by Faris, Fiona
“Gilbert!” Margaret snapped. “Can you not see that the lassie’s heart has been broken? Have you not a single word of comfort you can offer?”
Gilbert was dragged back from his speculations to the hard reality of Elizabeth’s distress.
“Aye… yes… well… It’s just as Margaret says,” he stammered, casting around for some appropriate consolation. “It was unfortunate, but no harm was done. I suppose we have to be thankful that this Comyn didn’t take advantage of you… or revenge on you once he found out who you were.”
Margaret stared at him openmouthed, her wide eyes screaming at him in silent appeal: “Is that the best you can do?”
She stood up and drew Elizabeth, still sobbing, to her feet.
“Come,” she said. “Come through to my boudoir and tell me all about it, every detail. I promise, you will feel better for it.”
With her arm around Elizabeth’s quaking shoulders, she led her from the room, casting a dagger-like look at her husband as they passed him.
* * *
As soon as they were gone, Gilbert took the stairs down to the hall.
“Have you seen Jamesie, Matthie, and Aonghas?” he inquired of a young retainer, who was sitting on a low stool in the ingleneuk, repairing a long slash in his tunic with a needle and yarn.
“I think they are down on the practice field, Sire.”
Gilbert left the castle and made his way out onto the flat of the promontory, where his men-at-arms trained. It was a fine, still morning and the archers were at the butts. The German Sea lay calm and glittering in the morning sunshine, and the gulls swooped and soared above the cliff of the bay. Far out, beyond the headland, a small open fishing boat lay at rest with its bladder floats and lines straggled out like jellyfish tentacles behind it.
His three lieutenants were instructing some new recruits in the finer points of slashing and stabbing. The fresh-faced lads had been paired off and were hewing at one another manfully with blunt swords and dirks.
“That’s it!” Aonghas was bellowing. “Slash with the sword to take down the targe, then stab with the dirk at the exposed body. Slash and stab, slash and stab, slash and stab…”
“It’s the same rhythm you would use when scything a field,” James added helpfully. “Just imagine the enemy is a field of corn you’re harvesting…”
Matthew was bent double with laughter, his hands pressing into his knees.
“Oh, don’t tell them that, man.” He gasped. “Or they’ll be standing the dead up in stouks.”
Gilbert strode up to them quickly. James was the first to see him and slapped a hand on Aonghas’ shoulder to attract his attention.
“Keep at it, lads,” he told the recruits as the three lieutenants turned to meet the Earl.
“My Lord,” they greeted Gilbert with curt nods of acknowledgment.
Gilbert led them a little way away from the ears of the new lads.
“I’ve not long learned that there is a stranger afoot, a Duncan Comyn.”
“A Comyn?” Aonghas said, straightening up to his full height with an expression of affront.
“Yes, a Comyn,” Gilbert confirmed. “I take it you have had no intelligence of this?”
The three lieutenants looked at one another, each of them shaking his head.
“No, my Lord,” James said. “We have had no news of him. How long has he been among us?”
Gilbert gazed out across the bay.
“I have no idea,” he replied pensively. “I have just learned of his existence from the Lady Elizabeth. Apparently, she has made his acquaintance in and around the bay there.”
He jutted his chin towards the beach that curved away to the north from the headland on which they stood. They all gazed down at the broad strip of sand as if they expected to see the Comyn standing there.
“Command the men to ask around,” Gilbert ordered. “Offer a newly minted silver penny to anyone who can bring us information about this Duncan Comyn. I suspect that, if he had only lately washed up on these shores, he will have washed up from France or Flanders, with a kistful of Balliol siller to cross a few hands with.”
“As you will, sir.”
Gilbert nodded before turning on his heel and marching back to the castle.
He would have an account of this Duncan Comyn, whoever he was, and would not be surprised to see him dancing one day soon on the end of a rope.
Chapter Sixteen
The Bullers and Slochd Altrimen
Some days later
Duncan stood as close to the edge of the Bullers as he dared and as the tug of the gusting wind allowed. It had been a fine morning when he had set out from the cottage in Cruden Bay, but a squall had blown in off the German Sea. An icy rain stung his face, and the wind buffeted him towards the edge of the cliffs. Down in the ‘pot’ of the collapsed sea cave, the waves boiled and crashed over the jagged, razor-sharp rocks, their turbulence echoing that which roiled in his veins.
His mission was going badly. In fact, he labored in vain. Everywhere he went, in every farm ‘toun’ and bastle house he visited, he found plenty of men who had suffered greatly in the Rape of Buchan and plenty of angry talk about justice and vengeance, but also a deep sense of hopelessness and self-pity. Invariably, the victims of the Bruce’s violent usurpation of the throne, and the subsequent bloody repression of their rival clans, the Balliols and the Comyns, were content to wallow in drink and despair, each of which fed off the other, ready enough to shed tears for their suffering but unwilling to shed blood for their liberty. Duncan, too, was beginning to despair; every day, his masters’ plan to foment a rising among their kinsmen in the northeast increasingly seemed to be an empty fantasy.
He also could not banish Elizabeth Bryce from his thoughts. She had captivated him, like the selkie in Mairi Cullen’s story. It was if she had swum up from the deep and left her seal-clothes hidden somewhere safe, revealing herself in all her sleek mermaid beauty on the rocks that fateful morning when he had rescued her, and she had first enchanted him. He knew he should hate and despise her, that she was one of his oppressors’ brood, a Hay in all but name, a favorite of those who had usurped his kinfolks’ land and titles, or those who had pillaged and raped and cleared his people from the land. But he found that he could not; his heart was not in it. His heart had been captivated by the small, slim red-haired beauty, and he could not harden it against her, no matter how hard he tried.
He gazed down into the pot from beneath his long tippeted hood, his robes flapping in the blustering wind. He watched the waves rush through the entrance, beneath the high natural arch that was all that was left of the cavern roof after centuries of erosion by the elements, only to expend their futile rage against the grim granite rocks. He was tempted to just give up, abandon his mission and offer his service as a free lance. The Comyns’ cause was lost, he admitted to himself; his recent experiences among the bonnet lairds and farmers of Formartine had only confirmed this.
But what about Elizabeth Bryce? Should he give her up too? The situation with regard to her seemed equally hopeless. Even if he could take back the hate-filled words he had thrown at her, her people would still be set against his suit. The Hays would only have to hear his name for them to forbid him to have anything to do with her. He was also a landless knight, with little or no prospects of distinction or a household of his own. They Hays, he suspected, would have ambitions greater than him for their favorite. Hers would be a diplomatic match, that would bring advantages to both parties, and not a love match that would bring the Hays nothing. Should he press his suit nevertheless? Should he elope with her and make their way as best they could? He staggered as a particularly strong gust of wind hauled him towards the Bullers’ edge. Even if Elizabeth herself was disposed to give up everything to run away with him, which he doubted, what kind of life could he offer her? That of a camp follower, flitting from household to household as he found employment with them. Was he willing to wish that upon her?
He scooped
up a rock that lay on the sodden turf and hurled it into the maelstrom below, letting out a roar of anguish and frustration as he did so. The pounding waves and heaving swell swallowed it with indifference. His cry was torn away into oblivion by the wind.
* * *
Less than a mile away, Elizabeth was making her way down a steep and rocky climb to Slochd Altrimen, the Nursing Cave, where Dearbhorghil Goudie, the spaewife, lived.
The cave lay at the foot of the cliffs that fall into the tiny St. Cyrus’ cove, which was inaccessible from the coastline and could only be reached by boat or by a slippery climb down the cliffs themselves. The entrance to the cave lay high above the tideline of a stony beach and was partially hidden by a thin waterfall or ‘strone’. Behind the strone, a narrow fissure led back into the cave itself, where the Goudie family lived.
Elizabeth took the climb slowly, hitching the skirts of her gown high above her knees and looping them through her belt. She would have preferred to have worm a kirtle, as she had done as a child, which would have been easier to climb in, but she could never have explained away such unladylike garb on her departure from the castle several hours earlier. She had left her shoes at the top of the cliffs, weighed down with stones and hidden in a thick spiky stook of marram grass, and was making the descent barefoot – the better to grip the wet ledges that zigzagged down the cliff face. That morning, she had plaited her dark red hair into two heavy braids to prevent the gale from blowing it about her face. She imagined that she looked like a common fishwife, minus the creel on her back.
When she reached the bottom, she unhitched her gown and let it fall about her legs again. The fabric was damp from the drizzle and sea spray that the wind had driven against her, and it clung to her as she stepped precariously across the large smooth stones, some of which rocked beneath her feet, towards the cave entrance. She carefully skirted the strone and slid sideways into the rough fissure.
It took some moments for her eyes to become accustomed to the dim torchlight inside the cave itself. When they did, Elizabeth’s breath was stolen by the astonishing, cathedral-like structure that met them, with its marble-like flowstone staircases and huge mineral columns formed by the centuries of water dripping through the stone. The cavern was about seventy yards long and wide. At the back, the frozen flow of a broad fossilized waterfall sparkled magically in the torchlight. The ribs of the vaulted ceiling arched high into the obscurity of the shadows.
A group of ten people lay and squatted around a small cooking fire near the center of the cave: two young adult couples, seven children of assorted ages, and an old crone. The children were all dressed in plain shapeless kirtles, the women in long checked skirts and shawls, and the men in shirts and trews. They were all barefoot and dirty, with the men sporting thick, tousled beards and long hair, while the women had their hair covered by loose-fitting wimples. Their eyes gleamed like shards of bleached shell from their dusky faces.
The crone lifted herself up from her hunker and stepped across towards Elizabeth.
“Lizzie Bryce,” she greeted her with a toothless gurgle.
Elizabeth gave a start.
“How do you know my name?”
Dearbhorghil Goudie cackled and dismissed the question with a small sweep of her hand.
“Och, Lizzie, I have been expecting you for a long while now. Come away ben.”
She led Elizabeth to the flowstone on which the others sat and invited her to sit down on one of its smooth marled contours. One of the children brought her a charred tin cup, of the sort that is hung by a stick directly over the flames of a fire, and which the tinkers who made and hawked them called ‘billet-cannes’.
“A brew of chamomile with dittany, scabious, and pennyroyal,” Dearbhorghil explained. “It clears the blood of pestilence.”
Dearbhorghil was a stick-thin woman of about forty years. Her hair, beneath the soot and grime, was a speckled gray, her eyes were bleared with cataracts, and her nose and chin all but met over the collapse of her toothless mouth. The neck of her kirtle, which may well have fitted her in her prime, gaped and sagged open at her chest to reveal two flat flaps of skin that once were breasts.
The crone sat down and lifted Elizabeth’s hands, turning them back and forth to examine them before peering deep into her eyes.
“And what brings you here, Lizzie Bryce?” she asked. “I know why the fates have brought you, but I would know what brought you to seek me out.”
Elizabeth shifted uneasily in her damp dress.
“I would know my future,” she said.
“A-ha!” Dearbhorghil shrieked gleefully, slapping her hands down on her bony knees. “That I can easily tell: your future is the grave, which it is of us all.”
“But between now and the grave.”
“That will depend on you,” Dearbhorghil said dismissively as if it could be no concern of hers.
“But,” Elizabeth continued, confused, “you are a spaewife; you are supposed to know the future, or at least be able to foresee it.”
Dearbhorghil sneered and shook her head vehemently.
“That is just superstition,” she said. “How could anyone see what has not yet come to pass?”
“But isn’t that what spaewives do?” Elizabeth insisted. “Divine what is yet to come?”
“Impossible!” Dearbhorghil barked, then sighed as if she had become weary of having to explain. “The trouble is that we live our lives forward but remember them backward. When you walk up a grassy knowe in the morning and look back, you can see in the dew the path that you must have taken, but that doesn’t mean you could not have chosen, when you set out to walk, another path.”
Elizabeth sought to shake the confusion from her head.
“But I don’t understand… What, then, does a spaewife do if not foretell the future?”
Dearbhorghil leaned forward, put her claw-like hand on Elizabeth’s knee, and whispered conspiratorially:
“We spy. We watch stealthily. We watch for signs and where they point to.” She picked up Elizabeth’s billet-canne, which Elizabeth had placed on the stone beside her. “We brew physic.”
Elizabeth was still confused.
“But how did you know who I was and why the fates had brought me?”
“By watching for signs and where they point to,” Dearbhorghil repeated. “I have heard all about you, Lizzie Bryce, where you are from and how you come to be here. I have pieced together your history from all the gossip that flits like bats in the night. I know that you have fallen for a young vagabond called Duncan Comyn, how the Comyns and the Hays don’t pull together, and how they are pulling you apart in different directions. I also know how Duncan’s heart is pulling him apart too. Between his duty to his kinsfolk and his feelings for you, how he skulks and languishes like a ghost that is doomed to wander the earth because of his indecision. I know he is at this very moment up at the Bullers, indulging his despair like a thrawn gull that canna settle on its roost on the cliffs for the gales that keep blowing it off… I spy all this, through the eyes and ears of my brood…” She indicated to the tinceard – ‘tinker’ – clan that lounged around the cooking fire. “… This being my skill as a spaewife. And I knew that the fates had brought you to me since wee Sìneag there spied you coming down the Jacob’s Ladder…”
Dearbhorghil chuckled.
Elizabeth was impressed.
“Then what am I to do?” she begged, spreading her arms in appeal.
Dearbhorghil gazed deep into her eyes. It was a sad look, filled with pity.
“I canna help you there, lass,” she replied after a moment. “You must do what you will and be all you can be… and make of that something worth being. You must decide what you want, lassie, and climb the dewy knowe to reach it.”
Aye… therein lay the rub, Elizabeth reflected dolefully. What did she want? She knew what others wanted for her, what Margaret in particular wanted for her, but what did she want for herself?
“Now, drink your physic,” Dea
rbhorghil told her, rising to return to the fire, “and then Maolmhuire will see you safe back up the ladder.”
* * *
Over the next few days, Elizabeth reflected on the spaewife’s words. What did she want? What did she really want?
She realized that she wanted many things, the most important of which were at odds with one another. She wanted to escape her station as a servant and become a lady on her own account. She was grateful to Lady Margaret for having made this possible – by rescuing her from the torment that had been her situation as an orphaned street child conscripted into service as a menial in the kitchens of Peebles Castle, where she had been cruelly abused – and taking her under her patronage. She wanted to please her benefactor and achieve the ambition that Lady Margaret entertained for her, yet she doubted that any eligible knight of substance would ever contemplate marriage to a woman as ruined as she had been and who would bring him no advantage or advancement. She had to wonder whether it would be wise to pass over a chance of happiness with someone who fell below the station that Lady Margaret wished for her, when the match that Lady Margaret envisioned for her might not even exist.