A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  ‘Well,’ said Mintie smartly, bustling with the cloth and saddle for Jaunty. ‘Dead or alive, we can’t leave Batty Coalhouse lying in the wet cold.’

  ‘You have no notion of where he is,’ Will declared, appalled at the prospect. ‘He could be anywhere. Unless the Saul can speak, we might search forever – and it is dark.’

  ‘The Saul can barely breathe,’ Mintie pointed out scornfully. ‘So might Batty also be – and he is not anywhere out there, he is close by and to the east, for he rode for Berwick and did not get far – the Saul could never have got back to us if he had.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Will said, climbing to his feet and beginning to see it. ‘And if I were he and found myself hunted, I would have turned for a good place to hide or fight.’

  He looked at Mintie.

  ‘Tinnis Hill,’ he said, and she had a hand to her breastbone and had said ‘bugger’ before she knew it. Then the look of Will, all raised eyebrows and shock at her language, made them both laugh and shred the fear of Faerie.

  ‘He might have been shot from cover and never knew,’ she pointed out, but Will gave a short bark of laughter, harsh as rook song.

  ‘Not him. I learned more about Batty Coalhouse and why the Keeper fears him. Hen Graham knows Batty Coalhouse.’

  He told it in fits and starts as they rode into the cold and the night, where it started to rain, a misery of persistent sleet fine as flour.

  ‘His name is German – Kohlhase. His da’s kin are from the Brandenburg, Hen says. Batty, it appears, is cunning. Knows everything and the price of it – how much a fool married on to a cuckold will pay for a kertch found in a wee gorse love nest when the fool was in Berwick. Which lass with a redhead man will pay what for news of a wee ginger newborn two steadings away. Who will run where with a fouled Bill on them – and how much they are worth to the Wardens.’

  He broke off, his wet face pearling with what might have been pale sweat or rain as he turned into Mintie’s wide-eyed listening stare.

  ‘They say he did terrible things with the rest o’ his kin in the Germanies. Since he came back he has been called many things. Corbie is one, from the way you can run from him, far and fast, then turn to find him sitting there, looking at you like a crow in a tree. Slow match is another, from the way he seems to smoulder, relentless and steady, down to the powder of the matter, then – bang.’

  Will clapped his hands in a spray of water and Mintie jumped, then shook herself.

  ‘He is an old man with a single arm, drookit and shot,’ she smarted back at him.

  ‘His ma was a Graham lass,’ Will went on, ignoring her. ‘Bella, from Netherby.’

  Mintie looked up at that, wiping rain from her face, and Will nodded grimly to her.

  ‘Aye – a lick and spit from here. Batty came right back to his Graham home like a calf to the teat, to the shame of all that grayne, according to Hen. It might even be them as has done for him this night.’

  ‘He is not done,’ Mintie answered determinedly. I would know, she thought.

  They rode on into the fox-screaming night, and the rain slackened off, allowing the cloud to clear and a moon to let them see the glint of water in beck and burn, which was a relief from the crush of dark. Mintie felt better when she could see – for a long time, it seemed, she had been letting Jaunty pick her own way, but now the great black hunch of Tinnis loomed over them.

  ‘How did he lose his arm, then?’ Mintie asked, more for the sound of her voice and his than for an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Will answered, ‘but his da died in a siege fighting for the Frenchies. I think Batty lost his arm at the same time and was a young man when it happened.’

  ‘Twenty and something,’ Mintie said, remembering Batty tell it. Will glanced at her, wan in the darkness.

  ‘His ma took fever and died not long after, so he’s had sore loss,’ he went on.

  They stopped when it became clear they were at the edge of a spated run of water, white as new snow where it racked over the rocks.

  ‘He went to the Germanies after that,’ Will said, as they picked a way along it, heading northwards he thought, but always pressing as close as they could get to the glower of Tinnis. A great weariness came rolling over the pair of them, though neither admitted it to the other; it was composed mainly of despair that this was a fool’s journey and that Batty would not be found.

  ‘The Germanies,’ Mintie echoed, trying to keep Will talking, to hear the sound of his voice and using it like fire to drive back the dark.

  ‘The Germanies,’ Will confirmed, and the tone of him was a chill that stopped Mintie dead.

  ‘That was when Bartholomew Graham became Balthazar Kohlhase,’ Will went on, flat and hard as napped flint. ‘And had himself a newer name still, from the way he and his kin took their revenge on those who had wronged his half-brother, Hans.’

  His face was pale in the moonlight, a lily-coloured match for Mintie’s own.

  ‘Brandfackel they called him, for the way he set the land to flame.’

  He looked at her and wiped wet from his bearded face.

  ‘You know the name in a decent tongue,’ he added wryly, ‘and there is the Devil in it – it means “firebrand”.’

  The silence that followed was ripped by scream of a hunting hoolet owl and brought them back to the sighing wind and the soft rush of the burn.

  And the singing, cracked and faint as a weary bell.

  ‘And see ye not that bonnie road, which winds about the fernie brae…’

  Mintie’s head snapped round and she yelped.

  ‘Batty…’

  ‘That is the road to fair Elfland, where you and I this night maun gae…’

  The crunch and clatter of stalks made Batty start a little. The voice, when it came out of the dark, was eldritch and tinkling like bells.

  ‘Batty. Batty Coalhouse.’

  The Queen of Elfland, he thought, and laughed aloud. As ye are summoned, so must ye come…

  ‘Batty. Batty.’

  The voice was closer, the whin broke apart and a Faerie face shoved through and stared down at him as he stared back at her. Well, almost Faerie – he wondered at the Queen of Elfland having a great drip on her nose.

  ‘Batty,’ Mintie said, her voice bright with relief and concern at the same time. ‘What have they done to you?’

  * * *

  They struggled him up on Jaunty, and Mintie crept up behind to hold him on. She even found his helmet nearby and clapped it on her own head, so that it might fool any night riders to thinking she was a warrior.

  Jaunty, dogged wee besom that she was, blew out her displeasure but plootered home without a twitch, while Mintie clung desperately to Batty as he wavered right and left and in and out of consciousness.

  Back at Powrieburn, drenched as voles, they manhandled Batty into the undercroft, where the women stripped and salved him expertly and without fuss. He had cuts and bruises and his leg was ‘swole bad’, according to Bet’s Annie, but the worst of it was that she was sure his shoulder was out of joint.

  ‘We can put it back in then, while he is out of his wits and feels nothing,’ Will declared, but Bet’s Annie pointed out the flaw in that – it was his left shoulder and how you put it back was with a sharp and particular tug on the arm. Which Batty did not have.

  Mintie thought about it for a moment, then fetched the birthing rope, the one they used to haul reluctant foals and calves into the world. Will got the idea at once and they tied it to Batty’s withered stump. Will snapped it expertly, and grinning as if they had built a palace between them, they swaddled Batty back up like a bairn.

  There was little chance of getting him up the ladder, so they bedded him alongside the Saul; the undercroft was dry and they smoked up a steaming because the fetid heat of beasts was driving the drench out of them.

  When Batty finally slept, Mintie passed a weary hand over her face and shivered, then felt the touch of Will’s concerned hand on her arm.

  ‘
You are soaked, lass,’ he said softly. ‘Away up and change. I will watch him.’

  She saw that he was as wet and said so, but he only laughed.

  ‘A wee bit weather is neither here nor there to a man used to hot trods on worse nights,’ he declared, so she went, gratefully. It occurred to her in the middle of changing into her only other dress that he had perhaps arranged it, that he had been sent to make sure Batty Coalhouse was dead.

  She was ashamed of herself when she half fell down the ladder in a panic, only to find Batty snoring and Will in his undershift and smallclothes, smoking with steam as if he was on fire and working up a sweat by mucking out the Fyrebrande. He had already looked to his own horse and Jaunty, both forgotten in the moment of caring for Batty.

  His clothes were neatly hung over a stall rope, and for all he was half naked, he looked up at her and smiled, such a calming, warming thing that Mintie stopped dead, feeling as if she had been struck by some unseen lightning, fizzing from crown to the itching soles of her feet.

  They never spoke more than an instruction or a question and answer while they worked together with the kine and horses. When that was done, Will climbed back into his damp things, the better for them to dry on him during the night, put a horse blanket round his shoulders, and they settled down beside Batty.

  ‘You should get away to your bed, lass,’ he said eventually, as the crusie guttered in the last gasp of oil. She shook her head and smiled at him.

  ‘I am happy here,’ she answered, and it was all the truth.

  Chapter Six

  Powrieburn

  Three days later

  She was there, sitting in the dark listening to the wind batter a fury at the unyielding bastel, feeling the odd swoop of it, thick with rain-damp, where it had fingered under the outside doors and through the grilled yett to the back of her neck.

  The Fyrebrande, blowing out unexpectedly encountered cobwebs as he hung over a stall side, made her turn her head to check him. When she turned back, Batty was awake and looking steadily at her.

  Neither of them spoke for a heartbeat or two.

  ‘I dreamed I was in Elfland,’ he said in a rheumed growl that was heavy with relief and disappointment both.

  ‘What was it like?’

  He thought a little, then a smile split his beard – which she had combed out, taking the opportunity of him not being able to resist or protest.

  ‘Like a Lammas Fair,’ he answered, which made her frown, for she had expected something better and more magical. All the Lammas Fairs she had attended in her time had been places of noise and drink, with all the strangeness invested in a lass with a beard, or a calf with an extra leg.

  ‘I thought you were the Queen of Elfland,’ he added and she laughed at that.

  ‘God forbid.’

  ‘As beautiful a sight, for all that,’ he said, and she felt herself flush to the roots of her hair and busied herself with his blankets to cover the confusion.

  ‘The Saul?’ he asked and she nodded reassuringly.

  ‘Behind you, bruised and scraped but fine as spun silk. Your five pounds still intact as well.’

  He nodded.

  ‘The Saul would have been good enough. I have lost my pistols, mind, which is hurtful. Them daggs are expensive engines.’

  She fetched his griddle and showed him where the shot had struck, so that he whistled through his teeth.

  ‘They were set on my death right enough. Give Wattie my thanks, then, for setting my stirrup badly and making me lift that leg to fix it. If not, they would have blown it clean away and I would be of a different standing entirely.’

  The humour clanked like poor tin. There was silence while Mintie thought of Wattie and wondered if he was safe. Then she told Batty of how she and Will Elliot had searched the night for him, but he drifted away before the end of it. She was comforted, however, by his easy snore; sleep is best, she thought.

  She sat there a little longer, breathing in the pungent reek where one of the mares had staled, listening to the rain and wind and the sound of his steady, regular breathing, comforting as the sighing Solway sea.

  He was still asleep when the crusie guttered down to little more than shadows flickering on a wall, and she rose stiffly to refill it, moving past the soft stir of the beasts, their warm fug as familiar and comforting as memory.

  She felt ruffled and strange, the shadows around her meeting, flowing, smoking into nothing and forming again; she felt as insubstantial as the fingering wind. Tomorrow, she thought, the horses will remember my hands on their mane’s bristle, the yard’s morning ice will crackle under my clumsy feet. Tomorrow I will fork hay and fetch water – but tonight…

  Tonight I am as Faerie as the Queen of Elfland.

  When the awakened light bloomed she went back to where Batty snored, sitting with her knees hunched and her arms clasped round them, listening to the wind and the soft, regular chewing of Jaunty at the straw.

  She felt like clouds over a hill, but it wasn’t the night and wind which had unleashed her, though she did not know what had. Mykkel did as dogs do, coming to stare at her with melancholy eyes until she scratched him behind the ear, feeling his pleasure in the delighted muzzle pressing harder against her knee.

  What did Batty dream? A person was as much what he thought and dreamed as a dog was locked to a mistress or master, and Mintie looked at the sleeping Batty, remembering all that she had learned about him.

  What did he dream? Nothing good, she thought and pitied him.

  The light was pale as bad milk when the sound of hooves in the yard woke her and brought Bet’s Annie spilling down the ladder into the undercroft.

  ‘My cousin Tam, from Bellsyetts,’ she hissed, as if he was a wolf at the door.

  ‘How is my mother?’ Mintie demanded, tugging her clothes straight and raking straw from her hair.

  ‘Sleeping soft,’ Bet’s Annie said, and then took a deep breath, as if about to plunge into cold water; Mintie felt her own constrict in her throat.

  Tam Crozier was little more than a boy, chap-cheeked and chilled; he slid awkwardly off the swaybacked old mare he was riding, his breath smoking and his face pinched. Mintie did not like the look of him and saw that Bet’s Annie had seen it too. She stopped, her hands folded into her apron against the cold, almost hugging herself.

  ‘Bring her in,’ Mintie declared, signalling him to lead the mare into the undercroft, but Tam shook his head.

  ‘I will not bide long, Mistress.’

  He nodded to Bet’s Annie and his eyes were raw now, so that Mintie saw Bet’s Annie bring one hand up to her throat.

  ‘What news, then, Tam Crozier?’ she demanded, almost defiantly.

  The boy stood and shuffled, pulled off his cap and wound it round and round in his big, red-knuckled hands.

  ‘Wattie is dead,’ he finally blurted, and Mintie saw Bet’s Annie rock under the wind of it, like a boat caught broadside.

  ‘Two men came for him, dragged him out. They beat old Ferg and one held a latchbow on us while the other carted Wattie to a tree. They hung him with his own belt.’

  The words spilled out now, rotted and sodden with grief.

  ‘They set a burning brand to the roof tree. Then they poked poor Wattie’s feet with a torch and dragged him off to be hanged like a side of slaughtered beef. They were grinning like hay rakes as they rode off. I have been sent to yourself and then to the Keeper to make a Bill. We don’t know the men at all, but those are faces none at Bellsyetts will forget.’

  He stopped, dumbed with the horror of it, and Mintie, who had wanted to stop the slew of words pouring from him – words so careless of what they did to those who listened – now found she could not speak at all. For a long moment there was no sound save for the hiss of the cold wind and the distant, harsh laugh of a rook.

  Mintie felt frozen. She had done it. Pretending to be an ostler and the only one at Powrieburn, so that they had hunted poor, innocent Wattie Crozier down, who knew nothing, h
ad seen nothing and died, choking and bewildered and swaying…

  The touch on her shoulder snapped her back to where Tam was swinging stiffly up onto the mare, turning away to ride to Hermitage. Bet’s Annie’s hand was light, her voice stronger than that.

  ‘Hush now, Mintie. The fault in this belongs to the pair who hoisted Wattie Crozier. He will be revenged and not by the Keeper.’

  ‘Not by Hendersons neither,’ Mintie declared, fighting the bitterness of tears. ‘We pay blackmeal to everyone.’

  ‘There are some who will ride if called,’ Bet’s Annie answered firmly. ‘And Croziers of my own with them.’

  Mintie was struck by the iron in the woman, which she had not known was there; it was a stark contrast to the wails of Jinet and Megs announcing the news to Mintie’s mother.

  ‘I will go to her,’ Bet’s Annie declared, then nodded to the undercroft door and the stable beyond it. ‘You care for Master Coalhouse.’

  She paused and looked hard into Mintie’s face, as if to drive the words through her eyes.

  ‘They will come for him next when they know he is here.’

  The truth of it sank into Mintie’s belly like a cold stone into a burn, so that she stood for a while looking down at the snoring Batty.

  For all Bet’s Annie’s iron, the truth was staring, if not stark; no one feared the Hendersons, and even if some would ride, it would not be enough. Black rent had been their only recourse, and with a sick certainty, Mintie knew that still remained the way.

  When Bet’s Annie came down into the undercroft, trailing gulping sobs from the other pair behind her, she found Mintie dressed in her best and leading out a saddled Jaunty and the Fyrebrande on a tether rope.

  ‘What is this?’ she demanded, folding her arms determinedly, but the stone misery of Mintie’s face robbed her of resolve and hard words.

  ‘Blackmeal.’