After Flodden (2 page)

Paniter’s young visitor had not seen the battlefield, nor could she imagine it. But like everyone in Edinburgh she knew the fate of their army. At first, like many others, she thought the
rumours were part myth, the scare stories of those who have escaped with their lives and wish to be seen as heroes, survivors of terror and carnage, not the flotsam of some skirmish where skill
played no part and pure luck carried the day. A week after the battle, though, and it was evident that the worst tales had yet to be told. Most of the returning soldiers would not speak; some could
not.

Only one tale interested this girl. Though just nineteen, she would not be brushed off without hearing it. Her brother had ridden out to battle, and had not been heard of since. There was little
chance he was alive, she knew, but until she was told he had been killed, or died, she had to keep looking. The dead king’s secretary was the only man in a position to know what had happened.
As Mme Brenier had said, when Louise turned her horse towards the town, the court certainly owed their family help.

‘And if he offers money as well, don’t you dare turn it down,’ she called after her daughter. ‘We need all we can get.’ Louise kicked the horse into a trot, and did
not turn around.

*    *    *

There had been no thought of defeat when James and his army set out. Even the foot soldiers, eking out their month’s store of salt meat and biscuit and ignoring the rumble
of their stomachs, had glory in their sights; glory and – God willing – riches to repay their effort.

James rode at the head of his men, the amethyst in his bonnet flashing in the late summer sun. Its rosy glint mirrored the wood-smoke sky above the hills as they marched out of Edinburgh towards
the Lammermuir hills. The old drove roads were flattened and scored, heather and bracken ground to dust beneath hooves and carts. Days earlier, four hundred oxen had plodded across this route, the
castle’s guns at their backs. Their yokes creaked as the cannons were hauled across earth, grass, stone and mud. Boys ran ahead of the teams, digging out the drays whenever the mud tried to
swallow them whole. Cracking whips, hollering oxen, barking dogs made a fierce sort of music as the beasts and their drivers picked their way south in the melting harvest light.

For the king’s army following in their wake, evidence of this violent passage littered the way: broken-boned oxen heaved off the road, throats cut to shorten their suffering; splintered
drays; a gun nose-deep in glaur, so sunken it was not considered worth the effort of retrieving.

The sight of the gun grieved Paniter. It was as valuable as a score of men. They might as well have slain their own infantry before setting out as abandon these weapons. But when he edged his
horse alongside the king’s, and brought the gun to his attention, James shrugged. He kept his eyes on the horizon. ‘The first casualty,’ he said. ‘There will be worse. You
are too squeamish, Paddy. You must learn to steel your heart. If you are to survive this game, it should be as merciless as a blade.’

Paniter felt the first chill wind of a deadly autumn. James’s teasing smile invited his secretary to raise his sights, and his spirits, but for the first time in their years of friendship,
he saw a guarded admission of fear. What they were doing was audacious, and audacity takes courage. Courage is the shadow to fear’s blaze, growing shorter and rarer as the fire strengthens,
but never – with God’s help – entirely absent. What lay ahead was daunting enough to make even the battle-seasoned James waver, and Paniter felt a new measure of respect for his
king. Were blame ever to be levelled for what lay ahead, it would fall on James’s head, and he was bracing himself. Their horses trotted neck to neck. The men did not talk. Behind them wound
the steel river of their army, the clink of bridles, spurs and spears rattling like coins in a gambler’s hand.

For years, James, Paniter and the inner circle of court had been stealthily preparing for war. They did not know who they would face, whether it would be their quarrelsome English neighbour,
their French allies or some new pieces on the board. The only certainty was that conflict was on its way. And now they were heading into its mouth. This march out of the city and into England was
the result of half a lifetime’s preparation: diplomatic visits, parliamentary councils, and enough letters to drain a sea of ink. Not to mention the smelting of iron and hammering of weapons
at the master meltar’s furnaces, and the frenzy of work in James’s shipyards along the Firth of Forth.

All were to vanish in a single afternoon that took with it not only James but James’s son, a boy as dear to Paniter as his own child. The best part of Scotland’s aristocracy fell
that day, but it was the loss of James and young Alexander that brought Paniter to his knees. Which is where he rested, wrapped in his housekeeper’s arms and sleeping, open-mouthed as a babe,
for the first time since he fled the battlefield. Downstairs Mistress Brenier found a chair, and put an arm around her dog for warmth.

Soldiers started sneaking home days after the army left the city. Those first deserters crawled back quietly, under cover of night. Within a month, however, their numbers were swelling, and this
new wave of soldiers burned not with shame but anger and resentment. Their first destination was the alehouse for beer to wash the grit of the road from their mouth. Bakeries did well out of them,
oven boys staring as these filthied, hard-talking men shovelled bread into their mouths, their packs lying on the street for anyone to steal while they closed their eyes and ate, as if life could
offer no greater delight than freshly baked dough. Later, though, some would be reminding themselves of even sweeter ecstasy, the flour-white attractions of the pox-house doing a trade almost as
brisk as the brewer’s and baker’s.

‘Hey, soldier,’ cried one baker’s boy to a Highlander, whose hand sat on his sword even as he ate. ‘Hey, man, did ye get a fight?’ The boy danced out onto the
street, brandishing an invisible sword over an invisible enemy, running him through with a roar.

‘Naw, son. Nae fight.’

‘So why’re you back then?’

The Highlander looked skywards, chewing. ‘We’d done our 40 days,’ he finally said. ‘Owed the bastards nothin mair.’

He picked up his pack, and left.

The Highlander and all the others who had served their time were half-starved. Their rations had run out on the march south, and still they had seen no action. Many would call them deserters,
but to their minds they had done their duty. If the king wanted them for a long campaign, he would have to pay them. Foolishly, James had made it plain that he had nothing to offer until they had
trounced the English, but he called on their loyalty to their country to give him several more weeks’ service. ‘You will be home by the end of September,’ he promised. But for
those with land to hoe for winter planting, or boats that had not seen a day’s catch since the summer, a call on their conscience and the promise of booty was not enough. Late in September,
though, when their comrades returned from the field – and many more did not – they were not then quite so easy in their minds as they’d have liked, or let on.

The first soldiers back from the field at Flodden reached Edinburgh on horseback two days after battle, so torn in clothes and body they were more like crow bogies than men of arms. No-one could
mistake them for soldiers who had slipped their leash. Even those unharmed smelled of steel and blood. As news spread of the Scottish army’s rout, of the king’s death and the
devastation of Scotland’s troops, fear licked through the city. The king is dead! The English are coming! Word spread fast. Church bells were set ringing, a heart-stopping knell that seemed
to mark every one of Flodden’s dead.

Mothers and daughters had heard what advancing armies were wont to do. With too few men to defend them, they hung sheets and shifts from their windows, flags of surrender that whipped at their
windowsills all that night, and for many to come. At their doors they gathered their fire-irons and long-handled pots, a housewife’s armoury. They set their household on watch, taking turns
to sleep, but there was little rest for anyone that night.

In the dark, builders piled their carts high with lime and stones. The next morning, before full light, work began on a new wall, facing south towards the road the English would ride if they
came to capture the capital – as surely now they would. Stones were slapped into place by a chain gang, sweat oiling every face despite the cold and wind. The bricklayers worked in near
silence. Only when the wall had risen higher than their heads did they relax sufficiently to talk. Their conversation was so gloomy, though, it was worse than silence, and slowly they resumed their
miserly habit with words, breaking it only to shout for mortar or rubble or ale.

In a small house in the port of Leith, two seagull’s miles from Edinburgh Castle, the days that followed the news from Flodden were a modern sort of torture. Louise Brenier had heard of
the rack and the boot, of what they did to traitors, enemies and spies in the dungeons beneath the castle, but what she and her mother suffered as they waited for Benoit’s return was surely
almost as cruel. She felt physical pain, listening for the foot on the stair that never came, or watching the vixen’s ears prick, as if she had heard his voice on the dockside, and then lie
flat when she knew it was not him.

When word of the battle reached Mme Brenier, her daughter learnt that blood drains faster from a face than wine from an overturned bottle.

‘Maman!’ she cried, as Mme Brenier slumped onto the settle. ‘Mon fils,’ her mother whispered, ‘mon fils est mort. Dieu me sauve, Dieu me sauve.’

‘He is not dead!’ Louise shouted, ‘He cannot be. He promised he’d be back.’ Even to her own ears she sounded like a spoilt child. She bit her lip.

The rest of that day they cried until their eyelids were swollen, their throats rough. Mme Brenier retreated into French. This was the language of her heart, and wrapped at the centre of that
heart lay Benoit.

‘I thought I had lost him, once, you see,’ she would explain when her preference for her son over her daughters was so blatant it could not be ignored. If her second husband,
Louise’s father, was not in the room, she would add: ‘And he is, of course, the image of his father. I named him well, you know, for he was truly blessed when he survived near certain
death.’

Louise knew the story as if it were her own. Benoit had been little more than five, Marguerite three, when smallpox, la petite vérole, spread through the family’s village in
Normandy. It carried away Monsieur Brenier within hours of him taking to his bed. The sight of his once fine body laid out in a shroud for the common grave would have destroyed his wife’s
mind had there not been Marguerite and Benoit to look after. Monsieur Brenier’s sheets had been burned, and fresh herbs newly set on the hearth when Benoit too began to ail. Mme Brenier knew
she would go mad if she lost her son as well. Handing Marguerite into the care of her grandmother, she hovered over the boy night and day. As he stewed and mewled, she wetted his lips with wine,
and bathed his limbs with vinegar. When the pustules were at their worst, she could scarcely recognise him. He still looked beautiful to her, but she knew that if he were to survive, the disease
would brand him for life.

Benoit’s face was badly pocked, certainly, but the steeliness of character that brought him back to health as a child allowed him to shrug off the taunts of the urchins who mocked his
complexion when he first arrived in Scotland. In time his face proved an asset. Men trusted him more for it, and liked his lack of vanity. Women were intrigued by a man with the body of a
blacksmith, and the eyes of a dreamer. He was known to read books. Some said he wrote poetry. More than one longed to run her hands over his marked face and put her mouth to his wide, French lips.
Now, before he had even reached his twenty-third birthday, it seemed that no-one ever would again.

Rain and wind whipped the east coast in the days after Flodden. Mme Brenier’s timbered house in Leith was set creaking, as if unseen guests were running across the roof and dancing down
the stairs. As the wind moaned and whistled around the rafters, Louise retreated into misery. First her father, then her sister, and now Benoit too, it seemed, was gone. This house was emptying
fast, death moving through it room by room.

It was three years since her father’s death at sea – despatched by sword, not drowning, as she later discovered. Nor was it an unprovoked attack. Davy Turnbull, the kindest man in
Leith, his daughter would have sworn, had been trying to board a Portuguese ship with his fellow crew. Pirates the lot of them, she learned. Her sea trader father, it transpired, was a thief, and
violent too. Louise mourned twice over for him, first for his loss, and then for the man she had thought he was.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, any of you?’ she screamed, when his body was brought home shrouded in sailcloth, and laid out on a table, a grisly, sea-stained package. No-one could
meet her eye.

‘He should have told me,’ she cried. ‘I was the only one who loved him.’

Marguerite put an arm around her sobbing sister. ‘He dreaded you thinking less of him,’ she said.

The truth was, of course, that none of them had fully known what Davy and his cousins did at sea. A member of the Barton clan, who had sewn up all shipping trade south of St Andrews, Davy
Turnbull was that common breed of men, a merchant whose business was entirely aboveboard except when it was more profitable to bend the rules. If that meant marching off with other folks’
possessions at sword-point rather than buying them at market, so be it. His wife certainly never queried the rich cloth and spices he brought home, nor the comfort of their house, even though it
was plain to all that most seafarers lived cramped as herring in a barrel, with little to fall back on when storms kept their boats in harbour save a daily visit to chapel and the open ear of their
patron saint Peter. While the weather raged, and fishermen grew wan, Davy Turnbull and his cousins repaired to the alehouse. The coins they tossed onto the board for food, drink, or wagers would
have kept more honest men in victuals for a year.