A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  Nor would the Keeper interfere, Will knew, for Hen Graham was held and he was the witness to his treachery. The Grahams would not want Hen strung up, for he was kin, and that bond would not be broken just because he was a sly wee conniver. Besides, they had the Keeper of Hermitage by the cods and would squeeze coin and favour from him as long as Hen lived.

  The Keeper would know his plans were all scattered. He would welcome the Grahams, his Land Sergeant and the returned wee Queen as if he had planned it all, playing out the mummery for all his life’s worth.

  Which it was, Batty was sure. Some kin or bribed lady’s maid in Falkland Palace had almost certainly spirited the babe away when it was being hastily moved for safety against the great band of raiders who had appeared so close to the capital. The Laird and his well-horsed Armstrongs, of course, making noise and flame to order.

  Later, the Grahams, not having had nearly enough drink to make them reel, climbed back on their nags and prepared to head off into the dark. Those remaining chaffered loudly about how they were not having to leave this good music and warmth to plooter about in the wet dark.

  ‘You will have to return her,’ Will said softly to Agnes, as the music skirled, and Agnes sighed, for she had known it all along. The babe had done enough, all the same, to balm the loss of her Eck. There would be other babes… She thought of Mintie then, and the sweetness that had been soured from her by Hutchie.

  Men are swine, she thought, feeling her own man’s comforting weight slide into the bed. He was too tired from having struggled with the wagon wheel to do more than grunt a welcome back, and Agnes, exhausted by events, slid off to sleep listening to the babe stir and mutter beside her.

  When she woke into the dim and clatter of a new day, she blinked and looked and blinked again. Her heart stopped.

  The bairn had gone.

  Chapter Nine

  The Debatable Land

  The next morning

  Christ in Heaven, Will thought frantically, they could have gone anywhere. He was aware of the men at his back, waiting patiently for his orders, could feel the sick heat of the burning peat on the lance tip, signifying that this was a perjink, organised hot trod in pursuit of felons.

  It was a jest, of course, to have a hot trod riding out of the lawless Debatable into an England they were at war with, and led by the Land Sergeant of Hermitage, but it gave some semblance of legality to what was a frantic bloodhound of a chase.

  Pursuing phantoms, it seemed, for the Count of Cipre had vanished.

  ‘It must be him as took her,’ Will had argued, when Agnes had come shrieking out of her smoky hole of a cruck house, ashen-faced husband in her wake. Batty could only agree, though it crossed his mind that Dickon and the Grahams might have taken the babe, for the chance at profit.

  But they had left men to escort the wee Queen and Will back to Hermitage, which seemed a strange thing to do if you had lifted the said Queen in the night. Besides, Batty thought, they are not so daft as to cross the Regent and the Dowager Queen Mary of Guise.

  ‘They have Wharton with them,’ Will pointed out, keeping his voice low and away from Graham ears. ‘They might do a deal with him yet, hand over the babe and take more of Fat Henry’s siller.’

  That was all very possible, Batty had to agree – save for the presence of Davey-boy in the escort party, proudly showing off his new gun he had already shot twice that morning, scaring horses and geese.

  ‘Dickon would never put his golden boy in such danger,’ Batty pointed out, and Will was forced to agree, tearing off his hat and rubbing his shaggy head with frustration.

  ‘Curse it,’ he said vehemently. ‘It must be the Egyptianis, then. Stealing bairns is what they do.’

  Trading is what they do, Batty thought. Stealing is what they enjoy, and bairns is the least of it. Yet you would not steal one unless you had a market for it.

  ‘There is hardly a bairn-fair, same as for horses,’ Will scathed. ‘Christ, if they find out it is the wee Queen of Scots…’

  ‘Mayhap it would have been better if they had known that from the start,’ Batty growled. ‘They might have been circumspect about lifting it.’

  Will, whose idea it had been to make no mention of the bairn in their presence, recognised the truth of that and scrubbed his head again, adding another gilt-stripping oath. Then he straightened.

  ‘Well, there is nothing for it but a trod. We will fetch some burning peat from the fire and bind it to a lance and be off.’

  ‘Good luck with that, then,’ Batty said mildly. ‘I would head for Carlisle – I surmise that is the most likely route for horse-copers like them. They will be headed down to Stow’s fair. It’s a long way and they have to reach it before May.’

  Alarmed, Will looked at him. ‘You are coming?’

  Batty shook his head, his beard quivering.

  ‘I will take the lass back to Powrieburn. Then I will go on to Hermitage and lie to the Regent on how the babe is safe enough, if not quite in our hands.’

  ‘Christ,’ moaned Will, remembering that part of matters with a lurch that sank his stomach to his knees. ‘The Regent…’

  He had seen the wisdom of that, even as he had dreaded a hot trod with strange Grahams at his back and no Batty to at least provide some measure of kinship. Some time later, his back felt more exposed than ever, for he had no idea, among all the cart ruts of the crossroads, which belonged to whom.

  ‘They have split up,’ one of the Grahams noted, though Will had already seen that and thought it little help.

  ‘They have signs,’ another declared. ‘The Egyptianis have signs that tell others of their like where they are headed. A mark on a tree,’ he added helpfully, ‘or a stem broken in a particular way.’

  ‘Can you read such signs?’ demanded Will sourly and knew the answer before the huffed silence revealed it.

  ‘On,’ he declared, as firmly as if he had spotted something they had not, which was a lie. He hunched up his shoulders against the stares at his back and led them down the wet mourn of road towards Carlisle, already sick with the certainty that they had lost the Queen of Scots.

  Carlisle

  Conversion of St Paul (25 January)

  Sebastiane, Count of Cipre, vanished somewhere along the road to Carlisle, climbing into the back of the lurching cart as a scarlet and green mountebank with red hair and coming back out as a sober perjink and slightly damp drover with black hair and a plain jerkin.

  His wife, the magnificently named Amberline – Lena for short – lost her hooped earrings and garish clothes to become plain Jean Gordon, which was her real name anyway. Her hennaed hair vanished under a proper kertch and the pair of them, with a brace of other carts, women, weans and anxious men, came down to Carlisle’s Scotch Gate with all hope for a deal of money.

  The babe, as Seb said often enough on the trip, was all luck. Last year, he and others had got drunk with a mason, a German who had come with Master Stefan von Haschenperg to rebuild the Citadel of Carlisle for Fat Henry, adding a new half-moon battery. The work was almost done and the German, Stahlmann, would be going home to Cologne with his wife sometime soon.

  She had come with her husband so as not to waste a moment in trying for a child of their own. Trying and failing.

  ‘I need a child,’ Stahlmann had confessed, ‘for I fear my wife is barren and will never have one on her own. Since we are leaving it will excite no curiosity if we suddenly appear back home in Cologne with a child. With no disease and who will not be missed. A girl child for preference…’

  Seb had his own ideas on which of the pair was barren – Stahlmann the mason was a thin, dry stick of a man who drank too much – but the German was well stipended for his skills and could afford to pay what was asked; the deal had been done then and there.

  Seb and Jean had thought it would take at least nine months and had assiduously sold the charms of their own daughter, Kezia, to anyone who would buy. Seb had even sacrificed a few nights on her, though Jean had thoug
hts of her own on that.

  ‘It will not sell if it comes out drooling daft or has three eyes,’ she growled and he took the hint and stopped.

  Kezia, thirteen and wayward, had stayed stubbornly unconcerned by weans all the same, so the arrival of a perfect wee girl child right under Seb’s eager nose had been sent by God, clearly; it had been the easiest of matters to lift the bairn and be off, scattering carts left and right to fool pursuit. They would all meet up down at Stow-in-the-Wold for St Edward’s Horse Fair and everyone would get their share.

  Once inside Carlisle, Seb sent Jean with the good news and she came back, frowning.

  ‘He seems less sure than he did,’ she reported and Seb dismissed that with a wave of one hand.

  ‘I will tell you how this will happen,’ he declared. ‘The wee mason and his wife will have the goods examined – only right and proper, after all, as you would a decent horse. But they will have milk or a wet nurse and wee geegaws for it to play with, for all their seeming change of heart. It will take ten minutes, mark me – they will not want us once the deed is done.’

  The next day they took the child through the thronged streets to the home of the mason. At the door, before knocking, Seb asked if the bairn was clean.

  ‘Aye,’ Jean replied and frowned again. ‘She is an uncommon beautiful wean to belong to a plain-faced wee besom like the lass at yon forge – and nurse-fed, so that she won’t take to anything but a breast. And these cloths in the cradle are yellow silk and fine wool.’

  ‘Then the mason and his wife will be doubly happy that we have taken so much trouble and expense,’ Seb answered and chucked the babe’s fat wee chin.

  ‘She’s our golden bairn,’ he cooed and had back a gurgle and what might have been a smile.

  The mason and his wife lived in a rented house, very fine but with nothing of a home in it. He welcomed Seb and Jean with the air of an old friend, effusive and polite though none of it hid the sweat on his forehead. The wife, a buxom Dutch piece, Seb thought, looked even worse, all waxed pallor and hand-wringing.

  They had brought a physicker, a sober-suited auld yin called Ridley who tried to be superior and had that knocked out of him by Seb’s growl; if the ancient reprobate was involved in this, then he was scarcely an upright citizen.

  The Dutch wife chewed her fingernails and apologised for the state of the place, which looked to Seb as such places always looked – unnaturally neat and clean coffins.

  ‘You should have allowed us more notice,’ she said and Jean simply presented the basket; for all her alleged surprise, the Dutch Goodwife was all ready with blankets and shawls, just as Seb had predicted. Right down to a rattle.

  ‘It would be better if you did not raise your hopes so high,’ the physicker declared pompously, sniffing down his nose at Seb and Jean. ‘The chances of this being undamaged or without trace of sickness are slight.’

  ‘Ach, away,’ Seb growled. ‘See for yourself.’

  The physicker fell to poking and probing and peering through spectacles on a stick, while Seb spun a magnificent, dazzling web of lies about how the babe came from a fine family, hinting at a great lady and a doomed love affair with one of the handsome Egyptianis, with this babe as the result. It had been the plot of a play he had seen once at Appleby Fair, but he found he was talking to himself in the end, for all attention was on the physicker and the bairn.

  She was right as new rain when the old man listened to her breathing, but fretted when he stuck things in her ears and tried to measure the spacing of eyes, mouth and nose. The physicker looked in the babe’s mouth, felt the belly, examined the bud of a cunny and then exclaimed when a small fountain of piss came up. He dabbed a finger in it and tasted.

  ‘As clear and fine as I am sure my own was once,’ he exclaimed joyfully. ‘Alas, I fear that has been much tainted since.’

  He turned to the mason and declared the infant not only well but near perfect and much cared for.

  ‘Did we not say?’ Seb declared, then beamed at the mason. ‘Well done – you’re a father.’

  The physicker was on the point of asking about the yellow silk and expensive wool blanket, but the babe started in to wailing with lusty vengeance, while the mason splashed wine in goblets and passed them round, gulping and grinning at the same time. His wife, unsmiling, sipped and stared at the babe.

  Seb and Jean stayed for a quick swallow or two, took their money and left. The physicker took his fee shortly after and also left. The mason and his wife looked at the bairn.

  ‘It’s a good sign,’ the mason declared, more in hope than sound judgement. ‘A noisy babe is a healthy babe.’

  ‘Suddenly an expert you are,’ his wife declared and put her hands over her ears.

  ‘It will need fed,’ he suggested and she shook her head.

  ‘I am too afraid to pick it up.’

  The mason did, awkward and afraid, tried to feed the bairn from a clay bottle with a sheep-gut nipple, as you did with calves, he had been told. The baby spluttered milk everywhere.

  ‘It will not drink,’ his wife said, alarmed and the babe wailed.

  ‘It will have been breast-fed,’ the mason offered. ‘It needs to become used to this way – you should have hired that wet nurse, as we agreed.’

  His wife bridled.

  ‘She was asking too much – besides, we are leaving in two days and she would not travel, as you know. And would have talked, besides, about where this babe came from. So it was pointless.’

  The babe wailed, hungry and in need of changing. The mason tried, but the wife would not. Exasperated, he turned to her.

  ‘This child cost a fortune. If you are going to care for it, as you so often wished, you will have to at least make an effort, schatzi.’

  ‘I never wanted it,’ she declared sullenly and winced at the noise. ‘Make it stop.’

  ‘Never wanted…’

  The mason could not go on, struck near senseless for a moment. Then he recovered himself.

  ‘You have spoken of little else for months. I wish I had a child. I wish I had a little girl of my own…’

  ‘Of my own,’ she said and began to cry. ‘Mine. Ours. Not someone else’s.’

  The sick realisation of it hit the mason then and he went pale and sat heavily, listening to the bairn roar and his wife weep, thinking of the monstrous expense and wondering what in the name of God they did now.

  Hollows Tower

  At the same time

  The Laird looked at them with a watery and wandering eye, his face sheened with sweat despite the chill, in a hall grey-dim with smoke and bad light, where the stone dust drifted like distant diamonds.

  ‘You are sure, wife?’ he demanded, and the Lady tapped an impatient foot, while Leckie the steward folded fat fingers over his paunch and smiled blandly.

  ‘Bella came to Leckie last night, wondering if we needed more fowl now that the English were gone,’ his wife said urgently. ‘She told of it – her visit was no more than a ploy to find out if her Agnes was in trouble with Hollows, since she was holding the babe when the Grahams struck.’

  Gone, the Laird thought. There is understatement. The English were gone right enough – all the way to Hell. The road from Hollows was littered with stripped corpses, bluing and rotting in the iced rain until the men he sent buried them as decent as possible.

  A score were dead at least. More yet from the failed endeavour at Powrieburn. The young Wharton taken. An English lord slain. The babe taken and Fat Henry’s wee clerk of an envoy shivering in his piss-stained hose. The truth of the enterprise now out and dangling like a swinging corpse on a gibbet for all to see.

  It was all a huge festering cesspit of no good, and he knew who was to blame for it.

  ‘Not the Grahams,’ he growled, feeling the sick wine-roil of his belly. ‘Batty Coalhouse.’

  His wife dismissed that with an angry flap of a hand.

  ‘Leave Coalhouse. The babe was taken from them, d’you hear. They do not have her. We
do not have her. Egyptianis have been mentioned and Carlisle spoken of as a likely place.’

  The Laird nodded owlishly and seemed lost for a moment. English Armstrongs had gone off, south and west, with the plunder they had taken, and though it had eased the cost and discomfort round Hollows, it left the place light in men if revenge came. He had counted on there being little revenge from the Scott of Buccleuch, whose lands had been worst affected, and if it came at all, it would not be in the depths of bad weather. Now he was not so sure.

  The Lady watched him and wondered; she was scouring the whores out of Hollows, but at least two had been ‘retained’ in some capacity and by order of her husband. She did not care for the implications of that, nor for his increasing use of the goblet; she sighed with relief as he slapped a hand on the table, belched and then squinted at Leckie.

  ‘Men,’ he said. ‘For Carlisle. Find the babe and bring it back here.’

  Leckie nodded, having already arranged it beforehand on the orders of the Lady; the Laird knew that and was not as foxed as either his wife or his steward imagined. Nor did he like the alliance between them, seemingly against himself.

  He paused a moment as a thought struck him, then cackled out a rook’s laugh.

  ‘Hutchie Elliott can go – Leckie, you will lead. Tell Hutchie if he values living he will exert his utmost to succeed in it.’

  ‘He will most probably run,’ Leckie advised carefully, alarmed at the prospect of riding anywhere in this weather, never mind armed to the teeth and with similar growlers at his back. The Laird shook his head and tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘No, not him. He fears Batty Coalhouse if he leaves the protection of Armstrong men. And he fears me if he stays. Who do you think he fears most, eh, Leckie?’

  He cackled again and looked pointedly at his wife, then at Leckie.