The Galliard (2 page)

And so on through all the names of their company in turn over and over, until they came down the moor into the shelter of the hollow and saw the hill of Traprain rise above them, a black sleeping monster hunched against the dim sky and racing clouds.  There in the scanty wood the Galliard halted his men, and their muttering song died on the wind.

There was wild weather in the upper air, may all the saints hold it there and not let it come down on them in heavy rain and rack his old shoulders with cramp again, prayed Toppet Hob devoutly, wishing the New Religion didn’t prevent his vowing a candle to Our Lady if she’d keep the wet off his back. A chill comfortless business this New Religion, warning a man off the saints and any hope of driving a fair bargain with them.

Now the men were all huddled together under the bare sootblack trees. An owl went blundering heavily up out of the low scrub of heather and whin, and Willie Wallocky let a screech out of him that he hoped to God would pass muster as that of the bird. It
didn’t, but a muttered curse and warning was all that it called down on him for the moment.

The sour smell of hot wet leather from the sweating horses cooled to a chill steam. The darkness settled on them, deepened slowly; the silence widened to an enormous gulf. Farther and farther off, the sounds of night reached out to them, the cry of a startled curlew, the sough of the wind in the sedges, the whisper and rush of dead leaves swirled up from the wet ground and scurrying on the wind.

And always close round them were the sounds they made themselves for all their care, the stifled yawns that broke in a gasp, their whistling breath as they blew on their hands to keep them from stiffening with the cold and damp, the squelching of a horse’s hoofs in the mud, stamping and fidgeting, and once or twice, shatteringly, the sudden trumpet of his sneeze. But this was rare, for these small rough-coated beasts that could leap so nimbly over the peat-hags in the dark and find a foothold in the slippery morass knew on what sort of errand they were out.

The wind whistled shriller; more than one man could have sworn he heard the thin cackling cries of witches in the upper air. But the furies that drove down on them were gusts and spurts of rain, swishing down on their heads and shoulders, trickling under the thick folds of the rough woollen scarves wound so closely round their necks for defence against sword thrusts, groping with icy fingers farther and farther down against their shrinking skins as they shivered in this wet chasm of utter darkness.

To their leader all that mattered was that the night was all but past, and had he missed his prey.

The rain stopped. The trees that had waited with him all these hours, so close to him that he could smell their wet mossy bark, now began to take their shape slowly with the dawn. The stars between the racing clouds were growing small and dull; the hump of Traprain was black once more against a rim of pewter; the night was over, then the quarry had escaped his grip. John Cockburn must have got some warning of his movements and smuggled his bag of gold safe across the Border to Edinburgh, into the hands of the ‘Bastard of Scotland’, Lord James Stewart,
leader of the Lords of the Congregation, and of his prime agent, Mr John Knox.

He heard the thudding of hoofs on the wet moor. At the distant sound every man tightened his horse’s girths and clambered into the saddle, stiff with cramp but ready before the scout reached them with news that their quarry was coming. The Galliard thrust a numbed foot into his stirrup, the fierce joy and heat of action already warming his blood. Not for nothing had he held his men in leash all this chill night.

It was still quite dark in the little wood, but John Cockburn knew the ground almost as well as the kinsman lying in wait for him, and he and his men would be off their guard, nearing the end of the night and of the journey. That end would come quicker than Cockburn thought for; he would see these familiar trees suddenly come alive and moving, rushing round him like demons in the darkness.

Now the Galliard could hear the creak of saddles, a clink of harness, and horses clumping heavily, slowly, tired with their journey. He stuck spurs into his horse, and Corbie sprang forward with a shrill whinny, as eager for the fray as his rider, who answered with a yell of joy, taken up by his men. They swung in among them, scattering them, a man shrieked that the devil was upon them, there were shouts and oaths and the clashing of steel.

The Galliard’s eyes, said his men, could see in the dark, and they saw at first glance the heavy lump of the portmanteau jingling at Cockburn’s saddle-bow. With a blow of his sword he cut Cockburn down from his horse, another cut severed the strap that fastened that clanking bag, and the Galliard swung it on to his own saddle, and galloped off with a halloa to his men.

‘Hey, my night hawks,’ he called to them, laughing, ‘has that warmed your cold feet as it has mine?’

Said Long Fargy, ‘That was a grand ding you gave him, sir.’

Said Toppet Hob, ‘I’m thinking Your Lordship kept my hands off your kinsman for the pleasure of cracking his head yourself!’

‘Is he dead?’ asked wee Willie in an excited squeak, for he had not yet seen a man killed.

‘Not he,’ said his lord. ‘It takes more than that to cleave our family’s brain-pans.’

They joked together, the men as much at ease with their lord as with each other, now that their job was over and he was well pleased.

‘There’ll be great cursing at Cockburn’s the night,’ they prophesied. ‘It’s they who’ll be crying this time “Fy, lads, cry a’, a’, a’, my gear’s a’ ta’en!”’

‘And Cockburn’s lost gear will cost him more than the lifting of a herd of cows.’

‘Aye, and it will cost his masters more,’ the Galliard told them. ‘We’ve put a good chapter of Lamentations into Johnny Knox’s next sermon.’

‘I mind him well as a lad in Haddington,’ growled old Toppet Hob, as though the worst thing that could be known of a man was his birthplace.

‘Will they raise the Hot Trod on us?’

‘They’ll not dare,’ said their lord, ‘they’ll have to keep this night’s work quiet. The Queen of England won’t thank them for bringing it into the open!’

But he did not feel as sure as he sounded. And it was for his castle of Crichton, not the nearer one of Hailes, that he was making.

A streak of angry red had begun to fire the iron edge of the clouds; it showed the black shapes of horsemen riding fast up over the hillside, and far behind them, on the moorland path below the wood, a pair of seagulls swooping and screaming over a group of bent forms huddled round a prostrate figure.

Big Bess was trying to whisk eggs to stir into her pan of Friar’s Chicken with the one hand while with the other she turned the spit on which a haunch of venison was frizzling and sputtering.

‘I have but the one pair of hands,’ she was wont to tell her mistress with untiring insistence on an indisputable fact.

The kitchen door of the Laird of Sandybed’s house at Haddington stood open to the stonewalled passage that in its turn was open to an oblong slice of sky and running water. This was not because the
kitchen was hot to suffocation and reeking of roast meat, fried fat and cinnamon, nor yet because Bess liked to get a hurried glimpse of the shallow Tyne that flowed outside her master’s back door, very convenient for the rubbish and slop-pails; but because the grey oblique light given her by those two doors was all she had to cook by.

And suddenly that was obscured.

‘If that’s yourself, Simmy o’ the Syke, for the Lord’s sake have the sense to come in and not stand blocking the light on me,’ she yelped on a high yet full-throated note like that of a hound.

‘It’s not himself,’ said a strange voice, deep yet rather harsh, that sent the blood tingling through her veins.

She swung round so quickly that she spun the bowl with the eggs on to the floor.

‘Mary have mercy!’ she breathed, crossing herself, before she remembered that both words and action were a legal offence.

In the doorway was a tall stalwart young man, splashed with mud to his head and shoulders and with water dripping from him as he stood with his legs apart, his arms clutching a heavy portmanteau to his chest, his swarthy head cocked and his eyes scanning her with so merry yet ruthless a scrutiny that poor Bess felt hotter than the kitchen fire had made her. Only wee Simmy o’ the Syke knew that inside that great gawky frame was a timid and modest being that leaned on his tenderness for protection, although he barely reached her shoulder.

‘What are you doing here – staring like that at a decent body?’ she demanded.

‘That’s a poor word for your splendid body, my Queen of the Amazons!’ And he let the bag slide to the ground with a jingling crash and came over to her at one stride.

‘I’m not your Queen, and my name’s not Agnes, it’s Bess, and – and – the men don’t like me as a rule, I’m so big,’ she finished weakly as he put an arm round her waist and stood with his shoulder, touching hers, which was almost on a height with his own.

‘The very thing I like best about you at this moment. I want your clothes. Will you take off your petticoats for me, Bess?’

Instinctively she swung out a fist like a ham to box his ear, but thought better of it as she saw the flash in his eye. This was not a man to anger lightly, even in fun, and he was a noble, she had seen and heard it from the first really.

‘I’ll do no such thing!’ she exclaimed in shocked tones.

‘You will – for the Lord Lieutenant!’

‘Oh mercy! I might ha’ known it!’ she cried on a note of terror. ‘But I’ve never set eyes on Your Lordship, I’ve been away with my married sister since a bairn—’

He snatched off her apron.

She gasped out, ‘You’ll not force a poor girl!’

‘I’d never force a girl my own size! What d’you think of me?’

‘What I’ve heard,’ she stammered ruefully.

‘Then hear this: I’ve no time for raping, I’m on the run, so off with those things – hurry now or I’ll tear them from you. They’re after me.’

He was dragging off his wet leather-jack and breeches as he spoke. She was quick enough then to strip herself of her bodice and skirt and help him to bundle himself into them, while he laughed and joked like a schoolboy dressing up for a prank. She dealt with their fastenings for him before she flung a plaid round her massive shoulders.

‘Now look out of the back door and see if anyone’s following,’ he commanded. ‘If there’s no one, then shut and bolt it. Never mind your shift.’

She did as she was told and came back with a grave face. ‘Not a body to be seen, my lord, but I heard the bay of hounds far upstream.’

‘They’ll lose the scent at the water. I turned my horse loose there and came down the river-bed.’

‘Eh, sir, is it the Hot Trod?’

‘Aye, Bessie, they’re after me with bug’es and bloodhounds and all. Now fetch Sandybed to me – and I’ll turn this spit for you in case anyone comes.’

The Laird of Sandybed was another Cockburn, a distant and humble relation both of John Cockburn and of the young
Lord Lieutenant. He came padding down the kitchen stairs in his slippers, neighing feebly with anxiety, an elderly man with reddish-grey whiskers, his fluffy face at this moment very white about the gills.

He had already heard flying rumours of the portmanteau  raid, and fondly believed that the author of it was safe, or not, in his castle at Crichton – but here he was in Sandybed’s own kitchen, and in his own servant-maid’s clothes, and here – God help him! – was that ominous black portmanteau plump in the middle of the kitchen floor, along with an overturned bowl and a creeping mess of raw eggs into which he stepped before he noticed.

‘Eh – eh – my lord! – you here, and in such a guise!’

The Galliard swept him a curtsy, eyeing him with cruel amusement. ‘This is a bad day for you, Sandybed, but I’ll make it a good one both for you and your heirs if I rid myself of this cold feeling round the roots of my neck.’

‘What feeling, my lord?’

‘Why, a foretaste of the axe, man!’

‘You’re not outlawed? They’d never put the Lieutenant to the horn!’

‘This is not a horning, it’s a hanging job. The Bastard and his spaniel the noble Earl of Arran are at the gates of Crichton with cannon and a couple of thousand men – if they’re not inside the Castle by now. I’ve told Somerville it’s no use to defend it.’

‘Eh, dreadful, dreadful! Crichton – the fairest of all, your castles! All the expense your father put himself to, getting those stonecutters from France – I always said – I always said—’

But he had better not say what he had always said of such extravagance, so he only neighed plaintively, ‘Eh, what evil times we live in! No man is safe, no man! After all the care I’ve taken to keep out of it all! You’ll not be staying the night?’

‘Three or four, more likely.’

At this, Sandybed, quite unaware of what he was doing, pranced feebly up and down and wiped his eggy foot against the side of the portmanteau.

‘I never knew you spurned money,’ observed his visitor; ‘there
are £3,157 in that bag, all counted out by Queen Elizabeth herself on the floor with the help of her minister, Cecil. It’s a weight, I can tell you, to carry downstream in one’s arms.’

Sandybed hopped back as though the bag had burnt his foot.

‘
You
carried it here! But where is Your Lordship’s bodyguard?’

‘What use of a bodyguard against two thousand men? I only had a quarter of an hour’s warning before they got to Crichton – time enough to leap on a horse barebacked, but no time for saddle or spurs, or boots either for that matter. But I’ve got the bag.’

‘Ah, God be praised!’ Bess bayed from the doorway, wrapped in her plaid. ‘Your Lordship will have Tom Armstrong’s to-name from now on – “Luck i’ the Bag”!’

After three days of wearing Bess’s clothes and making a show of turning the spit most of the time, the Lord Lieutenant managed to get himself and his bag to Borthwick Castle. There his Captain, John Somerville, arrived with the enemy’s terms. The money must be handed over to them instantly, and reparation made to ‘that honourable and religious gentleman’ John Cockburn, who had shown himself so ‘very diligent and zealous for the work of the Reformation’, and was now as a result lying grievously wounded. If the Lord Lieutenant refused to obey these commands, then he would have his castle of Crichton sacked and burnt and his property confiscated.