by Pat McIntosh
‘Oh, aye, a course he is,’ said Sandy.
There was another pause. Doig fidgeted slightly, but Sandy stood unmoving, waiting. Gil did likewise, thinking of the cats they had seen earlier and wondering at what point his cousin would strike out with an ear-piercing shriek, and how the four tinkers would react.
‘I’m wondering,’ said Blue Doo, giving in, ‘what would bring yourself out to take the air at this hour, maister. It’s a time for honest folks to be in their beds, so it is.’
‘I could say the same to you,’ Sandy returned. ‘I suppose there’s some errand brings you out in the moonlight. An unchancy hour to be abroad, so it is.’
‘Well, as to that,’ said Blue Doo easily, ‘and as it falls out, we’ve an errand indeed. It’s a freen o ours, you see, has asked us to come down here and collect a wee parcel from a fellow, a gadgie like yoursel, maister. Which we’re doing as a favour to him, he being a guest o the MacPhersons, and we had word that it would be a good thing to be doing.’
‘Is that right?’ said Sandy with great interest. ‘Now that’s a remarkable thing, for a freen of ours has sent us down here in the hope of getting a word wi a fellow that summoned him here concerning the very same wee parcel.’
‘Oh, aye, that’s a remarkable thing indeed,’ agreed Blue Doo. ‘Is that no a remarkable thing, Cauf’s Heid?’
One of his companions nodded. Another said, ‘Aye, it is that. Now what’s to be done about it, d’ye suppose, Blue Doo?’
‘I ken what I’d think we might do,’ said Blue Doo. ‘We might offer these bean gadgies, and the wee man and all, our hospitality for the nicht, to lie in our tents wi us, and then the morn’s morn when it’s day and we can all see what’s afoot, we can take him to meet our freen. Now how’s that appear to you, maister?’
Sandy Boyd cocked his head on one side, apparently considering this.
‘It’s a generous offer,’ he said at length. ‘You’d see us back on our road after, a course.’
‘Och, indeed, we’d do that,’ Blue Doo assured him. ‘To the very gates o Lanark itsel, and no mistake.’
‘I’d think that might be a good thing to be doing,’ said Sandy, ‘and a good offer to be accepting.’
‘I hoped you’d see it that way,’ said Blue Doo. ‘Indeed, I did.’
He turned, put two fingers to his mouth, and whistled sharply. The watchers in the shadows emerged, one and two at a time, and he spoke to them in a language Gil did not recognise. Some of it seemed to be Ersche, and there were Scots words in there, but much of it was unfamiliar. Like bean gadgie, he reflected; bean was possibly the good Scots word bien, lifted from the French, but was a gadgie a man, a human being, a gentleman?
‘Well, now,’ said Blue Doo. ‘It’s just a wee step up the river, so it is, to the sweetest place to be setting our tents we ever did see. Will we be off, then, freens, while the moon’s still watching us?’
The next hour or so stayed with Gil as the stuff of dreams. He could not imagine how Doig was coping with the journey. The tinkers’ notion of a wee step, it turned out, was four or five miles, mostly by the banks of the Clyde where it looped and curved across the flat ground below Carstairs. The going was rough grass and bushes, the occasional cattle-track, open land which the men around him crossed crouching low on principle, in case anyone should chance to see them.
‘For it would astonish you how people are willing to think we must be up to no good, maister, I can be assuring you,’ said the fellow guiding him, who seemed to be the one called Wooden Toe. ‘Your eyebrows would be rising off the top o your heid, so they would, if I was telling you all I’ve been accused of, and me as honest as the day’s long. Mind your feet, maister, the Carstairs herd laddie brings the beasts to drink here,’ he added unnecessarily. Gil’s nose had warned him some time since.
Moving rapidly, they reached what Gil reckoned must be the foot of the Carnwath Burn and turned up its narrow valley. The going was even rougher here, and the waterside was overgrown with bushes and brambles, which the company threaded its way through expertly, tugging the three strangers this way and that to avoid furze bushes and overhanging branches. Suddenly very tired, Gil plodded after Wooden Toe, ducking when ordered to, aware of Doig cursing behind him and his cousin discoursing on what seemed to be the doings of the Court ahead of him, and thinking about how far he had ridden or walked in the past two days.
Then, abruptly, they came out into an open area, with a fire burning at its centre, and a number of low tents disposed under the trees at its margins. Beyond the ring of tents, ponies’ eyes gleamed in the firelight, hooves stamped; the burn burbled happily ten feet away, a stewpot simmered on a base of stones by the fire, and several women sat in the flickering light watching them.
‘Come in at the fire, maisters, and welcome,’ said Blue Doo formally.
‘A blessing on the hearth,’ said Boyd. Gil murmured an Ersche blessing he had heard in Perthshire, and sank down where he was directed. One of the women leaned forward and put a leather beaker into his hands. It was hot, and steamed with a scent which made his nose tickle.
‘Drink that, maister,’ she said. ‘You’ll no be liking it, but it will be liking you.’
He sniffed more carefully, detecting thyme and wild garlic and other herbs with an undernote of, was it fennel?
‘Drink,’ encouraged the woman. ‘It’s what was ordered for you.’
‘Ordered?’ he said warily, looking at her across the beaker. ‘Who by?’
‘Him wi the red hair, a course.’ She made a sign with one hand. ‘Drink up, maister, and be easy, I’d no poison a guest at my fireside.’ Bright eyes watched him intently as he tasted the tisane, then swallowed a mouthful. ‘Aye, you were brought here in a good hour. Sleep now, maister, and get the word you came for.’
The voices woke him from a dream. He lay for a while, working out where he was, hearing birdsong beyond the voices, not the loud rejoicing just after the dawn but the chirrups and whistles of the morning feeding session. It must be a couple of hours after Prime. There was a mixture of odours, of cut bracken and heather, ancient canvas, trampled grass. Other, more pungent smells floated past, and then the scent of fresh bannocks. The voices became clearer as if the speakers were closer or something had moved out of the way. He was in a tent in the tinkers’ camp, he realised, wrapped in someone’s ancient, greasy plaid. He had slept like a log until the dream, and the scent of the bannocks toasting had set his belly rumbling.
The dream was oddly disturbing, and showed no tendency to evaporate now he was awake, as dreams usually did. He had walked under a shadowed hazel alley, like the one in Vary’s garden, with a companion who seemed familiar, seemed to know him well. The man had said, Not here, but in the orchard. Get your son in the orchard, under the apple trees by the midsummer moon. Then he had turned to look at Gil. He had red hair which fell over a long gown with wide lapels, of blue plaid shot through with many colours; under the gown he wore a linen sark bound with a fox-skin belt. Guard yourself, he said. Break out of the hazel grove. Beware of thunder. Gil had answered, I don’t know a hazel grove. The red-haired man reached out and touched him, with three fingers, just below the breastbone. And then the voices woke him.
They were still conversing, not far away.
‘Can you no get rid of him?’ said his cousin quite clearly. ‘You could just leave these parts, steal away in the night and leave him sleeping. You’re well able to do a thing like that, and vanish away into the hills.’
Gil sat up and unwound the plaid, settling his clothes about his person, pulling on the doublet which someone had removed before rolling him up in the plaid, patting the purse at his belt.
‘The trouble wi that, your lordship,’ said another voice, ‘is that we’d no want to be leaving this neighbourhood yet. We’re trysted wi the McEwans after St John’s Eve, see, over by Tweedsmuir, but for sure that’s a day or two away yet. We’d no want to be ower soon to the tryst, the way you’d think we was all young lassies.
’
‘Tell him to leave.’
‘Now what kind of hospitality would that be, mais ter? And yet he is eating all we can find, though he never hunts, and he has taken Pitmedden Maggie’s Annie to his bed though she was not willing, and he demands a fourth part of the coin we are promised for planting all the wee trees, up on the muir above Lanark town.’
‘Aye, the trees.’ That was Doig. ‘Who was to pay you for the planting, then?’
‘Och, the same man that was to be paying you,’ said the tinker. It sounded like the man called Blue Doo. Reflecting on the oddness of the tinkers’ by-names, Gil folded the plaid, emerged stooping from the tent and set off into the trees in search of privacy.
When he came back to the clearing one of the women from last night looked up from the spitting bakestone on the fire, studied him, then gave him what was clearly a blessing in Gaelic, and handed him a bannock from the heap arranged on a dock-leaf at her side. He returned the hearth-blessing he had used last night, at which she smiled, and turned back to her bakestone. She was clad in a worn and patched kirtle, much faded but still showing the original tawny in places; the shift under it was cleaner than one might have expected, and the linen on her head was neat and decent, though it was folded in a different way from that worn by the women he was used to.
Looking around, he discovered two other women seated in the next tent, gossiping happily over their spindles while four or five men of the tribe sprawled about on the grass, some whittling at sticks or staves with their great gully-knives, one spinning like the women a remarkably fine thread from a collection of tufts of wool. There were no children visible. Off to one side, his cousin and William Doig sat with three of the tinkers.
As he joined them Sandy looked up and nodded, but went on with what he was saying: ‘What you tell me, man, is you’d like rid of this fellow.’
‘Och, no, no,’ protested Blue Doo. ‘No rid o him, precisely, your lordship, just that we’d be well pleased if he were to be elsewhere, and us no wi him.’
‘Where is he the now?’ Doig asked.
‘Well, when we left,’ said one of the other men, ‘he would be wi the rest o the MacPhersons, see, where we last saw all of them.’
‘And that was?’ Doig looked as if he found the tinkers’ inability to speak directly to a subject exasperating. Gil, thinking that dealing with Euan Campbell had had its uses after all, chewed his bannock and listened as the man, who might be Wooden Toe by his voice, worked his way round to locating the other camp on the other side of Carnwath town, no so far from the Medwin, in a bonnie wee spot—
‘Kersewell?’ said Boyd.
‘Och, indeed, your wisdom, you’re setting me a trap,’ said Wooden Toe. ‘For indeed it is no more than a wee step away from the very house o Kersewell. If you kent that, surely you were never needing to ask.’
‘Will we go there now?’ said Doig bluntly.
‘Now, wee man, I can see you’re in a great hurry,’ said Blue Doo. Seen by daylight he was a lanky man with shaggy iron-dark hair and beard, the threads of grey pronounced at his temples; he was clad in a tattered doublet over a well-washed shirt and belted plaid, a great gully-knife at his waist and a felted bonnet on his head, of the natural brown of the wool rather than the woad-blue worn by most house-dwellers. ‘But we can get away if you’re wishful, the six o us you see here, and leave Bella,’ the woman by the fire looked up and he nodded to her, ‘and the rest to be breaking the hearth and following us by dark.’
‘Is that where the bairns are? Up at Kersewell, I mean,’ Gil asked. Blue Doo shot him a penetrating look, and glanced away again. Under his shaggy eyebrows his eyes were a bright blue, but did not meet anyone’s directly.
‘No need to be bringing the bairns down here,’ he said, ‘when there was no telling who’d be answering the invitation we left.’
‘Will we get away then?’ said Doig impatiently.
‘Haud your horses, wee man,’ said Boyd. ‘There’s one or two other matters I need to deal wi.’
‘Is there, now?’ said Blue Doo. Wooden Toe casually began gathering his feet under him to rise. The third man in the group, a small wiry fellow with fairish hair receding under his mottled brown bonnet, was grinning uneasily.
‘Och, surely no, maister,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘your honour can have nothing to discuss wi poor tinker folk like us. We’ve no reason to mix wi the likes o yoursel.’
‘You’re mixing wi me now,’ observed Boyd, grinning in his turn, rather like a cockatrice Gil had once seen in a bestiary.
‘No, no, your wisdom’s mixing wi us,’ corrected Blue Doo politely. ‘It would be a different thing altogether were we to be mixing wi you.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said Boyd firmly across something Doig was about to say, ‘I’ve matters to deal wi. For a start, when did you say you were to meet the McEwans?’
‘Did I say so?’ said Blue Doo evasively. Wooden Toe, still moving casually, ambled away from the group.
‘St John’s tide, he said,’ said Doig. ‘No more than a week away.’
Too direct, thought Gil. These folk are even more devious than the Campbell brothers; they’ll not respond to the direct approach.
‘What road d’you take to Tweedsmuir?’ he asked idly. ‘I was never over that way, I’d not ken how to start.’
‘Well, I wouldny start from here, maister, if I was you,’ Blue Doo assured him. ‘You want to be over by Biggar, for sure, and work your way down the Biggar Water and then away up the Tweed. A bonnie river, the Tweed, and teeming wi salmon and trout, so it is, and hazelnuts all along the banks in a couple o months, there will be.’
‘I can imagine,’ agreed Gil. ‘Is that the way the McEwans take and all?’
‘Och, no, they are coming over from Lochmaben way. It’s an easy climb up from Annandale, so it is, the auld grandmother would have it so.’
‘And the Lees come over the border from England, do they?’
The bright blue eyes flicked sharply to his face and away again; in the corner of his vision Gil was aware of his cousin turning to look at him as well. He waited a moment, but neither Blue Doo nor his remaining companion commented. ‘It’s a long way into the hills,’ he went on, ‘just to meet another group o travelling folk. I’d look for there to be a better reason than the McEwans, and the Lees wouldny come any further into Scotland than that, would they?’
‘No, no, maister,’ said Blue Doo softly. ‘Surely you must be mistaken, for the Lees are English travellers. They’d no be welcome in the Marches, no this side o the Border. I couldny say they would gather at sic a tryst as you describe.’
‘I see,’ said Gil. ‘I can see that. Maybe they’d send a messenger, I suppose.’
‘I suppose they might,’ agreed Blue Doo. ‘I suppose they might, maister, though it’s hard to be sure.’
‘And if they did,’ said Gil, ‘he could bring anything across the Border, anything small, a message or a letter or a package, I expect. Or a cartload of guns or a barrel of gunpowder, maybe.’
There was a silence, in which he felt the tinkers were carefully not looking at one another.
‘Aye, aye,’ agreed Blue Doo again. ‘I dare say sic a one might, maister, I dare say he might. But I couldny tell you aught about sic a thing, for neither guns nor gunpowther has come near me, I’d say, and I’ve no knowledge o messages or letters, being as I’m no a man that can read or write. Someone wi book-learning, the like o yoursel, maister, could likely tell us more.’
‘You think so?’ said Gil. ‘But I’ve no knowledge of messages either, since I’ve never been into Tweeddale, nor met a messenger from the Lees. I wonder where the gunpowder came from.’ He gazed at a blackbird which was hunting under the bushes opposite, turning leaves energetically. Feeling his eye on it, the bird scurried off into the shadows, and he added, ‘And I wonder who might be able to tell us of sic things.’
‘I tell you who might,’ said the other tinker who was still sitting with them. Blue Doo glanced
at him, frowning, but he continued with an innocent smile, ‘Yon fellow we was just speaking o, maister, he might ken all sort o things. Him being a travelled man, you ken, and been to all sort o places, and outside Scotland, and into Ireland, and all.’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Blue Doo, ‘the wee man here, that’s seated like a statue in some great lord’s garden, might be able to tell you more o messages and packages than us poor gangrel bodies.’
‘Aye, that’s a true word, Blue Doo,’ said the other tinker, while Doig preserved a stillness like the statue he had been compared with. ‘For one thing, he can read, Maister Doig can, I ken that.’
‘He can indeed, Cauf’s Heid,’ agreed Blue Doo. ‘And he’s a travelled man, forbye.’
‘Billy?’ said Boyd, breaking a long silence.
Doig glared at him, and said in a goaded tone, ‘Aye, I suppose. Like maybe the letter I delivered to you a’ready?’
‘Billy, the day you’re working for one man and only one, I’ll dance naked through Edinburgh,’ said Boyd. ‘Who else have you carried for this trip, and what?’
‘I’ve gave you all that’s yours, you can be certain,’ said Doig aggressively. ‘You’ve no need to get on at me.’
‘Oh, but I think I do, Billy,’ said Boyd, his tone silky. ‘What did you carry to the Irishman?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what will you carry for him? Where is it to go?’
‘I’m carrying nothing for the Irishman,’ said Doig, the anger still rumbling in his voice. ‘You can search me if you will. I’ve nothing to carry away for the Irishman nor anyone else, unless you’re planning to gie me an errand to the back o’ the North Wind.’
Yes, we can search you, thought Gil, sitting impassive in the circle, because the packet you were carrying is in my purse. When had the small man put it there, he wondered, and why? And just how much did he know about the cartload of guns, about the gunpowder?
The letter in the packet had made interesting reading earlier, under the trees, a missive in diplomatic Latin addressed to the Earl of Buchan, invoking his aid in disposing of ‘he who styles himself of York’ should ‘the boy’ set foot in Scotland. It mentioned significant amounts of money, and appeared to be from John Ramsay, the former Lord Bothwell, one of the favourites of James Third, dispossessed after that king’s death at Sauchieburn and currently resident in England. Gil hoped the seals could be reinstated if necessary; it seemed likely that Sandy would be better at that than he was.