by Andrew Greig
At the tenement door he stopped, put his arm out against the wall, as though propping it or himself up.
“I am the heir now,” he said. “I am not a free man.”
“But your other brother?” I protested.
He shook his head. “Malcolm is . . . not right.”
I did not enquire further. I could see he had lost more than an admired brother. I would inherit nothing in this world but my father’s tools of trade, and for the first time appreciated my good fortune in this.
“It seems I must learn accounts and the breeding of cattle, suck up to Lord Maxwell and look to a canny marriage.” He shook his head, slapped the wall. “Ouch!” He sucked his knuckles, keeked across at me and managed a grin, a flicker of the youth he had been. “I think Constantinople must get by without me,” he said.
And later that night, as we lay on our pallets in the dark, I blurted, “But your father should live many years.”
Silence, then his voice husky from the far wall. “Still, I am heir, d’you see? I had thought to make my own way in this world, far from Annandale and our feuds and reiving . . .”
“You were born to it,” I said. “The rest is a young man’s dream.”
“It was a fine dream,” he replied. “Much better than waking.”
Never to be born is best. In student days we used to quote that to each other, and marvel at our world-weariness.
Now I look out the window at the ordinary day, the North Esk in spate, the kestrel pinned to the sky. I eat plum tart with warm spiced wine, and think on Helen and Adam, Jed and Bell and Elenora Jarvis, young Watt, Janet Elliot, the fighters and schemers and all those who just plodded along, head down, through another day.
The nib scores the paper as a knife scores the arm, bleeding ink. The tart is excellent and the wine lingers in the throat. So much for antique wisdom.
Amours
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. And who am I to flyte against Montaigne?
I have let memory graze through lush meadows of our early friendship, to account for what was between us. Now I turn the head of this stubborn nag back to hard track and straight going, kick my heels gently against its flanks and urge us both down the story-road.
Up ahead: the Fleming compound, the peel tower, night, my old friend at bay.
“So, do you love me still?”
He sat cross-legged on a flattened straw-pallet bed, his back against the bare stone wall. On a bench a creusie lamp burned dourly, as they do at the best of times. This had once been the heidsman’s bedroom, before Adam’s father had the new house built, and the bed and furniture moved across the yard. Now the room was a chilly store that stank of fish-oil, pigeon-dung, and the dog that settled itself contentedly across his long legs. Philby was a straggly lurcher, mottled grey like peeling birch bark. He shrank and dwindled in his master’s absence.
“Such elegant quarters you have,” I replied. “How long have you been sleeping here?”
He shrugged. “Since the wedding. Since I feared for my life. A year or more.”
I helped myself to wine from the skin and eased myself down the wall opposite him. Our breath made clouds and the fireplace looked unused. Personally I thought it was a comfortless place to come for a sulk. I suggested any man spending much time alone in the peel tower would come by morbid thoughts.
“I have company,” he said. “Snood eats here, sleeps on the roof by the balefire timbers.”
“No one has heard Snood say other than Aye or Nuh since Queen Mary fled Scotland.”
“He is no conversationalist,” Adam admitted. “But he is armed and he is one of few I trust.”
“Would you not be safer—and warmer—sleeping in the house, with retainers hard by?”
He looked like a petulant boy with his long lip pouting. “With bed-music from my mother’s room at night? With my uncle’s retainers? You have seen the boy Watt. He follows me like a fart, and is about as useful.”
I proffered wine, he shrugged it away. I huddled deeper into my cloak. The room was damp and drear to the core. The lurcher whiffled in his uneasy sleep.
“So,” he said.
“So?”
He sighed. “I’m sorry I had not written before,” he said. “And at the wedding . . . I have been much preoccupied with, well, you know.”
“Your amours are no business of mine.” I drank, waited, felt the slow fire spread in my belly.
“Nor yours of mine!” Philby raised his shaggy head, stared at his master, then rested his long snout on the floor again. Adam chuckled softly. “Is it true what they say happened in Leyden?”
“Probably not.”
“The abbess?”
I raised my cup to him. “Definitely not.”
“How did you find the Anabaptists?”
“Insane to the last man.”
“How I envy your travels and travails.”
There was nothing worthwhile to say to that, so we looked at each other in silence. I was not about to answer his first question. I had sulked long at his neglect. A scrape at the door, Philby howled and Adam’s hand went to his blade. Then heavy breathing and boots slapping on up the tower to the roof as Snood went to keep his watch.
“Just the same,” he said, “I’d rather you barred the door.”
I shook my head, but slid the stave across. Then refilled my cup from the skin, sat back cross-legged against the wall and waited. I watched his dark-shadowed, troubled face, lit by the creusie as he began to talk of his father’s death on a cross-border raid, his Uncle Dand, now his stepfather, and why he believed his life threatened. It was a long, stumbling tale, and the room grew cold as we huddled into our night-cloaks. Philby snored and Snood moved overhead, and I listened and marked Adam Fleming well as he talked not of love but death.
This was the short of it. Last Martinmas, he had been set on behind the luckenbooths at Langholm mart. Jed had heard the stushie and together they drove off three men who disappeared in the crowd. Were they known to him or Jed? Not at all. That in itself was unusual.
“So bien sûr they must have been set on you by Dand. No other possibility?”
He glared at me across the lamplight. I spread my hands. Why would his new father want rid of him?
“Because I am still heir, poor Malcolm apart! The lands and the house are in trust to me, by agreement when I did not become heidsman.” He looked down, then added softly, “And he knows I have suspicions about my father’s death.”
Before we went chasing again after that improbable fox, I hastily said, “And your second incident?”
Returning from Hawick’s Spring Fair, early dusk coming on as he crossed the high moor home, his saddle had lurched. He looked down, felt and found the cinch had burst. Two horsemen in the distance behind waited. He had pulled the saddle off and ridden on fast by halter alone. He lost the horsemen in the heuch woods, then made it home by starlight. When he went back for the saddle next morning—it was valuable, his best—he found the leather edges of the cinch were clean-cut. Then, after eating with companions at the Fortune Rigg by Kirtlebridge, he had become suddenly ill with stomach cramps and sweating. He went bright red, then fainted. Jed had rolled him on his side, stuck fingers down his throat to make him spew. They got him home that night but he had been sick for days.
“You should complain to the kitchen,” I joked.
He had stared back at me across the yellow flicker of the lamp.
“We all ate the same. None else were sick. It was after that I wrote you.” He hesitated. “I have not been entirely myself, and thought it best to play to it, so they think me hairmless.”
“You ken I am no fighter. Jed’s your man.”
He stretched out his hands to me.
“Keep an eye on me,” he said. “Keep me steady. Advise me on Helen. You knew me in earlier days. I love you like a brither.”
I hated it when he called to me like that, for I would aye come running,
and he would never ken what I came running for, or in what baseless hope.
We stood by the great studded door and bade goodnight. Above our heads, a faint snore from the battlement where the watchfire lay ready and unlit. The night was hard, the hairst was gathered in, the season favoured by reivers for its dark nights and fattened beasts was coming on.
His arm pressed about my shoulder, then he was gone in. I heard the bar shuffle across the door. I stood a minute in the night silence, letting my eyes adjust to moonlight smeared through cloud. It was late, the Hunter was mid-leap across the western sky. My chest ached with every breath.
I crossed the courtyard to the deeper dark of the house, felt my way round the back, in the low door and along the scullery passage. Once in my room I slid the bar across.
I groped for my tinderbox, lit a candle. My chamber was small, chill, unadorned: bed, table, chair, washbasin, commode. It was the kind of room I have inhabited most of my life, something between a guest, a retainer, a friend and a witness to the lives of others.
Weary to the bone, I sat down at the table in cloak, scarf and woollen hat, and began to scratch out my report.
Rising
Ah yes, the report. First of several I wrote that season in a bleak room with door barred, and then had had discreetly delivered to their commissioner.
You think the Prince’s friend a free man, the Cardinal’s secretary uncompromised, the lady’s maid entirely devoted? At the time I was two men, the one who had come to help my friends achieve their hearts’ desires, and the shadowy other I loosed only at the end of the day.
The truth of the world is low-born men may rise from the muddy bottom like trout, following the ascending nymph, and rise far enough to be glimpsed by the patient angler waiting on the high bank.
In plainer terms, we come to the notice of one to whom we are of use.
After we completed our degree, Adam was called home to Annandale. We parted at the Gallows Gate, tears in our eyes caused perhaps by the brute wind off the sea. I watched him ride away toward the Biggar track, then turned back to the city streets where my own future lay.
I secured a lowly position to grub away in what our noble Reformation had left of the Black Friars’ dungheap of a library, bringing some order to their dank scriptorium in exchange for board and lodging. An elderly ex-friar—whose name I cannot recall but whose extensive farts I can—extended my knowledge of Natural Philosophy to include new treatises from Italy and Warmia, and hinted at the whereabouts of certain pagan works in the libraries of Old Europe from which I might find comfort, pleasure and instruction. That sly and witty man, whose wandering hands were easily and gently diverted, in friendship then found me a chambers where I might train as a legal clerk.
It was at that time my father died, between one Sabbath and the next, of sweating sickness. As he lay on his pallet he commended me to my studies. “Dae weel, laddie, dae richt weel!” The following day I closed his eyes and commended him to God and my mother. After burying him by her in Blackfriars kirkyard, I sold his tools and bought my own writing desk, fresh quills and good ink, a heap of quality rag paper.
In truth I have studied Theology without much interest in God, and Law without expecting to see justice done. At times I studied for the sake of study itself, for the brief peace that contemplation brings, in the manner by which the laverock rises above the fields to look down, singing, on its nest, its mate, all that is dear to it.
I have read too many of my host’s Petrarchan effusions! Less gloriously, I studied so I could better eat. It has proved more congenial than labouring with a cooper’s mallet, more long-lived than reiving.
A month after my father’s death, I was toiling in my assigned cubicle. I looked longingly through the window slit out over the city walls at the King’s Park and the Seat, where once a friend and I had climbed by night and opened our hearts to each other. He was long gone into the Borders, my mother and father even further gone.
Someone shouted my name. I leaned out and peered down at two women. One was my mother’s elder sister, Ann, waving, her long-jawed face upturned. The other, clad in green, pushed back her hood and looked up to me, and in that look all else went dim.
Helen Irvine lagged behind her mother at the door of my cubby-hole. I had not seen her these last three summers. It was she, it was not she. She carried her new beauty of face and breast and hip in a dazed, uncertain manner, as one might carry something from a burning house, uncertain of its use.
I sweated and gabbled, she looked round gravely as Aunt Ann pushed papers to the floor and settled herself in the sole chair. I never learned how they got past the servitor. They smelled of things long lost, of women and Annandale. In Aunt Ann’s voice I heard again my mother, and felt faint.
“You have found yourself anither den, I see,” she said. “I mind you aye made them amang the in-by fields.”
Helen’s eyes flickered to me, quick blue flirt of a kingfisher. She looked down innocently, but the flush was in her cheek, a pucker at the corner of her mouth. I glimpsed the child she had so lately been, impish and baffled behind her unasked-for beauty.
What had brought them here? To offer sympathy for my father’s death, of course, and to be reassured I was getting by. I nodded, thinking of how I had stood alone at his grave.
The real mission, it transpired, was to visit the couturiers of the city, and have clothes made that would best present my lovely cousin. “Even a diamond needs a fine setting to flourish,” Aunt Ann said with relish. Helen coloured and looked to the floor.
To be fair to my aunt, such ambition was reasonable and commonplace. She herself had become an Irvine, a middle-ranking Borders family. To survive, let alone prosper, in that near-lawless March, advantageous alliance was essential. Romance was something best left to poets. Helen was the only surviving child, and her unexpected beauty too good an opportunity to miss.
“None but the best for my little girl!” my aunt announced. I saw Coz Helen blink, a flicker of resistance run down her lovely cheek. I remembered how she played each game to win, how she would assent to advice, then do what she willed.
Aunt Ann announced she would leave her treasure in my care an hour or so, while she attended to some business. She looked at me closely. “I think you are hairmless enough,” she said, then left.
We stood together in my cubby-hole, awkward at first.
“So,” Helen said at last, “I am done with yearning to be a discalced Carmelite.”
“Glad of that,” I said. “It sounded most comfortless.”
She giggled. “It was. I went barefoot for months, and scabbed my knees from praying. I thought if I could not have Luc, I would marry only Christ.”
She had written months earlier to announce she was in love with one Luc Gautier, tutor to her Springkell cousins. I understood there had been kisses, pledges, touches I did not care to think on. Somehow my aunt and uncle had found them out, and young Luc disappeared—back to France, they said, though it was not impossible he lay in a nearby bog. To assuage her loss, Aunt Ann had foolishly given her a Latin abstract of Teresa of Avila’s El Castilio Interior, and my cousin had taken to wandering barefoot by the burn in silent prayer, and making a great nuisance of herself at mealtimes, announcing, “Either let me suffer or let me die.”
“I heard rumour you are sought by an English Kerr. Apparently he is heir to excellent lands in Redeswire.”
She rolled her eyes. “My mother’s choice. Jamie Kerr was so dull I learned to prop my eyes open with my fingertips when he discoursed. Like this.” She leaned forward with an expression of boredom so extreme it looked near-saintly, put her hand before her face and pushed her eyelids open. “He believed the gesture flirtatious!”
There had been little enough laughter in my study room.
“What happened to this discerning young man?”
“He had the good grace to catch fever in Corbridge and expire in Hexham. My good mother took my relief for disappointment, and said, Never fear
but we’ll soon find anither.”
“And did you?” I asked, casual-like.
“Apparently Saint Teresa has opened a monastery in Granada. When I considered the procession of suitors I must endure till I agree to one—the slack-jawed second cousins, the swaggering boys, those widowed friends of my father unable to raise their eyes from my chest—then Matins Laud at two in the morn seems a minor inconvenience.”
“So, Granada it is, then, and a nun’s life?”
“Unfortunately, I have little talent for obedience.”
“Really?” I murmured, and was rewarded with her cuff towards my head.
“And—” she lowered her eyes in some version of decorum—“probably very little for chastity.”
She reached under her cloak and handed back the copy of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria she had insisted on for her last birthday.
“My Springkell cousins were fascinated,” she said. “We read it aloud in our bed. Edith stuck her fingers in her ears at the naughty bits. Lizzie said God did not much mind if we gave men pleasure, but He wished we keep our worth till marriage.”
“And dour May? What did she have to say?”
“She said, Surely God has fatter kye to drive to market than fash about what men and women do wi their bits.”
“And you?”
“I wondered where our worth goes when we marry. You think it evaporates, like hoar in the sun?”
As we laughed together, I could smell Annandale on her, and felt us enter again an understanding of which we could never speak. We had once shared closeness and a peace that had little to do with chapels and bleeding hearts and penitent knees on cold stone floors.
She told me how, briefly apostolic, she had taken her Springkell cousins up into the hay barn to lead them in Oratio Mentalis, mystic prayers of the ascent of the soul, talking them through the four stages, rising to sweet, happy pain, then being entered by a fiery glow, followed by a swoon, then waking in tears. Cousin Edith had moaned in appreciation. May complained of cramp in her knees. Elizabeth said she woke in tears most mornings anyway.