Shake Loose the Border

by Robert Low

  The Bastard Steward, biting his bottom lip, nodded to Batty, asked about the guns in a distant way and then left while his men – French among them by the banners Batty saw – went tearing into the English, driving them back to the water’s edge; horsemen with lances rode among them and they looked like the Border riders he knew well.

  ‘Time for us,’ Ewan Fraser suddenly announced, standing up; his men grouped round him like a dog-pack and he looked at Batty and raised the big two-hander.

  ‘Last of the Lovat,’ he said and loped off, trailing his hounds.

  ‘Bigod,’ Hans Cochrane said, shaking his head. ‘I am glad I am on this side of him.’

  Batty said nothing on how irritated he was that they were supposed to be guarding his guns and yet had gone off plundering. Later, in the blood-swirling retch of the foreshore, with the blinding cough of powder smoke everywhere, he and the others manhandled the rabinets down on to the turf above the shingle, where they could shoot fist-sized iron balls into the flat-bottomed boats that had managed to push themselves off, back towards the English fleet and safety. Far out in the Forth, held there by the shallow inshore waters, the great ships loomed, magnificently impotent.

  Batty had crunched over splintered bone and sloshed through bloody parts of what once had been men – his doing, he thought. No match with a slow match, that’s Batty Coalhouse; out in the water, the frantic fled up to the neck. On the shore, vengeful men prowled – and Batty spotted Ewan Fraser with blood all down his face. Next to him was Huw, limping and reeling on the edge of falling down.

  ‘I killed a captain,’ he exclaimed with delight; around him, men moved to and fro, as if there was no enemy left – which might have been the truth, Batty thought, for he had come on none and was grateful for it.

  ‘He was cursing me,’ Huw went on, ‘and I gave him steel in the teeth. He had ten silver pence on him.’

  ‘Have we won then?’ Ewan asked, mopping his face with a square of cloth, shaking blood from him like a dog coming out of a river.

  ‘I dinna ken,’ Huw growled mournfully and reeled away spitting blood, ‘but, ochone, I believe I have lost.’

  Batty helped with the guns, using a rammer to force the ball on to the powder bag, then a stiletto dagger thrust down the vent to poke a hole in it. The vent man poured priming powder in from a little horn, blowing on the linstock match to keep it glowing; Batty gave him a scathing look – if that spark landed in the powder horn they’d all go up. The vent man looked back at Batty, grinned and waved the linstock in a question. Batty nodded, the match went down and there was a moment of fizzing, then a loud pop.

  Batty skipped out of the patch of the gun’s recoil and stuck the rammer in the churned-up ground as he went on a little way, picking his way over discarded equipment and rag-doll bodies, trying to find someone to ask about how the battle was going; he did not want to have a sudden surge of vengeful English down on his guns – after what they had done to them, no quarter would be given.

  He heard shouts and bangs and screaming horses, then heard someone roaring in what he recognised as the barbarous tongue of the Frasers, so he went towards it. The rest of the Frasers were in a knot with John Dubh towering in the centre of a crowd of men – and women, Batty saw – who were cowering and screaming. None louder than the man in dun and black, who had his hands raised as high as his voice.

  ‘We are not of the army. I came with them to watch and offer spiritual guidance. I am a minister of My Master Jesus Christ. Spare my life.’

  ‘Aye, weel – if you are a good one, your Master has need of you,’ John Dubh replied in thick English. ‘If not – the De’il take you.’

  The sound of his sword was sickening; the man screamed, the women shrieked – one fainted – and a voice bellowed: ‘Johnnie Dubh – are you killing men of God here?’

  They all turned into the purpling face of the Lord of Wemyss, cantering up with a banner in one fist and steel in the other, his head bare and his wisped hair all wild; behind him came grim-faced, well-armed footmen and horsemen cantered out from behind him, lances poised. John Dubh merely grinned and wiped the blood and hair from his sword.

  ‘Och, no, Your Honour. A wee Reformed cant – nae men of God here.’

  Wemyss, rampant Catholic and bloated with victory, waved his sword in the air and lumbered off, followed by his loyal bodyguard and yelling ‘Well done – carry on’ over his shoulder.

  The wind was blowing away the smoke, for all that Batty heard his guns fountain out more of it. The Frasers fell to looting the dead minister and gathering the women in knots like sheep.

  ‘Are you done here?’ Batty demanded, annoyed; he wanted the Frasers guarding his guns.

  ‘No’ quite Master Coalhouse,’ John Dubh declared, squinting at the coins he had taken; he bit one experimentally. The women clucked a bit and then squatted, trembling whenever the guns spat – Batty realised they must be servants from Newark Castle and said so. Then he called out, asking if any had seen Will Elliot the steward, but had only blankness back.

  John Dubh spotted Batty’s jaundiced eye over the body of the minister and grinned. ‘We will be back with you afore long, Master Coalhouse – this affray is over and we will let the Stewart’s men charge about in the heat to finish it. I wouldnae mourn for this one much either – he is a shitlegged chiel of Reformist, which is flat-out Lutheran by the back door.’

  Out in the bay, one roundshot had struck a crowded boat and the subsequent panic overturned it; the screams were distant, mournful threnodies which John Dubh glanced up at and then ignored. There were horsemen from the Bastard Stewart’s command galloping exultantly up and down the shore, ramming lances through anyone fleeing into the surf.

  ‘Losh, man these here are in no danger from us, but them prickers might cause them hurt. We will escort these fine Newark ladies to some decent shelter. I am sure they have mislaid their chastity and it is only chentlemanly to see if we can uncover it.’

  October 1548

  Everything in Edinburgh was fevered – wee Mary, the Queen in swaddling, had been packed off to France and a betrothal to the Dauphin, which meant the English plan to forcibly wed her on to young King Edward was a poorer hand.

  It also meant the French thought Scotland was their own and arrived to challenge the English hold on Leith, Haddington and everywhere else. The main English forces had scuttled back to Berwick, all save the luckless besieged, and everyone was en fête, from the official receptions at the slightly charred Holyrood, to street peddlers offering fruit and nosegays and the Egyptiani offering fortunes while they picked your pocket. You could not walk down a wynd or a cobble in Edinburgh that did not have acrobats, stilt-walkers or rope-dancers.

  Goodwives looked on in astonishment at the women who came in the French train in their sumptuous dresses with wide sleeves and swooping partlet, teetering on perilous, unseen heels with a little dog under one arm and a coterie of demoiselle de compagnie and at least one footman in cramoisi or citrine satin. It could just as easily be a boy with a trained dancing monkey, dyed blue or yellow or bright green. And none of them were titled or even within a whiff of it, just ladies who came with the soldiery.

  It was, Ewan Fraser, noted scathingly: ‘pàrtaidh an diabhail.’

  Batty had no quarrel with the Devil’s party it was and the taverns between West and Nether Bows did their best to turn into salons, vying with one another for the outlandish, for that was where the French gentleman chose to play cards for high stakes.

  The best card game in the city was that of the Chevalier de la Tremoille, a young sprig of that French House. He served on the staff of the French army, as secretary intendant in the fiscal department where, as he said with a wink ‘all the best money is’.

  He was not short of it and presided over games in places of his own choosing and with his own 40-card deck. The one Batty attended was in Johnnie Lyle’s Natural Wonders exhibition, a cramped four-storey house off a wynd up the Cowgate, full of the sinister and odd
which customers could view for the price of a meat pie.

  He had only gone there to meet the Strozzis and Lord Methven, Master of the Scots Artillery and was glad he had not eaten at all. They sat between glass jars of preserving fluids full of body parts – a lamb with seven legs, an infant with flippers instead of arms, a two-headed cat – and were served wine by blackamoor dwarves dressed in not much more than coloured scarves and palm fronds.

  De la Tremoille – dressed as a woman, which was his habit when off duty Batty learned – dealt to a select group which included the Chevalier d’Antone, who gambled for a living, Ewan Fraser – claiming status as a ‘lord of the Lovat’ – and the Comte Saintgalles, who swore he had the secret of winning at Primero and, incidentally, immortality.

  ‘But you lose,’ de la Tremoille pointed out when Saintgalles brought this up – yet again boasting about how gaming had sustained him for the last hundred years of his own life. Since he seemed to be only in his thirties, that secret was worth more than winning at Primero Batty thought and said so.

  ‘You may think it,’ Saintgalles said diffidently, briefly studying him from under an arched eyebrow, ‘but maintaining one’s style in all that time is essential. Otherwise, it is just an eternity of ennui.’

  He certainly seemed to have the monies to preserve the style and neither he nor d’Antone were much good at gambling, for all that Saintgalles claimed he had the secret of it and d’Antone insisted he was a professional. Fraser played recklessly and de la Tremoille laughed at his losing scowls.

  ‘All Scotch are the same,’ he said. ‘Your Regent Arran should be here, since he plays the same way with his name, his sword, the lives of a few thousand Scotchmen and the fortunes of some faithful gentlemen.’

  ‘The ones from the north fight naked underneath dresses, I hear,’ d’Antone said, frowning at his cards and then offering Lovat a winning smile. ‘Which is why you esteem them well, Chevalier de la Tremoille.’

  ‘That and their barbarous tongue,’ de la Tremoille answered non-plussed and slid a card from the pack as he smiled at Lovat. ‘Speak it to me, sir.’

  Lovat said something in Gaelic and de la Tremoille clapped his hands with delight.

  ‘Liquid gold, is it not, gentlemen? What did it mean. sir?’

  ‘Yes, pray tell Master Fraser,’ Saintgalles demanded laconically, knowing full well that it had been insulting, even if he did not understand a word of it.

  ‘You are a skilled practitioner of the cards and a gentleman of honour,’ Fraser replied and Saintgalles scowled.

  ‘Skilled, certainly. He has dealt me a hand like my very foot. My very foot, I swear.’

  Batty learned later that Fraser had actually said ‘You are a perverted idiot who would take a diseased cock up the arse’.

  Up at Holyrood the great and good – D’Esse the French commander and Arran the Scottish Regent among them – were sitting with Mary of Guise listening to Sermisy’s Au Joly Boys and Scott’s Lament On The Master Of Erskine set to music, which was all refined and polite.

  Down here the only music was the chink of coin and the play was brutal – Batty watched since he was not allowed in the game because he did not have the stake, nor the style of a gentleman to be permitted credit.

  He said nothing and eventually discovered why he had been summoned here when he got head to head with the Strozzis and Methven, all of them close in a corner and stared at by a goggling foetus of something which reminded Batty of a fish-eyed boy he had seen once, out along the Solway.

  ‘Admiral Seymour is away back to London with his plumes in draggles,’ Methven said, chuckling fruitily. ‘The business at St Monan’s was a disaster and cost him one of his fleet of fifteen warships, foundered in the shallows, not to mention a wheen of sojers.’

  ‘His other ships failed to prevent the French taking Inchcolm,’ Leon Strozzi added, ‘and the spiriting of the wee Queen away safe to France. He is much reduced and at the mercy of his enemies.’

  ‘Aye, his plumed hat is on a shaky peg,’ Methven agreed. ‘So also will be the one of his brother, the Lord Protector. I am sensing a change in the wind, gentlemen.’

  ‘Perhaps – but it is an impasse at Haddington,’ Piero Strozzi declared, scowling and spilling wine down his front in an attempt to get as much down his throat as he could. Batty could sympathise; he was trying to kill the pain in his leg, shot through the fleshy part of the calf when he had gone to site artillery against Haddington not long since.

  ‘Not for the English,’ Methven answered in a growl. ‘They cling to it like misers with a fist stuck in a hole – the only way to get loose is to let uncurl the fist and let the gold fall and they will not do so. The rest of the English are fleeing south, hanging on to what fortalices they think they can hold. Most of them are deserting.’

  By now everyone knew the baby Queen of Scotland had gone to France to be married on to the French throne’s heir, Batty said, so there was no more need for a war to force a union with her and Edward, now king. Besides, the great will and heart of Henry had died with him; no-one had stomach for the fight anymore.

  ‘Least of all the Lord Protector,’ Strozzi agreed in his thick accent and grinned, raising a horn cup to Batty, ‘whose nose you helped bloody at St Monan’s.’

  Batty acknowledged the honour with a deprecating nod, wondering if this meant there was coin coming with it. There was, to his surprise and then dismay.

  ‘Sandilands had his wee fortalice at Newark spoiled,’ Methven said, his beard ruffed like a badger’s arse and his glare as if Batty had ordered the affair.

  ‘I was next to it,’ Batty pointed out gruffly, ‘pinching the embers out of my beard.’ Methven patted his good arm soothingly, then brought up a bag which chinked loud enough to turn the head of Saintgalles.

  ‘Sir James Sandilands also lost a few tenants and his castle servitors,’ Methven went on, ‘including his steward, Will Elliot. I am aware you ken him.’

  Which was a slurry of old, reeking memories where Batty’s cunning plan to free Will from a cage on the top of Hollows tower had blown half the tower down and Will with it. He had lived but had never been the same again.

  Methven saw some of that in Batty’s face and nodded. ‘I heard you gave the Border fire and sword to rescue him and Sir James has asked for you to help Will again. Sandilands values him, even if the man cannae hirple without a stick, I hear. His mind is sharp and he keeps matters in order.’

  Batty suspected Will was dead; if he had been dragged off into a boat with other prisoners, it would be for ransom and Will was not much attraction when viewed in a better light.

  ‘Ransom it is,’ Methven said when Batty hoiked this up. He shoved the bag at him.

  ‘Forty pounds in good shillings – no coppernoses or clips. A great sum for such a wee lord as Sandilands, who also has Newark to refurbish, so you know the depth of his regard for Will Elliot.’

  He took a long swallow of wine; nearby, Saintgalles flung his cards down with a gilt-strip Gallic curse. Methven plucked a roll of seal-dangled paper from inside his doublet.

  ‘Here is a writ of safe travel signed by Arran and wee Georgie Hume, who lies sick to death after being run through at Pinkie. His wife surrendered his castle to the English, but Georgie is yet Warden of the Scottish East March and the Hume name still carries. Intelligencers tell me a deal of prisoners have been taken to Berwick.’

  Batty eyed the bag, then the face of Methven, which was no less pouched.

  ‘You want me to ride to English-held Berwick with a bag of silver and a Scottish safe pass, down roads where deserters crawl like lice, find Will Elliot and offer forty pounds for his release.’

  ‘I told you he was man for task,’ Strozzi said, beaming. Batty gave him a sour glance.

  ‘You can have those Scotch from the north who guarded your guns,’ Strozzi added. ‘Good men in a fight, I am told.’

  ‘We will keep Cochrane and the other gunners,’ Leon Strozzi interrupted pointedly and his brothe
r acknowledged it with a weary flap of hand; he did not sleep well for the pain and fatigue was limned in every line of his face.

  ‘We will need them more now that Batty is gone,’ he added with a mollifying smile. ‘If the French don’t find a way in to Haddington, then we will need to knock the stones out and make one for them.’

  The Lovat Frasers. Batty felt sicker than ever and the foetus goggle added nothing. Methven let him stew for a minute or two; he knew of Batty Coalhouse, who hunted out those who had ignored arrest warrants – bills – for robbery, plunder, murder or worse declared by the March Wardens on either side of the divide. There had been little March Warden work since the English invasion and Methven had been told of some quarrel over a horse that had led Batty to blow up a powder mill.

  He’d known that when he summoned Batty to Edinburgh and got him working with his guns. No match with a slow match, that was what he had been told and Batty Coalhouse had lived up to the reputation; with all he had done, you had to consider Batty Coalhouse was not the beaten-up one-armed old soak in bad clothing that he looked.

  He grinned and Batty scowled back at him.

  ‘You will not be going with just a band of carlins in saffron skirts,’ he said. ‘You will be part of the entourage of Harry Ree. You ken him I am told.’

  Batty knew the Berwick Pursuivant, Henry Rae, a cunning and efficient messenger who rode back and forth from London to Edinburgh in his Herald’s coat carrying this and that for one side or the other. Murder and mayhem might wash the land, Batty thought, but it stops at the hem of the gaudily embroidered armorials on that coat. Unless someone wants rid of him for the English spy he truly was.

  ‘I ken him,’ he said and made it clear he did not want to know where Harry Rae was headed or on what mission. It was enough to have the protection.

  ‘Berwick and beyond,’ Methven said, as if Batty had asked and then leaned closer, so that Batty smelled onions and wine from his breath. ‘The beyond is no concern of yours. He is sent by the highest in the land, to seek the highest in the land and bring an end to this… unrest.’