Time and Tide

by Shirley McKay

  ‘It seems you have a proverb and a prejudice,’ said Hew, ‘for every foreign race. Go, then, and talk to him. Yet know, that if you threaten him, then you will lose your place.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Robert, with a rare show of humility, that Hew did not believe.

  He watched the soldier make his way towards the bar, and move towards the Welshman, drawing up a stool. The other man did not resist, and Hew observed him calling for a second stoup of ale, which he passed to Robert Lachlan. Presently the pair were thick enclosed in long and heavy talk. Hew left them to it for a while, feeling dull and dizzy from the close heat of the fire, before he decided to retire to bed. He made his way towards the bar.

  ‘I am going to the room. Will you ask the girl to send another cup?’ he instructed Robert Lachlan. The Welshman turned upon him with a sneer. ‘So this is your new posting, Robert, nursemaid to the gentlefolk.’

  In view of his instructions, Hew could hardly rise to this. Robert answered placidly. ‘Aye, and I will follow you. I will not be long.’

  Hew went back to the room, to find the maid had lit a fire and set fresh linen towels upon the folding beds. He sat down on the blanket, pulling off his boots. Robert came in after with a cup of wine. ‘The girl says she will bring you water, if you want to wash.’

  Hew agreed, ‘I do.’ The room was warm and pleasant in the crackling of the fire. He stripped down to his shirt, lying on the bed.

  ‘What was the talk with your friend?’

  Robert shrugged. ‘Talk.’ It seemed his mood had changed again. He opened both the shutters, letting in the moon. ‘Do you have the sense that someone has been here?’

  ‘Of course they have been here,’ Hew pointed out. ‘Someone lit the fire.’

  ‘And someone else,’ said Robert, ‘has been going through your things.’

  ‘What things?’ murmured Hew. ‘Close the shutters, light the lamps.’

  ‘In a moment,’ Robert said. He lit a candle from the fire and placed it on the window ledge, looking out across the fields. ‘It is too quiet here.’

  ‘How can it be too quiet, when we wish to sleep?’ objected Hew.

  ‘The other rooms look out upon the yard. Why are we in this one?’ Robert mused.

  ‘Because,’ Hew answered patiently, ‘it has the better view. What is it, Robert? You are like a cat, that prowls upon a roof. We go to Ghent tomorrow, let us now be still.’

  Robert paced the room again, and buckled on his sword. ‘By your leave, sir, I will go outside, and look around the yard. I need to take a piss.’

  ‘Granted,’ Hew said sleepily. The servant eyed him sharply. ‘How much have you had to drink?’

  ‘The Spanish wine is potent.’ The world seemed well when his eyes were kept opened, but when they were closed the room seemed to spin.

  ‘Bolt the door behind me,’ Robert said.

  Hew was startled back to life by a light knock on the door. ‘Hot water, sir,’ the girl called out, or something of the sort, in Dutch.

  ‘One moment!’ It was surely but a moment since Robert Lachlan left, and yet the candle on the window ledge had burned down to a stub and the fire lay out in ashes, smouldering in the hearth. Where was Robert, then? And how could it be possible that Hew had slept the night? Heaviness oppressed him. He felt confused and dazed. He pulled back the bolt. The girl who brought the water jug had somehow disappeared, and in her place were five or six black–bearded men. Hew saw a grinning flash of teeth and steel, and two men held him fast while the others turned to strip and search the room. Hew asked them in bewilderment, in Latin, Scots and French, what was it they were looking for. They answered with a sneer. And then they lit upon the catechism, tucked inside his bag. The book was seized, and brandished, thrust into Hew’s face. ‘I do not understand,’ he whispered. ‘What it is that you want?’ They answered him in Spanish then, with dark and mocking grins. He understood the meaning though he did not know the words.

  They took him by the arms and marched him from his room, and through the tavern drinking hall out into the yard. At this early hour, the house was already awake, and breakfasting. Two or three guests looked up at curiously, but none of them ventured to help. The innkeeper’s daughter fetched water from the well, and passing, Hew called out to her, yet she would not look up. He saw Robert with the Welshman in a corner of the yard, crying out his name in clear and frank relief, turning to despair as Robert turned his back. In the bitter Flemish morning and the coldness of its light, he knew that Robert Lachlan was someone’s else’s man. Hew felt himself enclosed by rough and heavy hands, gagged and bound and blanke ted, and thrown upon a horse, before the last dregs of the wine again took their effect, and he slipped once more from consciousness. Which may have been a blessing, after all.

  He awoke, he presumed, in a cell of sorts. He knew that he was there because of Robert Lachlan. Robert had betrayed him at the Molen inn; perhaps he had betrayed him from the very start, staging the attack in the alley at Campvere. Hew had little doubt he was a spy for Andrew Wood, and that Andrew Wood had wanted Hew to disappear. Yet he could not think why. Surely, not to save a brother, for whom he had no love? Then family honour, Hew supposed, or some grave secret of the state. It seemed unlikely he would ever come to know. Whose man was Andrew Wood? The question turned relentlessly, and yet he could not answer it. He fretted most of all, for the fate of Meg and Giles. He had no way of guessing what had happened since he left.

  His own fate, too, gave cause for some concern. His prison was the cellar of some great stone country house, where a heap of woollen blankets served him as a bed, and kept him from the comfort of an early grave. The penetrating cold reduced him once to tears, grateful for their warmth upon his frozen cheeks. He was fed and watered once or twice a day, and allowed a little light, from a candle at the wall. They sometimes came at night, to wake and question him, though their questions were haphazard, and showed very little art, and as torturers, they struck him as peculiarly inept. He had no misconception that they were the Inquisition, and yet they made it plain to him, that horror was to come, and he would come in time into more practised hands. The matter, as he understood, was Jacob’s catechism, which they had brought with them from the inn. The charge against him, he assumed, was one of heresy. And though they tricked and toyed with him, and kept him there for sport, they had a deeper, darker purpose, which he began to dread.

  To dilute the fear, which at times seemed overwhelming, he made use of the candlelight in learning to speak Dutch, by reading Jacob’s creed. It helped to pass the time, and took his mind from what was yet to come. He found some words were closer to the Scots than to the English tongue, and that if he spoke them aloud, they gave up their sense to him. It reminded Hew of learning Latin when he was a boy, teasing out the meaning from his Seneca or Cicero. He had been quick and good at it; the puzzle pleased him well. It was a code, a secret to unlock, a hidden store of wisdom to while a winter’s night.

  ‘Wat is uw enige troost, beinde in het leven en sterven?’ ‘What is your only . . . troost was trust perhaps, the thing of which you were assured . . . both in life and . . . sterven he assumed was death, aye, what else but death? What is your only trust – or solace, he supposed – both in life and in death?

  ‘Dak ik met lichaam en ziel, beinde in het leven en sterven, niet mijn, maar mijns getrouwen Zaligmakers Jezus Christus eigen ben.’ ‘That I with . . . something and . . . body and . . . soul, both in life and in death, not mine . . . but belong to my . . .

  ‘That I with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my saviour the Lord Jesus Christ.’

  And then he saw at once what Jacob meant, and understood the words that he had said to Maude:

  ‘Niet mijn . . . eigen ben.’ ‘I am not my own.’

  ‘What is my only comfort, both in life and death?’

  ‘That I am not my own, but belong to Jesus Christ.’

  For Jacob had been no one’s man, yet he belonged to
Christ, and whispered his last prayer to comfort him in death. That brought to Hew no comfort now, at all.

  Chapter 20

  Soldiers of Fortune

  In the dawning light of the late October morning it was already cold; an early frost instilled a stillness that was absolute. The soldier tied the letters and the creed into a sack, which he hung around Hew’s neck, so close that Hew could feel the hot breath on his cheek. This sack, as he supposed, was to be his San Benito, or penitential garb. The soldier grinned, and showed a mouth of broken teeth. A pity, Hew thought ruefully, if this turned out to be the last face that he saw.

  The soldier stood behind and drew his sword. Hew felt the blade tickle the back of his neck. The soldier urged him, ‘Walk.’

  Hew answered, ‘Where?’ Calmly, and evenly. He would not let them see that he was afraid. ‘Where would you like me to walk?’

  The soldier said, ‘You, walk,’ pleased with his few words of English. He slapped Hew on the back, hard enough to push him forward, without him falling to the ground. It was the sort of slap that Hew had sometimes given to Dun Scottis, encouraging, exasperated, rather than unkind.

  It was a long, cold walk. So long that in the course of it, Hew became detached, immune to bitter sunshine and the yawns of sleepy labourers, to windmills and canals and woods and far off fields, and to the dull, insistent pricking of his bared and bruising feet. He did not want the walk to end. But end, it did, in a quiet copse of trees where the birds were mute and desolate.

  ‘Kneel,’ the soldier said. And Hew could not resist. His hands and feet were bound, and a strip of riband placed around his eyes. And there he knew at last, that there were no inquisitors, that there was only death. He gave up his last prayer, in cursing Andrew Wood for sending him to die so far away from home, and in a pile of leaves. Like Jacob, he was lost.

  Hew heard a twig crack behind him and the whistle of a sword. He knew that it was time. And while he had imagined he was ready for the moment, he now realised that it came too soon, too late for him to make his peace with God. The birds around were silent as the man approached. He felt the cool draught of the sword; as the bonds that tied his feet were cut, and he fell sideways from the sudden force. In retrospect, he realised that his own voice had cried out, a shrill, involuntary sound that he felt ashamed of, though it did not come from any conscious sense of fear. He lay face down in the leaves, and felt their soft damp muddiness, before strong hands took hold of him, and dragged him to his feet. He realised it began again; the game was not yet done, with a sense of terror, resignation and relief. His heart clung still to life. The men who held him now spoke Dutch, as he inferred from their few grunting murmurs of command. He knew that that meant little in itself, that there was no one in this place that he could trust. They did not speak to him, or give credence to his cries, his trying, inarticulate, to connect with them. They did not seem to notice him at all, but swept him from the surface of the forest, as though he were a sack of gathered leaves, or a corpus they had found, littering the land, that they must now clear up. He thought, perhaps, he was; and in this last strange trail of time had somehow failed to hear the scythe that stripped and cut him down, and had become a ghost. The stiffness in his knees and the rawness of his wrists where the rope began to chafe suggested he lay open still, to fresh and deeper pain. The men were Dutch, he told himself, and yet it brought small comfort; he was cut off from their pity by the strangeness of his tongue, and from common understanding by the bandage round his eyes. And the Dutch, as he had heard, had exquisite forms of torture, that were too explicit even for the Scots. And so he found no solace in the sudden change of hands, for fear that there might be no sweeter course than death.

  He was taken to the edge of the wood, and lifted, still blindfold and bound, onto the back of a horse. He could feel its broad flanks, a great Flemish beast, several hands higher than his slow Dun Scottis, and broader in the beam. The swerve from the ground took him dizzyingly high, and Hew entwined his fingers in the horse’s mane, for fear he would fall. He was comforted to feel his captor climb behind, to steady and to settle him before him like a child. Though he had not ridden double on a horse since he was six, yet he was thankful for the rider’s skill and expertise, as he held him to his place, spurring the horse on. He felt a desperate fondness for this man, who held him through the darkness, the giddy bump and sway, and in whom he was obliged to place his trust.

  Hew judged from the sounds there were four or five men on horses around them; the man at his back was heavy and tall, and had his hands and eyes been free, and even with his sword, he could not have overpowered him. They had ridden on perhaps for half-an-hour – Hew had long ago lost any sense of time – when the ribands round his eyes were cut, and he cried out in pain. He thought it was a trick to hurt him, before he realised that it was the noonday sun; they had travelled on for several hours. He saw that he was riding with a troop of Flemish soldiers, roughly dressed and fiercely armed, and that they brought him to the threshold of a Flemish town. Emboldened by the sight, he asked aloud, in Dutch, ‘Antwerpen?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation, before one of the soldiers confirmed, ‘Antwerpen.’ Though nothing more was said, Hew took a scrap of comfort in the word, spoken without rancour or evidence of threat. At Antwerp, at the least, he felt no fear of Inquisition, with Jacob’s catechism hanging round his neck. It was, as he assumed, a safe, Reformers’ hold. There was a marked lift in spirit in the soldiers at the gate, where they stopped to joke and jostle with the Antwerp city guards. Hew hoped that he himself had not occasioned it, for he had still the sense that they were bringing home a prize. He was aware of curious eyes as he was taken down the street, handfast on the horse, with the soldier braced behind him, careless and unkind, as though he were a runaway, taken to be whipped. And whipping, as he knew, was the least that they might do to him. The people watched him pass, with frank and curious gaze, and pity for the consequences he must have in store. Hew had heard it said that the Flemish were inclined to sympathy for others who had fallen foul of laws, in part because they were resistant to authority, in part as a revolt against the cruel and stringent penalties that often were attendant on the smallest crimes. They had the reputation of a fiercely stubborn race, who scorned to bear the yoke, and shared a common grudge, the wicked and the good, against the force of law. In that respect, he judged, they were quite different from the Scots, who were keen on retribution, and saw justice done with relish. Both approaches filled him with a sickening squeamishness, and a gnawing apprehension of what was soon to come.

  They came into a courtyard under heavy guard, where after some exchange of words, Hew was lifted bodily and set beside his horse. He saw the locks and gratings of another prison gate. And as it closed behind him he felt his hopes give way. His long, blind ride on horseback and cold trek through the woods had robbed of him his wits, like a melancholy sleepwalker, falling in a dream. The dream became more vivid as he was brought in through an entrance port into a central hall, where a woman waited, fine and fair of face. She spoke to him in French, ‘Come, monsieur, he waits.’

  In the centre of the room was a large oak standing bed, with thickly woven drapes of ochre, red and black. The curtains opened back had the look of a campaign tent, for a heap of scrolls and documents was strewn across the coverlet. Around it were four or five soldiers, who came to and fro with papers and packages, brought to the man in the bed. A young boy by his side stood with pen and ink. A little further down a chessboard was set out, where a second man sat thoughtfully considering a rook. The room was large and light, and bright with coloured tapestries, while the marble floor was chequered like the chess set it contained. The player on the bed loomed up to look at Hew, and spoke to him in French. ‘Come into the light, that we may see what hope our intervention bought.’

  The voice was low and kind. As Hew approached the bed he saw light, reflective eyes, intelligent and searching, and a neatly sculptured beard, lightly flecked with grey. The
beard was thin and straggled on one side, where the hair refused to grow. Above it was the horror of a sunk and, blasted cheek, a mass of thick confusion, taut across his face. The cheek was turned again, returning to the chess, considering his queen. The second player looked at Hew and grinned. ‘Will you not bow your head, to the prince of Orange-Nassau?’ It was Robert Lachlan. And Hew dropped to his knees, as his head began to spin. He saw the chessboard mirrored in the marble of the floor, and strong hands came to catch him as he fell into a faint.

  Hew was not surprised to wake up in a warm soft bed, to find Robert Lachlan sitting at his side. ‘I had the strangest dream,’ he told him. ‘I dreamt that you were playing chess with Prince William of Orange. He had a hole in the side of his face.’

  ‘It was not a dream,’ Robert Lachlan said, ‘You are in his house. And when he comes to speak with you, as he is like to, presently, I’ll thank you if ye dinna make a show of me, by gawping at his face the way you did before. Though he is not a vain man . . . Pfah!’ he finished with a gesture of disgust.

  ‘I did not think that it was real,’ whispered Hew.

  ‘It’s real enough,’ said Robert grimly.

  ‘And then I thought you had betrayed me,’ Hew admitted.

  ‘And why would I do that?’

  ‘I thought you were in league with Andrew Wood, and had sold me to the Spanish Inquisition.’

  ‘Who is Andrew Wood?’

  ‘The coroner of Fife,’ Hew closed his eyes again.

  ‘And why would the coroner of Fife want to sell you to the Spanish Inquisition?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  And Hew told Robert Lachlan, as he had not done before, of Andrew, and of Robert Wood, and of the college and the baxters, and of Jacob and his windmill, and why he went to Ghent.

  ‘Strewth!’ said Robert Lachlan. ‘The company you keep. I ken not how you come to think that I would take my orders from a man like that. Some of us,’ he mentioned pointedly, ‘are more particular. You do know, I suppose, that band of renegades who held you in their grasp was not the Inquisition?’