The Lanimer Bride

by Pat McIntosh

  ‘I’m thinking more o how far up the partitions go.’ Gil tilted his head back, looking up at the rafters.

  ‘Oh, aye, your good-father’s a mason,’ said Boyd.

  ‘Pierre doesny deal in wattle and daub.’ Gil began to drag the settle nearer the wall. ‘You were never in the attics in the Darngaber house, were you?’

  ‘No, I was only there the once.’ Boyd took an end of the settle. ‘Will we tip it up on end, or is this high enough?’

  ‘High enough for me.’ Gil placed his end of the piece and stepped up on to the seat. ‘You’ll maybe want to tip it up for Billy, unless he can fly.’

  ‘You mind your tongue,’ said Doig, turning away from the door to watch as Gil reached up, took a firm grasp, and swung himself up on to one of the crossbeams.

  ‘As I thought,’ he said. ‘They haveny taken the wattle right to the roof – there’s a gap at the side here.’ He leaned over to seize hold of the wattle panel and shook it. It creaked slightly, but stood firm. ‘That’s why we’re up here, a course,’ he added, leaning further to peer into the next chamber. ‘The cellars must be full o guns. He’d want to store those secure, wi a band o tinkers on the policies, and they’d be a bit heavy to drag up as many stairs.’

  The next chamber was just as dusty as the one they were in, and contained more disused furniture. More to the purpose, its door stood ajar. Gil got his head and shoulders through the little gap, kicked off from the beam he had been sitting on, and rolled forward to land crouching in the other chamber. Moving quickly to the door, he listened carefully. There was movement in the distance, footsteps and voices, a rattling of crockery. Beyond the window of this chamber, the man was still singing. The tune was unfamiliar.

  He slipped through the door, into a further chamber. The one in which they had been imprisoned clearly opened off this as well.

  ‘Well? What fortune?’ demanded his cousin beyond the thin walls.

  ‘Excellent fortune,’ he answered, turning the key in the lock. ‘No need for Maister Doig to fly after all.’

  Doig growled at him, rolling past him with his awkward gait.

  ‘Well done,’ said Boyd, clapping Gil on the shoulder as he emerged. He paused to brush a dusty hank of cobweb from Gil’s arm and shook it fastidiously from his fingers, adding, ‘And have you a map o the disposition o the enemy and all?’

  ‘I’ve no surveying gear on me,’ said Gil. ‘You’ll have to make your own.’

  They picked their way quietly out of the maze of small chambers which had been partitioned out of the topmost floor of the tower, just as in the attic of the house Gil had known in childhood. The floorboards creaked under their feet, no matter how carefully they stepped, but it seemed, if there was anybody on the floor immediately below, that nobody was listening, and they reached the top of a stone newel stair without being heard.

  ‘Up or down?’ said Boyd.

  ‘Up, of course,’ said Gil, setting off downward, whinger in hand. ‘Likely the jackdaws will bear you off the roof, if you cozen them a bit.’

  ‘I’ve no bread,’ said Boyd, following him.

  ‘Wheesht, the pair o you,’ said Doig, bringing up the rear.

  No tower was ever built with a stair which ran from top to bottom: how would one defend such a place? This stair ended at the floor below, and the door at its foot stood ajar; Gil paused, ears stretched, before slipping into the chamber sideways, back against the wall. This level was clearly used, the chamber roughly furnished with a low bed, several kists, and three stools. Servants’ quarters, perhaps, Gil surmised, making his way cautiously along the wall.

  Crossing two more similar chambers, they found the next stair, and paused at the doorway to listen. The rattling of crockery had ceased, and the voices were fainter, as if further away.

  ‘It’s awfy quiet,’ said Doig in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m no liking it.’

  Boyd moved past him, to set foot on the topmost stair, but Gil put out a hand to stop him.

  ‘Wait,’ he breathed. They listened, frozen in place, and Gil heard again what had alerted him: the soft pad and shuffle of feet, bare feet, on the stairs. He fell back a step or two, waving the other two back with him, watching the shadowy aperture of the stairs. In a few moments the light changed as someone ascended. The padding feet stopped.

  ‘Maisters?’ said a voice. A boy’s voice. ‘Are ye there? Blue Doo sent me.’

  Gil looked from his cousin to Doig. Before he could answer, Doig said, ‘And how’d we ken that?’

  ‘Och, maisters, would I play ye fause?’

  ‘Ye have done a’ready,’ Doig pointed out.

  ‘That wasny me, maisters. Nor it was Blue Doo neither. It’s none o our doing if Maister Vary’s forsworn, so it isny. Maisters, I’m sent to fetch ye out o here, to where the bonnie lady’s waiting for ye. Are ye coming, or no?’

  ‘Bonnie lady?’ said Gil, with a sinking feeling. Beside him, Boyd was grinning broadly. ‘What bonnie lady?’

  ‘The one your lordship’s mairriet on, a course,’ said the voice scornfully. ‘What other would it be would come to find you? Is yir lordships to company us, or will we be going back and telling her ye’re minded to stay the night?’

  ‘We’re coming,’ said Doig, and stumped off down the stairs. Gil glanced at his cousin, pulled a face, and followed him.

  One floor down, they emerged from the stair to be surrounded by a troop of tinker children, who tugged at their hands and clothing and hurried them to find the next descent. While the song outside changed to another, equally unfamiliar, they glimpsed more elaborate, neglected chambers, some with high beds and painted kists set on their flagstone floors, one a dusty solar with moth-eaten embroidery on a stand near the window-seat, but there was no time to take in details, and attempts to question their escort were hushed. When they reached the stair Gil recognised why: there was much more stirring below them, voices and movement, sounds and scents of food being served, a great waft of roasted mutton smells. Doig’s stomach rumbled loudly. The boy who had spoken to them, who seemed to be the leader of the group, halted them here.

  ‘Donnie,’ he pointed at one of his henchmen, ‘away and mak siccar o the door, and see a’body’s in place. Yir lordships’ll ha to be quiet,’ he instructed the three men, ‘for we’ll be passing the big hall, where they’re a’ eating and drinking o the best, and we’d no want to be noticed.’

  ‘And the armed men?’ Boyd asked lightly. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Och, they’re all out-by, the most o them, making siccar we canny be getting into the house.’ A two-note call sounded in the stairwell. ‘Right, yir lordships. One at a time, in case they would be seeing us, and we’ll ha you first, maister.’

  ‘My turn, indeed.’ Boyd stepped forward, and Gil realised his cousin had neither sword nor whinger but only his dagger on him. ‘Wish me luck, Gil.’

  Gil watched him go, listening to his quiet steps on the stairs. There was a quick exchange with the boy on guard, and more soft steps which faded into silence, and then, at the edge of hearing, a scuffle, a choking sound, a thump and scrape, and another silence, broken by more serving sounds from the hall. What was Sandy up to, he wondered.

  When the soft call was repeated, he followed his cousin down the stairs as quietly as he could manage. The stairs led down past a sturdy door, behind which clinking of knives and glassware could be heard and the smell of roast mutton drifted out again. The grubby boy waiting beside it, Donnie, waved him on urgently, and he hastened downward, hearing the door open above him.

  ‘Here, you!’ said a voice. ‘Get down to the kitchen, fetch another jug o the good ale, and be quick about it. And you’ll no be tasting it on the way back, neither!’

  ‘Aye, maister!’ said Donnie’s voice, and after a moment his bare feet pattered on the stairs and he appeared beside Gil, clutching a jug and grinning broadly. Above them the door closed, and Donnie called up to his leader again, a different signal, and led Gil on downward. The stair curled down
past the kitchen, where the door stood ajar on the bustle and scurry, but nobody looked round as they slipped by, and a few steps below it ended abruptly in a low, wide cellar, dimly lit from barred openings high up under the vaults.

  Gil stopped as his feet met the flagstones, and peered around in the shadows, sniffing the air of the place. There was a lot to see as well as scent, and little light to see by. The usual stacked barrels and sacks were ranged along the walls, with pools of shadow beneath them, and dark objects lurking in the spaces. There seemed to be a lot of people about, not all of them child-sized. Directly in front of him was a row of packing-cases, long and narrow, with twisted straw sticking out of the gaps in the wood. Several figures were bending over these. As he stepped forward, one of them leaned hard on a crowbar, and there was a sound of splitting wood.

  ‘Ah! Got you, you diabhal,’ said a familiar voice. Euan Campbell, he thought, and if Euan is here, so must Alys be. Searching for her, he recognised his mother’s groom Steenie.

  ‘Let’s get a look at it,’ said his cousin in the crowd. People shifted, and he saw Alys, neat in her riding-dress and the hat like a man’s, bending over the opened case, and Boyd’s head of light hair beside hers.

  Something impelled him forward, very rapidly, but when he reached them all he said was, ‘If you wanted one of these for your birthday, you’d only to say.’

  She did not look round, but her hand came up and tucked itself unerringly, tightly, into his.

  ‘We’ve nowhere to keep it,’ she said in Scots. ‘It wouldny rest on the sideboard.’

  He looked down at his cousin; he could smell blood, but Sandy seemed to be undamaged, though he was shivering.

  ‘Maister Gil,’ said Euan. ‘What will we be doing wi these handguns? Are they to be left here, or what?’

  ‘Can we get a better look at them?’ Boyd asked. ‘Anyone got a light?’

  ‘I think we shouldny have a light in here,’ said Alys. ‘There’s a sack o what I take to be black powder on yon barrel. I hope it’s the right grade for these.’

  ‘You know powder, cousin?’ Boyd said in surprise.

  ‘My father dealt once wi a quarryman who used it,’ she replied.

  ‘We can be taking them outside,’ said another of the figures in the shadows, and Gil recognised Wooden Toe. ‘We can be fetching them out to the other side o the wall, if your honours think it fitting, if once we can get them all out o these kists. They are not being that heavy outside the kists, see.’

  ‘That’s a true word,’ said Boyd, straightening up. He had the gun in his arms, a long pipe of cast metal, strengthened with hoops of iron here and there along its length, with a wooden stock at one end which extended its length by another half an ell or so. ‘One man can carry it, no bother.’ He raised one hand to his nose and sniffed, grimacing. ‘Though he’ll be greased like new leather when he’s done.’

  ‘Wullie,’ said Wooden Toe, ‘you’ll see to clearing the way, then?’

  ‘My name’s no Wullie,’ said the leader of the troop of children, stepping in from the stair. ‘I’m The Fox now, see. That’s my by-name. This bonnie lady, that has a’ the wisdom o Scotland and France both, was naming me hersel.’ The pride in his voice would have inflated several footballs, Gil thought.

  ‘Fox,’ said Wooden Toe patiently, accepting this. ‘You’ll be seeing the way’s clear, then, till we get these cannons out of here.’

  Euan Campbell was already applying the crowbar to the next packing case. The newly named Fox turned back to direct his henchmen, just as Doig stumped in off the stair.

  ‘This isny the way out,’ he said irritably, looking about him.

  ‘No, it’s where the guns are,’ said Boyd. ‘Gin you’ll wait a wee, you can carry one out for me. I need a right look at them afore I bargain wi Vary for them.’

  Alys looked up at him and nodded, but did not speak. Gil pulled her against him, and watched as the remaining guns were freed from their packing and shared out round the group. By the time the Fox returned, a procession had formed up waiting for him, Boyd at its head with the first gun cradled in his arms and the leather sack of gunpowder dangling from one wrist by its sturdy ties, Gil with a small barrel on his shoulder which seemed, by its markings, to hold more powder.

  ‘We’ll gang out through the kitchen,’ the boy said, his voice full of suppressed excitement. ‘I’ve tellt them we’re to take the guns outside. Just walk out through and they’ll no stop ye.’

  ‘One can see,’ said Alys softly in French, ‘how these people are said to be related to the fairy folk. They know well how to make themselves unregarded, and so invisible.’

  ‘And how to cover others with the same invisibility,’ Gil agreed. Wooden Toe, just in front of them, turned and nodded, grinning widely.

  ‘And this laddie will be the maist skilled in his generation,’ he assured them in Scots.

  Wondering where Knollys’s armed men might be, and whether he was committing a felony, and if so which one, Gil followed the rest of the procession up the stair, into the kitchen, where the kitchen hands looked up to stare at the guns and sand crunched under their feet, up another flight, and across the screens passage at the end of the hall. Through its openings, out of the tail of his eye, he could see the back of Vary’s head, a full view of Knollys, a side view of Knollys’s companion who was still tantalisingly familiar. The three were seated round a small table, their meal now at the nuts and sweetmeats stage, with the cloth removed and glasses of claret wine set out. Some of Knollys’s men stood about; they peered suspiciously at the movement in the screens passage, but did not act. The Irishman was not present.

  From the screens passage, predictably, they descended by another stair to a richly appointed chamber, designed to impress and better kept than those above, where a heavy door stood open to the daylight. Tapestries stirred in a breeze; two great chairs and several upholstered backstools stood about; a sideboard boasted an array of pewter which gleamed faintly. The actual silver, Gil assumed, would be kept on another sideboard further into the tower. He stepped out on to the platform at the head of the wooden forestair, and found the weather much changed from what it had been when they arrived at Kersewell.

  ‘We’ll no need to hang about,’ declared Wooden Toe, ‘if we’re to test these cannons. I’m thinking it will rain within the hour, by the look o the sky.’

  ‘I’d say you would be right,’ agreed Gil, looking about him.

  It was not just the sky, now half-full of mountainous clouds, which foreboded rain. A wind had risen, hectic and unpredictable, turning leaves upward, tossing blooms about in the neat flowerbeds of the pleasance. It tugged at Alys’s hat, and she put up a hand to the brim.

  ‘Come on!’ urged the Fox from the stairfoot. ‘You’ll no be waiting about here, there’s men wi big swords just the other side the wall. We need to be ganging that way!’ He pointed along one of the sanded paths, where half the guns were already processing hastily towards a door in the wall, the swarm of children running beside and ahead of the bearers.

  The door was narrow, with slots in the stonework for two heavy bars. Gil noted this only in passing, finding himself thrust out and along the hillside, away from the barmekin wall towards the encroaching wood, Alys hustled after him. Several of the tinkers’ dogs came loping silently towards them, heads down, but a word from Wooden Toe and a whistle from the margins of the trees sent them circling back uphill. The party rounded the flank of the hill and found themselves in the valley of the burn which Gil had seen earlier from the top of the tower.

  ‘There you are,’ said Sandy Boyd, looking up as Gil set down his barrel and gave Alys a hand down the slope. ‘What d’you ken about guns, Gil?’

  ‘No a lot,’ Gil said frankly. ‘I value my hearing.’

  ‘If these are the ones Brosie Vary mentioned,’ said Alys, ‘he said they’re something like an arquebus, but Maister Hamilton the Depute described something bigger, that needed two men to work it. I suppose one must hold i
t and the other apply the match.’

  ‘Cousin,’ said Boyd, smiling at her in delight, ‘I tell you, if I’d seen you first, Gil would never ha stood a chance.’

  ‘Oh no, maister,’ she said, with demure ambiguity. ‘You’d never ha got into my gowns.’

  Boyd uttered a crack of laughter, and then turned, punching Gil hard in the shoulder.

  ‘Come on then. I’ll not risk men to hold them. We need to prop them somehow so they willny fly about when we fire them.’

  ‘Why have we no been observed?’ Gil said uneasily, looking about. ‘I’d have expected Knollys’s men to come down on us, let alone Vary’s own.’

  ‘I was telling Knollys’s folk,’ said Euan cheerfully, ‘that we would be testing the guns out here, and to be staying away from this side the castle meantime. Likely they’ll be spying round the corners at us, but it will keep them out of our way for a bit.’

  ‘And it was me was suggesting it to him,’ observed Wooden Toe, ‘thinking it would come better from a smartly dressed fellow like him, see.’

  ‘It was not,’ said Euan indignantly. ‘I was thinking of it my own self!’

  ‘I was just borrowing this fleuchter, see,’ said the Fox, ignoring them. He brandished the peat-spade, narrowly missing Doig’s head with the metal-shod wooden blade, ‘that was lying about down by the wall. Your lordship could be using it to cut holes in the ground, and put the cannons into them, maybe?’ he ended diffidently.

  ‘Aye, that’s a good thought,’ said Boyd with enthusiasm. ‘Can you find us another one? Just we’ll need to make haste.’ He glanced at the sky, which was darkening steadily as the clouds advanced.

  ‘Do we have slow-match?’ Gil asked.

  ‘There is some here,’ said Alys, looking up from the sack of gunpowder. ‘In a purse inside the sack, to keep the powder off it. Cousin, was the sack split when you lifted it?’

  Boyd looked up from the hole he was making in the slope beside the burn, and shrugged.