn broadened, the bottom turned to sand and the spate of it eased, so that Fiskie relaxed into it more; then Batty spotted, as he had thought to when it started to widen, the other stream coming in from the left, so he turned Fiskie up it, back into the rounded stones that fretted the nag so much.

  They grew larger, it grew shallower and more narrowed until, finally, Batty was forced to scramble Fiskie up and out of it. Here he stopped, reached into his slung bag and pulled out the body of a snared hare, scored deeply with his dagger to let the blood scent loose. It stank from being marinaded for hours in what else had been shoved in the bag, and he dropped the hare and moved on.

  Twice more he led Fiskie into and out of the burn until it narrowed to a thread and too-steep banks; a steady roar made him think the thunder was rolling in on him. But it was a froth of falling water, white in the darkness, white as the lace round a fancy lord’s throat, spilling down a cut of the Tinnis like rain spouting from the eaves of a chapel.

  It might be the very burn I landed near, Batty thought with some amazement. He looked up at the wet slick of rock, black as a hog’s back, and thought that it was certainly high, that cut. Same as the one I fell off, he thought, and the memory of it brought a twinge of pain to his leg.

  The water tumbled and roared and Batty had to turn his whole head and cup his ear to listen for the dog. He thought he heard shouts, faint on the sudden rise of wind, but he could not be sure. A hoolet screeched, a feral sliver of sound.

  If it had been a fine story of derring-do, of knights and ladies and questing beasts, there would have been a handy cave in behind that fall, Batty thought. But there was not and he would have to ride right or left. Left took him across the steep-sided burn and on into the cold dark of Tinnis, and he chose that, forcing the reluctant Fiskie into the water and up the other side.

  Here he stopped, fumbled in his bag and then dropped another hare slashed with cuts to make it bloody. He hoped it would work, wished the rain would come and make it unnecessary. He hoped the slow match snugged under his hat stayed dry. He wished the flask he had was full of eau de vie.

  Poor hope and Faerie wishes, he thought. Not a hook to hang your life on.

  Batty urged the nag on, backtracking in a half-circle – or so he hoped, for there was no moon and fewer stars, only the shroud of unseen cloud in the dark. The thunder clapped, hard and sudden overhead, so that Fiskie snorted and danced sideways.

  They went on, shouldering through alder; the thunder banged again and then a great fist of blue-white flare glared into the night, throwing everything into a stark parody of daylight. Fiskie squealed and Batty soothed him.

  Not long after, feeling the slope of Tinnis start to make Fiskie grunt and bend to the work, the rain emptied on them, sizzling like fire through the clawed trees.

  Not far away, Black Penny f
elt the first drops of it and nodded to himself, while the other three with him stumbled at his back, making more noise than a boulder rolling downhill through gorse. It did not matter much, for they’d had little chance of bringing Batty to heel – though Black Penny was pleased with the dog’s efforts in the damp.

  When he came on it, he found it whining uneasily and circling, sneezing now and then in a quiet way and shaking its head when it did it. Black Penny saw the hare and smelled the reek, knew it at once.

  Clever wee Batty, he thought, sitting back on his hunkers and gathering the dog to him.

  ‘Swef, swef – good Beauchien. Never you mind – you did well.’

  ‘What’s up?’ demanded Sore Jo, and Penny glanced up at him, seeing the man’s fingers stray to his scabs, as natural a gesture to him as breathing.

  ‘Ransom,’ he grunted. ‘The beast is ruined.’

  Beauchien snuffed out a wet agreement; the ransom – wild garlic – Batty had tumbled the hare in was all he could smell now and all he would for hours. Penny was admiring of Batty’s trick, for it spoke of knowing how trail hounds worked, that Beauchien had the sense not to wolf down some left titbit of meat, but would be unable to pass it without at least a sniff to taste any taint.

  At least it was not pepper, Penny thought, which would have caused distress and injury – might even have blinded the beast – and that made him contemplate Batty Coalhouse in a new light.

  ‘Christ – is that us, then?’ Sore Jo said with relief. ‘Now we can get out of the wet and the dark.’

  Penny leashed the dog and rose up as the rain started in earnest, nodding to himself. Clever Batty, he thought, having shrugged off the dug, would think himself safe and us lost in the rain. He would think it better to get back to the warm and dry of his wee cave.

  Where Clym and the others were already waiting, having planned it all aforehand. Clever Batty – but not as clever as the Hen Harrow; Black Penny almost felt pity for the one-armed man.