The courtyard was the same, without the bodies nor the blood, and the rain lisped down from a pewter sky as cold as a witch’s tit. The earth was a manged dog, leprous and mottled with mud and patched snow, the trees clumped and bare as poor hair; along the gills and burns the reeds whispered, and the willows clacked bare branches like wry applause.
The bastel door had been patched, Batty saw, though it would need replacing in full and by more expert hands if it was to resist another battering. The rooks were the same as before, rising and smoking through the damp air, rasping away.
No dog, he saw and felt sadness for the loss. It was not the only one and Batty wondered if a month would have balmed her much.
Bet’s Annie came out, all shawl and folded-arm grim. Her nod was welcoming but lacked smile; men are not liked in Powrieburn now, Batty thought, and his heart sank. Not balmed at all, then…
‘She is fetching fodder,’ she said, nodding towards the store and then hesitated as Batty levered himself off the horse; she took the reins with a sudden gesture, as if ashamed of her previous lack of smile.
‘Be easy with her,’ she said, leading Batty’s horse into the comfort of the undercroft; later Batty would go in and murmur to the Saul, but for now…
For now there was Mintie and her summons. Batty did not think she wanted the borrowed horse back so badly, or to insist the Saul be removed from eating Powrieburn’s winter feed.
The store was solid drystone capped with a thatched roof weighted with rope and flat, heavy rings of stone. Inside, it smelled of summer, and Batty stilled in the dim of it, to allow his eyes to catch up and just to breathe it in.
Meadow hay, he thought, with wildflowers and clover in it, cut from a field that had never seen a plough. It was a marvel to him, thrawn cynic that he was, that it was still here at all, that the grizzled, dark-souled reivers could smoke folk from a house like shelling crabs, slaughter them, steal all the livestock they possessed, and all the goods they could lay hands on – and yet not burn winter feed.
For the loss of winter feed was sure death to beasts, and beasts was what everyone depended on. What everyone stole from each other.
Mintie, in the dark recesses of the place, heard him and felt a rise of panic which she quelled savagely. It had been recent, her return to the world, and she knew the day and hour when she had woken to the urgency to tend to Powrieburn, unveiled as if from some dream. Yet her new resolve wavered in the face of Batty, that seamed, bearded face; smiling or not, it was a man.
‘Mintie,’ he said with a nod, and she speared the fork into the hay and then stopped to push a stray wisp of hair back under her kertch, wondering what to say, where to begin…
‘Master Coalhouse,’ she said. ‘You went without your five pounds English.’
‘Hardly earned,’ he replied levelly. ‘Since the Fyrebrande is still in the Laird’s stable and…’
He stopped, not wanting to mention Hutchie Elliott, but the omission was loud as a shout.
Mintie felt the blood thunder up in her ears, a rush of sound like pouring water. Suddenly she was back in Hollows, feeling him, feeling the pain of him, seeing the pewter medallion swinging back and forth, back and forth…
The pain. She had not felt it then, so why now? Was it a memory she had buried? A memory of a memory? A fable – had there been pain at all? Had it been, God forbid, a pleasure for her? That was the only way you could get a child, she had been told. If you fetched off. She knew the feeling, had experienced it the first time riding bareback on Jaunty in the blaze of a summer sun pouring on her skin like honey. She had felt it since, using her sinful fingers. She knew the difference – had she felt that at Hollows and buried it?
Batty’s hand touched her shoulder, that old reassuring gesture – but she twisted away from it and stepped back, so that it fell limply between them. The sadness in his face then made her ashamed, want to explain.
‘I didn’t…’ she began and then stopped. Didn’t what – fight hard enough? She had not fought at all, she had grovelled and begged.
‘I am not offended,’ he lied, and she blinked back into his concerned face.
‘Lose it,’ he said suddenly, urgently. ‘Lose it or he will have his way with you every day for the rest of your life, Mintie. Put it behind you and get back into your life—’
‘I am with child.’
The words clattered out like china falling on cobbles. There was silence, broken only by their breathing, the smoke of it mingling and vanishing.
‘Is that why you called me?’
She was surprised; he had not asked – as everyone else had asked – if she was sure. She was sure, as sure as when she felt any other black humour descend on her, from winter snotters to summer chills. Something dark was in her and she was sick with it.
He saw it in her face, waited for her answer.
‘The road is dangerous alone, I am told, so you must take me to the Solway Coast,’ she said, tilting a defiant chin, an echo of the old Mintie returned enough to make his heart glad even as the request settled coldly in him like sea haar.
‘To where?’ he asked, though he knew most of it already.
‘There is a woman there, near Graitna…’
Her voice fell away, and he looked at her until she dropped her eyes. He remembered other times, when women in the camps had come to his ma with similar requests. He remembered what they had looked like after, all drawn and sunken-eyed and sick; one, he knew, had gone mad and hanged herself, the loss being too much to bear. More than one had died of fevers afterwards.
He said as much, harsh as a metal file, and watched her flinch, then right herself and come back on the same gait.
‘Will you go with me?’
Her voice was defiant, filled with the implication that she would go anyway, but she had called him all the way here from Berwick, him in particular, and not just because of the protection he would offer on such a journey.
Will Elliot would have done it, he knew. He had met Will only a week ago, found him sitting in Berwick’s Old Brig Tavern one day when he had lurched in to fill his one fist with more drink, as he had done since the day he had quit Powrieburn and the whole festering boil of Liddesdale.
The aftermath of everything had seemed unreal, a calm as sudden as the storms that had swept everyone. Will had arrived back empty-handed, the trail of babe and Egyptianis gone cold. The Regent had not been happy, but had decided on silence, decided to wait for the inevitable haughty announcement from Fat Henry that wee Queen Mary was in his hands and about to be wed to his Prince Edward and they could like it or lump it.
Nothing had come; and even allowing for delays and deliberations, the time was stretching to where the Regent was beginning to wonder – and the fretting mother, Dowager Queen Mary of Guise, was growing less inclined to be politically patient and more inclined to start howling to her French relations about kidnap, murder and the ineptitude of Scotland’s nobility.
Will had suffered a lot of that, passed down from on high. He had been glad to escape from under it, if only into the scowl of Batty Coalhouse.
‘What news, then?’ Batty had asked heavily, after a suitable ritual of buying and tasting in a quiet corner. The Old Brig Tavern was a favourite with the drovers, an evil-smelling bunch of hard drinkers reeking of woodsmoke and wildness – yet carved above the fireplace were the words ‘Wisdom and science which are pure by kind, Should not be writ in books but in mind’, and that hint of fineness in a place like the Old Brig gave Batty pleasure.
‘The Fair Earl is fled,’ Will reported laconically. ‘Only to Bothwell, mind, where he is trying to avoid being looked at too closely by the Regent and the Auld Queen.’
Batty merely nodded as if he had known that. Hepburn, Keeper of Liddesdale and Earl of Bothwell, had always been a byword for treachery. ‘Fair Earl’ had been given to him for his looks, all golden and handsome, though they had faded ever since he had been imprisoned for two years back in 1529 for ‘harbouring robbers’. He was hot for Fat Henry – or his money, at least – which did not prevent him being the scourge of Reformist preachers, for he was a fierce Catholic.
He was also a cunning political and knew when to lower his gaze and his head.
‘Which leaves Hermitage and Liddesdale in your charge,’ Batty noted shrewdly, and Will shook his head moodily.
‘Scarcely. Maxwell is in the Regent’s bad books as another of Fat Henry’s friends, so he isn’t permitted in Hermitage lest he fortifies it for himself. Scott of Buccleuch may get it, but not yet. So it is left to me for now.’
‘I would have thought you would relish this,’ Batty said, squinting at him. ‘A rise in station, no less.’
‘Until they appoint another,’ Will answered shortly. ‘Wicked Wat Scott of Buccleuch, no doubt – the Scotts are growling for it, so that they can be all legal when they visit revenge on the Armstrongs for what the Hollows Laird did to them.’
Batty had heard that the Armstrong Ride to scare the court into moving the bairn – and allowing it to be more easily stolen – had fallen hardest on the Scotts. The Laird of Hollows, unable to pass up the chance to swipe at old enemies, had burned a deal of them out and stolen horses and cattle. Yet the reiving in that was an old tale, which the Scotts would revisit on Hollows and its dependants in turn when they could. So the world turned, ordered by God and the Devil in tandem.
‘No matter who takes the seat, it will be all up with me – who wants a Land Sergeant prepared to turn on his Keeper?’
Batty had no answer to the truth of that and so said nothing and supped instead.
‘Every time one looks at me they will see those bodies everywhere,’ Will added, his eyes back on that snowy road with Wharton’s men scattered like winnowed stooks, the Grahams dragging shirts and boots off them. Some had not been properly dead, but were not even given the grace of a knife. All had been left to freeze, including the English lord, Otley.
‘Just so,’ Batty agreed with a dismissive wave. ‘Hard times and only a wee lick of what will come in the spring, when Fat Henry turns his army north. Which he will do, even in the teeth of the French threatening invasion in the south. He hates the Scots even more than before, which is a considerable feat we have achieved.’
Silence closed them off like a yett.
‘How is the lass?’ Batty asked eventually, and Will shook his head.
‘Sore, in mind and body. Hutchie Elliott broke into her and broke something in her, that’s sure. She will not speak to any man now, let alone one with that cursed surname, no matter the spelling.’
‘You have tried,’ Batty answered, and it was less a question and more a bleak, sad statement of fact. It spilled from Will then, like rot. How he had gone and fetched and carried, tended livestock and repaired the door, all in the hope of seeing her, of soothing her. But she would not speak nor stir to even look.
Hutchie was with the Laird of Hollows, the pair of them still untouched and now untouchable, since the Regent would need the Armstrongs for the coming war and was inclined to forget if not forgive. Unless presented with red-handed evidence that they’d a stolen Queen, of course.
‘All is over and done with,’ Will ended bitterly, ‘and everyone served with their reward. The prize for Mintie and me is bitter.’
Mintie and me, he had said; Batty knew love when he saw it. Knew it too when it was doomed. He could not say that, nor that he cared for Mintie himself in a strange way, for her spirit and the loss of it.
He stared into his mug of ale and thought on bodies, stripped and scattered. And what would come in the spring, worse than anything Will could think on, even though he was no stranger to hot trod and night reiving.
This would be a vengeful old Fat Henry at war, and Batty knew that well enough, had seen his fellow monarchs, the French and the Holy Roman, wage the same and even been part of it. The memory of rubble and flames, shrieking and corpses made him blink and grip his emptied mug until the leather buckled.
Then Will had gone off and left Batty glowering and nursing drink in a corner of the Old Brig – until word had come from Mintie that he was wanted back at Powrieburn. Even then he had wondered why – and now the truth stood in front of him, pale as poor milk and with her chin tilted defiantly.
‘Will you go with me?’
The question wrenched Batty. He looked into the whey, anxious face of her and knew she would go alone if he refused, knew that she had called for him because he was the least threat of a male she knew. So he agreed and saw the relief wash her and her attempts to hide it by forking up more hay.
‘By God, you have a mountain to barrow into the undercroft,’ he added lightly. ‘Must be the Saul, eating his fat face off.’
Mintie managed a wan smile at that. The Saul was healing well enough, but it would take a long time and he would not be the mount he had once been. She said that, watching Batty intently and swearing she could see another line or two crease the grim sadness.
‘Ach,’ he said heavily. ‘I know that well. Keep the five pounds English and the Saul safe and warm for the rest of his days. If I can visit him now and then, that would be fine, but I do not insist on it.’
She knew why he had offered that last and bit her bottom lip to stop her weeping. She did not want to feel the way she did about Batty, or Will, whom she knew now had come time and again out of concern; she suspected Will wanted to woo her, and the thought settled like a cold sinking sick into the black bile humour that lurked in her, that must be got out of her before…
Batty stayed the night, sleeping with the Saul after he had eaten upstairs, as he had done before. This time there was no Primero, for Mintie’s ma had taken to her bed following the events and horror, and the other women were not much better. The unease of Mintie seeped into them all save Bet’s Annie, who led Batty back to the undercroft with a horn-panel lantern and set it down slowly in the old place where Batty had bedded before, bruised from falling off Tinnis Hill.
‘You are moving better,’ she observed as he struggled out of his padded jack.
‘I am that – possets had a deal to do with it,’ he answered smiling, and she remembered them, then looked at the grilled yett and the battered double doors beyond, draught wheeping in through the holes. She shivered at the memories.
‘Is she sure?’
The question turned her to face him, and for a moment she thought he spoke of her being with child – then realised he did not, and knew at once what he meant.
‘She is set on it. I said it was too early to tell and that if she had missed a bleed it was as much because of how she had been mishandled as having his plant in her.’
Batty shook his head and the unspoken words ‘bad business’ seemed to coil out of him anyway. He squinted at her.
‘Is she good, this woman from the Solway?’
Bet’s Annie thought on it. Auld Nan had as good a reputation as any, better than most, and would send away all the young ones who came to her begging love potions, or spells to ruin rivals in their affections for some man. Those she scourged away with growls and strangeness – but folk like Mintie, with good reason and deep fears, were differently treated.
‘Auld Nan,’ she said, nodding. ‘I went there once with my mother and a cousin in trouble. She took a long time, did Auld Nan, and most of it was to make sure the cousin knew what she was set on.’
‘Did she?’
‘She was relieved of her condition,’ Bet’s Annie said, and saw Batty shift. Then suddenly she realised why, and the shock of it almost brought her hand to her throat. He had been the unwanted bairn, got on Bella Raham of Netherby by a German. But for the merest chance, he might well have never been born at all, scourged to oblivion by the likes of Auld Nan.
‘What does she use – pennyroyal? The tail hairs of black deer?’
She looked grimly back at him.
‘You know a bit,’ she answered, and he waved his one hand and then used it to balance himself against the stable stall while he heeled off his boots.
‘My ma did some for the camp women.’
Bet’s Annie did not doubt Batty had seen the results – another reason for him not liking the business much.
‘Pennyroyal keeps fleas off a dog,’ she answered flatly. ‘That is because it is poison. Deer hair will make you sick, for sure, but you can’t sick up what is inside Mintie.’
She handed him blankets against the cold, busied and fussed in getting him comfortable, as if he was a wee boy. Then she straightened.
‘She used black hellebore and savin, which is the juniper, on my cousin. Boiled it all up in milk and ale. Then she potioned her with dittany, hyssop and hot water, which is balming to the aftermath.’
‘Safe?’
She set the lantern carefully on a hook, so it would not fall and burn the place down.
‘Nothing is safe. My cousin was as sick and near death as any woman I have seen. But she recovered. Went on to have a brace of healthy boys for the man she eventually got married on to.’
All night Bet’s Annie felt him, awake and staring at memories, even through the corbelled stone floor of the undercroft.
Fiskie, he called the horse, and Mintie suspected Batty did so to provoke a response from her. Normally she would have been stung by this renaming of her da’s old mount, especially since it was the term given to a horse prone to kicking, which was a great lie for her da’s gelding.
But Mintie had no arguments in her, only a dull dread that kept her from saying anything other than the answers to direct questions about when to start, when to stop and which way to take.
They had avoided Andrew’s forge and any encounter with Agnes, skirted Netherby and any contact with the Grahams, avoided Graitna and slept in the cold and the damp until Batty’s bones creaked. All rather than meet folk she might have to speak with.
They came down on the River Sark in a dawn of milk and gold, with the wind hissing off the firth, fat with cold and running snell fingers through the hawthorn and gorse and willow. Red-legged little waders waddled and wheeled back and forth, and Batty looked up at a skein of geese making a black fork in the silver sky.
‘Mayhap we will find their tree,’ he laughed softly to Mintie, who nodded and almost managed a smile; it was well known that such geese were grown on a branch, hanging by their beaks until they matured and fell into the water. Though no one had yet found such a tree.
The shape of a man rose up, dark against the sky, and Mintie reined in while Batty rode up to him. It was moot who was more afraid, Mintie or the man out with his bow, poaching from some mean hovel in Graitna and as anxious to avoid being seen or spoken to as Mintie herself.
But he stammered out what Batty needed to know and then scuttled off. Batty kneed his horse back alongside Mintie and jerked his jut of beard at a rise of coast.
‘That headland splits and between is a sandy cove. Auld Nan’s cottage is there.’
And so it was, a wattle and daub affair built almost into the earth and invisible, swaddled by willow and yew. It faced onto the opening in the headland, along a wind drift of sand in as sheltered a cove harbour as you would find anywhere. Smugglers, Batty thought, with a professional eye. For sure.
There were seabirds on the boundary wall, hung out and dried to black crosses. A whole fox was nailed to a post, gone to a rickle of bones with ribs like a set mantrap. And as they rode up, the bitter firth rolled through the gap of the headland in long sighs, already withdrawing to leave the great stretch of sucking mud that was low tide. The wind mourned and danced spirals up from the sands.
A woman opened the door as they dismounted, so that they paused in what they were doing and looked at her. She was neither old nor young, her hair unbound and a colour that might have been, in the dawn light, silver or gold.
She said nothing, merely waited for them to duck under her lintel and enter, Batty with his nerves raw and his one hand on the hilt of his sword. The room was dim and grey with smoke, flowered with dancing flames from an open fire; mad shadows reeled on the walls.
A chittering, like rats, made him crouch and half draw, but then he recoiled a little and blinked his eyes to get used to the poor light until he saw the figure. It hirpled out, rolling like a sailor, naked save for a scrap of cloth across its hips, and Batty felt the hackles rise on him because he did not know what it was, let alone male or female.
The face was beautiful as a girl’s, the head hairless, the haddock eyes wet and bright, seeming blind as a slow-worm, and the jaw slack. The hands were held in front, like a prayer, and looked like flippers; the feet, Batty saw, had all the toes fused.
‘Christ in Heaven,’ he said and would have crossed himself save that he did not want to take his hand off the hilt; Mintie stood and stared. The creature made a chittering sound and a grimace which Batty realised was meant to be a smile.
‘My son,’ said the woman coming up behind them. Close up she was older, the eyes set deep as caves in a face once beautiful and now ravaged by time… and worse, Batty thought.
‘He bids you welcome and says you should eat.’
Batty looked at the son, seeing now that the eyes saw well enough, just kept rolling up into his head. His hands flapping, he hirpled past them out of the hut, and the woman smiled.
‘He goes to swim,’ she said and looked at Mintie. ‘He swims well. But you would have guessed that.’
‘Is he… selkie?’ she asked wonderingly, and the woman laughed, bitter as the wind.
‘His da was, so I think,’ she answered. ‘At least he vanished swift as one when he found I was with child.’
Mintie stared at her, at the surrounds and the fire which poured silver smoke up to the sucking roof hole, like a fall of water reversed.
‘But you could have…’ she began, bewildered, and the woman tilted her head, then looked at Batty.
‘Eat the broth,’ she said to him, ladling it into a bowl and fetching him a horn spoon. ‘Then leave. This is no place for a man, be it father, husband or lover. Come back in two days.’
‘I am none of these,’ Batty answered levelly, though his heart thundered. The woman nodded and Mintie said nothing.
‘And more than all, I think,’ the woman answered. ‘I know you, one-arm. You are Corbie. Slow match. I know your work, for I have had the spill from it here – wee husbands presented with evidence of cuckoldry from you and now convinced what lies in their unfaithful wife’s belly is not any get of their own.’
She looked at him expectantly; Batty looked her right back.
‘Fathers,’ she added, ‘told of their daughter’s sins and determined to end the dishonour of it.’
‘They could take it to term,’ Batty answered in a growl, ‘but would only have it left on the moss, so there is little choice for them, which is what happens when you sin. Besides – you could have refused them, woman. Them and their menfolk both.’
‘And leave them in fear and with the loathing of those they have to live with after,’ she replied tartly.
‘Losing the fee betimes,’ Batty countered, because he thought he had the measure of the woman now.
He nodded grimly to Mintie, but kept his eyes on the woman.
‘She wants to know why you did not use your skills on your own self. Will you tell her?’
Auld Nan said nothing, merely worked the fire so that it flared and a small log rolled out into the ash on one side.
‘You had none, of course,’ Batty answered for her. ‘That artifice all came later, as if in answer to your misbegotten, who might be selkie-born and might not.’
He leaned into the flames a little, blood-dyed by them.
‘Every wee silly lass you root out,’ he added, ‘is yourself. But that horse has long bolted, Mistress – does your son know you never wanted him?’
‘Firebrand,’ she said bitterly, and whether she spoke of the log in the ash or of Batty’s other byname, the one that set flame to everything it touched, was never certain. Then she turned to Mintie.
‘We will speak on it more,’ she said, ‘but I say this for the Corbie’s sake. I know why you are here. What you have in you was put there by a man and is now rooted. If it be your wish, then we will uproot it – but the part that is him will come also with the part that is you, and that will tear your soul.’
‘Do not forget the rip of the body in it,’ Batty added harshly, and Mintie finally stirred.
‘Leave,’ she said, and there was a deal of plead in her voice. Batty thought about it, while a cat with one eye wound itself round his legs. The broth was rich and good and welcome, so he ate it, wiped his beard and then nodded to the women and left. Mintie never looked at him.
Outside, he found himself breathing hard, as if to take clean air into him. It was the smoky hut, he told himself… But he looked for the selkie son, half expecting to see him rolling in the Solway’s cold slide on his back, eating raw fish.
But there was nothing. He crossed himself, took the horses and rode away to Graitna.
He rode back, his tongue furred and his head thick and heavy from too much brooding drink at the Forge Tavern. The place was the same, with its black crosses of hung birds and rickle of fox bones, and the full light of day did little for it; even the cries of the gulls sounded like lost children.
Auld Nan was waiting for him, though there was no sign of the selkie son, and he asked after him, out of politeness.
‘I send him away at times like this,’ she said, ‘for fathers, husbands and lovers sometimes do not take kindly to the work’s aftermath.’
The work’s aftermath lay in the smoking dim on a draggle of old furs covered with grey blankets she would never have let touch her in normal times. Her breathing, as far as Batty could tell, was slow and even, so she was asleep and not dead.
He turned into the woman’s stare, and she nodded at him.
‘Alive,’ she agreed, then frowned and handed him a slip of paper. It was clear neither of them could read it, and Batty simply turned it over in the calloused fingers of his hand until she told him what was in it – as he knew she would.
‘The lass says it is a writ, with a call on her for five pounds, English, and the name of the man she will not soil her mouth with. Justice, she says.’
Batty closed his eyes against the beating storm of it, hearing Mintie’s voice even as the woman spoke. He felt the bleak, welling sadness rise in him.
‘Ach, Mintie,’ he said, slow and heavy and sad, then realised that Auld Nan was holding something, presenting it to him.
‘Last time,’ she said, ‘you supped from my pot. This time the lass bid me serve a harsher meal, and then you must leave. She will make her own way home.’
Batty looked and saw the battered pewter dish and the spurs lying on it. Rusted, leather-rotted and useless for the purpose they had been made for, they were bright and sharp for the one they were being used for now. She must have brought them with her, Batty thought, all secret with purpose even then…
It was the pointed way a Border woman said it was time a man did his duty and went on the raid, to ensure the survival of the household.
A dish of spurs.