Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  With the cracked crystal ball of aftersight, I also identify those who will be hung, who would die by the sword and who by the axe or rope, those whose houses would be razed, wives ravished, the lucky ones merely exiled forever, their lands forfeit. And passing among them, murmuring and listening, his coulter-blade eyes shining, the future Lord Scott of Buccleuch.

  Patron

  After the ceremony, the company flushed with wine and well-wishing, I crossed the crowded room to reacquaint myself with cousin Helen Irvine of Kirkconnel, grown an inch more tall and a world more bonnie as she took my hands in hers.

  My friend was by my side. Heaven help me, I first introduced them.

  Her letter was delivered to me a week or so later. Its ostensible purpose was to thank me for my present of a bound copy of the latest Essais. She apologized for not having more time for me, perhaps I had been offended? (I had.) It contained her own account of the wedding at Gilnockie. Though I lost it many years ago due to my precipitate departure from these shores, I mind it fine and still smile and frown at the story she told.

  The Armstrong wedding at Gilnockie had been her first outing since the timely death of her last suitor. She was newly turned seventeen. She tied a black ribbon at her throat and went with her Springkell cousins, Elizabeth, Edith and May, and they giggled at the sprushed-up lairds and farmer’s boys. They goggled at the legendary reivers. They agreed Laird Johnstone resembled nothing so much as an inflated pig’s bladder propped on stumpy legs. Wat O’Harden had a nose like a burning brand, and red-brown bracken sprouting from his ears. They sighed for the new Lord Maxwell, a long streak of a boy in black, with his dead father’s heidsman dagger awkward, emerald-studded, on his hip.

  The new Warden was charming. He kissed her hand without slobbering over it, and asked warmly after her father’s health. He looked not at her chest but into her eyes as he said that reports of her beauty were among the few items of Border gossip not exaggerated.

  “And you will marry soon, I expect?” he enquired.

  She touched the black ribbon at her throat.

  “There has been a . . . disappointment,” she said.

  His mouth twitched before he offered his sympathy. He waved his hand towards the priest and the minister. “So which of these would you have your marriage blessed by?”

  “Only the minister can make a marriage in the eyes of the Law,” she replied with care.

  That charming, alarming man cocked his head a notch to the right.

  “And in the eyes of God?” he asked.

  “I am a humble Borderlands girl,” she said. “What would I know of our Maker’s preferences?”

  “A good answer,” he said, “though I doubt that very much.” He gently took and lifted her hand. His lips brushed her knuckles, with a tiny suction.

  “Haud ullis labentia ventis,” he murmured. So he knew the family motto: “Yield under no wind”—though it seems to her they did a deal of yielding. “Have your father choose well,” he added, smiled, and Lord Scott of Buccleuch moved on among the company.

  She looked after him, deaf to whatever her cousins were saying. Then she spied Cousin Harry standing wide-eyed, wary and alert at the foot of the stair. As she threaded through the crowd towards him, she began to take note of the man at his side.

  I doubt not your friend is a bonnie one, she wrote in the margin of her letter, bright as an Annan morn. How often do such morns last out the day?

  Though I loved the man, I had been wondering myself.

  You will remember my pretty image of the low-born trout rising in pursuit of food, the clever angler waiting on the bank? Though I was but one of his many catches, of limited significance, I marvel still at the alert patience of that man, how he scrutinized the waters and when the moment was right, brought me in with one deft flick of the pen.

  Adam had never thought to ask how I was able to leave my employ indefinitely to come to his aid. That is the difference between the gentry and the rest of us.

  When his note came to me—a rambling, drunken scrawl, concluding, You are the only one I trust—I did not rise up in delight, strike the board with hearty oath, run to my horse and gallop hot-trod to Annandale to the aid of my old friend. Instead I sat crumbling salt over my morning porridge, exhilarated and dismayed in equal measure. Perhaps one who has finally put behind an old affair of the heart, all yearning extinguished, then receives a note pleading for assistance, will imagine how I felt.

  Besides, my student days were long over. Back home in Embra after the largely sober sojourn at Wittenberg, the eventful affair of Leyden, I had to my surprise secured a post as correspondence and personal secretary to one of our less sottish Justices. I had, it was hinted at, a patron. A wink, a knowing nod, but no name forthcoming. I was too pleased to enquire more deeply. In my youthful vanity I assumed some impartial higher power had noted and rewarded my abilities.

  I did not dare lose such a position. The Bench was sitting, and it was most unlikely I would be given leave to go to Annandale for a period indefinite and a reason unstatable. Besides, Adam had not even notified me of his father’s death—in a Saughton raid, it seemed—in time for me to attend the funeral. I made allowances, wrote to commiserate, and congratulate him on becoming heidsman. No reply. Then a couple of months later I got an invitation from his mother to attend her marriage to Dand Fleming.

  I had attended, of course. Adam would need my support. I was baffled as to why Dand rather than he had become heidsman. But my old friend had been distant and preoccupied at the wedding. His eyes had been cloudy as he looked on me, his voice both formal and slurred as he welcomed me to the Fleming house, then drifted away in inky black.

  I had, in truth, ridden back to the city after that wedding nursing a hangover and a sulk. Not only was my friend not open with me, my cousin Helen was away with her mother in Paris, being given a final polish, and no one had seen fit to tell me. Much else had changed since my last Borders visit, with Buccleuch now in the Tower awaiting the Queen’s Pleasure following the springing of Kinmont Willie Armstrong from Carlisle Castle.8 The newly knighted reiver warlord Sir James Johnstone was now Warden, and had held court at the wedding, throughout which he talked and guffawed.

  All in all, I was scunnered wi’ Scotia. The life of the Borders, the intrigues of the Court, were no affair of mine. I had no mother or father, no lover, no guild. The wedding had reminded me I was an insignificant man. Which suited me fine. By the time I passed through the Cowgate, I had determined I would abroad to pursue beauty in painting, music and sculpture, encounter freedom of thought and imagination. Heavens, I would even be allowed to dance! And abroad I had gone, for near on two years.

  Now I walked up the High Street to the Inns, my former friend’s letter in my pocket, resolved. I would make my request for leave from my post. It would be turned down. I would then write back to Adam Fleming Esq., explaining why I could not oblige him.

  I put in my request. The Judge’s senior clerk—a man name of Gillivray, with a face grey and smooth as parchment—would have sneered had I been important enough to expend facial expression upon. His eyelid drooped a lash’s breadth as he said he would convey my request to the master. He came back from the inner room.

  “He will think on it. You will be contacted.”

  Hard to say which of us was the more astonished. I walked to the first of my day’s duties, fingers brushing my friend’s plea till the fabric shredded.

  The summons was thrust under my lodging’s door next day at first light. I read it, cold striking up from the stone threshold through my slippers. I turned and went back up the winding stair, deep in thought and already numb to my knees.

  That afternoon found me in an antechamber in Liberton Tower, a morning’s walk from the city walls. All had been secret, nameless. No one would meet my eyes as I was passed from watchman to adviser, hustled up the back stair by one armed man to meet another at the top. The guard now stood silent by the stair door, armed merely with a short sword, d
agger and a pistol the size of a harquebus, though by the look of him he could dispose of me with bare hands.

  “A fine afternoon,” I ventured.

  “Fuck off, pisspot,” he replied.

  I was unable to produce a witty reply, so just stood there, examining the grain of the stone at my feet.

  “Attend me!”

  The voice, though muffled by the door between us, was lightly stained with the earth-brown vowels of the Borderlands. My guard nodded. I entered a panelled room, furnished only with a table, a heavy seat and a not-very-good tapestry of a hunting scene that conflated the Lothians with Ancient Greece.

  The man standing at the window slit was unshowily dressed, with just a short dirk on his hip. As he advanced on me, smiling, I understood now the hugger-mugger. I had lately heard rumours that instead of having his head removed, he was about to be released from the Tower of London, after private audiences with the Auld Hag and Cecil. Apparently the springing of Kinmont Willie had been put by. Fowler had hinted at high politics. And now the former Warden of the Western March was back, in a city full of his enemies, any of whom might surround him in a close or tavern and dispatch him from the rowdy world.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. I tried not to flinch. Who knows how many men that hand had put away with sword or pistol, and how many more he would with a stroke of the pen in days to come.

  “I hope you have brought your crystal ball, Master Langton,” he said. “You may need it yet.”

  Rarely is it fortunate to come to the attention of the high heid ones, and in those days there were few higher and more precariously set than Scott of Branxholme and Buccleuch, my secret patron.

  He commenced with enquiries as to my health and situation since my sudden return from Leyden. As I stammered that I was quite well set, he wished me well with my proposed translation of that scandalous and—smiling—probably heretical and maybe even treasonous work, De Rerum Natura.

  As I tried to remember to breathe, he went on to commend some of my verses I had copied out for the Queens’ secretary some weeks back, and quoted—accurately—a line that had pleased several: “And all the bright stars were her dowrie.” This was flattering and worrying in equal measure, his point being to remind me just how informed he was, and to hint he was once again privy to the King.

  Then he took me by the elbow, guided me to the window slit and gently outlined how my present living and my future prospects depended entirely on his favour. As did my long life, which of course he wished for me. He had had his eye on me for some time, and now, through my Border relations and an old friendship from my college days, I could be of some small service.

  He then instructed how I was to proceed in the matter of young Fleming, Rob Bell and Helen Irvine of Bonshaw. He made it seem a little thing, a favour to him, a task to which I alone was suited.

  I nodded, stared at the floor. He softly put out his hand, lifted my chin so I must stare into his grey and shining eyes. He hefted a small purse. “For the road,” he said. “And maintenance. There need be no accounting.”

  He tossed it. I caught it, chinking in my hand, and I felt myself falling from whatever high opinion I ever had of myself.

  It was near dawn when I finished my report. It had required much consideration, and twice I had to start afresh. None stirred in the Fleming compound. Likely my friend lay sleeping in his damp guardroom, safe there at least, dreaming of Fair Helen and better days to come.

  I used the last of the candle to burn my drafts, powdered the ashes, sealed and folded the fair copy inside my shirt, then laid me down with blanket and first light happed about my shoulders.

  Stiletto

  I had aimed to set down plainly only what I witnessed concerning the events at Kirkconnel, to correct the folk haivers and bring some understanding. Yet already I find footnotes, asides and addenda have begun to run wild down the margins and among the lines. I like to think of them as bright wildflowers that border and run through the acres of turnip and kale by which we feed ourselves.

  But I suspect the truth is this. I set out to memorialize Adam, Helen and Bell, and those around them. Perhaps I have some faint hope that through this they will not be forgotten, nor entirely transmuted from human clay and recast into the unyielding stone of ballad. But these marginalia, these flowers of moi, proliferate among stern, productive history. They sway in the wind, raise their heads to the sky and cry, “Me! Me! Remember me!”

  Were this story set down by stern Livy or high-minded Plutarch, I would scarcely appear but as a footnote. But I am not they. I call on Monsieur Montaigne for his support—his personal anecdotes are said by some to lower the tone of his Essais—but know I am not he. I am but a passing aside in another’s story.

  Yet I would you remember me, the canny cloot.

  Jed Horsburgh jogged my elbow as I ate dozily in the scullery next morning. He carried two Border swords in one big fist, gauntlets in the other. He said I must come outside with him.

  For dignity’s sake I first finished my porridge, then followed him out.

  He stopped in the yard between house, peel tower—no sign of life there—and stables. Said he would make a man of me. I said I was man enough. At least I could read and scrieve my name.

  His muckle right paw whipped out. I ducked so it but cuffed the side of my head. He grunted. Then we stood in the courtyard and looked at each other.

  “If not for your sake, cheeky whelp, then for his. I canna aye be at his side.”

  Fair point, but still I hesitated.

  “If you think you’ll be spared because you go unarmed, you’re a bigger gowk than I tak ye for.”

  I took the blunted sword Jed handed me, donned the padded glove and made ready.

  Whack with the flat of his sword, faster than the drop of a hawk. Again. And again, to shoulders, to thigh. I could not parry quick enough. The little fencing I had been taught was nothing like this. When I attacked him, he turned me aside with ease, then whack, on my bad ribs. I could not but cry out.

  I pulled back. Studied him as he stood ready to go again. He was a fighting man all his life. I could not possibly defeat him.

  He swung high—I ducked. He stabbed frontal—I jumped back. He feinted to chest, then made at my legs—I skipped aside, went by him. His blade was heavy, I was small and fleet. No matter how strong and skeely he was, I should be able to move faster. I noted his left arm moved a fraction early, to give balance for his coming sword-arm blow. That movement, and a certain flicker of his eyes, were my prompts.

  I began to enjoy myself. I could not fight him, but I was younger, lighter, quicker on my feet. I had fought many a rammie as a bairn in the city yards, and had learned to slip blows from fist or stick.

  Autumn wind blew hair over my eyes, dust streamed out from our boots. It was a dance of sorts. When he came on, I played the female part. When he moved across, I sashayed. When he raised his arm, I slipped under, birled, made ready again.

  For several minutes he could not lay a blow on me.

  “Stand and fecht like a man,” he panted.

  “No chance.”

  He near got me then, a quick slice coming in low. I louped aside. A couple of side swipes I dodged easily, then found he’d worked me to the corner of the stable wall with no room to move back, no sideways escape. His sword stopped an inch from my ribs.

  “You’re a runt, Langton, but quick on your feet. We maun use that.”

  We agreed that even if he had a month to train me, he could not make me a match with sword for an experienced man. He went to his house—little more than a byre ahint the stables—and came back with a long, very slim, dagger. He carefully fitted a bate to it, then handed it to me, haft first. I weighed it in my right hand. It was light, with little edge. The thin blade flickered in the sun as it followed the turn of my wrist. I had not seen the like.

  “Italian,” he said. “I have the sheath in the house.”

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, transferring it automati
cally to my better hand.

  “Italy, of course.” I stared; he shrugged. “Long yarn,” he said. “So you are corrie-fistit—that is good. It will surprise them.”

  We went back to the centre of the courtyard and faced up. I was beginning to warm to his ugly mug.

  “It will not happen like this, loon,” he said quietly. “Assassins nor reivers favour fair fights. But this is where we maun begin.”

  I see him yet, his big sonsie face mottled with weather, drink and hardship. Under eyebrows like grand tufts of barley, his narrowed eyes betrayed his next move. Him it was who showed me how to slip a sword-thrust, shimmy and let it slide by, then jump in quick with the stiletto. He showed me the gaps that armour, whether leather or metal, seldom covers—where neck meets shoulder, under the raised arm, the privates and low belly. The point would slide through leather jerkin or metalled jack. “Ain deep strike,” he said, “then a second tae mak siccar.”

  I owe my life to that dour, kindly man of Hawick. Others owe their death to his instruction.

  When the sun was high as it would get that day, Jed called a halt. I nodded and turned back to the house, then gasped and fell to my hunkers as his blow hit my side.

  “More often it happens like that,” he said.

  I nodded weakly, as though broken—then sprang inside his guard. My Italian dagger passed the base of his neck. As we clutched, our faces were inches apart. His teeth were few and blackened, his breath made dung seem sweet.

  “Aye, you’re a sleekit wee shite, Harry Langton,” he said. “You may do yet. And for fuck’s sake do something wi’ your hair.”

  In my room, I took off my shirt. Red weals where his blade had slapped, bruises like livid thunderclouds from my earlier beating. I thought of Robert Bell, of his follower who had throttled me. Thinking of the third one who had stood aside, his face averted lest I kenned him, I passed the sling over my head. The pale-tan leather sheath fitted well by my right rib.