A Dish of Spurs

by Robert Low

  Always the same.

  Not this time. This time the nun, her face Mintie’s, was suddenly so close Batty could smell the cloves and nutmeg Mintie used in her hair while, incongruously, the flames that shrivelled her had no heat or substance to them at all.

  ‘Die for me,’ she said.

  Newark Castle, near Selkirk

  At the same time

  ‘It is my considered opinion,’ Wat Scott declared, ‘that every man needs a woman, to share the burden of murder, the guilt of victory and the melancholic phlegm of defeat.’

  He shifted his big beefy shoulders inside the casing of fine dark blue perse, slashed and brocaded in green; he stroked the grizzle of combed and trimmed beard that lay over his neat white-lace collar.

  ‘To dry the tears of shame,’ he went on in his growl of a voice. ‘To scent with delicacy the smell of blood on your hands. To show you God’s exquisite plan when all your slain rise up in dreams to challenge your very reason to exist.’

  Batty sat and listened, stone-faced.

  ‘I myself,’ Wat went on, ‘have recently gotten married on to a fine woman. My Janet is a helpmeet and all of the above what I have been saying, for I have fought in a wheen of affrays and seen my share of hempings, so my sleep can be troubled.’

  Wat Scott leaned forward a little, his brows an arrowhead of irritation.

  ‘But never has it been removed from me entire by the nocturnal shouts of another. Not even in any brothel.’

  He looked round hastily and added loudly: ‘Which I have never visited, only heard hearsay of.’

  ‘I am sorry for it,’ Batty replied wryly. ‘Sorrier still to have dreamed it.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Wat declared sourly. ‘But myself and Goodwife Janet are mightily puzzled by a burning nun and what Mintie Henderson of Powrieburn has to do with it. By God, the whole of Newark is. Nor does it make me consider your endeavour favourably. A man as hag-ridden as that, Master Coalhouse, is not filling me with confidence.’

  ‘I am sorry for it,’ Batty repeated, appalled at just how much had been revealed of his dreams and more shaken by the change of it than he cared to admit. He recovered himself and pretended to look round the hall of Newark to allow him time to chivvy his thoughts into a semblance of ranks.

  Newark was fresh to Wicked Wat, handed to him a month or two before and still being furbished properly by his equally new wife. There were dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight through the small windows and a general bustle and beating of old hangings; Newark, Batty thought, was only a floor higher than Powrieburn and a mere rickle of flagstones wider than Hollows, yet it held the name ‘castle’, while Hollows did not dare be anything more than a tower.

  Wicked Wat Scott of Branxholme and Buccleuch, however, was delighted with it, the more so since he had been in and out of wardings in Edinburgh, held at ‘the king’s pleasure’ and only released the year before last. As he had always argued, how could he be in the purse of the English when Branxholme was a sooty lair of scorchings still, ten years on from when Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had led the English to burn it?

  Now Scott was the darling of the Regent, a bastion against the English he had once been accused of being too close to and, once again, lording it over the Kers of Cessford. So much so, as Batty told him, he had taken his eye off the Armstrongs of Hollows and paid the price for it.

  ‘True enough,’ Wat agreed and poured good ale from a pitcher, lifting his feet obligingly while a woman with a broom attempted to sweep and curtsey apology at the same time. ‘You need eyes in your neck for this part of the world.’

  ‘You should have stayed married to Jinty Ker,’ Batty growled back daringly, and for a moment Wat scowled, then gave a mock shiver.

  ‘God forbid. But no man can ever claim I did not exert my upmost to keep the peace between that widdershins race and myself. Jinty Ker was left-handed, like all of them, but she was as contrary in everything else she did and said as well. As bad as her da, and being married on to her was as good as sharing a bed with Himself of Cessford. Divorcing her was the best thing I did.’

  He broke off, looked flustered for a moment, then added hastily: ‘Besides marrying Janet Beaton, that is.’

  The broom-woman swept away and Wat grinned at Batty.

  ‘That told in a hall is repeated in a solar,’ he said softly, tapping his nose. ‘Janet will know it by nightfall.’

  ‘The Kers of Cessford are no danger to you now,’ Batty said, swallowing the ale and wishing it was stronger. He was flustered and ruffled by the dreaming, the third time in a week. ‘The Laird o’ Hollows is. He is planning more against you, to prove to Fat Henry that he is worth the hire.’

  Wat knew it, and if truth was told aloud, would have been forced to admit he was more concerned than he let on.

  ‘You need not tell me about the Laird of Hollows,’ he declared, and riffled through the papers in front of him, lifting one.

  ‘Item,’ he read, ‘on the eighteenth, men of Armstrong and Bourne took out of Cleuchbrae, within a few miles of Dumfries, four horses.’

  He threw it down, picked up a fistful more.

  ‘Item – on the nineteenth, of same took from Drumhill forty beasts. Item, on the twentieth, of same took at East Waperburne, hurting five men in peril of their lives in pursuit, twenty-four oxen and sixty sheep. Within half a mile of Branxholme.’

  He flung the lists down.

  ‘A hundred sheep and mares, more in oxen and kine, and twenty folk hurt,’ he growled. ‘All done by Armstrongs and Bournes from both sides of the Divide, and away, free as you please with their spoil – my beasts. And me not able to do a thing about it.’

  ‘And all in a time when no Rides are usual,’ Batty pointed out, impressed – as he always was – with the magic that allowed folk to put memory on paper. ‘Still, we know the cause of it, the ruse that led to the wee Queen’s kidnap.’

  Wat shot him a look.

  ‘Still no word on that, then?’

  Batty shook his head and Wat closed one reflective eye.

  ‘I hear you played a part in it.’

  Batty knew what the Warden was at and smiled grimly.

  ‘In the rescue. I do not know where the bairn is now. We were careless, I admit, but not treacherous, my lord.’

  ‘Aye, well – still lost, all the same. The Regent is convinced Fat Henry has her and is biding his time before revealing it.’

  ‘Better that than the wee lass is away with the Egyptianis, brought up as thieving wee besom,’ Batty pointed out. ‘Or found out and left in a panic on the moss for the foxes.’

  Wicked Wat crossed himself.

  ‘Heaven forfend – still, with the entire country scouring every brake and bush, that will reveal itself fairly soon.’

  It had to, Wat thought, for a country with no wee queen was a nation in turmoil. You would not need a Regent, you would need a ruler – and, if it became known that wee baby Mary was dead or gone for good, then all the factions would draw apart and start snarling about their rights. With King Henry at the door, grinning out of his fat face and priming his big guns with Hollows-made powder, offering help and money to all of the factions while attaching their strings.

  ‘The best man for the task of finding her is now caged at Hollows,’ Batty said sternly. ‘A Land Sergeant of Liddesdale. In your March, my lord. Bad enough the Laird spoils you blind without thumbing his neb at your station as well.’

  ‘By God, we will see,’ Wat scowled, the memory of his lifted beasts and ravaged households scouring the comfort from him.

  Batty rubbed his pouched and prickled eyes. ‘I can deliver the Laird of Hollows,’ he went on. ‘But I will need you and your men at his door. Perjink and proper Warden’s men.’

  ‘If there was a chance of knocking down Hollows I would be there,’ Wat declared. ‘With a thousand lances. None of it will do the least good if Hollows is barred, for two men and a three-legged pup could hold it against twice a thousand. But get me in and I
will be there, with Bill and band.’

  And a blaze of torches for burning that mill, if he could get close enough…

  Batty sat for a while, brooding on the dream. Then he stirred himself.

  ‘Hollows will be open to you and you will not need a thousand lances. Just the Warden’s garrison. At dawn on Lady Day.’

  ‘Lady Day? I had plans for Lady Day eve, involving jigging and wine and a deal of meat.’

  ‘You and everybody else,’ Batty replied. ‘Including Hollows. They are holding a Feast of Fools on the eve of it.’

  Wat laughed and slapped his knee.

  ‘And you plan to make fools of them?’

  He shook his shaggy head with amused admiration and his massive shoulders trembled with amusement.

  ‘By God, Batty, you have iron in you and a neck of brass to match it. I will go light on the celebrating then and take a wee Lady Day ride out to Hollows, in company with a hunting party of a few score close friends. If what you say turns true, then I am in your debt.’

  He raised his pewter mug, and Batty, after a pause, clanked his own against it, hearing it like a knell sealing the matter. The flame is at the fuse, he thought, and there is no going back from it now.

  ‘How d’you plan on doing it?’ Wat asked. Batty had no intention of telling him and simply shrugged, his one good shoulder lifting higher than the other.

  ‘Loudly,’ he said.

  Chapter Nineteeen

  Hollows Tower

  Lady Day eve (24 March)

  The day had been benisoned with sunshine, turning the land tawny, streaking it with green as new life struggled through the leached winter grasses. The last leprous patches of snow had gone and the Esk danced and sparkled.

  Batty lay up in trees that were still skeletal and clawed but already budded to bursting. He lay there like a laired fox, watching while the day slid down from sun-warm to chill, watching the water in the river jig for the joy of not being ice, watching the slow progress of Bella driving more shod geese up to Hollows for the night’s Feast of Fools.

  He wondered how Agnes was faring after her encounter with Mintie. He wondered how Mintie was faring and if she would contrive another way to exit the world. If she was determined enough, he thought, a length of rope and an undercroft beam would do, but the long trip to the Solway and the business of the bairn of stones smacked of contrivance; if she had wanted the balm of oblivion, Batty thought, rope and beam were handier and quicker.

  So he was sure it had been a desperate mummer’s play for his benefit. She had invested her future in himself and had let him know it – at no small risk to herself, mind you; if he had been an inch shorter in the arm, a second later in the splashing dash to her, or a quim-hair less in strength, she would have slipped away whether she meant it or not.

  There was, of course, just enough dark in her for that risk not to have mattered much. Batty was trying not to feel the weight of all that, and failing.

  That will account for the dreams, he thought to himself. She has shaken me like a dog with a rat and all my sins are burst from the prison I fastened them in – Hans on the wheel, the burning nun I should have helped, the slaughter of Florence and the abandonment of it at the last. I should have taken up Michelangelo’s offer, so that I would not be here, at this moment, about to do what I must.

  Then he sighed. Hey-ho, you can only play the cards you are dealt, in life as in Primero.

  So he watched the men moving to and fro, slow and deliberate in their movements, barrowing loads of saltpetre, hoisting loads of charcoal. In an outbuilding, far removed from the mill itself, yellowed alchemists forged sulphur out of fool’s gold. The millwheel turned and the sound of grinding and shrieking told where the machinery whirled.

  Wooden, of course, every toothed wheel and spoke and kept thickly greased but squealing like an ox-cart axle as they ground and sieved and spun.

  There were equally noisy carts, lumbering up with loads of charcoal probably made from alder – nothing but the best for the Hollows powder mill, Batty thought. Others reeked with the produce of every privy for miles, carefully mixed with wood ash and mortar, then placed in piles ranked in order of age, the older having more of the vital saltpetre they needed. Everyone was encouraged to water them with their piss; they leached evil brown stains, spilling in sluggish runnels down to the Esk.

  Then there were the kegs, no more than four or five a time, loaded onto wee ponies and led out south. To Carlisle, Batty thought, and on to Fat Henry’s depots; he would pay well for good corned gunpowder, and it was small wonder the Laird of Hollows could afford to build his tower in stone.

  He watched the shuffling, careful pairs who brought out the thick cakes, moving as if underwater. The charcoal and sulphur had been pulverised by the huge flat-edged millstones, the resulting mixture sieved to remove any impurities – anything that might cause a spark – and then saltpetre added and the whole mixed into ‘wetten dough’, a damp cake.

  That went to the press for ‘coming’ – squeezing smaller – then was dusted and black-leaded to keep out the damp. Finally the cake, thirty or so Scots pounds of Hell waiting to happen, was taken out to the underground magazine and stored by these shuffling, cautious pairs.

  Even the last dusting was reused, and working in the mill was a hard job, even when the turning wheel handled the heaviest parts of it. The only advantage to the work was that they only had to do it from light until it was too dark to see, for no lantern or, God forbid, torch was ever used.

  Twice in the day a solemn party came out of the mill carrying the proving mortar, no bigger than a decent goblet, but black and heavy iron. They moved far enough away not to be a danger, then went through the motions of testing the batch – the bang scared up a protest of birds, the fist-sized smooth stone they shot sailed satisfyingly far, within acceptable range for the weight of powder.

  Batty also watched the little knots of armed riders – Hollows men – out to collect the year-end black rents, extorting money from little steadings and holdings. He counted twenty or more out, knowing they would be gone all the next day and grumbling at missing the Feast of Fools. That left no more, Batty reckoned, than a dozen fighting men at Hollows, who would be working up a rare thirst at the promise of the coming revels.

  Still, drunk or sober, there would be enough of them to defend the place if the doors were barred and the walls stood.

  Batty watched the mill workers on into the dusk, until they stopped. The talk went up a level when they were free of labour and concentration. They fell to chaffering one another as much with relief at having got through another day as with the promise of a celebration, however small and mean, to bring the year round to anno domini 1543.

  Better yet, tomorrow was a day free from work that not even the hardest taskmaster in the most lawless part of God’s world would dare flout for the ill-feeling it would foment. They were happy and off to see wife and bairns, or women and drink.

  The mill workers went off in twos and threes, pausing to wish the guards well as they lit their brazier on the bridge, only entrance to the mill itself and far enough away that no spark would carry. In the mill, Batty thought, would be the luckless man left to shiver in the cold dark, with only a cudgel for a weapon, there to keep out the casual thief or ragged-arsed stranger looking for shelter in a place seemingly abandoned.

  Batty waited until the landscape silvered and the river turned to a plunge of moonshine. To his left, the bridge guards flitted shadows back and forth on the brazier; there were two only, with pikes and back and breasts, and helmets, all to show how important they were. To the right, Hollows loomed briefly against the dying light, a black spike glazed with the slight lambent light from its few high windows.

  On the half-finished roof was another guard that Batty had seen in daylight, right next to the unlit beacon brazier and within taunt of the caged prisoner who hung there.

  The cage hung out across the new crow-stepped gable, swinging to and fro and perilously c
lose to the lattice of scaffolding erected for new work to begin. Too early and cold yet, Batty thought, for mortaring stone in place of that timber.

  He squinted up at the dark tower. The banded cylinder had been empty for all the day and Batty wondered if Will had died. He thought not, in the end, because the cage was still there, waiting for an occupant. It was probable that the Laird had taken Will inside, if only to feed and warm him, treat the wounds he had; the Land Sergeant had to be kept alive, after all, for his purpose to be fulfilled.

  He will be in the cage tonight, Batty thought, certes. Hung like a decorating bauble on the Hollows’ Feast of Fools.

  Eventually, as a dog fox yelped love to the dark, he moved slowly, stretching the stiff out of him. He was about to leave cover when he heard the muffled clap and clop of hooves and froze on the spot.

  Three figures, dark and swaddled, ambled nags up to the bridge, spoke briefly with the guards. One of the riders was a woman and made the guards laugh; then the horsemen moved on into the dark, heading down to Andrascroft.

  Batty thought for a fleeting instant that one of the riders was Bet’s Annie, and wondered on that for a while; then he shook it from him and, lumbering like a soft-padded bear, went down to the river and the dark powder mill.

  He went across the Esk, the cold of it biting like a dog’s jaw. The water was not deep, but the thaw had spated it and he had to move slowly and carefully, feeling his way across the jumbled rocks of the bed.

  Twice he slipped and managed – just – not to soak himself, which would have been a disaster to the slow match he had coiled round him. Still, he crawled out the far side cursing silently and beginning to shiver; he would suffer for this in days to come, with bone-deep aches and probably an ague and blocked nose.

  If he had days to come.

  The mill was dark, the wheel locked and still with the water gurring soft and creaming round it; he moved swiftly and silently to the walls, rolling like a sailor, keeping an eye on the men at the bridge. The night had enough winter memory in it to keep folk close to the flames, and Batty was happy with that – he did not want them wandering up to find out how the watchman fared.