Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  “Mystic prayer is akin to daily watering a garden,” Helen insisted.

  “Your Teresa should live in Annandale,” May said. “Our garden gets watered near every day, prayer or no prayer.”

  Together they looked out to the courtyard, the sodden, lovely fields and woods.

  “Aye, we must be awfy holy in these parts,” Elizabeth said. Four girls convulsed among the straw.

  “That was the end of Saint Teresa,” Helen said. She raised her eyes to me, put out her hand, laid it on my arm in a touch more knowing than any lover’s. “Still, a certain yearning remains,” she said. “Though it may never be satisfied in this world.”

  I blinked at that.

  “There is always love,” I said foolishly.

  She laughed. “Love! Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out. You see, I have read your Montaigne as instructed. It is very diverting, all his Que sais-je?, but it is of little use to me.”

  We heard the stair door clunk, then my aunt’s step on the stair. Helen stood back, pulled her cloak about her shoulders and spoke swiftly. “Dear Harry, I am the sole surviving child of my parents. My father is heidsman of the Irvines, and has no brothers living. Ergo, I must marry and breed—la-la!”

  Her desperate smile, her swift, patronizing kiss to my cheek, they felt like a farewell to something more than me.

  I ushered them out before the servitor found them in my room. From the upper window, the senior clerk scowled and beckoned to me. Helen and I hesitated, then she held out her hand. I made to shake it, clasped her soft palm, then raised her fingers to my lips in unconvincing gallantry, embarrassing us both.

  Aunt Ann’s nod was more dismissal than goodbye. Ann had married up, into the lairdship, and my mother had married down, into the city. I would never know what hard words had been said between them. This visit had been dutiful, no more, perhaps checking I was not disgracing the family before they moved to yet higher ground.

  I stood for a moment, watching them walk up the High Street. Two young gallants swerved by Helen, then both heads turned to look back, as though checking they had just witnessed such radiance in a scurvy street.

  Choking down the sour spit of yearning, I turned back to Justice’s door. Being indentured, there was no possibility of going back soon to Annandale. I resolved to find my own entertainment and some of my own kind in the city of my birth—and that is what I did, and so rose a little closer to the unresting gaze of the patient angler of useful men, waiting on the bank.

  Embra, then and now, is a steep-sided, dark galley laid on a canted keel with Castle at the prow, Palace at the stern, and banks of churchmen, lawyers and merchants oaring away amidships, above slaves locked in the hold. Wherever I stravaiged on the long years of exile, I found it was ever thus, but in Embra it is perhaps most evident. Just stand on the Pentland hills and look at it, going nowhere on its dark grey-green sea, the Ship of Fools.

  It is also a place of unexpected levels and curious connections. To keep some brightness in my post-student life, I had continued translating poems of Horace (the stoic melancholy appealed) and Catullus (for the naughty bits) into English and mixed Scots. A fellow clerk of higher standing offered to take me to an upper room in the Grassmarket where the poet Montgomerie held court. With certain reservations—mostly those of envious youth—I admired that man’s clean-struck sonnets, and his work sang beautifully. Curiosity outweighing trepidation, I mounted those creaking stairs into a smoke-filled room of laughing, clever, witty, modern men, the soi-disant “Castalian Band” who numbered the King as their head.

  And it was there that, drink taken, head spinning with tobacco smoke5 from a dozen pipes, I was emboldened to converse with William Fowler. (His sister would marry John Drummond, father of William, my good host. So small a country.) A dozen years my senior, he was dark, slim, sharp-eyed, witty. More to the point, he was a poet, soldier, spy, diplomat, and had become of late the private secretary to Jamie Saxt’s wife. Dizzy heights indeed for a cooper’s son, conversing wi’ the likes of he!

  I watched and listened to the gentry with great interest and some yearning. Montgomerie himself was stout, drunk, ill-tempered at some endless court case where he tried to reclaim the pension lost while he was fighting in the Low Countries. He read aloud from the first printing of some sonnets relating to his plaints with the Law, quickly confirming my belief that legal affairs and poetry are not good bedfellows.

  But a young man stood up and amid hushed silence sang the poet’s “Come my childrene dere, drau neir me.” My heart was split like a chiselled stave, and long-delayed tears for my parents—or perhaps just the effect of the smoke—ran down my cheek.

  Fowler’s hand on my arm. “Bonnie song, is it not?” he said quietly. “You write yourself?”

  “I translate the works of my betters,” I replied, quickly wiping my face with my kerchief.

  We became friends of a sort, so far as society allowed. When discussing and translating, we met as equals; it was a true brotherhood. It was through Fowler that I heard something of the gossip of the Court: who was in and who was out. And it was in part that unlikely connection that first drew my patron, my lord, my nemesis, to cast his eye my way.

  The following spring I completed my apprenticeship and was given brief leave. I rode down to Annandale to return my aunt’s dutiful visit (that is, see my fair cousin again) and look up my old college friend. By arrangement I was met in Broughton by six of them on small strong cobs, armed cap-à-pe. Adam Fleming looked older, at once more formal and more uncouth. Grown-up, I suppose. He was doing his best to be his dead elder brother.

  We shook hands, constrained among those hardened fighting men. Their lances pricked the bright air, swords gleamed, crossbows dangled.

  “Thank you for the escort,” I said.

  He grimaced. “It would be unwise to ride by Liddesdale alane. The place is a fuckin’ shambles. The Middle March is not much better.”

  I felt myself a soft-handed city loon as I rode on beside him, Jed Horsburgh at the other side. It was indeed doolie days in the Borderlands. I saw burned-out cottages, wooden shacks and empty, untended fields. In the villages, folk lurked, disappeared at our approach. I felt starved eyes staring into my back as we rode on. Suspicion and hunger hung like haar in the air, dank and chilling.

  Even in an Embra obsessed with Bothwell’s doings, the recent battle of Dryfe Sands had been news. Lord Maxwell had decided to deal with the Johnstones once and for all. He rode near three thousand followers to Dryfe Sands, made a complete cock of it. Exeunt, permanently, Lord Maxwell and hundreds of his men. It was said that, three months on, the streets of Dumfries were still spattered in blood.

  “Disaster for us,” Adam said. “We have been unmade for supporting Maxwell. Scott of Buccleuch is Warden now, but I doubt he has the men to keep order. As for Liddesdale . . .”

  He shrugged and rode on. We passed through another ruined village, past little huts, our heads turning, turning.

  “Does no one build in stone any more?” I enquired.

  “What’s the point?” he said. “The Warden’s men, or the Grahams, or Sandy’s Bairns, or English reivers will burn you out of your cott and pull it down.”

  We rode on through Tweedale, climbing towards the pass above Devil’s Beef Tub. Near the headwaters we billeted in a cousin’s high lonely farm. In the morn we climbed into cloud, descended by unfamiliar ways towards Moffat, then looped west to give Liddesdale a wider berth.

  Nothing was said, but the heads of those around me kept turning, turning as we went through the poor lands.

  “There will be small hairst this summer,” I said, looking round.

  “Why sow when your fields will be burned?”

  Adam’s voice was neutral, his eyes straight ahead, impassive under his helmet. I thought of the yearning, inspired young man on Arthur’s Seat summit, dreaming of love and Constantinople.

  “How do people
live now?”

  “Them as has the strength go reiving,” Jed said. “The ithers starve or move to Embra. These are end days, friend.”

  We were now deep into Annandale, my mother’s people’s lands where I had been happy as a child, and the men around me began to be easier. When riders approached on the road, Jed’s hand went to his short sword. Two others of our party unstrapped their lance. This is no way to live, I thought.

  “For now, this is the only way,” Adam said softly, as though to himself. For a moment we were close again.

  The approaching band were a group of Croziers and Moffats, heading for Kelso. As far as anyone could remember, we were not at feud with them. Jed went aside with their leader, they had words. He rode back, nodded once, and we rode on.

  This was Adam’s life now. It was not mine. Even amid the green braes and birks and burns of Annandale, it was depressing.

  “Never mind,” he said, catching my mood. “We will attend an Armstrong wedding at Gilknockie this week’s end!”

  “Are you not at feud?”

  He shrugged. “We might kill each other on a dark night, or disputing over a pig, but to not attend the wedding would be a gross insult.”

  “You are all mad,” I said.

  He smiled. Even Jed chuckled as he rode, hand always to his sword.

  “My father wants me there,” Adam said. “He has business in Carlisle, and I must represent the family. We will teach you to drink deep afore you depart for the saft city.”

  Heidsmen

  I see them yet as I first saw them that day, the heidsmen of the Western March, jostling and carousing by the great fireplace where a small forest burned. Is it just memory with its magnifying glass that makes them so much more vivid and expansive than other men? Or perhaps in country places, where people are further spaced apart, like trees they grow wider, odder and bigger, to fill the light and space available.

  Centre among them stood a great bear in a fur-trimmed cloak, wearing muddy riding boots. Round-shouldered, heavy-bearded but balding on top, scar on one cheek and two fingers missing on the vast paw that chucked wine from glass into his maw—the very model of a Borders warlord, the Laird Johnstone, victor at Dryfe Sands. Even across the hall, his voice was loud, his laughter rich and free. He seemed inflated with energy and high humour.

  “Aye, he’s fucking hilarious,” Adam murmured in my ear. “In Kirk Yetholm last year he killed a Kerr who accidentally spat on his foot.”

  “No hawkers, then,” I replied.

  Laird James Johnstone was joking with the tall thin priest and the short red-faced minister who had conducted the marriage ceremony twice, once each, to be on the safe side. Such ceremonies had been banned on pain of death in Embra and St. Andrews since the Reform, yet here it was being done quite openly. Either Jamie Saxt was still hedging his bets, or his writ did not amount to much in these parts.

  Nearby, flanked by two armed men, a skinny boy waited, face of stone. Expensively dressed in black hose and stockings, his dagger too big for him, he stood out among the big, hardened heidsmen. Unamused by Johnstone’s guffaws, he stared straight ahead with wide black eyes as one of his kinsmen bent to whisper in his ear.

  “Yon’s Maxwell’s son,” Adam murmured into my ear. “The new Eighth Lord.”

  I stared again at the boy-man, standing but ten feet from the laughing laird who had killed his father at Dryfe. His eyes would bore holes in stone.

  “You’re joking me.”

  My friend shrugged. “It’s a wedding, the Warden invited them both, they have to come or lose favour. Anyway, loads of food and drink at another’s expense.”

  I shook my head. “You lot.”6

  The muckle grey-haired man was Sir John Carmichael, famed for the Redeswire Raid twenty years earlier (neither in Redeswire, nor a raid—ballads, eh?). I stared, fascinated by his wild eyebrows, his monumental hands. He listened impassively as a thin, elegant, Frenchified man with white gloves murmured in his ear. Behind them, two swordsmen stood tense as hawks.

  “Earl of Angus,” Adam murmured.

  “But he is locked in Edinburgh Castle!”

  “It seems not. Perhaps he has declared himself a Protestant again.”

  Sometimes I scarcely believe myself that I saw such a panoply of reivers in one place, all scrubbed and dressed, swilling down wine and brandy, scoffing pies as though Famine were round the corner. (For many, it was.) Each a heidsman with his family of followers, able to put dozens, even hundreds of armed men, skilled and mounted, in the field in their cause within a day. Five of those men had been, or would be, Warden of the West March. All but one would die well before their time.

  Walter Scott, Laird of Branxholme and Buccleuch, new-made Warden of the Western March and host of the evening, stood in the far corner of the Gilnockie Tower hall, with only two of his people by him while folk came to pay fealty or share in the clash.

  The dirk at his hip was ornamental, not functional. He was of medium height and build, good-looking and well dressed but not offensively so. At a time when most heidsmen were expansive, swaggering, brimful of vim and smeddum, his gestures I thought restrained, modest. His hands would open towards his listener, and everyone he talked with inclined his way. When they stood together, he made young Robert Bell look an inconsequential thug.

  I watched him with interest across the hall. Even in a time when song and story inflated a man’s deeds like gas in the belly of a dead pig, Scott was remarkable. Stepson of Earl Bothwell, he had flourished along with him, then was exiled to France after Bothwell’s fall. Yet he had returned, and instead of summary execution was given possession of estates in Hailes and Liddesdale.

  A minor laird had become at a quill’s stroke a man of some substance. Encouraged, he raided deep into Northumberland, bringing back cattle and horses, burning villages to ash, infuriating the English Queen, who demanded his head. Which remained stubbornly on his shoulders, following fulsome apologies from the Scottish regents.

  When Queen Mary went into exile, he plotted to have her restored. Her execution, and Jamie Saxt taking control after surviving his regents,7 should have been an end to Buccleuch. He was warded in Embra Castle on charges of treason, a doomed man.

  The young King visited him there. I wonder yet what understandings arose over the claret, what promises they shook upon that had the former cattle thief, the Catholic-plotting robber baron, restored again to his lands and knighted. Now with Warden Maxwell dead at Dryfe, Buccleuch had succeeded to his position. I had it from Fowler that certain courtiers had opened a book on his surviving the year, and the odds offered were even.

  But for the moment Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch and Branxholme was host to the Armstrong wedding, and seemed pleasant, modest, at ease as he worked round the hall. Among these hot-headed, impulsive, unbridled warrior lairds, he seemed cool as a well-run pantry.

  All day, as though seeing it afresh through my eyes, Adam had been bemoaning the current state of the March. The Borderlands had been in turmoil for near-on three hundred years, but of late murder, black-rent, kidnap and rustling had become the principal economy.

  “And I am expected to take side with one, be enemy to another! They talk of honour, but are reduced to stealing ploughshares and timber, and killing unarmed men. How can a man remain honest in such times?”

  I already considered myself more follower of Marcus Aurelius than the Blessed Virgin, but neither had to be heir to a small estate in ravaged Annandale. It is not so hard to be stoic when one is Emperor of Rome.

  “Long may your father live,” I said.

  He nodded sombrely. “I am not he.”

  A darkness hovered around him. Perhaps that was why I spoke carelessly.

  “Dinna fash yourself,” I said grandly. “These Border days will soon be by. In ten or twenty years there will be no more need of Wardens or Keepers. Nor reivers, come to that.”

  “An interesting prediction, friend.” The voice was warm and fluid, deep-pitched. Walter Scott
’s eyes were pale and shining as a coulter blade. “Perhaps you read this in the stars?”

  “A crystal ball, sir,” I replied. “Left to me by an old spey-wife.”

  He smiled, but his eyes never left me. I felt myself a mouse running before them, twisting and turning from their edge.

  “I should surely like to possess one of those,” he said. “Do you think the King has one?”

  In that rowdy hall, I felt a grue pass through me like a chill wind shaking a field of grain. He had seen too well where I was going. Flanked by two followers, Walter Scott waited, head cocked to one side, smiling benevolently upon me as though I were the most interesting person in that company.

  “All kings have crystal balls,” I stammered. “At least their queens must think so.”

  He laughed at that, full and easy. Clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Very good,” he said. He smiled at Adam, drew him into our entertainment. “According to the Castalian Band, our friend here turns out an elegant sonnet. It now seems he is also a seer and a wit,” he said. “Keep him close, Master Fleming!”

  “Close as my best kye when the Carletons come raiding,” Adam said.

  Scott of Buccleuch looked down at his hands, spread his fingers.

  “The Carletons will not reive Liddesdale again,” he said quietly. A dark bog opened at my feet. He shrugged, smiled on us both. “I must talk wi’ friends,” he said. “It is good to see you here, Master Fleming. It is time to let old feuds sleep, and find new loyalties.” He looked at me. “Master Langton, we must talk again, perhaps in Edinburgh.”

  Then he went through the company, so neat and modest and balanced. We watched him go. “Twenty murders and not yet thirty,” Thomas Lord Scrope had said of him. He bore them lightly, without swagger.

  And he kenned my name. I wished he did not.

  I can still entertain Drummond with tales of seeing Wat O’Harden and Ritchie Graham—two of the fastest throat-cutters north of the Solway—playing knucklebone on the wedding table with the loser knocking back a brandy cup each time, till they set to arm-wrestling, red-faced and straining like men at stool, then both falling to the floor to lie giggling like bairns.