The Lanimer Bride

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘Ride on,’ said Vary, and they spurred the reluctant horses. Socrates, taken by surprise, galloped after them and sprang up to Gil’s saddlebow.

  ‘What’s the approach to the house like?’ Gil asked Vary. He shook his head.

  ‘I canny mind. There’s a track goes off this road, that much I do mind, but how you come on the house—’ He chewed at his finger, staring into the distance.

  ‘Is it Tarbrax we’re for, maisters?’ asked Henry, urging his beast up behind Gil’s. ‘I was there once wi Cunningham, God rest his soul.’

  ‘Amen,’ Gil said, crossing himself at the mention of his father. ‘What d’you mind, then?’

  ‘It’s on the side o the valley,’ Henry tucked his reins under his thigh, the better to demonstrate the slope of the land, ‘a bit back fro the burn, see, wi a wide-open prospect to the west, and there’s a kinna spur o the hills to the south that the track goes over, so you kinna come on it unexpected-like.’

  ‘And the house?’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘No that good in eighty-eight, the Deil kens what it’s like by now. I’d ha said Somerville didny use it, and he didny put aught into its upkeep. The stables were like to fall down, I couldny put the beasts into them, we’d to hobble them on the muir to get what grazing they could.’

  ‘Right,’ said Gil. ‘We’ll halt this side of this spur of the hill, and I’ll go forward on my own to spy out the place, see what I can learn.’

  ‘No, I’ll go—’ said Vary.

  Euan Campbell spoke up from the back of the ride: ‘Will I no be going forward my lone, Maister Gil? I am the best stalker after deer in Ardnamurchan. I can be learning all there is to ken about the place and never be seen.’

  ‘Aye, but this isny Ardnamurchan,’ said one of the other men.

  ‘A hillside is a hillside,’ said Euan obstinately.

  ‘That’s no what you said the morn,’ said someone else.

  ‘Euan will go forward,’ said Gil, putting a stop to this, ‘to learn what he can.’

  By the time Henry called a halt it was beginning to be evening. The day was still warm, but the sun was visibly dipping towards the horizon, away round to the northwest. Larks sang in the blue depths above them, a hunting buzzard quartered the hillside, and Gil could hear a wheatear’s alarm call from a pile of rocks uphill from them. They had left the Edinburgh road and cut in through the hills, forded a burn whose peat-brown waters, the colour of Alys’s eyes, ran lazily in a deep-cut bed which spoke of winter spates, and now faced a climb to a low saddle over the spur of the hill Henry had described.

  ‘It’s just ower there,’ he said, ‘as far’s I can mind. Only thing is, I’d ha thought we’d see smoke by now. They’ll need the fire going if they’re cooking.’

  ‘Odd,’ said Gil, frowning. ‘Unless they brought bread and cheese and the like wi them.’

  ‘Wish we’d brought the like,’ muttered someone at the back. ‘My belly’s flapping.’

  ‘Quiet!’ said Gil, as Euan slid from his horse, giving his reins to Tottie Tammas.

  ‘I should go too,’ said Vary, watching the man go forward at a crouch, then on his belly in the rough grass of the hillside. Socrates jumped down to follow him, much interested, and Alys called him back.

  ‘Euan’s good,’ said Gil. ‘He’ll bring back word, sure enough.’

  They sat their horses, watching as Euan melted into the landscape. The wheatear had flown off in alarm, though the buzzard still sailed above them, mewing; Gil, catching a small movement out of the tail of his eye, thought at first he had found the buzzard’s prey. Watching without looking at it directly he realised that whatever was moving was much bigger than a hare or rabbit, and gradually made it out to be a human figure, not full-grown. A boy, to judge by the short hair, perhaps eleven or twelve. The dog had not noticed him yet.

  ‘Good evening to you,’ he called softly, turning his head to look straight at the youngster. There was a pause, and a muffled curse, and the boy stood upright, grinning. Several of the men at Gil’s back exclaimed, and Socrates growled at this sudden appearance out of the long grass.

  ‘It’s your lordship has the sharp eyesight, sharp as a needle,’ said the ragged figure, touching his brow to Gil. ‘And were you seeking the house o Tarbrax, your lordships?’

  ‘We are,’ said Gil, studying the boy. He was thin, with bare brown arms and legs, a tattered and very dirty shirt belted about his waist with a length of cord, dark hair straggling about his face. He wore an expression of innocent candour which Gil assumed must be entirely spurious. Now he shook his shaggy head.

  ‘No use, my lords, no use to go there. Your errand’s wasted, so ‘tis.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Vary sharply. ‘How so?’

  ‘Why, they’s all left. Left the morn, so they did,’ the boy assured them, nodding at the track behind them. ‘I seen them myself, my lords, wi these eyes.’ He cast Gil a sidelong look with the eyes in question. ‘They took all the horses away down this track, they did indeed.’

  ‘That could be why they’s no smoke,’ said Tottie Tammas. ‘If the house is empty.’

  ‘Did they have a horse-litter wi them?’ Gil asked.

  ‘I never saw it,’ said the boy. His Scots was rapid, and his accent was strange, a kind of lilting, singing intonation. At Gil’s expression, he added, ‘If I had I’d tell you, so I would, I’d no conceal it from your lordship. No horse-litter went down this road.’

  ‘Did it go the other way?’ Gil asked. ‘Any other way from the house?’

  ‘Ah, you’re a wise one, your lordship! No, never a horse-litter left the house o Tarbrax the day.’

  ‘And why have you sprung up out the heather,’ said Henry inaccurately, ‘to tell us this? What reason have you?’

  ‘That’s no very friendly,’ objected the boy. ‘Here I’m telling you this out the goodness o my heart, and you ask my reasons? Would I have to have a reason to do a passer-by a good turn? And you, bonnie lady,’ he added to Alys, ‘that was a true word you were given this day, you should remember it well.’

  ‘He’s full o nonsense,’ growled Vary’s man Archie. ‘Gie him the flat o your whinger, maister, or we’ll be here a’ nicht hearing him.’

  ‘Hey, here’s that Euan,’ said Henry, as the gallowglass appeared over the brow of the rise. ‘He’s ganging quite open, no hiding in the grass. I doubt this wee limmer’s right, the house is empty.’

  Gil watched Euan for a moment, then turned back to speak to the boy, only to find he had vanished. There was not a sign of his going, no movement among the tussocks of grass and clumps of reed. Alys, rather pink across the cheekbones under her layer of dust, was staring at the place where he had been.

  ‘I have no certainty,’ said Euan when he reached them. ‘The house is silent, the gate is wide open, you would be thinking nothing breathes there.’

  ‘But?’ said Gil. The man gave him a sideways look, suddenly very like the vanished laddie.

  ‘You ken that thing,’ he said diffidently, ‘where you are looking down into a corrie, and nothing is moving, but you are certain as salvation there is deer down there? You ken that, maister?’ Gil nodded. He had little experience of red deer, but he had felt the same thing on other hunts. ‘It is like that, maister. I am certain as could be there is someone in the house, though it is seeming empty.’

  ‘Sounds like a waste o time,’ said someone.

  ‘We are come this far,’ said Alys. ‘We might as well mak siccar.’

  ‘Vary?’ said Gil. Vary straightened up in the saddle and gathered up his reins.

  ‘As— as Mistress Mason says,’ he said. ‘We mak siccar.’

  As Euan had reported, the gate stood open in the drystone wall of the barmekin. They approached cautiously, but behind the windows of the house nothing stirred. Within the barmekin, two storehouses also lay open to the warm evening, empty and shadowy. In one a ripped sack on the earthen floor had a scatter of grains around it; when Gil slipped in at the
door something with a long tail whisked away into a dark corner. The other held only a broken bucket. He peered out round the doorway, and looked about the yard. Euan was right, he was certain; the place was still, apart from the rats, and he had no feeling of being watched, but he would swear to it that some living thing was present, somewhere within the drystone wall.

  The rest of the group had gathered in the cover of the empty storehouse.

  ‘The house,’ said Vary. ‘We need to check the house.’

  ‘We should secure it first,’ Gil said. ‘It could be a trap. Euan, Henry, wi me.’ He looked at Alys. ‘Will you wait where we tethered the horses, sweetheart? Take the dog, if you would.’

  The house, as Vary had said that afternoon, was timber-framed above a stone ground floor; there was a single jettied upper floor and an attic with windows set into the mouldering thatch. The house door, above two broad steps, stood ajar as the gate had done, nothing stirring beyond it. Shuttered windows on either side suggested a conventional hall within.

  With a nagging feeling of life repeating itself – of course, he thought, last night at The Cleuch – Gil made a dash for the door, kicked it wide, sprang aside waiting. Still nothing moved. First Euan and then Henry followed him across the yard to the steps and paused, listening like him for any sound from within. After the length of an Ave he stepped into the dark interior, senses at a stretch, the other two following him.

  The hall was empty, almost as empty as the storehouses. It contained two broken stools, a table which must have been built in its place, since it would certainly not go out of the door, and a central hearth with a heap of cold ashes. After a wary look about him Gil went to open the shutters, filling the chamber with sudden light. Euan, sword in hand, kicked open first one, then the other of the doors at one end of the chamber.

  ‘There is nothing there,’ he reported. ‘Not so much as a cut of peat.’

  ‘The fire’s been out since last night,’ said Henry, straightening up and blowing ash off his hand. ‘They’ve stripped the place. Displenished it as if they was tenants. I’m surprised they’ve left the rafters.’

  ‘The laddie never said they rode,’ Gil recollected. ‘They took all the horses, was what he said. I’ll wager they used them as pack-beasts.’

  ‘Unless it was the tinkers,’ said Euan darkly, ‘that has found the door open and emptied the house.’

  Gil went back to the door, and waved the rest of the company forward. Vary came across the yard at a run ahead of the other men. ‘Is she here?’ he demanded, bursting into the house. ‘Have they taken her away and all? Where is she?’

  ‘We’ve yet to check overhead,’ Gil said, looking about him for the stair as the other men tramped in.

  ‘There is someone here,’ Euan said positively. ‘I am not knowing just where, but someone is here.’

  ‘You said that afore,’ said someone. ‘I canny see anyb’dy. Can you, Tammas?’

  ‘Would the dog no scent her out?’ Henry suggested. ‘I ken he’s a sight-hound, but he’s a good nose for a’ that.’

  ‘Gil,’ said Alys in the doorway. He turned, opening his mouth to remonstrate, and she let go of the dog’s collar. ‘Gil, someone is moving in the attic.’

  He stared at her. She stepped into the house, and Socrates began exploring the hall, sniffing carefully in corners, his claws clicking on the flagstones.

  ‘I was out among the horses,’ she said quietly in French, ‘as you bade me, and when you kicked the door open someone stirred behind one of the attic windows. You wouldn’t have seen it from the yard, but from where I was I could just see the movement.’

  ‘No more than that?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘No more. It could be man or woman.’ She thought briefly. ‘I think quite tall, and taking care not to be seen from below.’

  ‘Here,’ said Tottie Tammas, opening another door in a corner of the chamber. ‘The dog’s found the stair. Will I gang up, maister?’

  ‘Let me,’ said Gil. ‘Euan, Henry.’

  The stair was narrow, uneven, shadowed. He listened, but could hear nothing. As quietly as he could, Socrates at his knee, he climbed the first turn of the spiral, into the light falling from the upper floor, and then two more steps. Pausing just below the sill of the upper room, Henry and Euan at his back, he drew off his hat, balanced it on the point of his whinger, and extended it into the chamber. Nothing stirred. Socrates looked up at him, clearly puzzled.

  Well, he thought, either there’s nobody there, or it’s someone who knows that trick. Retrieving the hat he clapped it on his head, and took the remaining two steps and one more.

  This chamber was roughly panelled in Norway pine, and was as empty as the hall, indeed emptier since there was no table. A few papers were scattered under the window, some other odds and ends were heaped in a corner, one shoe with the sole gaping lay at the top of the stair. The dog tick-tocked round the chamber, pawing at the shoe, snuffling briefly at the papers.

  ‘Is there another stair?’ Henry wondered, while Euan tried the door at their left, and found another, smaller chamber. Gil looked up; overhead the beams sagged worryingly, the broad planks of the ceiling, which formed the floor of the attic chambers above, adrift from their pegs in more than one place. Whoever was up there must be frozen in place, not daring to stir for fear of making the planks creak.

  ‘Go down,’ he said to Henry, very clearly, ‘and fetch Maister Vary up.’

  Overhead, someone drew an audible, sharp breath. There was a pause; then, as if it had been squeezed or disturbed by a sudden movement, a baby wailed. A very young baby.

  Henry grinned broadly, and clattered off down the stair. He was back a moment later with a wild-eyed Vary. ‘Where is she? Where’s my lassie? Is she here, Gil? Is she here?’

  ‘Vary!’ called someone overhead. ‘Come up, maister, come up!’

  ‘Where?’ Vary stared about, as if expecting a ladder to drop in front of him. ‘Where are you, lass?’

  The boards creaked above them as someone moved across them. Footsteps descended behind the panelling, and a door opened, invisible before it moved, identical with the panels on either side. A woman came through it, ducking under the low lintel, and Vary took a step back as the dog rushed forward, tail waving.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s— where’s— where’s Mistress Madur? Where’s my wife?’

  ‘Vary, I’m here!’ called the first voice. The woman stood aside, gesturing ironically, and Vary plunged into the stairway and up out of their sight. She turned to look at Gil, a tall angular woman with pale blue eyes, wisps of reddish hair escaping from her cap. Gil pulled off the hat again and bowed to her.

  ‘Well met, Mistress Lithgo,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Maister Cunningham,’ said Beatrice Lithgo, curtsying in return. ‘You took your time finding us.’

  ‘They kept moving us,’ Mistress Lithgo said. ‘I made it plain, it was no way to treat a new-made mother, but they’d not listen.’

  ‘We tracked you to Castlehill,’ Gil said, ‘and then to The Cleuch, but it’s taken us till today to calculate that you were here and to come for you.’

  ‘Aye, and sic an escort,’ she said, smiling faintly at the men gathered round. They were out in the yard in the warm evening, Alys close against Gil’s side, Mistress Lithgo seated on the mounting-block and looking much as ever, unperturbed by her five or six days’ imprisonment. ‘There was more places than that,’ she went on now, ‘but I never heard their names.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Four different houses, we were in. I was sick o the sight o that horse-litter by the time we fetched up here. And every time, the bairn was taken from Audrey, and we were threatened no to make a sound, or they’d slit his wee wame. Though I will say they carried him safe enough,’ she added. ‘She had nightmares about it, poor lass.’

  ‘Did you hear any names?’ Gil asked. ‘Names of people, I mean.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, and closed her mouth firmly. He nodded.

&nbs
p; ‘And when did they clear out of here?’ he asked. She gave him an approving look.

  ‘First light, I think, or little after. We were asleep, in the small chamber up yonder,’ she pointed at the end window, ‘and they cam in and seized the blankets from us. I tried to get some sense from them, but all I got was, They’d send folk to fetch us, they’d send her kin to fetch us.’ She grimaced. ‘There’s a well, that’s clean enough, so we’d water, but they’ve left us no food, and I’d a trouble to keep the blanket we’d rowed the wee fellow in, till they found he’d fouled it. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘And then we turned up,’ said Alys. Mistress Lithgo looked at her, her expression softening.

  ‘Aye. I’d got Audrey up to the loft for safety. She was asleep when you all rode up, and I was feart at first, for I saw nobody I kent. Then I saw you,’ she said to Henry, ‘and I kent Tammas there, the wee bauchle that he is.’ The gigantic Tammas grinned, and his neighbours dug him in the ribs and guffawed. ‘And then I kent your voice, maister.’

  ‘And here we all are,’ said Alys, ‘wi no food, and no fire, nothing for the horses, and one fouled blanket among us all.’

  ‘We’d best ride out,’ Gil said thoughtfully. ‘It’s more appealing than a night on the bare floor in there. There’s maybe an hour to sunset, and the beasts have rested and grazed a bit. We could be most of the way home by dark.’

  Alys turned to look up at him, but said nothing.

  ‘I’d as soon no spend another night from my own roof,’ said Mistress Lithgo. ‘I was to be at Laigh Quarter on Sunday past, they’ll be wondering what’s come o me. And I’m famished wi hunger.’

  ‘Raffie’s searching for you all across the county,’ Alys said.

  ‘Can the mistress ride?’ asked Vary’s man Archie. ‘She’s no one to sit astride, how would we carry her?’