Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

  “Not my type.”

  “The Abbess, then?”

  “Definitely not my type. Not when I have memories of you.”

  “Foot-licking whelp.”

  Perhaps a hint of rose came to her cheeks. I thought of her awkward last embrace with Fairfax.

  “I shall give you a true accounting. It concerns a book I greatly desired access to, one that is not permitted in our enlightened country. I cultivated a douce librarian with an alarming mouth—”

  “Ah, I had thought there would be love involved!”

  “Not love. Lust perhaps, and some hope of gratification.”

  I gave her the story, made good in the telling. The days of astounded reading, feeling my dark world illuminated by words burning across so many centuries. The weeks of secret copying, the wandering hands kept at bay, the pallet bed in the scriptorium. The moonlit city as I hurried to my alliance with the Abbess. The warning, the hasty packing, the barred door, the window and the waiting horse below. And so homeward, with my copy in a sealed pouch next to my skin, more precious to me than gold.

  Some good touches in there, I thought—the cloth-muffled hooves, the Abbess’s bad breath, the pished guards at the city gate. I did not name Lucretius’s heretical poem, nor say that when this affair was by and time permitted, I sought to translate De Rerum Natura into English or even good Scots, the first to do so. Fowler had hinted that, anonymously distributed, it might make my name among the Castalians.

  Elenora enjoyed a good yarn, as I had enjoyed hers about Dowie Fairfax, spy for two Crowns, aid for the Earl of Angus at his incessant plotting. When we finally bade our goodnights and I went chastely off to the dog-basket down the stair, I doubted if she believed my tale more than I believed hers.

  Pend

  After all, what have we here? A creature that is the strangest thing on Earth—a long stalk of matter that has grown an outlandish flower at its crown. A lamp that lights itself, that knows its own existence, and by the same light foresees its own demise . . .

  But I must delay no longer, and pen this next scene before shame stills my hand.

  In the morn, as we bade goodbye outside the Fortune Rigg, Elenora hugged and pressed herself to me. Her eyes widened, and not at my manly charms.

  “So you are armed,” she murmured. “That may be for best.” She put her mouth close to my lug. Her warm breath in that orifice.

  “Dinna let Dowie in ahint you. Trust nane.”

  For a moment we regarded each other direct. I nodded, then turned to take my cob from the smirking stable lad.

  “Haste ye back!” she cried as I left. I waved without turning round, for it was her commercial cry, given to all. But her whisper had been for me alone. Trust nane, herself included. That much I believed.

  Once clear of Kirtlebridge, I set Handsome Jenny on the high way to Langholm where my report would be sent off. As I crossed the muir, then down into the dale that narrowed like a coney trap about the burn, there was an old song birling in my heid.

  Then lowly lowly cam she in,

  And lowly cam she by him;

  The only words she ever said,

  “Young man I think you’re dyin.”

  Your man in Langholm could not look me straight, on account of his skelly een as much as his crooked nature. In the back of his saddlery he brought me wax and candle, watched without comment as I pressed my patron’s ring into the seal. His mark. His man. Deliver to Himself.

  It was mart day in the toun. The streets were full of stoorie-feet pedlars, raggedy-arse drovers with their scraggy yowes, folk crying their wares. In the sole inn—a poor place after the Fortune Rigg—a solitary fiddler sat scraping wood, sheep gut and horsehair.

  I stood long minutes at the open door. Mine host called for my order, but at first I could not speak, for the slow air “The Hangman’s Tryst” clutched like a garrotte about my throat.

  There are only so many fiddle tunes one can enjoy, beasts one can watch being bid for. I took a daunder down the High Street, found the printer and speired after his latest. But the pamphlets were the usual religious ravings or else sadly pornographic. The Latin texts were familiar to me, and the poetry yet more flowerings rapidly gone to seed. Allegory and decoration, all that courtly wit I had lately so admired, seemed but daft to me now. Whatever had happened to good Robert Henrysoun, with his death-knell metre and braid Scots hammering down the coffin lid on life?

  I bade the printer good day and, aiming for the river, turned down a narrow pend. A man dark and thickset as a mart bullock stepped before me. No helmet, but sword, dagger, leather armour.

  “Cuntface,” he greeted me.

  “Begging your pardon?”

  “Whoreson gutterslug bumboy.”

  He already gripped his short sword. By the failing of the light, I knew another had stepped into the passage behind me. I held up my right hand.

  “Whoa! Politesse, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Whit?”

  I stepped nearer him, put my left hand up to my chest to demonstrate my sincerity.

  “Friend, a little politeness glows like fruit on the underside of leaves.”

  My hand slipped inside my shirt, and while the oaf still grappled with my words, the stiletto slid through his leather, twitched off a rib and sank into his heart. A quick twirl to finish it off, then I whirled to face the man behind. He looked at me, at my crimson blade. His mouth fell open as his friend clattered to the ground. He ran.

  I stepped over the body and ran the other way. Louped the wall at the end of the pend, circled back to the mart. My mare was still tied behind the farrier’s. I dawdled in the shadows, wanting assurance none was watching her. A drover brought a tummle of kye through the street, lowing and shitting. As they clattered by I untied Handsome Jenny, led her round the corner, quickly mounted and bid honest Langholm farewell.

  My hand pauses, the point drips. I put the pen down, wipe the tip and stare down at the North Esk. Below, my host Drummond leads some artistically inclined young member of our local gentry around his garden. By the way his hand waves, I fear he is reciting some of his poetry.

  The young man stands—patient, bored, in thrall? At this distance I cannot tell. I was as him once, before that autumn I went down to Annandale, before a man, now long dust, took time to instruct me how to kill and so live a little longer.

  I cross myself with my good hand. As for that desperate young man, heart hammering as he put Langholm behind, crouched low over his horse, what he was becoming? What he had perhaps always been, for when my assailant stepped before me in the pend, everything had become clear, slow, inevitable. Terror and remorse came later.

  It is many years since God and I had anything to say to each other. I expect he is saving his best for last. Timor mortis conturbat me, indeed.

  I pick up the pen again.

  “There is a man deid in Langholm,” I said. “A foreign blade passed through his heart.”

  Jed did not blink.

  “Any witness?”

  “One. He ran awa to whoever sent him.”

  “So he’ll no testify. We do not want you summonsed.”

  Jed Horsburgh’s shack within the compound was chill but clean and orderly. It was said he had a wife in Alnwick. In summer when there was little fighting he would go to her, then be back to work in the hairst. I did not doubt he had a steady hand on the plough.

  “John Rusby,” I said. “Tall, muckle-shouldered, baggit nose?”

  “Aye,” he said. “I ken him. He’s welcome as a forky golach crawlin’ out of yer lug.”

  He looked at me enquiringly.

  “He was the one that ran off. I jalouse he poisoned Adam in the Fortune Rigg.”

  Breath whistled atween his broken teeth.

  “And I thought you were just awa hooring.”

  I shrugged. Man of the world.

  “I saw him at the inn with Dowie Fairfax. He may have had a glisk of me.”

  On my ride back there had been time to work it out
. Fairfax and Bell had spared my life by the Kirtle. All that had changed since then was my seeing him with Rusby, who had been present when Adam fell sick. I must have been followed from the Fortune Rigg to Langholm. I was not ready to consider what part Elenora might have played in this.

  Jed scowled at the pristine earth floor. “Fairfax is a dangerous man.”

  “They say he is at one with our Warden.”

  Jed picked at his teeth with the point of his dirk. He found a shard of old meat, held it up atween thumb and finger then flicked it out the window.

  “I say he is at one wi’ many.”

  We sat in silence. I heard Philby yelp, the peel-tower door thud to. Adam went by the stables and out the compound gate, hound at his heels. He was sprushed to the gills and doing his best to look casual.

  Jed was already on his feet, short sword in his hanger.

  “Froggy’s gaun a-courtin’,” he said. His hand heavy on my shoulder kept me down. “Weel done in Langholm,” he said. “Seems you’re a natural.” And he was gone after his man.

  At the gate, I watched Jed slip into the woods below. Though strong and weighty, he appeared to float over the ground. It seemed we took turn to be Adam’s guards. “Quis custodiet custodes?” I murmured.

  I turned away from the bright day, quick enough to glimpse Watt at an upper window, looking down at the woods where Adam and Jed had gone. He saw me and for the first time his thin face masked not contempt but fear. Then he withdrew.

  I went to the kitchens, needing something on my stomach. It could never be well done to kill a man. I had seen his face as I stepped over him. I wished I had not.

  Yet I was hungry and would eat. In Langholm a man had left the world of appetite and, judging by his expression, he left it most reluctantly.

  Bonshaw

  Across the North Esk gill at Hawthornden there festers not quite pond nor marsh. Year after year of leaf-fall rots there among reeds. I sat on the bank on this chill afternoon of Martinmas and watched the last leaves tear off and fall. In a few weeks they will be black, then sink. This both depresses and soothes me.

  A minor Latin poet linked falling leaves to both the dead and our memory of them. My friend and patron Drummond has lately translated sonnets from the Italian on the same theme. Though he is not a terribly good poet, I am gentle with his later verse, because for all its courtly conceits his loss is real. The woman he was to marry died but weeks before the wedding. Though he married later, and has the many rowdy children who enliven the castle with their shrieks, in his cups late at night, her name still arises. Mary Cunningham of Barns. Sweet Marie.

  The sounds bubble from his lips like a drowning man giving up his last air.

  At night the will-o’-the-wisp flickers across this bog. The peasants say they are spirits of the dead, but I think not. Yet the dead return to us, no doubt, by night or by day, rising from the rotted mulch of the years. Up from black oblivion they rise, catch fire and play across the surface of our minds, insubstantial, unignorable.

  Adam, Helen, Jed, William Fowler, my fine landlady removing her brave yellow coif to signal time for pleasure, my mother singing old songs of Annandale and my good father grunting as he drove his cooper’s hammer down—they all passed long syne into the black bog. They are its unexpected graces, its jack-o’-lanterns, elusive flares that are left to us, to baffle and delight with their false fires.

  That season after Martinmas rang high and bright as a clean-struck bell. The days grew hard, the stars more sharp-edged each night I left the peel tower after conferring with Adam. Each morning the sky stretched paler above the hills. Winds stripped the trees of their glowing dead and piled them in ditches to rot.

  Across the in-by fields, fat kye were clumped like juicy fruit awaiting picking, and it was time to make a long-anticipated visit.

  Dew was still heavy on the riggs when Handsome Jenny and I followed the Kirtle downstream then crossed the glittering Lea. I nodded to shepherd, farmer, labouring wife, a bairnie staggering at the door, unsure whether to wave or run from the stranger.

  It was aye that way in the Borderlands. Folk would look at me, hesitate, look again, uneasy. At a glance they saw this was not a soldier, not preacher nor merchant nor pedlar (where are his goods?), not handyman or tailor, nor farmer, smith, journey-man or tinker (no tools of his trade). Not a hangman nor a doctor nor stockman (again, no tools). Not quite a musician, ballad makar, or juggler (they travel in groups, for their own protection, and have better patter). He has no companion or servant, yet he is not a servant.

  Of what family or guild is he? How are we to treat such a one?

  Border folk do not welcome strangers—with good reason, Lord knows. Their eyes did not linger on me long, and few ever shook my hand, in case I carried some contagion they could not name. They saw one who is not defined by family, trade, guild or station, who is thus a not-quite man, and gave me the by.

  Fair enough, really, to pass by such a man. For who knows how the world appears from behind his not-quite eyes?

  I passed the ruinous kirk where Irvines and Maxwells still lay in the lower crypt while their allies, dependants, retainers and workers worshipped elsewhere. I wondered if the horse blankets were spread yet in the chamber off the vestry, and when young love had last lain there.

  I swivelled in the saddle. None rode behind though curious glances followed me. Jed had gone with Adam and Dand to do the rounds of the tenants. I was on my own, as I had long been. The Italian dagger under my jerkin, wit and low cunning were my only friends.

  As the high cleuch crowned by Blackett House came into view, I turned my cob’s head and made a long loop, through the woods of Burnfoot. I had no desire to meet with Rob Bell again. So I rode by the ruins of Langshaw’s once douce wee farm, charred rafters pointing at the sky like broken ribs. I was entering a land part real, part myth, the world of my childhood summers. Smoke unfurled blue-grey from the woods upstream as I rejoined blithe Kirtle water and followed it on down.

  I took the way without hesitation, knowing it somewhat better than the back of my hand (which I doubt if I would recognize, set alongside others). The water was easy at the ford, then I urged Handsome Jenny up the steep bank, through a stand of young Scots pine, to look on Bonshaw Hall remade.

  I slowed, admiring the broad brassed door, the knotted corbels, the ground-floor slits that since my last visit had bloomed into arched and graceful windows. It seemed the Continental ornamentations and gentilesse of Linlithgow and Falkland were spreading. Money was being spent here, and I wondered from whence it came, in what expectations.

  Nevertheless, the peel tower still lurked massively behind the Hall, tall and brutal as a broken-off cliff, its lower windows mere slits, the great door studded with blackened nails. If the outer walls could not be held, this remained the Irvines’ last redoubt.

  A man lounged on the guardhouse ledge, set high on the stone barnkin wall (a step up from the Flemings’ wooden palisade). Booted feet up on a stool, sword propped beside him on the wall, a crossbow dandled across his knees. He stared at me as I called up to announce myself.

  “I ken wha y’are,” he said, then went back to cracking fleas in his hair. “They’re no at hame.”

  “I come by invitation,” I said.

  He swung his feet off the stool and glared down at me.

  “You could come by fuckin’ chariot,” he said. “Himself and his guidwife are no at hame.”

  The out-by door set in the main gate snicked open, and there stood one assailed, perhaps imperilled, by her own beauty.

  Helen hastened over, took my arm as I dismounted, then led me quickly away from the walls. I looked back at the guard, saw him spit down into the dirt below, then swing his feet back up on the stool and close his eyes. Long may I be protected by my unimportance!

  The path Helen took me on ended at a little ledge, so steep on all sides they had built a wooden rail. We stood high above the deep cut where the river hastened, spray rising to moisten our fa
ces.

  I knew, as few others did, that the thick ivy on our left could be parted, and a short tunnel went through the cliff, and the path then jouked and snaked on down through landslip and blackthorn, laurel and briar. The hidden descent to the Kirtle water, and the way upstream to Kirkconnel was old, surely very old, from before the de Brus family arrived with their swords, bows and charters.

  As a bold, bored, solitary child she had found it, and one afternoon, after making me swear many oaths, she had taken my hand and shown me the way through. Now I looked at her spray-glistered averted head, her hidden eyes as she looked down into the foam. That path’s existence was the only secret of hers I knew for sure.

  I took her arm. “That is the trysting way?” I said.

  She turned, looked past me at the ivy. “One of them,” she said. She smiled at last, her eyes seemed to swell and fill my world. I felt complete, as though reunited with the piece of myself she carried within her.

  “Adam kens it?”

  She dropped her gaze, blushed, mock-demure.

  “He has come that way.”

  “And Rob Bell, what of him?”

  She looked me in the eye. “You have come here to know my mind?”

  “Or your heart.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Did Adam send you?”

  “I am not his spy or messenger, only his friend in this.”

  She stared me out, then nodded. “Bell has no need of hidden ways,” she said. “He is approved of my mother and father, and may enter by the front.”

  Then I began to giggle at her words, and she in turn, and we laughed, blushing at our low minds. Then she pushed damp hair from her eyes and spoke more seriously.

  “I ken what others think of Robert Bell,” she said. “I do not find him so. Let him be as he is in the company of men, but among women, he is strong but douce, nigh-on jocose.”

  “I find that hard to imagine.”