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.
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 thoughts 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.
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.
‘Who do you fear most, Leckie?’
His wife looked sourly at him.
‘We will find out,’ she said.
The physicker was in a scramble when the door was pounded. He was also in Ganny, and so near that point of whimpering release that he had started to babble about love and white marble, as he always did; the thunderous noise jerked him out of his trance and out of Ganny.
‘Christ, Christ – we are undone.’
‘You are undone,’ the boy declared viciously, and hauled up his hose. ‘Do yourself up – I will answer it.’
‘No, no,’ the physicker wailed, clawing his hose up and trying to find his fat breeches. ‘Wait, wait – oh God—’
His head was full of fire and hot irons, for the physicker was not a man of the medical – though he knew some aspects of it – but a priest from a dissolved priory far to the south. Father Ridley of St Mary Merton in Surrey had been looked on askance at the best of times, for his ‘unhealthy’ interest in cutting up perfectly good small animals before they reached the pot, ‘just to see how they worked’, and brewing up potions, ostensibly for use in treating the sick.
That would have been bad enough when the hordes fell on St Mary Merton with hard words, torches and sticks. But Father Ridley had another weakness, and Ganny was spirited away before the full wrath of the Suppression Act consigned them both to a pyre.
Now, at last, he was sure they had been found out, was trembling and trying to be brave when Ganny came back, his arms full of basket and his beautiful face full of frown.
‘Don’t,’ Father Ridley said automatically. He loved the beauty of Ganny, his Ganymede, and had run off with him when the boy was eight. Ganny could not remember another name now and three years had not yet ripened the delicate beauty into the harsh beard and sinew of youth that Father Ridley knew, sadly, would turn him to pastures new.
‘A babe,’ Ganny said in his pipe of accent, his voice full of wonder. ‘A man pushed it at me and babbled something about not wanting it, then hared off down the Shambles like a cat with a burning tail.’
Ridley blinked once or twice, stared at the basket, then back at Ganny as if the boy had performed some marvellous trick.
He looked so ludicrous, standing with the failing remains of his erection poking beneath the shirt, his hose puddled round his ankles, that Ganny laughed.
Snapped, Ridley darted to the basket, and the familiar babe gurgled at him, then started to wail.
‘Christ in Heaven, no, no,’ Ridley said and snatched the basket, darting for the door, half falling over his hose and realising what he was about to do. Appalled, he dropped the basket and the babe screamed. Ganny collected it, scowling blackly at Ridley.
‘Oh Christ, fuckpishshit,’ Ridley said, hauling up his hose and hopping. He would run back to the German and give him babe and a piece of his mind – by God, the man and his wife were leaving this day, mayhap they had already gone…
In a fever, he was struggling into his breeches, the babe wailing and screaming, when the thought struck him that the last thing he wanted to be seen doing was rushing through the streets with a babe in a basket. Especially one that was wailing – though that, mercifully, had ceased enough to let him think…
The wailing had ceased.
Ridley whirled to where Ganny, bouncing the creature gently in his arms, was feeding it from a contraption of bottle and gut nipple. He stared, open-mouthed, at this apparition.
‘She was only hungered,’ Ganny declared, then looked at the babe fondly. ‘Weren’t you, little ’un. Just hungered. Well, by God, you will think your ma has the biggest dugs in Christendom by the time you have sucked all this milk up.’
Ridley stared.
‘Where did you learn this?’ he demanded and Ganny scowled.
‘Don’t,’ Ridley pleaded. ‘It will leave a mark.’
‘I had four sisters and two brothers, all younger than me. Two were babes no older than this.’
And your ma was less of a Goodwife and more of a whore, Ridley recalled, while your da was a drunk – so the task would fall to you, even at that tender age.
He sat down suddenly, realising that it was all too late to go after the German and that somehow he and Ganny had been stuck with a baby. He looked at Ganny, cooing away, and knew the boy had been struck by the child; jealousy rose in him, even when he knew how foolish it was.
They would flee north where priests were less hunted. He wondered if he could get rid of the creature on the way without upsetting Ganny…