Fair Helen Read online

  Fair Helen

  Also by Andrew Greig

  Fiction

  Electric Brae

  The Return of John Macnab

  When They Lay Bare

  That Summer

  In Another Light

  Romanno Bridge

  Non Fiction

  Summit Fever

  Kingdoms of Experience

  At the Loch of the Green Corrie

  Preferred Lies

  Poetry

  This Life, This Life: New and Selected Poems 1970–2006

  As Though We Were Flying

  Getting Higher: The Complete Mountain Poems

  Found At Sea

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2013 Andrew Greig

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

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  eISBN: 978-1-62365-646-1

  Cover design by Two Associates

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For Lesley.

  i.m. Gavin Wallace, who cared for our literature and its makars.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea

  “Ane doolie sessoun . . .”

  Peel Tower

  Tryst

  Family

  Cloot

  Amours

  Rising

  Heidsmen

  Patron

  Stiletto

  The Fortune Rigg

  Pend

  Bonshaw

  Hot-trod

  Jarrall Burn

  Hameward

  Mother

  Trip-step

  Crichton Castle

  Gales

  Woods

  Lovers

  Privy

  Timor Mortis

  Siccar

  Blackett House

  The Scabby Duck

  The Cypresse Grove

  Flitting

  Alfornought Hill

  A Lang-wake Litany

  Strong Box

  Gaol

  Doos

  Clockwork

  The Shot

  Donjon

  Exile

  Hawthornden

  Grave

  “J’ai seulement fait ici un amas de fleurs étrangères, n’y ayant fourni du mien que le filet à les lier.”

  SCOTS GUIDE

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  A glossary of Scots dialect words and their approximate English meanings is placed at the end of this book.

  “I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.”

  Michel de Montaigne

  Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea

  O gin I were where Helen lies!

  Night and day on me she cries;

  O that I were where Helen lies,

  On fair Kirkconnel Lea.

  Curst be the mind that thought the thought,

  Curst be the hand that fired the shot,

  When in my airms burd Helen dropt,

  Wha died for sake of me.

  I lighted down, my sword did draw,

  I hacked him in pieces sma,

  I hacked him in pieces sma,

  For her that died for me.

  O Helen fair, beyond compare!

  I’ll make a garland of thy hair,

  To bind my heart for evermair,

  Until the day I die.

  O gin I were where Helen lies!

  Night and day on me she cries;

  And I am weary of the skies

  Of fair Kirkconnel Lea.

  “Ane doolie sessoun . . .”

  These winter morns are bitter cold and the draughts unstoppable under the roof of Hawthornden. My breath puffs clouds as I scrape clear the garret window, ice slivers melt under yellowed fingernails.

  Yet today I am snug as a bug on a dug. I have donned shirts, a shift, my disreputable jerkin, two nethergarments. A quilted bunnet sits cosy on my head. A hefty plaid borrowed from Drummond is happed round my shoulders, and falls clear to the floor. What remains of my right hand is warm in wool, as are my feet and scrawny thrapple.

  Even the hot wine I fetched all the way up from the kitchens has remnants of warmth.

  In my green days, when morns were cold and the world much awry, I would scurry about trying to keep warm and right it. I complained bitterly (if silently) at the injustice of it all. Now I shrug and don more clothing—resignation, or wisdom?

  Having little time left for either, I sit amid so many layers and furs I am more bear than man. The weather—sleet driven out of the North. The past—ever-present. I look down at it from this high, enwrapped place, and note how readily my living breath fogs the view even as I contemplate how to begin.

  Ane doolie sessoun to ane carefull dyte

  Suld correspond and be equivalent . . .

  Or as we say in present days, now the Kingdoms are united and the Court gone south, “A dismal season to a woe-filled work should correspond and be equivalent.” Ah, Robert Henrysoun, what a falling off is here!

  I lean forward to wipe the glass with the back of my good fist, before at last commencing the story that is not mine yet remains the only story of my life.

  Peel Tower

  I had not seen Adam Fleming since his mother’s wedding. He had been silent and inward then, remote across the crowded hall. Tall, slim and agile, in his black cloak of grieving for his father, tallow hair cut straight across in the new Embra style, dagger in embroidered pouch, he had been every inch the young Borders gallant.

  Now as I stepped onto the battlement of the peel tower, my dearest friend stood mouth agape with muddy britches, un-matched slippers, his shirt stained and torn. Short sword stuck skew-whiff in his belt, he was bouncing and catching an old cork tennis ball as though his life depended on it.

  And he was right, I concede now to the bleary pane, the scratching quill. It probably did.

  He looked up at me. His eyes flickered over the laddie who had showed me up. He bounced the ball off the bale-fire cage, caught it, swayed a little. So it is true, I thought. Not yet noon and drink taken.

  “It is Harry Langton, sir,” the boy said uncertainly.

  “No doubt, no doubt.” Adam kept stotting and catching the ball. In our university days tennez royale had been all the rage, along with the speaking of French to mask our uncouth mother tongues. He had been effortlessly good with racquet, rapier and small pipes, while I was a dogged trier.

  Plus ça change, I murmur to none, and huddle deeper within coarse blankets. This
stern house is silent. It is hours till chapel service, which I attend for the sake of dinner if not my soul. No choice but to sit here and feel again, like a dirk slipped between the ribs, dismay as he cut me dead.

  The sleekit laddie—Watt his name, and I regret his end—hesitated. Judging me hairmless, he turned and padded down the tower stair. I heard him slap slap slap on the worn sandstone, hesitate at the trip-step, then gone.

  Stott stott stott of the tennis ball into the drunken hand of my bedraggled lost friend. I could smell stale wine across the distance between us. Still, he never fumbled the bouncing ball, even when he looked out absently over the valley, the Kirtle burn, the woods and braes of his small corner of the Borderlands.

  He flicked the ball between his legs, caught it as it rebounded off the castellation, then hurled it far into the walled garden. He turned to me and his grey-green eyes were now bright, perhaps too bright.

  “Harry,” he said quietly, and we embraced. “Thank God you are here,” he murmured, breath hot in my ear. Hot, but not vinous. Only his stained shirt stank of claret. “I need your help and counsel, old friend.”

  Once he had said those words I could not have ridden back to the city, the courts, the college where we had once disputed fine points with words and argument, not the finer point of dagger and short sword. In any case, I was not quite the free man my friend imagined.

  “So,” I said. “You seek advice from the daft, or a loan from the penniless?”

  “Still poor and honest, then?”

  “Poor, at least,” I said.

  He smiled, though I had spoken but careful truth. From the courtyard below a lassie’s song rose. An axe thudded in the stables, kye moaned from Between the Waters. Doos flew in and out of the storey below, all grey flutter and reproach. The pale sun lit on our faces, the Kirtle water glittered, and for a moment the Borderlands lay at peace.

  He slung his arm across my shoulder, the way he would when we were students, no more than boys, slipping into the Embra night, bound for mischief, or heading into the examination hall of the Town’s College.

  “I am in love,” he announced. “And they mean to kill me.”

  I addressed the less implausible first. “Who is she?”

  “Helen.” He turned his gaze away from the circling pigeons. “Helen Irvine, of course.”

  “Ah,” I said, trying to sound surprised. “Fair Helen.”

  And who else would he have set himself on but my childhood confidante, Cousin Helen? Even in the city I had heard the new flower of Annandale lit soul, heart, loins. And she was Irvine of Bonshaw’s daughter, and the families were long at feud.

  “So Will Irvine plots to kill you for fancying his daughter? Even by Borders standards that is high-handed.”

  I was trying to calm his fervour, and my own.

  Adam shrugged. “Feud is like fire in a peat-bank. It smoulders, it burns, it sleeps again. Irvine could perhaps be persuaded to the match—despite my mother’s remarriage, I am still heir to these small lands—were there not another asking for Helen.”

  “Who?”

  “Rob Bell.”

  “Ah.”

  In student days I had passed Robert Bell of Blackett House, striding down the crowded High Street past St. Giles, sword set high in his belt, Flemish pistolet on a sling, swerving not a jot for anyone but Jamie Saxt. Upon his father’s death amid a storm of daggers in a wynd in Gala, he had lately become the Bell heidsman. Folk said young Robert Bell had a future, though most hoped it short.

  “Bell’s not half the swordsman he thinks he is.” Adam grinned, looked carefree for a moment. “He swings that long pistol like it was his cock, and we are meant to be impressed.”

  “They say he shot one of the Farrer boys across the mart square in Moffat. I am impressed enough.”

  “A coward’s weapon, killing a man at a distance.”

  “What would you do if he points his pistol at you, out of sword’s range?”

  “Duck, of course!”

  After our laughter, a shout came faint from the far woods about Kirkconnel Lea. Blackett House, set high above the Kirtle water, was but another call away. From its watchtower on a calm day, a pistol shot would carry to Kirtlebridge, making one I cared for there start at her work. And if she in turn stood in her inn courtyard and loosed off a shot, the report would carry to the Irvines’ stronghold at Bonshaw. (How small a stage our drama treads—Embra apart, one could ride to any of the principal locations, even the English border, within the hour. Aristotle would have approved.)

  A horse whinnied in response, then silence but for the faint wheesh of wind and water that, like feud and memory, pour forth unceasing in the Borderlands.

  “You smell like a coach-house drain,” I said. “People say you are a sot, and not right in the head since your father died. You muck about with tennis balls. You can’t be arsed to dress mannerly. You neither fight nor work nor study. What use—?”

  He put his hand, long-fingered, scarred and weathered already, on mine.

  “I think some among my family seek to kill me,” he said.

  “In a shirt like that, I am not surprised.”

  His dagger point lay at my throat. His eyes were watchfires lit.

  “Dinna fuck wi’ me, Langton.”

  I looked him in the eye, wondering at the rumours I had heard of his state of mind these last eighteen months. I kept my voice steady as a man may with steel at his thrapple.

  “Does Helen Irvine not love you even as she teases you?”

  His head went down, his shoulders shook. Now he was not greiting but laughing, his moods shifting like an aircock.

  “She claims she does, the flirt!” His arm about my shoulder. “I have missed you as I have missed the better part of myself.”

  Fortunately, he was already turning away. As we headed for the stairwell, he murmured in my ear what he was about this very evening, and my part in it. Then we clattered down the echoing stone, past Watt loitering ahint the portal, and we were laughing and chattering like lightsome young men, careless of present danger and future grief.

  The chapel bell tolls, my stomach rumbles. My host William Drummond asks little of me but that I organize his library and correspondence, look over his Latin essays that seek to harmonize Crown, Church and the People (not likely at the moment), and offer some helpful though not overly critical responses to his English verses in the Petrarchan manner. He likes having this relic of lang syne living in his garret, so he and his friends may enjoy tales of lawless days that now appear romantic. But he does insist I attend household services, which are of the unheated, penitential sort.

  I sit a minute longer by my morning’s work, seeing again Adam Fleming, mouth agape as though munching empty air as I first stepped onto the peel-tower battlement.

  We have made a start.

  Tryst

  Fair Helen, cousin Helen, Helen Irvine, Erwyn,1 Irwin, Ervyn, Irving, of Bonshaw or Kirkconnel or Springkell—call her as you will, she did once live and breathe, and when she smiled the joy of the world declared itself at the in-by of her mouth.

  She is long gone, yet still her step stirs dust along the whispering gallery. The folk tales and the ballad have many versions, the chaste, the bawdy and the sensational (“He cuttit him in pieces sma”), none of them sound and siccar. I, who was there at the margins, have come if not to set the record straight then at least to add my honest errors.

  She was born plain Helen, daughter of Will Irvine of Bonshaw. She would die Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea. Her whole life extended twenty-one years wide by some five miles long, all it takes to get from Bonshaw to Kirkconnel.

  In the days before her blooming, when we still shared much, she told me of the first time she came to know herself living—our second birth in this world.

  She said she was by the peat-stack ahint the barnkin wall, setting her nose to smells of field and burn and muir. She rubs her hands on the peats, enjoying the crumble and mush. She sniffs her palms. The lines are
now brown as burns after heavy rain. She studies how they run down the wee braes and heuchs of her hands.

  The burn below their house is the Kirtle. A kirtle is also what she pulls on after her smock then waits for her mother to lace up. The burns in her palm, the peat they burn in winter—how oddly things come together!

  Doos clatter from the peel tower, and for the first time she kens herself.

  She sits on in the yard, crumbling and rubbing the fields in her hands. A telling-off will come, for breaking up the peat, for getting her kirtle mucky, but for now everything is connected and siccar.

  So she told me as we sat within Bruce’s cave, cross-legged in the stone-smelling dimness, hearing the river crash by below, her thin child shoulder warm on mine.

  Adam and I waited below Kirkconnel Brig. The arch over our heads rippled with reflected afterglow from the western sky. I was being bitten by things near-invisible, he was tight-strung in the gloaming, exultant in the way of those who are about to learn they are loved.

  He had changed shirt and britches, run fingers through hair, dragged it down about his lugs then carefully adjusted it to show the lobes and the gold snake ring he had bought from a Romany in the Lawnmarket. Green half-cloak about his shoulders, dagger at his hips, he was quite the thing of the ton. Apart from the fact we wore heavy boots and were lurking under a bridge on the margin of his violent rival’s lands, we might have been two young callants about to salute the salons and bawdy houses of Embra.

  Mostly we were silent, for each had much to think about. On our way here, skulking like broken men as we followed the Kirtle water downstream from Nether Albie, pushing birch and elder aside, alert to bird cries, starting at roe moving in the woods, he had been whingeing. Of late Helen had insisted on secret trysting, and he did not like it.

  “Do you think her honest?” he had demanded of me as we set out from the family compound, supposedly to check the kye safe-gathered in the in-by pastures. “At Langholm mart a fortnight back, she was with her father and Bell, laughing! She gave me the high nod as though we were scarcely aquaint. She says she needs time to prevail upon her father, to end the blood-feud and help my family be reinstated. I do believe her!”