by Robert Low
Well he might be, Bet’s Annie thought, for it was a foul deed and now Batty is repaid for it – he will have no help from his new kin. Other than this daring boy, she thought, and was touched enough by it to announce Davey to the rest of the house as if he was being presented at court.
‘He has come to help rescue Will Elliot,’ she added to Mintie’s back and saw the head come up.
Mintie turned then, so pale that Ridley whimpered, thinking her the next victim.
‘Will,’ she said, as if in wonder. ‘Batty.’
Her face was misery, suddenly old and white as a blanched walnut.
‘Christ in Heaven, Annie – what have I done?’
Chapter Twenty
Hollows Tower
One minute past midnight, Lady Day (25 March)
They had demolished most of the last of the feast, when the Laird finally sent for his prisoners and Leckie half stumbled down into the undercroft with Davey’s Pate, the pair of them red-faced with drink and cursing their luck.
The light made the prisoners blink, but Hutchie’s eyes were rat bright and expectant as he looked the swaying pair over; even down here in the dark and cold he could hear the riot of the Feast of Fools.
Leckie had not known what to expect, but the friendly, confident nod of Hutchie Elliott had not been part of it and made him scowl. Hutchie merely grinned his still-white grin and nodded at the half-eaten pie clutched in Leckie’s fist, a betrayal of custard cream fringing his moustache.
‘Good vittles, then,’ he declared brightly. ‘Any left for us?’
Leckie recovered enough to growl, while Pate swayed and belched and blinked like a weary owl, his mind trying to grind out a sharp response and so far from it a week would never be long enough.
‘The dogs have your portion,’ Leckie managed, and after a long moment – while it pierced the fog of drink – Pate laughed, got caught in a great belch and looked surprised at it.
‘You are called to the hall,’ Leckie declared portentously and then waved to Pate, who fumbled for his keys, held them for a moment and blinked once more.
‘Ah might boak,’ he announced and shoved the keys at Leckie before turning away and vomiting copiously.
‘Ach, you filthy whoreslip,’ bellowed Leckie, leaping back from the splashing. Hutchie laughed and the dog barked.
‘Don’t try anything,’ Leckie warned, suddenly aware of the crowd of men he had to release and that he was alone save for the retching Pate.
‘Aye, aye,’ Hutchie replied wryly, ‘a quick blow to lay you out, shove the brace of you in your own cell and then fight our way through the hall and out into the yard, battle to the stables, saddle horses and away to freedom. Pausing only to thieve the silver and violate a woman or three on the way.’
‘Less of your violatin’,’ muttered Sore Jo, picking his scabs. ‘That’s what landed us here.’
He dug Hutchie sharply in the ribs and for a moment they glared at each other; then the dog growled and Hutchie relaxed. He had not forgotten the strange contract the Lady had intimated with these others and did not trust them. For now, though, they were all mired in the same muddy dub.
Leckie opened the door and Pate moaned about ‘bad pie’ and ‘nivver again’. They left him in the dark as they were shepherded upstairs by Leckie, their shadows bobbing and dancing in the torch he held high.
They came up into a blare of light and leprous heat, a beating bell of noise from bellowers and roarers, and a shrill shriek of drunk women; drum and flute fought and failed to be heard over it.
The fresh rushes had been scattered and littered with the debris of a rich table, spilled from torn-apart platters which still had the memory of the original, enough to water the mouth of Hutchie and the others.
Stuffed goose, Lombard-style with sliced almonds. Stewed pigeons with sausage and onions. Boiled calves’ feet with cheese and egg. Sheep’s pluck and bashed neeps. Fried veal sweetbreads and liver. Rob’s Tam groaned and champed saliva onto his beard; the dog tore free from Black Penny and darted in to fight the wolfhounds for scraps.
‘Well, well – the bold lads are here.’
The Laird sat at his high seat, bright in pale blue silk slashed to show the white linen beneath, though the fine suit was already stained with meat juice and wine. His face was a berry of seeming delight, in contrast to the stone of his Lady, who sat in prim dove grey, her hands in her lap and her eyes agate.
‘It is right and proper,’ the Laird bellowed, aiming to be heard above the din, ‘that a Feast of Fools be graced by some of the greatest fools in Liddesdale.’
He slapped the table and rocked with laughter, which everyone dutifully joined in; the marzipan model of Hollows Tower teetered. The Laird waved magnanimously.
‘Follow Leckie and he will tell you what to do. It is the Laird o’ Hollows’ pleasure to feast you and then send you on your way, with no bad cess atween us. Before that, you will entertain us as befits fools.’
He paused, drank, belched and then laughed.
‘Save you, Hutchie. You will play your part in this mummery, but I will keep you close at my pleasure.’
Hutchie bowed, fighting the seethe in him. He followed the others out the door and down the steps into the barmkin yard to the accompaniment of laughter, only some of it good-natured, and a shower of small bones and bits of bread.
Down in the yard, lit by flickering torches, Leckie smirked and indicated a heap of filthy brown robes.
‘Put them on and take up your censers, wee priests,’ he declared, and Hutchie realised the robes were ragged, stained and stinking habits. The censers were buckets of ashes.
Then he saw the boy dressed like a bishop in cloth of gold, clutching a basket crib.
‘The Boy Bishop and the baby Jesus,’ Leckie declared. ‘You are his clerics.’
Black Penny, more concerned about his dog than anything, merely struggled into the garments without a murmur; the rest followed, muttering.
Hutchie climbed into the slime of his own habit, took up the bucket, and then, with a sharp bark of laughter, Leckie waved them back up the stairs. They processed forward into the hall, waving the ash buckets back and forth until the contents spilled in a cloud, right and left.
Behind came the Boy Bishop, beaming and cradling his holy charge, reciting the Creed at the top of his shrill voice. As they came into the hall, a great roar went up and folk answered every ‘amen’ response with a bray like a donkey and great howls of laughter.
William Patten caught the Lady’s eye, saw that it was jaundiced as his own; King Henry had banned the Boy Bishop abomination in England only recently, but it was such a well-established tradition that it would take more than an edict to end it. It might never end for the Scotch, he thought, looking at the greased delight on faces.
As entertainment, he thought scornfully, it is what you might expect from this unsophisticated outpost in a barbarian country. He warmed himself with the thought that soon he would have concluded his business here and be gone. He would give this Laird three days, though he did not think the missing royal babe would be found in that time; after that, he would inform King Henry of the truth of matters.
Hutchie, seething as he ducked food missiles from the laughing snarlers and growlers on their benches, processed round the small hall twice and found himself at the heels of the Boy Bishop, who had discovered just what it meant to be coped and mitred in cloth of gold and treated as a fool.
An outthrust foot made the boy stumble and Hutchie shot out a reflexive hand to catch the tumbling crib, realising that it was a real child a moment later. Then he looked at the wee face of it and the shock was like a dash of freezing water.
The Boy Bishop turned to thank him, then saw the frozen astonishment on the man’s face; he snatched the crib from him and stumbled away.
Hutchie, bedazzled, ignored the flung bones and insults now. He had seen the babe, and even allowing for the sullen twist of her bawling face at being in this melee, he knew her well.<
br />
It was a marvel, though, how Mary, Queen of Scots had ended up in the charge of a Boy Bishop at a Feast of Fools.
And how no one else knew but him.
The powder mill near Hollows Tower
Dawn on Lady Day (25 March)
The sour milk sky smeared light in the high window and Batty stirred, stretching slowly to get the stiffness out; his movement set the rats scurrying from the body, now a vague outline in the dim, lying in a circle of sticky shadow.
Batty thought about it for a moment, shoved the regret away and shrugged; one more on the heap of bad cess on his soul. Let us see, he thought, levering himself up, if I have finally annoyed God.
He sang, soft and out of tune, for there was no one to hear but the rats and the long dead man: ‘It was mirk, mirk night, there was no starlight and they waded in red blood to the knee.’
Then he took a breath, pulled out his axe-shafted dagg and examined the wound wheel of it.
‘For all the blood that’s shed on the earth, runs through the springs o’ yon countrie.’
He squeezed the trigger. It was not loaded, but the wheel spun and the sparks flew, catching the fine wool and charcoal. Sparks in this place; Batty almost heard the walls shriek, and with sweat running on him like lice, he puffed the faint glow into life, then lit a master match.
It was always the most danger, this part. He blew softly on the master match, then touched the smouldering end to all the others, one by one, the ends burning bright and red, each of them adding to the danger of a premature detonation. But the night was chill and damp, damp enough even in the mill.
He watched them. Like rat eyes in the dark, he thought. Then he scurried away, out of the mill, moving in a half crouched lumber, limbs stiff and sore.
He did not breathe normally until he was across the Esk, dripping this time because he had fallen twice in his haste and was soaked through.
Yet he lay back briefly and stared at the cloud-winked stars and got his breath back. Then he levered himself up and stared back at the mill, which would be silent and empty for only a little while longer, with no one bothering it, nor the dead man in it, nor the winking crimson eyes. Everyone would be too busy drinking and eating, jigging and laughing.
Feast of Fools, Batty thought, then took a deep, grim breath.
Yon sorry arse in the mill is only the first. By the time I am done here, Hell will seem a sunlit meadow.
Hollows Tower
At the same time
He swung and sometimes thought he was in his cradle, though why his ma had put his feet in the fire was a mystery; he called to her, hoping she would move his crib back a bit.
Then he surfaced into the horror, hanging in the banded cylinder out over the tower of Hollows, his feet shrieking with agony because he only had a narrow metal strip to stand on, and his arms were close to his sides so that he could not move them.
So he stood, all his weight taken on the balls of his bloody, stabbed feet, bound in banded metal and swinging.
‘Will Elliot.’
The voice made him blink, but he was turned away from it. Then the vagrant breeze turned the cage in a sickening circle and he saw the Lady, wrapped against the chill up on the tower roof. Beside her were two men – Leckie, Will recognised. And the Englishman, the wee man who had pissed himself in the coach when the Grahams had attacked. It seemed another age since that, and he shivered. He had a name, the wee English, but he couldn’t remember it…
He has fever, the Lady thought with alarm. My husband will kill this man with his carelessness.
She glanced at Patten and saw his grim look, the raised eyebrow. The Englishman saw the danger in this course, she knew – but Leckie, swaying and owlish with drink, was here because her husband had seen his wife leave the hall and set his drunken dog to watch her, so there was little that could be said or done.
My husband does not trust me, she thought bitterly, and that is what we have come down to, him and I. What does he think I will do? Drag the Land Sergeant of Hermitage onto the roof, knock the lock and free him – to do what? The man can hardly see, is almost certainly not able to stand, and all my husband’s growling men between him and freedom.
She could only negotiate.
‘He is fevered,’ she said to Leckie. ‘A blind man can see it and the air is chill. If he is left out all night, he will die.’
Leckie, aware that he had drunk too much, tried to marshall a suitable riposte but lost it on the march out of his mouth and degenerated into mumble and a wave of one hand that could mean anything.
‘Bring him in,’ she ordered sternly, and that sliced the fog in him.
‘Naw,’ he said, shaking his head and waggling a finger. ‘Nawnawnaw – nay brininggin… bringin’ gin. Hang, the Maister shays, and hang he will. Will will hang, so he will…’
He brayed with laughter, the sound shaking Will out of a slow sink into oblivion. He opened his eyes with difficulty, saw Leckie’s red mouth wide with laughter, saw the pale marble of the Lady’s face and the disapproving moue of the Englishman. Patten, that was his name…
Then, behind them all, a huge red flower blossomed in the dark, expanding like opening petals in all directions, a sick, swollen black and crimson bloom, leprous with menace.
A second later the heat and the massive noise blasted all sense away; Hell opened its throat and vomited all over Hollows Tower.
* * *
A concussive wave of light and sound knocked Batty to the ground, slamming the breath out of his lungs; for a single eyeblink the world was bright as day, etched in red with a huge flare of stretched shadows.
There was a time when he was neither in nor out of the world and, when he eventually decided he was still in it, he lifted his head and heard the singing emptiness of a strange silence.
Too close, he thought. Too much powder. Yet there was a flicker of pride at how all the slow matches had burned down almost together – no match with a slow match, that’s Batty Coalhouse…
He rolled over and tried to get his breath back and heard pattering like running feet, raised his head a little and saw myriad small lights; nearby, shunked into the earth like a stake in a heart, a balk of timber smouldered.
The pattering was the last of the debris, fine as rain and some of it burning so that a mirr of fire fell all round him, hissing into the Esk; trees, stripped of their new buds, some uprooted, burned like torches.
He levered himself up slowly, checking limbs. There was the smell of burning hair and he patted and pinched out smoulders on the cloth of his jack. His sword was still slung, his single dagg stuck in his belt.
For a moment the vision of his father presented itself, the moment he waved from under the shelter of the Red Tower. Or perhaps he was just stirring life into the match he was about to touch to the powder kegs that blew him and the gate to Hell.
Batty shook it away and got up, grunting. Somewhere ahead was Hollows, and at last hearing returned, so that the screaming seemed loud.
* * *
The tower shuddered as something massive struck it; a black wind whirred like a bird-wing between Patten and Leckie, with something darker still at the centre of it. The Lady was whirled away by it, struck and flung over the edge in an eyeblink by what Patten swore was a shattered segment of millstone.
The wind of it flung Patten backwards, skittering across the narrow walkway to slam into the slated peak of the roof. Leckie was flung the other way, colliding with the banded cylinder of the cage so that it swung wildly, right out in a half-circle, with Leckie clinging by instinct, like a barnacle to a wave-lashed rock.
Patten got up and staggered, panicked at not being able to breathe, turning in little jerky movements until he realised that the roaring he could hear was the slow, thunderous slither of the crow-stepped gable collapsing and taking half the roof with it, plunging down to the next floor. It left the curling wind of stair like the exposed nerve of a shattered tooth.
He lurched away from the tumble of fall
ing stones, saw the incongruous sight of a half-circle of wood embedded in the wall. He had enough time to register it as part of a mill wheel before it tore free with an agonised shriek and fell into the huddle of buildings inside the barmkin, taking the wooden lattice of scaffolding with it in a great shower of timber skewers. He stumbled for the remains of the stair, looking for a way out and away.
Will’s world tilted crazily and he lost his senses in the bewildering twists. The cage spun right round on its chain, out from the crenellated walls and all the way back to the other side; he heard screaming and squinted down as far as his chin would allow.
Below, clinging on and staring up with his mouth a gaping sewer of shrieks, Leckie swung by one hand like a mad rope in a high wind, scrabbling furiously for grip with the other.
Will smiled as the cage lurched and banged Leckie into the stones, so that he tried to reach out and grab the wall. But there was no firmness left in Hollows Tower. It was melting like the marzipan model in the hall below, while the world seemed all fire and roaring.
Will moved his pain-burning foot onto the fingers and pressed hard, stamped until his own screams merged with those of Leckie, and when, fainting, he finally relaxed the pressure, Leckie fell away with a last despairing shriek.
Will had time to laugh one laugh. Then the cage gibbet snapped and sent him plunging sixty feet to the ground.
Chapter Twenty-One
Two miles east from Hollows
Lady Day (25 March)
The morning sun was barely up and staggering with weakness, yet it lit Ganny like a beacon. He glowed with golden perfection and dazzled himself; he whimpered and peeled off the cope – the mitre he had long since lost in the frantic desire to be gone from Hollows.
It had been after the smiling man had come to him, one of those wearing the stinking priests’ robes who had acted as his processional escort. Ganny had known something was up the second this man, with his white teeth and slicked hair, had saved baby Jane from falling and seen who she was at the same time.
