by Robert Low
‘How is the younger Wharton?’ he asked and there was more amusement than concern in his voice.
‘Officially, he is hale and hearty,’ Patten replied blandly.
‘Privily?’
Patten’s face remained slate blank, then he cleared his throat.
‘He is festering with pox, his humours are unbalanced and, according to the old woman who tends him, he wakes night after night, screaming about a one-armed man and calling for Lord Otley to leave him be.’
‘Christ betimes,’ the Laird said in wonder. ‘That’s hagged, without a doubt. I would look to the auld beldame; check beneath her cot, Patten, and you will find a wee homunculus slathered with blood and young Tom’s privy hair.’
His voice was light and laughing, and Patten sighed, seeing the way of it and what he would have to do.
‘Young Tom’s father does not think so,’ he said, throwing some iron into his voice. ‘Sir Thomas believes that the spell in it is simply the continued presence of this Batty Coalhouse in the world. So does Henry, his elder brother.’
He paused a moment to let the words seep through the sodden head that was the Laird, saw the eyes narrow and realised that at last he had the man’s full attention, drink-fogged though it might be.
‘Otherwise,’ he added, stroking the hat feather as if it was the skin of an expensive woman, ‘Sir Thomas may feel constrained to inform the king that the money he pays the Laird of Hollows is returning little reward. He may even feel constrained to ask permission of the king to re-examine the entire construct of Hollows Tower, lying as it does in an area which permits no permanent structures—’
The movement was swift, so swift that Patten barely had time for a yelp before the Laird’s hand closed on his own, the pair crushing the hat feather.
‘Constrained, is it?’
The voice was hoarse and low, and Patten felt the terrible crushing strength of the fist, felt his bones grate, and whined, high as a dog.
‘I will give you constrained. You and all your bloody Whartons—’
‘Husband.’
The voice slashed him like a slap and he blinked, then looked up into the sharp face, the needle stare; his hand relaxed and Patten drew his own out of the cave of it, nursing it and breathing heavy with the effort of not weeping. The feather drooped, broken and draggled as a drunken bawd.
‘Wife,’ the Laird offered her with a grudging nod.
‘I have prepared hospitality for Master Patten,’ the Lady said, as if nothing had transpired at all, as if they were all waxing philosophical or mathematical, like perjink proper folk of breeding in a fine hall. Discussing physiognomy, or King Henry’s forthcoming nuptials with the Parr woman.
Patten managed a smile and massaged his hand; he did not look at the Laird at all when he spoke.
‘I will, if I may, avail myself of it. I feel fatigued after my journey and have not quite recovered from a touch of ague I contracted at the Porte last year. During negotiations with the Ottomans.’
‘Indeed,’ the Lady said and ushered him, smiling, into the care of Grets, whose thick-woolled body, fat, chap-cheeked bannock of a face and waddling walk did nothing at all for Patten’s mood.
But it ensured that, at least this time, there would be no unwilling upending and tupping of women in Hollows, the Lady thought. Though that horse had already bolted.
‘Are you determined to ruin us?’ she said, low and hissing hard, once Patten had gone. The Laird shifted, angry and uncomfortable.
‘Threatened me,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody wee clerk – the Porte, indeed. As if he had had the ear of the sultan himself – and even if he had, what good did he do? The Ottomans signed a treaty with the French against the Emperor and Fat Henry. Bloody wee lowborn parish clerk from Billingsgate. His da is a clothworker, in the name of Christ…’
She did not point out that he was no noble-born himself, just Johnnie Armstrong, son of Johnnie Armstrong, and all the blackmeal rents paid to the hereditary head of the Armstrongs in the Debatable was what gave him his power. That and living where the only law was March law and that depended on strength; she did not like the thought that her husband’s was failing, for all his breadth of shoulder.
‘You need to be better tempered with Master Patten,’ she said, keeping her voice low and without rancour, though the effort was trembling her. ‘He is secretary to the Earl of Arundel, who has lent him to Wharton. Arundel is the closest King Henry Tudor has to a friend he can trust, so you need to consider that, my good lord. One wrong word will pass down that chain, and if Henry Tudor turns his face from you, then all the enemies you have made over the botched business of the wee Queen will come down on our heads here.’
He bridled and stared bitterly back at her.
‘And who advised me to that?’ he declared sourly. ‘Who thought it was a perjink wee plan to kidnap a Queen?’
She waved one dismissive, irritated hand.
‘The politics of it are sound – marry Scotland to England and end the war. No one is hurt and everyone gets to drink wine and eat sweetmeats at a wedding. Once done, the bairn is the next Queen of England and Scotland both when Fat Henry dies and his wee Prince Edward takes the crown. Fat Henry would have thanked us and wee Mary would have thanked us twice when she was grown.’
She shot him a stern look, like a mother at a child caught in a larder with jam round his mouth.
‘Now no-one has thanks for us at all – and the babe remains a lost mystery. If you had not involved yourself with Batty Coalhouse…’
‘Aye, well – the war you sought to avoid is coming, for certes,’ he spat back. ‘And it will be harder than ever.’
‘Because of you and Batty Coalhouse,’ she said, fighting to keep her rise out of her voice. ‘Because of him and your mishandling—’
‘Enough!’
The roar came with a slap of his hand on the table, so that the jug and cups bounced; folk stopped dead, paused for a moment, then slowly, careful, went back to what they were doing.
The Lady looked at him, at this golden lord she had once married, powerful and potent and moneyed. He looked back at her from pouched eyes, sullen as embers, set in thread-veined cheeks. His mouth was wet and slack and he did not look potent – though the fault could be with herself.
For a moment she felt a sharp blade of anger scar through the core of her at Mintie, at her ability to fall into a bairn from a single encounter, at her ruthless desire to rid herself of it. She dared sin on her soul for the thought – I would have stood the rape of it, for the child. Though it is too late. Too late for child, for all the gold of my days is spent…
Her husband, muttering and scowling, jerked her back to the bleak now.
‘Here’s you saying leave him be,’ he was growling, standing now and pacing, swinging his arms. ‘Here’s a wee clerk frae Billingsgate threatening me with the wrath of Fat Henry if I leave him be. Here’s you telling me to listen to the wee clerk from Billingsgate – and yet leave Batty Coalhouse be at the same time.’
He spat the name as if it was soiled fruit and saw the admittance of the insoluble problem of it in his wife’s eyes, grabbed at it in triumph.
‘You chap and chop, wife. It is a circle that will not be squared is Batty Coalhouse, and so—’
‘I can get you Batty Coalhouse.’
The voice swung both their heads to where Mattie of the Whithaugh stood, stern and solid as a weathered fence post; beside him, Sorley twisted his hat back and forth in his hands.
‘How so, Mattie Armstrong?’
‘You have tried hunting him and failed,’ Mattie said. ‘Now let him come to you. Find something – or someone – he values and flush him from his hidey-hole.’
‘If you dare lay a hand on the head of Mintie Henderson, Johnnie Armstrong of Hollows, you will rue the day you married me.’
Her voice was sharp and grating and the Laird winced. I already rue the day, he thought.
‘Not her, begging your ladyship’s pardon,’ Mattie
said, and indicated Sorley, who bobbed something halfway between a bow and curtsey. ‘I set my boy here to watch Powrieburn for Batty, for I owe him blood, as you know. Instead, there is another flitting back and forth to that place. Wooing Mintie, I am thinking.’
‘Will Elliot,’ Sorley blurted, and the Lady was not surprised, even if her eyes widened. He will get poor commons from her now, she thought, unless the lass has softened in recent times.
‘Elliot?’ the Laird repeated, then laughed from the side of his face. ‘There is fitting. Use one to repair the damage caused by one.’
‘He is Land Sergeant at Hermitage,’ the Lady added warningly. ‘Have we not annoyed the powers on this side of the Border enough?’
‘He will not be Land Sergeant for long,’ Mattie said slyly. ‘I hear Wicked Wat holds the writ for the Keeper’s task. Unlikely he will keep Will Elliot on in his job.’
He paused and shrugged, seeing the effect Wicked Wat Scott’s name had.
‘Wat Scott will not have the Keeper’s title for long,’ he added, ‘but long enough to do your good self harm, I am thinking. Best you rid yourself of Coalhouse now, before you have to bend all your thoughts on Wicked Wat.’
‘Will Elliot is still the Land Sergeant,’ the Lady argued, and Mattie cocked a sly head.
‘No matter who sits in Hermitage, they will not want Will Elliot as Land Sergeant. A man who has betrayed his Keeper, no matter the cause? No man will trust him from now.’
Right enough, the Laird thought. Every man of power dipped his beak a little. Some did it a lot and there was money to be made in black rents and tithes, which was why even the likes of a Land Sergeant’s position was sought after and could be bought.
The upkeep of Wardens was poorly provided in part because, that way, kings knew some of the black rents went on useful purpose – but everybody had to fall in with it, and if you could not trust your closest deputy…
‘What makes you think Batty will come for Will?’
Mattie smiled like a weasel sensing rabbit.
‘Will is sweet on Mintie and she has not sent him on his way. Batty will do anything Mintie asks, it appears.’
The Laird thought it over. He wanted to ask his wife if this seemed likely, if Mintie held such a power of the pair, but he did not want to speak to her at all, so in the end he nodded.
‘Get me Will Elliot,’ he said, and then, conscious of his wife’s whetted iron stare, added: ‘Gently.’
The Lady said nothing, merely watched as her husband, pointedly ignoring her, went off into a huddle with Leckie regarding what Patten had come for – apart from finding the missing Queen of Scots.
Wharton’s plan to further Fat Henry’s cause was to set the Names to their old feuds. The Armstrongs were being paid to put the Scotts and Kers to spoil; Croziers and Storeys from England would join in. The whole Border was about to flare into unholy fire and sword.
It would only be a lesser imp to the full Satan set for the spring, when the English would come in force. This was only Wharton being careful with his master’s money and knowing the nature of the Borders men – he would not take fulsome assurances from the likes of Johnnie Armstrong, Laird of Hollows Tower, but set him to make some ‘annoyance’ among his neighbours, to prove his worth and mettle.
So Hollows would have to strike and at the English-hating Scotts.
She hated Hollows. The old tower had been torn down by the English almost two decades since, and this new one, moved to a better spot, had originally been spacious and wooden.
Now Johnnie wanted it built in stone, but that was hard to get, even plundered from his father’s original, and so it had been built tighter, cramping everyone together. Most of the servants and retinue lived round it, clustered inside the barmkin wall like cooped chickens, for there was scarce room for Laird and Lady in the tower itself.
She looked round it and saw the reality of her dreams, writ in ashlar and flagstones – something supposedly fine and grand, made mean by circumstance. There was even a strange powrie stone being used as the lintel, which no one cared for; that and the reeking chimney and stale must of the cold-ruined mortar, already rotted and crumbling, was as good a metaphor for Hollows as any wee poet could devise.
And for her life, she thought, seeing men lever the new doorway slab over the pit there. By tradition, a bitter enemy was buried underneath it, so that walking across him every day was a constant revenge and a good omen.
The Lady thought she knew who her husband had planned for it.
Powrieburn
At the same time
He must have come in the night and asked the question of her, though how Batty had heard, out there on the cold-swept moor, that there might be doubt left in Mintie was a mystery in itself.
But Corbie was one of his names, Will remembered. The crow that no one notices, sitting in a twisted tree and watching, watching…
He stood with Bet’s Annie, who was prim as a pursed lip in partlet, kertch and apron. Mintie, arms wrapped round herself under a riding cloak, peered from the hood of it and only the smoke of her breath betrayed her at all.
‘It is clear enough,’ Bet’s Annie said, looking at the scrawl on the worn white of the feed store wall. ‘Though how we are to answer it is another matter entire.’
The charcoal scrawl taunted them, a foot-high gibbet from which hung a stick man with a wide, toothed smile. Not hard to work out who it was meant to be, or what it asked – but answering it was not as hard as Bet’s Annie made out.
‘Strike through it,’ Will advised sternly. ‘That’s message enough.’
‘If he can see it, others will as well,’ Bet’s Annie responded, hitching up her bosom and wishing she had not had to point herself into the bones of the corslet, which seemed restraining more and more these days. I almost wish it was me bairned, she thought mournfully, for I know it is too much beef from too many licks at the honey spoon and that will not be shifted in nine months.
The thought made her guilty, made her look at Mintie and see a briefness of whey face; the voice, when it came, was firm.
‘He will come and they will not see him.’
No one needed to know the ‘they’ she spoke of; once or twice Bet’s Annie had seen a rider, Will had spotted a man heading on foot to his tethered horse, and even Mintie had seen someone, claiming it to be Sorley Armstrong from Whithaugh.
No matter the who, the why was clear – they would spy out Powrieburn in the hope that Batty would crawl back to it, cold and stiff and done up with hunger and thirst, him and his mount both. Then they would come for him – not to take him while he was inside, but to lie in wait and grab him when he left, sluggish with warmth and a full belly and a bag of fresh provisions.
Will had felt the eyes, making his skin goose up more than the snell wind off the moor. He had felt it again that day and now followed the women back to the house, muttering about staying a while, just to see.
None of the women were fooled, all the same, not even Mintie’s ma, who struggled to rise or even make sense of the day now. Will moon-calfed after Mintie, and Bet’s Annie, Jinet and Megs felt as much sorrow as laughter for him and his desire to please.
Mintie herself was aware of it, but the world still seemed like something seen from behind a veil, where wind and light and birdsong all seemed somehow muted, a land from which all colour had been leached.
She saw his wooing and wanted to tell him not to, that it was no use, that this fruit was rotted and spoiled and the seed fallen on stony ground.
Not only that, she was sure the missing part of her, the part ripped out with Hutchie’s, had left that ground more than stony.
It had left it barren.
Riders came not long after and Bet’s Annie saw them first. She was taking beasts out to the field for a taste of clean air and a lick of what sun there might be, for locking them up in the dark undercroft of Powrieburn did them no good.
She levered the feed off her shoulder and stood while the beasts clust
ered, shouldering one another to snatch at mouthfuls, for there was only mud and browned grass in their field. She unfastened the cord and shook it free, raised her head and saw the men, moving steady and slow, picking a way through the tarns and tussocks.
For a moment she was paralysed with fear – then she recognised one of them and the relief almost dropped her to the ground. By God, she thought, Powrieburn in winter was a time when no one came; now the place is like a high road in Edinburgh.
She bobbed a polite curtsey all the same, for the one she knew was a man she had been expecting to arrive.
Ower-The-Moss Hob Henderson was short and squat, with eyes that were familiar to anyone who lived in the Borders – wary and distrustful – and what skin could be seen beyond the beard of his face was flushed and peeling from some longstanding disease.
‘Bet’s Annie,’ he acknowledged and jerked his head at the other two, without taking his eyes off her. ‘This is my middle laddie, Hew. And Agnes’s Eck of Saughtree.’
The middle laddie gave her a grin, and despite herself Bet’s Annie was pleased with it, for he was a good looker and dressed in his Sunday best – a moss-green doublet slashed to show the corn yellow beneath and a wee blue cape and matching bonnet. The other might have been handsome, save that all his front teeth had gone, leaving monster yellowed wolf fangs on either side of his smile.
‘Is the Mistress well?’
‘Mintie or her ma?’ Bet’s Annie replied sharply, for she had an idea why the chief of the Hendersons in Upper Liddesdale had ridden out from Hobsgill. It had taken him long enough to stir his arse, she thought, and Mintie would not like it.
His shaggy eyebrows went up at her presumption.
‘Mintie’s mother. I hear she is taken to her bed. I hear also that Mintie is… with condition.’
With condition – there was a neat ride round the harsh fact, Bet’s Annie thought, and her scowl showed something of it in her face. Hob did not care for it, nor for all the comings and goings he had seen around Powrieburn. He had come to put it right.
He said so and Bet’s Annie glowered at him, her cheeks flushing.