by Andrew Greig
“Then try harder, dear coz. Folk are more wax than stone.” She paused to grip my arm. “You are not the only shape-changer in the valley.”
I inclined my head, accepting the thrust.
She recounted their first privy meeting at Bonshaw (her mother pacing silently outside the door). Bell did not stammer or bluster or blush. He had looked at her from slipper to coif, then shook his head. “You are the bonniest quine I have ever set my een on. Ask what you will of me.”
“Winning words,” I conceded. “And what did you ask of him?”
She smiled down at her feet in private memory.
“I asked that he might stop the rain outside.”
I winced, thinking Bell would kill a man for such impudence. Apparently he had stroked his beard, looked at her again and said gravely, “That I cannot do. But I can offer you shelter from it.”
I groaned theatrically, while inwardly admitting the reply had merit.
On parting, his hand had fallen lightly on her wrist. Without taking his eyes off her, he kissed his own palm where their flesh had met. Then he pulled on his gloves, strode to his followers, mounted and was gone through the gate without backward glance. Her wrist had reddened and burned where he had touched, as though she had been flicked by nettle.
“Hot stuff indeed,” I said. “What say your Springkell cousins?”
She told me Elizabeth declared Rob Bell looked like the Devil and was the most desirable man in Annandale. Edith, the pale, earnest, sleekit one, had replied, “A devil just the same. Who is to say he would not use you hard as he uses other men?”
Cousin May had looked up from sewing flounces for her wedding day—did I know she had been agreed to Andrew Charleton, a merchant trader out of Carlisle? There would be no reivers in the family she would have.
“Rob Bell is like to quickly give you children,” May said, “then leave you a young widow.”
Helen laughed, kicked her boot against the rail, scraping away the mud.
“I replied, No man could do better by a woman.”
“Yet it is not Rob Bell with whom you tryst.”
She looked down into the Kirtle as it rushed swollen and mud-brown by Bonshaw.
“No,” she said quietly. “It is not. Were I a salmon, I would rush upstream to Nether Albie and one who lives there. He runs through my thoughts like rain.”
More might have been said between us, but the girl Alysoun hurried up the path, all a-fluster. It was not right we met alone.
“Don’t be daft,” Helen said. “Harry is my cousin, and no suitor.”
Alysoun hesitated, but stood her ground with sulky mouth.
“Yon was my instruction,” she insisted. “Nae privy meeting. It’s mair than my job’s worth.”
Helen took on her high-toned look that minded me she was gentry. I took her by the elbow.
“A job’s a job,” I said.
Three of us walked away from the ledge and secret path. I wonder yet had we but five minutes more alone, four fates might have been otherwise.
Helen Irvine and I walked round Bonshaw’s walled garden. Alysoun walked behind us, sulky eyes downcast, ears attentive. I was asked to admire the espaliered apple and pear trees, the peaches that grew under glass frames against the southern wall. By them some late roses still clung on.
Out of habit, I hunkered down to sniff a yellow, a pink, a deep damask. Each scent coursed through my body like an apothecary’s draught. I did not know what it was I longed for, only that it was at hand.
I opened my eyes, her face was there across the yellow rose, looking straight at me. As she crouched in that garden, she made sunlight dim. The faint lines across her forehead, the little asides that flickered round her mouth, could not obscure it. She was golden and perfect as a mask. But her eyes with their pale flecks were still the ones I had known when we were young. They looked out at me, mutely appealing, as a prisoner clings to the bars as the visitor goes by.
“Unchanged, I see,” she said, so saft. “You still dawdle to sniff the beauty of the world.”
I looked square at her.
“I am much changed,” I said. “And the world has grown ugly.”
Her hand squeezed my wrist. Her grip was strong and urgent.
“Think that, and they have won.”
For how many years her words, whispered vehemently as she gripped my wrist in that sunlit garden, have guided me. They twitch yet at my dark brain, as a horse’s bridle jerks the head back when it turns the wrong way.
Without doubt the Borderlands are more at peace since the Union of Crowns. That, I now see, is what my secret patron worked towards always. Jamie Saxt had to become King of England. Buccleuch foresaw what I had seen in my so-called crystal ball. That, and opportunity for his own advantage. His family are now among the greatest in the land, and what remains of the Maxwells, Bells, Irvines, Kerrs, Armstrongs and Flemings, even the Hieland Lords, all must do obeisance to the Lords of Buccleuch.
Yet the gentler arts and human reason are still in eclipse, even at Hawthornden. There is no dancing in the inn courtyards now, religious fanatics denounce and rule, witches still confess under torture, King and Parliament are at each other’s throats, and our songs are all grim or piously false as “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea.”
Do not have me start. The world is what it is, the times are what they are.
Bring my head round, dear long-dead cousin. Let me look through the window at the garden at Hawthornden, and through the years to Bonshaw that day, and say most quietly to myself this heresy: Néanmoins, c’est si belle. Not in the manner of good Drummond’s verses praising timeless gardens, sun without rain and love without loss, but seeing all in all, and insisting: Nevertheless it is beautiful.
Otherwise they have won indeed.
We walked once again around the garden. The walls protected us from the wind and stored the remaining warmth of the sun. Helen talked lightly of this fruit, that unlikely vegetable, the bottling and jelly-making, the elderberry wine whose sweet-sour rankness billowed through the scullery. Alysoun, bored, fell a little way back.
I did not change my tone of voice as I asked, “And which would you rather have?”
She pointed at the stand of currants, keeled over at the end of their season, some last fruit still clinging dark as blood.
“I would like to eat that fruit,” she said. “But others insist there are finer.”
“And your preference, dear coz?”
She leaned to pluck three berries.
“My will is not my own,” she said. She offered me one, dropped two into her mouth and smiled.
I stopped by the gooseberry bushes, long denuded of their fruit, a tangle of thorn. “Perhaps you are considering something sharper, more strong-flavoured?”
“My family’s taste has long inclined towards gooseberry. It is both richer and stronger than the redcurrant. What do you think?”
Alysoun dawdled, attention caught by the garden boy bent over the kale.
“I think him a swaggering bully. Men fear Bell, none love him.”
I kept my voice casual. The corner of her mouth tugged at some secret amusement.
“He does not bully me,” she said. “Indeed he follows me like a well-built puppy dog.”
We had toured the garden twice and were back where we had started.
“But which will you choose, coz—the strong or the sweet?”
She looked away then, far above and beyond the walls around us.
“My will is not my own,” she repeated softly.
Her mother was bustling down the walk towards us.
“Your will is Toledo steel,” I said quickly. “I have never known you not get what you want—by whatever subterfuge is required.”
She turned away with a small smile, but perhaps the seed I had proffered found fertile ground.
Aunt Ann was upon us. By her ferocious smile I understood she did not much like me, never had. Perhaps it was my sly cheek, or that my mother had married down bu
t had a living son. Perhaps it was the company I kept.
“Dear Harry!” she cried. “So long a stranger!” She seized me with one arm, took Helen with the other, and marched us to the newly promoted Hall where the seeds of the Renaissance flowered but were not, I fear, well understood.
We ate in the new dining hall. What had been bare and dark was now fetlock-deep in rug. Stone walls were swathed in tapestries of Italian hunting scenes, tactfully bordered by emblems of the Scottish crown. The chairs we sat in were heavy-carved with fruit, flowers, unplayable lutes strummed by blowsy cherubs, surmounted by the Irvine arms, the sharp and ever-green holly.
“So you have seen our new décor, and the remaking of the frontage,” Aunt Ann enquired. “What do you think?”
I raised my head from pheasant pie.
“As one would expect,” I pronounced. “It is in as good taste as money can buy.”
Ann beamed. Helen looked down at her plate, a faint pucker at the corner of her mouth.
Over a damson cheesecake—my tooth is sweet, I gorged myself—my aunt apologized for her husband’s absence. He was meeting with the Bells of Blackett House.
“Business or pleasure?” I enquired.
“The twain aye meet at Blackett,” she whispered conspiratorially. “We have some ongoing affairs with them. I expect an announcement will be made soon enough.”
My spoon did not falter.
“Mother, that is not at all assured,” Helen said. Her face was flushed, but she did not look at me.
“Detail, fine details,” Ann said. Her fat hand waved, as though calling on the tapestries to witness the fineness.
I finished my second helping of cheesecake, but it did not taste so sweet as before.
We sipped tisane in the withdrawing room (the hastily remodelled front scullery). The seats were padded with quilt, backed with dark velvet. The Borders’ arse must be growing soft indeed.
I sat eyeing the brutal Gothic script above the lintel. HAUD ULLIS LABENTIA VENTIS. Or in the vulgar, Yielding under no winds. Perhaps so, perhaps not. I sensed a great gale was blowing through Annandale, and the Irvines like the rest of us would have to bend with it, or break.
A clatter outside, banging of doors. Enter Uncle Will, still booted and raised from the ride and the wonders of Blackett House. He shrugged off his wife’s scolding at the mud he’d brought in, tossed his hat on the window seat. His fuzz of black hair sprung out, minding me of a rook’s nest high in the tree.
“Still not full grown, young Harry,” he said, not unkindly in his thin, nasal voice. “You spend too much time in libraries.”
He was in high good humour, mucky and flushed.
“Did it go well?” Aunt Ann asked.
“We advance, we advance!”
“Doubtless some costly details remain,” I said innocently.
He gaped at me, his great mouth like a lapwing, outstretched.
“Why say you?”
“Because I spend too much time in lawyers’ chambers, where all details are expensive.”
He hesitated, then laughed. Clapped me on the shoulder and nearly knocked me off my chair. There was something of the fool about Uncle Will Irvine, a kind of stumbling, precarious dignity I had liked as a child. Now I could see his long, deadly arms. Even Jed said he was verra handy in a fecht.
Through all this Helen said nothing. She stared at the embroidered rug—a portrait of Jamie Fifth looking blurred and baffled—as though something of great import lay there.
They made sure I would have no further time alone with Helen. By the time I understood this, darkness was silting up below the surrounding hills. By the stables I hesitated, looking down that gloomy avenue of trees. That did not look a healthy place to be.
I went indoors and asked if I could stay the night. Aunt Ann smirked.
“You spend too long with the Flemings,” she said. “They are unmade men.”
Will Irvine nodded, reached his long arm out and the boy poured sherry wine into his cup.
“Perhaps not for much longer,” he pronounced. “I hear Dand Fleming—a sound man—has petitioned our Warden, who has given him hope the family will be restored. Subject to good behaviour, of course—and Warden Earl Angus remaining in his post.”
He glanced at me. I donned my diplomat’s face, though much was being reshaped behind it.
“You think he may not?”
He shrugged. “Competition is tough at the top, in these parts.”
“I think you’ll find it’s tough at the bottom, in all parts.”
He keeked sharp at me, then laughed.
“Aye, the difference is the heid yins get a roll on the drum afore the heid comes off!”
It still dumfountert me that the Earl of Angus had been made Warden at all, when but three years earlier he and Bothwell led an attack on Embra. Not only was he pardoned of treason—on declaring himself a Presbyterian, he had promptly replaced Sir James Johnstone as Warden. I couldn’t keep up.
“I too wish Adam Fleming to know his best interests,” I said. “I work only to those ends.”
My aunt loosed a suspicious scowl at me, though I had said at least some of the truth.
“They say he is become a sot, and not right in the head,” she said.
“He is . . . erratic and excitable,” I allowed. Only I caught the little dip of Helen’s head that hid her smile. “His father’s death still ails him.”
“We are still at feud,” Ann insisted. “You should not be biding wi’ the Flemings.”
“Wheesht, Annie,” Will said. “The blood-feud sleeps now. Jock Fleming and I rode together, with the Bells, when we ganged to free our kinsman from Saughton Tower.”
I tried to keep my voice casual.
“Was Dand Fleming on that gang?”
Will looked at me. His eyes were already dowzy from sherry. With that great mouth, wild hair and twisted neb, he really was not a well-made man. Many speculated as to the source of Helen’s beauty, for it was scarcely in her mother either.
“Dand was by me when Auld Jock was lost to us on the way hame. Riders came out of the dark in ambush, ran him through wi’ the lance and were gone in the woods. Cowards all!”
When reivers pulled off an ambush, they called themselves cunning strategists. When they were ambushed, they were outraged by such low behaviour.
“Did you know them?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Na. English Grahams, some say.”
His indifference—Jock Fleming was part of the gang, but not family, and such things happen—seemed unfeigned. A guilty man would protest more. I changed the subject, but there was much, much to think about. An ambush, in the dark, targeting one man only. It was very strange.
We supped lightly on cold game (to my regret the damson cheesecake did not reappear). The precious candles, tinted red in the Oxford manner, swayed and guttered in the draught. It grew chill in the withdrawing room as Helen was prevailed on to sing. She passed me an old chanter, and asked me to accompany her on something from old days.
I fingered the unfamiliar, familiar stops. Some bleats at the reed got it supple and summoned the few retainers from other parts of the Hall. They hunkered down in the shadows as she began to sing, soft and low, “The Unquiet Grave.”
The wind does blaw today, my love,
A few sma drops of rain.
I never had but ain true love,
In cold clay she is laid.
I’ll dae as much for my true love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit aside her grave and mourn
For twelvemonth and a day.
My breath blew across the reed, and the wee instrument moaned like wind through a dry dyke. As we played, I thought of Jock Fleming ambushed in the darkness, and of the face of a man gasping his last in a Langholm pend.
The twelvemonth and a day being rough,
The dead began to speak.
“O wha sits weeping on my grave
And will not let me sleep?
You crave ane kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong,
If you’ve ane kiss of my clay-cold lips
Your time will no be long.
The stalk is wither’d dry, my love,
So will oor hearts decay,
So mak yourself content, my love,
Till death calls you away.”
She finished. Silence. The retainers stared straight ahead, and in the candlelit silence, their faces were wild, haunted, grim, as though the final end of Man was but enduring.
Helen looked down at her hands, head bowed as if in prayer.
I was shown to a small room at the end of a backstairs corridor. I was handed lamp, blankets, chanty pot. Aunt Ann was not hard to read.
The window was one of the originals, a narrow slit without glass, but there was no bar for the door. The Irvines were family by marriage, surely I would be safe enough for tonight. I bedded down still in britches and jerkin zipped tight, dagger to hand.
I happed coarse blankets about my neck and waited for sleep’s ambush. Come the morn I would ride straight back. I had to talk to Adam, and I had a report to pen. Both required careful thought to handle aright.
I lay looking at the ceiling. That song, and Helen’s clear, unshaken voice singing it, sounded yet in my head. I blew out the candle. Lord knows our graces are few in Scotland, but they dirl like an auger, richt tae the bane.
The scrape of wood on stone woke me. A light bloomed behind my slowly opening door. As I fumbled for my weapon, Helen entered, bearing a small creusie lamp afore her. She wore but her shift and her feet were bare.
I was about to speak, annoyed by my own fear and more than a little uneasy. She reached forward and put a finger to my lips. She put the lamp on the stand, looked down on me gravely then slipped in.
Her linen shift was chill and damp under my hand, her feet ice.
Our embrace was not carnal and never had been. We lay mixter-maxter in each other’s arms and legs, as we had done as bairns, and she kenned she was safe wi’ me. I looked direct into her eyes. The lamplight snagged the glassy flecks within them, and as I stared they seemed to enlarge, then begin to drift, as in some dark uncanny current. She put her hand over my mouth then cooried her head into my neck.