by Robert Low
‘Batty – for the love of God, what are ye about—?’
It ended in a sudden deep thunk and a shriek, so that Dog trembled so hard he almost lost the pitch-brand, but it was plucked from his fist, and he heard the sizzle and the sudden smell of roasted meat.
Now everyone was bellowing and screaming, though Dog could hear Batty returning to the pot, still singing, slow and tuneless.
‘O, they rode on and farther on, and waded rivers abune the knee. And they saw neither sun nor moon, but heard the roaring of the sea.’
‘Batty, for the love of Christ…’
‘Hold this.’
And the stick was shoved into Dog’s fist again. Another thunk, another shriek, and Dog, when the brand was plucked from him, fell to the ground, hearing the roaring of Batty’s singing sea.
On and on it went, endless and dark as Dog’s world.
Powrieburn
At the same time
Mintie had dreams in her wee place in the roof space, dreams where the wind blew and she heard a baby wail, though she could not find it when she waked, more often than not chilled and drenched with sweat. She did not sleep much at all, and when she did, it was all dreams.
Once she found herself lying in the middle of the floor, while one of the kist-mice cleaned its whiskers and looked at her with a bright black bead of an eye; somewhere the wails of a lost bairn faded.
She wished Agnes would come back, but knew she never would now. Mintie suspected Jinet or Megs had told her what had happened, when they’d been sent to trade winter feed for goose eggs and been resentful of struggling the cart through the mire, fearful of being fallen on by one or all of Powrieburn’s many enemies.
They had not, of course, but excitedly spilled all their gossip about Mintie’s visit to Auld Nan, and afterwards Agnes had come on her own, come no more than an hour since, to offer some soothe. Since her own loss was something shared, Mintie had welcomed it, been fervent for it, for she wanted questions answered and could not turn to her ma, nor any of the women in Powrieburn – even Bet’s Annie, least chook-brained of them all.
She wanted to know why Agnes had named her bairn. Eck, she called it, even though it had died before it was even born and so was unbaptised. You never revealed a bairn’s name save to the priest – Reformed or otherwise – who was wetting its head for the first time.
‘So your Eck was unprotected from witchery,’ Mintie said, staring fervently into the whey face of Agnes. ‘Or the Queen of Elfland’s Faerie folk. But since he was not even born when he died, does that place him still in the grace of Christ? Is a babe innocent and in the embrace of God until he tumbles from the womb?’
‘I don’t know,’ Agnes had mumbled, not liking this, not liking the way it brought memories she’d thought balmed enough to suffer this, surfacing like turds in a blocked privy.
‘I mean,’ Mintie had said, hugging her knees in the old girlish way she had done when they had both been young; it lumped Agnes’s heart into her throat, that remembrance of the way they had been and how far it was from what they had become now. She could not believe, sometimes, what they had gone through in so short a time.
‘I mean,’ Mintie repeated, ‘if your babe was in the grace of Christ, then he would not have died unshriven, wandering lost forever.’
‘What became of him?’ she asked suddenly, catching Agnes by the hand. ‘Was he buried at a crossroads?’
Agnes knew that was the haunt of suicides and the moon-mad, the unshriven who had died; she did not want to think of it, for her ma and da had actually buried wee Eck at the Debatable boundary stone, which served the same purpose and for the very reasons Mintie had dragged up. They rasped across Agnes, opening the old wound to new raw.
She knew why Mintie did it, thinking of her own bairn, the half formed, unborn wee soul sent spinning back where it had come from.
‘Mintie,’ she said. ‘Don’t, please, if you love me…’
‘My ma told tales of such,’ Mintie had gone on, oblivious to Agnes’s distress. ‘I heard her tell them with old Mary, who was servant here until she died four years since. About a woman whose bairn had died and she kept it hidden, for she was not married on to anyone and feared the wrath of her lover if he found out about it.’
She turned liquid eyes on Agnes, who did not want to hear more but could not move.
‘But you can’t keep such a thing hid in a house full of women, can you? They found out and tried, for mercy of the woman, to bury it on holy ground at night, in the graveyard of their wee chapel. The priest caught them and forced them to bury it at the crossroads beyond the village – and then told everyone, as wee priests will do.’
Mintie stared unseeing at the peeling whitewash of the walls.
‘They heard it wail every night. Every one of them and others for a twenty-mile round. Some saw it too, bone-white and crawling, trying every shuttered window in the hope that someone would let it in, to the warm and a mother’s embrace—’
Agnes broke then, ran wailing from the room, spilling past Bet’s Annie, busy carding wool, down the ladder to the undercroft and out, away home. She would never come back.
Mintie remembered Bet’s Annie’s scathing curl of lip.
‘By God, you were a wilful lass and have now become an uncaring woman. Yours is not the only bairn lost in Liddesdale, and if you had an ounce of love left in you, you would have been more merciful to poor Agnes.’
She had then huffed off, trailing her cardings of wool like an indignant veil, and Mintie had sat for a long time, watching the slow, whirling drop of a wisp, remembering when she had watched her own mother do that, hearing her laugh at Mintie’s attempts to stagger up on little chubbed legs to chase them.
Her own mother. Mintie glanced at the bed and the rattle-breathing heap on it, who would never card another thing, nor laugh with Mintie again. Nor would any bairn of Mintie ever stagger on fat little legs, to be laughed at in turn and smile a rosebud smile back at her. She thought then of Will, of what might have been, of falling into him like a spell, of drinking the air from his lungs like the sweetest French wine.
Now she picked all that by the edge, holding it at arm’s length until she could find a safe enough place to rest it upon the earth and walk away forever.
She wept then, the tears squeezed out like fat apple pips, slow rolling on her cheeks like the lost drift of carded wool – then gulped, stopped, and dried her eyes, sniffing. Tears would not serve. Work would serve. That and her justice.
Later, washed clean of tears, had come the long burn, like the time she had found her da with a hole in him the size of a dinner plate, the size of a wee unformed bairn in a belly. Justice, she thought. Or revenge.
It did not matter which, to her or to Batty Coalhouse.
Chapter Fifteen
Hollows Tower
The next day
The Laird was eating porridge and smoked fish in the reeking dim of his hall, brooding on the fact that his wife was up in her bower, embroidering with a furious intensity and allowing only the two women culled from the ones sent away from Hollows.
He ate alone and was conscious that those coming and going around him did not linger and moved as if they walked on plover eggs. All save Leckie, of course, who knew he had more leeway than anyone else and took advantage. He had known the Laird since he was wee Jock, son of the arrogant, infamous Johnnie Armstrong. He knew the burden that had heaped on a wee boy’s shoulders and the crushing grief when the da was hanged by the king. No grace from a graceless face…
There had been other Armstrong deaths that day and since, at the hands of Grahams and Musgraves, who had been visited in turn by Armstrongs from Willieva and Langholm. All of it had forged a hot iron of hate in the boy who took on the mantle of Hollows – yet even Leckie had never seen the Laird’s Jock so intense with brooding as he was now over this Batty Coalhouse.
So far, Leckie was pleased to see, it had not warped him enough that he did something foolish – like burning th
e Grahams out of Netherby and starting a war within a war, or routing the Hendersons out of Powrieburn and bringing the wrath of that name, as well as their supporters, the Hepburns of Bothwell. It had been a sweaty moment when Armstrongs had burned the Musgraves out of Bewcastle this very year for a ten-year-old slight, but the nations were at war so no one had blinked an eye.
The Laird had not been able to resist a dagger swipe at old enemies the Scotts when the Armstrong Ride had gone out to force the moving of the royal babe, and Leckie saw a fester in that which might grow poisonous in years to come – but there was God’s hand yet in the Laird’s forbearance over Coalhouse.
So far. It was a constant alarm to Leckie that he could not be sure of this remaining unchanged, that the slow match that was Batty Coalhouse might burn down to something designed to make the Laird burst with a madness of anger.
The arrival of the peddler and his hooded companion made for unease then, even though the peddler had been expected and Leckie set to watch for him, among others.
Leckie was heading for the yett and had to pass through the hall, pass the Laird spooning porridge and fish into a beard that needed trimming; a mark of the times, he thought uneasily, when a man who usually prides himself on his appearance starts to let his barbering slide.
‘Who is it – Clym or the packman?’
Leckie hesitated.
‘The packman, though there is another with him. Not Clym.’
The Laird pushed his bowl away, wiped his mouth with a napkin and rose up, the rasp of his chair bringing the servitors quickly, more for the scramble to get surreptitiously at what he’d left in his bowl than any assistance.
Leckie obediently allowed the Laird to precede him across to the yett and the doorward, already squinting at the pair below. The peddler waved a greeting with as much enthusiasm as he could muster; he was known the length and breadth of the Debatable and left alone for his usefulness – the women saw to that – but still, arriving in such places as this could be dangerous if you put a polite foot wrong.
The other man moved little, simply stood there hunched and shivering with cold, the soft shroud of rain-mist dripping off the frayed edge of the loop of cloth he had covered his head with. They took in his ragged, stained clothes and the sack on his back; alarmingly, Leckie noted, it leaked watery red down his leg onto the ground and away in tiny runnels of pink thread. He took him for a poacher of fish and rabbit.
‘Needle Tam,’ the Laird announced. ‘Come up into the dry and warm. The women will bless your arrival, and once you have seen to me, you can see to them.’
Tam the Peddler nodded sagely, hefted his snail’s-home pack and started up the steps to the tower door. He had silk thread, good needles, ribbons, buttons, geegaws and much else besides – but the true wealth in Needle Tam’s pack was a crumpled, crinkling square of sealed envelope, carried secretly from the English Deputy Warden to the Laird of Hollows.
‘Who is your companion?’ the Laird asked curiously, peering at the man. Leckie gave a short, sucking gasp as the man swung his head to the sound of the voice, the soaked cloth band round his eyes revealing that he was blind. Despite it, despite the filth and the mad beard and the tangle of infested hair, Leckie knew the face. So did the Laird, whose voice went quiet and hard.
‘Dog Pyntle,’ he said, and the blind man jerked.
‘The Laird,’ he cried. ‘Is that yourself?’
‘Dog,’ the Laird replied, and the man suddenly fell to his knees and started to moan.
‘By God, Laird, he made me. He made me bring them and I could see nothing of it, but I heard, Laird, I heard. The screams and the chopping, Laird…’
Tam the Peddler was alarmed himself now and stepped back from the moaning Dog Pyntle, disowning him.
‘I met him on the road,’ he whined apologetically. ‘I could hardly leave him, blind and stumbling as he was, for Christian charity. But the sack bothered me, Laird, then as now, but he widnae let me look…’
Men spilled down the stairs at the Laird’s command and he came out himself to the top step, heedless of the rain dripping on him. The men took the sack from the grasp of Dog Pyntle and upended it.
The harvest of arms tumbled out like bloody kindling, so that Tam stepped back with a cry and Leckie had to shove a fist in his mouth at the sight. All left arms, he saw with horror, bloody stumps still leaking, cut off just above the elbow…
As a message it was as unsubtle as a blow to the head, Leckie thought. As unsubtle as a horse head on a pole. A message from a one-armed man, ramping up the vicious mean of this pointless feud – eight strong arms, culled from eight Armstrongs. Left arms, like the missing one on the man the Laird hated.
He waited, holding his breath at what the Laird might do now, and after a long pause broken only by the rasp of breathing, the Laird turned to Leckie.
‘Find out from Dog Pyntle where the rest of these men are and if any live yet,’ he said, and the harsh, quiet voice was as discomfiting as if it had been a raging shriek. ‘Then have Clym come to me the minute he arrives – the very minute, Leckie. I want to see him dripping puddles in front of me.’
He turned away and Leckie could not be sure if it was rain making the runnels down his cheeks.
Hollows Tower
The next day
Clym watched the brace of two-wheeled carts lurch up to the dule trees, the luckless Armstrongs and Bournes trailing after them faced with the task of untying the men and loading them.
Two were dead, one would die, and the rest, as Unhappy Anthone noted, ‘will ne’er play the fiddle again.’
No one laughed and not only because Anthone’s savage wryness was so familiar to them that it was little more than noise these days. Clym looked at these, his Bairns; they were bog-brown with ingrained dirt and weather, careless of clothing, careful with weapons and any armour they had, since life depended on it.
None of them had Names. Red Will’s Tam, Sore Jo, Corbie Mart – they had bynames, given for appearance or character, but not one had a Name, for they were all the worst of the worst, the broken men.
At some point, they had committed the one crime that the Borderers would not forget or forgive – they had sinned against their own and were now shunned by the grayne. Once they might have been Croziers or Bournes or Grahams, or Forsters and Hetheringtons from across the Divide, but now they were only Clym’s Bairns and that was the sole family they knew. They skulked in the worst wastes of the Debatable, trying to scratch a life and avoiding everyone unless they had advantage in it.
Clym had been an Armstrong once, but no Armstrong would give him even the loan of the title; not after he had killed his own da and ma and sisters while deep in the drink and quarrelsome. Clym had woken to the horror of it, but it was too late then and he had been forced to flee before the world came down on him.
It had turned his hair white, and that, with his round face and beaked nose, gave him the look of the hen-harrow, that pale merciless hunter of the moss. Clym, in the years between then and now, had gathered other broken men to him, and they called themselves his Bairns in a bitter parody of the family they’d all once had.
It was strange, then, for them to be riding openly up to Hollows and they did so cautiously, though Clym was reasonably confident that he had carefully avoided annoying the Laird of Hollows in all the Rides they had done – wee affairs, for oats and the odd cow and a bit of shine to spend in Mosspaul.
Reasonably. But you could never fathom the Laird of Hollows, for he was his father’s son after all.
So, with his men scowling filth into the enclosure of the barmkin, Clym trailed his moss-trooper reek of woodsmoke, leather and old death into the hall and stood, neither arrogant nor subservient, while the Laird slouched in his high seat and looked him over.
Christ, he was an ill-made scourge of a man, the Laird thought, taking in the monster dagg stuffed into his belt. Worn wood and old iron, it had a handle that ended in an axe blade, so that if you held it by the muzzle you ha
d two weapons for the price.
And that face, he thought, looks as if it had been set on fire and then put out with a shovel.
‘You know Batty Coalhouse,’ he said without greeting or preamble and saw Clym’s head come up, knew he had hooked the man as sure as a trout takes fly.
‘Aye,’ Clym answered, and the Laird tossed a leather bag across the table, so that it slid and chinked and then fell off the edge to the floor with a satisfying shunk of coin.
‘Find him. He is on Tinnis Hill, hiding like a wee rat. Find him, half kill him and bring the live half to me here.’
Clym pursed his lips, squinted, ran grime through his beard with his fingers, and then finally bent, picked up the purse and weighed it.
‘If I find these are coppernoses,’ he said without a smile, ‘I will be back to demand double.’
‘Speak to me like that one more time,’ the Laird said coldly, ‘and I will break your limbs and hurl you in the Hole.’
Now it was Clym who narrowed his eyes; the Hole was a great scar out of the rock Hollows stood on – the name came from it, for once the Tower had been named Hole House – and was where the quarried stone had come from. It was as deep as the Tower was high, steep-sided and treacherous.
‘Aye, so you say,’ he managed, though his throat was dry. ‘But you need me.’
The Laird said nothing, and Clym, with a last curl of lip around the silent, staring hall, turned and clacked out, aware of the disapproving scorn like a heat on his back.
Now Clym watched the Armstrong servitors struggle with the bodies and let his own sneer of triumphant scorn hold sway at them labouring while he watched. Hard labour too – dead weight and groaning wounded were lending little help. Clym had heard that a victim of an earlier affair was gasping and unlikely to ever recover from a viper bite at Hollows.
It was a fearsome tally on its own, never mind the others Clym had heard laid at Batty Coalhouse’s feet. And all for a dead horse and a man called Hutchie Elliott.