“I just came to say good-bye,” he told her. “I’m going back to my grandam in the morning.”
“How did you get here?”
“I have feet, ma’am, though they’re sore. I followed you and Brother Aurelius down from the abbey.”
She looked at him carefully. “You aren’t going to ’prentice to the Cathedral?”
Slowly he shook his head. “You’re right,” he said, “they won’t have me. I was going to lie about who I was but with Jimmy Tait’s father there, that won’t work. And they’ll be afraid of my Lord Spynie. I’ll go home tomorrow.”
She sat up. There was something wrong here, he seemed too calm.
“How will you find the way?”
“I’m sure one of your men can see me right back to Wendron. Perhaps I could borrow a hobby from Mr Widdrington since I’ve blisters on my feet.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. I’ll wait until Cuddy, Archie, and Jimmy are away—they’re leaving before dawn tomorrow with Jock Tait—and then I’ll go. It’s for the best.”
She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong but she nodded and smiled.
“The King of Elfland’s collar was payment from an English archer for services rendered by my grandam, I realise that now.”
Elizabeth nodded. She didn’t see any point in arguing otherwise.
“You know Cousin William?” asked Lord Hughie. “You know how old he is?” Elizabeth shook her head. “Well he was born in 1545,” said the boy quietly, “because he’s forty-seven now. I only just worked it out. My Lord my grandfather claimed him as a byblow, said his mother died giving birth. Of course my grandfather loved my grandmother dearly, always did.”
Elizabeth took a deep breath. “He was your grandmother’s?”
“Yes. Everything was confused in those years with the destruction and the burning, and I know she stayed at a convent for a while. We still had them in Scotland then. Humes are blond not brown.”
“Ah.” Elizabeth felt somehow satisfied, as if she had suspected this without knowing.
“The other half of the necklace is probably still in Norwood Castle,” he added, “since my Lord Spynie isn’t dead, unfortunately.”
“He’s here, you know,” she said anxiously, in case it was a surprise to him.
“I know that, ma’am,” he told her gently. “I’ve met him now and I’ll be going to Court as his page next month.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Why not, ma’am, who’s going to stop him?”
“I will.”
The boy shook his head, still gently, bowed to her and left the parlour.
She sat up and gripped her hands together until the knuckles went white, put her chin on her fists and thought harder than she ever had before. Then she ordered paper and pens, since she had left her satchel with the Burns, and wrote a letter to Chancellor Maitland of Lethington the like of which he had probably never received before nor would receive again. Then she went in search of the landlord and found Lord Hugh already had a bedroom and had locked the door. She found a young man from the Widdrington surname and sent him off to Maitland with the letter.
Saturday Night 21st October to Sunday 22nd October 1592
They didn’t ride fast, with Bangtail showing the way and when Red Sandy rose up from the bank of bracken where he’d been keeping an eye on things, they were within half a mile of the castle and everything was quiet.
“Are they still there?”
“Ay, they’re in the farmhouse but there’s a tower there and it’s all open,” whispered Red Sandy, “If we can…”
Somebody’s gun went off, the boom from it cracked around the valley. Carey’s head whipped round.
“Who the hell…?”
Somebody was on watch at the farmhouse. There were torches and lights; they could make out men running into the tower and a boy on a fast pony galloping away northwards.
“Ay,” said Carleton blandly, “there he goes. They’re Grahams in there and if ye dinna prevent it we’ll all be taken prisoner.”
“Why?” asked Carey with interest as if they were talking about a horse race.
“The lad’s gone tae the Debateable Land to fetch out the Elliots. So now.”
And Carleton leaned on his saddlebow and watched him.
Dodd was expecting fireworks; he got none. “Andy Nixon,” said Carey evenly, “I want you to go back to Carlisle, rouse out Mayor Aglionby and ask him to lend me all the Trained Bands of men immediately. Bring them out here to me as fast as ye can.”
“Ay sir,” said Nixon, turning his horse and riding back down the road.
“Ridley, Little, Hodgson.”
“Ay sir.”
“Rouse out your surnames, gentlemen, bring them here to me, Warden’s quarters on it.” The three men headed down the road at a gallop while Carey looked oddly at Carleton who had his brows raised.
“I’d ask you to fetch your surname, Captain Carleton,” he said, “But I’m thinking they might be busy, eh? Come with me.”
He drew his sword, turned his horse and smiled at the twenty men remaining. “Come on,” he said, “let’s see if there’s any insight left at the farmhouse.”
Whatever the men in the tower expected, with their door locked and men on the roof with long bows, crossbows, and a couple of guns as well, they did not expect the twenty men of the guard to come close to the tower. The men took turns ducking and firing until Carey sprinted to the farmhouse, kicked through the door, ran inside and found, as he expected, no women and practically no furniture.
“It’s a trap!” said Dodd furiously, behind him. “The Elliots will be here in an hour…”
“Yes,” said Carey, “it’s a trap. What did you think? And bloody Carleton’s in it up to his neck as well.”
“Goddamn it…”
“Do you want to go back to Carlisle?”
Dodd stared at him in puzzlement. “No, why?”
Carey grinned at him and actually laughed. “So let’s see what a bit of modern siegework can do, eh?”
Carey hurried outside, and wandered near the tower. A gun fired and two crossbows loosed, missing him and he retreated. He had all the men off their hobbies, with the animals kept to the back. The men in the tower were shouting insults at them and one showed his arse to Carey.
“Tut tut,” said Carey mildly. “Such language.”
He had the men ring the tower just out of range with instructions to try and draw their fire but do their best not to get hit.
Then he spent a while drawing patterns in the mud and counting under his breath. Dodd took a squint at them: a triangle with square boxes on each of the sides, that was all.
“We need two beams, twenty-five feet long,” Carey said after a moment, “or fruitpicking ladders. Nothing less than twenty-five feet long.”
“Why?”asked a bewildered Dodd, “The tower’s only twenty feet high, it’s a short one.”
“Ladders are always too short, aren’t they?”
“Ay sir.”
“No, they’re not. Not when I’m doing the besieging.”
They looked about for anything long enough but there was nothing. So Carey sent another man all the way back to Carlisle to bring back one of the ladders to the castle walls which he thought might be right. Also ropes, picks, and axes, as quickly as he could, don’t wait for the Trained Bands. At least he told the man to hurry. By that time the bells were tolling from the farms and pele towers in the area, and Carleton and a couple of his cronies had found firewood and started a fire.
The Ridleys were the first to come in, fifteen men and another twenty-seven on their way from farms further south. Carey thanked them all for coming out for him, promised that if anything came of it they would get first chance at the loot because they were there first, and placed them around the towe
r and some in the farmhouse itself with arquebuses to point through the windows. When the Littles and a lot of Hodgsons came in later, he did the same. There were two rings around the tower, one facing inward, the other facing outward.
If Carey was worried about the Elliots, he didn’t show it. He sat down by Carleton’s fire and talked affably about various sieges he had been at in France and asked courteously about Carleton’s experience with seigework. Carleton admitted he hadn’t much, and he wondered what Carey was doing. The Elliots would be here soon, did he know that?
Then Carey took a spade from the farmhouse and started digging a ditch parallel to the tower while the men inside jeered at him and threw lumps of shit.
“It shouldn’t be very needful this time,” he explained to the fascinated men whilst ducking flying turds, “but this is the right way to dig a ditch so the men you’re besieging can’t shoot you.”
At that point the man Carey had sent to Carlisle for the ladder turned up with four men on horseback, carrying two ladders between them. Carey stopped digging, laid them on the ground, and measured them by pacing along them and then grinned again.
Dodd found his relaxed attitude alarming. What insanity was he planning now? He soon found out. Carey started anyone with a bow or gun shooting as steadily as they could—the clear superiority of longbows over guns showing now, in Dodd’s opinion. He explained to Dodd exactly what he wanted him to do, which Dodd found first appalling and then funny. But he could do it. He knew he could.
Friday 20th October 1592
Elizabeth was offered a bed in one of the better guest rooms by the innkeeper, with his own daughter to keep her company. He refused her money, said that the abbey would see to it. She even had a nice fresh linen shift from the innkeeper’s wife for a shilling, which she thought was money well spent. While she was undressing she found the book of “The Schoolmaster” still in her petticoat pocket where she had put it and forgotten it. The small book was well-thumbed—she looked at it and then put it back. She’d give it to Poppy when she got home.
She slept well in the big bed with the polite innkeeper’s daughter. And then, in the early morning she heard a scraping and then a bellowing and a shouting, dull thuds, and then someone light came running along the corridor full pelt, jumped out of the window.
She got the innkeeper’s daughter to stop clutching her and got dressed in record time. When she came out of the room she found the place was a bedlam with Lord Spynie’s young men stamping around and shouting.
She looked out of the window, saw a dung heap with a deep imprint in it and tracks in the mud running away, uphill toward the abbey. She trotted downstairs and asked the landlord what was going on.
“That boy, Lord Hugh, he tried to stab my Lord Spynie and got away.”
“Ah,” said Elizabeth, “I see.”
“Bide there ma’am and dinna be afraid. Your husband has gone out with my lord to take the young murtherer.”
“He succeeded?”
“No, he couldna get past my Lord Spynie’s men, but he could have…”
“A pity,” she said coldly. “Thank you.”
With all the stamping about and shouting, nobody was interested in a woman. She needed a horse and she took one with a Widdrington brand, sighed at the man’s saddle and mounted carefully.
She put her heels in and drove the animal up the path to the abbey where she could already hear her husband having a good loud argument with Brother Aurelius about where Lord Hugh might be. Lord Spynie and his men and some of the Widdringtons were searching the abbey, the Widdringtons notably unenthusiastic about it.
She knew where he was because she knew he had a plan. She went straight for the church, leaving the hobby to mill about with the others. At the back of the church she found the little door that led up to the tower and it was shut but not locked. She went through it and barred the door on the inside. She went up the narrow spiral stair, round and round and up and up in the dark, moving by feel except when part of a huge window let some light in.
The last part was all in darkness and she was breathless. Maybe she was wrong…?
She opened the door at the top which led to the tower’s roof and the fine view north and south across all the Border country. Lord Hugh was looking at her anxiously from where he was perched in his breeches and shirt, sitting on the battlements, kicking his bare heels above a drop of hundreds of feet. He was smeared with dung from the dung heap.
Elizabeth came through the door and bolted it behind her. Parts of the tower were blackened with smoke and in one corner the leading had melted and was letting rain in to do damage to the timbers.
She came and stood by Lord Hughie and looked all the hundreds of feet down. It gave her a sick and dizzy feeling in her stomach but also a tempting thought. She could sit on a battlement like Hughie, swing her legs over the drop and then…Oops. And all her troubles would be over. Wouldn’t they?
It was a terrible sin, the sin of despair which denied the goodness of God. Yet she felt it would be a relief to end the constant sadness, the constant pulling of her heart toward someone she couldn’t have. And what if God wasn’t good, what if He really was a vicious old man like the Bible showed Him in the parts every fire-eating minister quoted?
She looked at Lord Hughie.
“Lord Hugh Hume,” he said thoughtfully. “What a stupid name. Typical of my grandam. I’d rather be an Ian.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Trying to get the tombstone right?”
Lord Hughie looked sideways at her and smiled.
“I like it up here, it’s just like climbing a tree,” he said.
“No, a tree’s much safer. Look how smooth the stone is.”
“He was planning something, I knew he was, from how nice he was. I slept in my breeches and when I woke at dawn and heard the scratching at the lock, I drew my dagger, and got behind the door.”
Elizabeth nodded. Son and grandson of reivers, what did Spynie expect?
“When they came in I tried to stab him but I couldn’t get through the padding and his men stopped me so I left the dagger and ran. It doesn’t matter. At least I tried.”
“You planned to come up here, anyway.”
“Yes ma’am, I did. But how did you know? I even made sure the window above the dung heap was open.”
Elizabeth smiled and didn’t answer.
“Yes, I planned to come up here, high up where it’s clear…well, a little bit clear…” The weather was closing in after a bright sunrise, it would be raining soon. “I’d sing a song and then I’d jump.”
“And your grandam?”
“She won’t know,” said Lord Hughie gently. “And she’ll see me dancing with her other dead at the faery fort.”
“I think she’d know. In fact I think it will kill her.”
Hughie shrugged. “She’s old. I’m sorry for it, but I willna be Spynie’s bumboy.”
Play for time, she thought, even while a part of her longed for the simplicity of it. Only you couldn’t do that. You would end in Hell for sure.
“Aren’t you letting him off lightly?” she asked. “Just jumping off? Why not tell all of them why you’re doing it? Why not tell him?”
“He’d just laugh. Or lie. Or both.” Still Hughie was looking thoughtful.
“I tell you what,” she said, impulsively. “I’ve a mind to come with ye.”
“What?”
“Yes, when you jump, perhaps I’ll jump too.”
“But…why?”
“My husband beats me. I can’t have the man I love,” she told him recklessly, not even feeling the shame of it that she couldn’t make Sir Henry happy, that she had fallen in love with another man. “I try and try to do what God wants, and nothing changes. And I’m tired of it. So maybe I’ll jump too.”
“No, my lady, you can’t do that, they’ll bury you at the cross
roads with a stake through you…”
“I’ll be dead, I won’t feel it.” She leaned forward and looked down, half to frighten the boy, half in earnest. “That’s how they’ll bury you too, my lord.”
“No, I’ll make it look like an accident.”
“God will know.”
“My lady, do you think God cares? I thought maybe He did but when the minister was killed…He doesna give a fig for you or me. If He did, my dad wouldna be dead and I wouldna be in this fix. I don’t want to die but I canna see an alternative. Sooner or later Lord Spynie and his friends will get me where they want me. That’s why I tried to stab him before I ran.”
“How do you know so much, Lord Hughie?”
“I’ve watched the dogs doing it though they dinna seem to mind. And my cousin Christie tellt me about it a lot when I was younger, how Christie would try and hide but it did no good.”
“Where’s Christie now?”
“Oh, he drowned in the summer in a river. It was an accident. He was drunk, they say.” Lord Hughie’s voice was bleak.
Elizabeth couldn’t think of any answer to that.
“If God cared, my mam wouldnae be dead,” said Hughie. “If God cared, my grandam wouldna be away with the faeries either. And my father wouldna be dead forebye. That’s the one that matters.”
Elizabeth said nothing. What was there to say? It was true. After a little she asked, “What about Cuddy and Archie and Jimmy?”
“Yes, they’ll do what they want, go to the cathedral school and be clerks. I can’t do that. I have to be a laird because I’m the heir.”
“Do you think they’ll be sad about you?”
“Ay, a little, but not for long. They’ll be too busy learning music and singing and learning Latin.”
“What do you want, my lord?”
“I don’t want to be a laird. I want to go to school and learn Latin and then I want to study all the poems and the stories. I want to read Virgil. I want to read Juvenal and Catullus. I don’t want to go hunting, it’s boring, though Cousin William keeps taking me with him and explaining it to me again. I want tae study.”
A Chorus of Innocents Page 28