When They Lay Bare Read online

  When They Lay Bare

  ANDREW GREIG

  In memory of Anthea Joseph

  The support of a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary during the writing of this book is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks to Iain B for the wee Mac.

  To the Queensferry Mafia (plus Shirley) – love and all.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Plate 1

  Plate 2

  Plate 3

  The Lovers’ Plate (Rose)

  The Lovers’ Plate (Red)

  Plate 6

  Plate 7

  Plate 8 (Broken)

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  As I was walkin all alone

  I heard twa corbies makin a mane

  The ane unto the ither said

  Whaur sall we gang and dine the day?

  Oh in ahint yon auld fail dyke

  I wot there lies a new-slain knight

  And naebody kens that he lies there

  But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair

  His hawk is to the hunting gane

  His hound tae fetch the wild fowl hame

  His lady’s taen another mate

  So we can mak oor dinner sweet

  O you’ll sit on his white hausebane

  And I’ll pike out his bonnie blue een

  Wi ain lock of his gowden hair

  We’ll theek oor nest when it grows bare

  Though many a one for him maks mane

  Yet nane shall ken whaur he is gane

  Oer his white banes when they are bare

  The wind shall blaw for evermair

  Plate 1

  The story waits in painted plates that years and many hands have scoured till nothing is for sure. This bright speck off-centre could be the flash of a coin or a blade. That greenish patch below might be bracken or a discarded cloak. The hurrying figure could be a tall woman or a long-haired man, so worn is the outline. And this one at the centre, head back, mouth open, limbs askew, may be falling or reaching for love.

  Take the only comfortable chair and one by one pick up the plates. Stare into them as though they were windows out of a place where you have come to stay for as long as it takes. (This is a kitchen, cool and bare. The windows have small panes that leak wind and the creak of crows in the trees outside. This cottage looks over a tumble of pale wintered fields that fall away to the Border, and it has been empty for years, until now.)

  Think of the Willow Pattern plates that gripped you as a child. You were fascinated how stages of the story were painted alongside each other – the lovers, secret trysts, discovery, the elopement, pursuit, death, the dead returning as birds of the air – as though they were really all one time. As though in the lovers’ first meeting their death was already standing at their side on the bridge with a whip, and the white doves are rising even as she first turns her dark head his way.

  So it is here. You start to realise the many figures are just the same few recurring, and these multiple scenes are often the same event recast. The novel element is that these plates, helpfully numbered on the back from 1 to 8, are not all the same but form a series, and their worn, uncertain pictures yield a story in a darker and more northern light. They are called Corbie Plates and their setting is the badlands, the ballad lands, those debatable Borderlands where two countries join and separate in some rough and pungent mating.

  It’s a very old story that has come down to you.

  This first plate is so worn only the essentials are beyond doubt. You sit at the table in a dwam of pale March sunlight, looking first at the plate then out the window as if to compare the views. A metallic taste rises in your mouth as it often does these days. Perhaps you are being poisoned by mercury fillings. Then something quivers up your legs, arcs through your groin – it’s like coming suddenly to the edge of a great drop, and you sway between wanting to move back and stepping forward to get it over with.

  But the truth is you have nowhere to move back to, and that is what brings you here. So tilt the plate to the light.

  The faded blue-grey is sky, the brown below is moorland. Beneath that is green, a patchwork of fields sloping down towards a silver brushstroke river that must mark the Border. (Impossible as yet to say which side of the Border we are on, or whether it matters.)

  Look closer now and find a crumbling wall of turf or stone. Behind that dyke there’s a faint grey road curling round the shoulder of the hill like smoke from an old man’s pipe, and this tiny smudge – scrape it with your nail, it does not come off, it isn’t someone’s food – is something on the road.

  It is a young man travelling. On horseback or foot or wheels, there is always a young man travelling. Usually he sings to keep his spirits up as he moves towards his unknown but certain destination.

  Peer more closely now. That darker green below the dyke, half-hidden among the skeletal bracken, is surely a cape, and there’s the hunch of a shoulder and legs folded up to the chin. There is someone behind the wall, and it’s not a new-slain knight. It is a woman, waiting. (There is always a woman waiting.)

  Now look out through the window at the old wall and the dirt track that runs by it. The road is empty, but if you went outside and waited, certainly someone would come.

  These plates are very old, passed on from generation to generation and finally to you, but their story is ever present as the air. Already you suspect it will touch you as if it were your own. And you are needing to be touched, aren’t you, or you wouldn’t be here.

  All day the cack of crows and the yearning wind have been at you, gusts tugging at dark hidden roots. Watch and listen now till you begin to go behind the wind, and the light hawk hangs steady in the violent air.

  She has been so long behind the wall, the corbies no longer protest. It’s chill and the wind is strong here, high up the dale. It blows dark hair across her eyes but she doesn’t blink as she hugs the cloak around her and stares out over the rough pastures that fall away down to the Border. There’s no sign to mark it, only the river and a grey haze around the trees, but it’s there just the same. On either side the long bare shaven ridges horse down in a pincer movement and head off the glen in a choked valley, a narrow bridge, a frail road skewing east towards the village and a wider world.

  She’s not looking at anything visible. The corbies skirl above her as she shelters behind the old dyke whose grey-green lichen blends with her rough woollen cape, and her face is hard and pale as the trunks of the beech trees that soar above the darkness of the cleft away to her left. A fine spray from the hidden waterfall has webbed around her hair.

  She is so still she could have been there for centuries.

  The crows cack louder, their wingtips clap the air like worn black-leather gloves. Her head tilts slightly, long white fingers stroke a heavy clasp that holds the cloak about her shoulders. She twists to stare along the old drove road. A puff of dust, a flash of light on glass. A faint rumbling like a stone running round and round a bowl, and somewhere along the rim there is faint music.

  She bows her head, her fist tightens on the metal clasp, and it begins.

  *

  Tilt this first plate better to the light and find more guessed-at detail. Down in the bottom left, what looks like the same green figure is emerging from a mist that hangs over the river. She – if it is a she, and you prefer it to be – has something on her back, and a pale shimmer going before her, perhaps a companion now worn away completely.

  This is her arrival. For that’s how these plates work: events apart in time are held alongside each other in one frame. (These bare yet oddly secretive hills, with
their steep dales, narrow passes, towers and ruins and grassy mounds, vanished forests and forts, if they had memory, everything in it would be simultaneous.) These arrangements say whatever has happened, happens always. It is for you to settle on an order and live it.

  Shift in your chair then look again and see what you hadn’t seen before: a short brown smudge by the edge of a patch of trees. A witness. A watcher. He’s on nearly every plate, at the edge of things, near where the lovers meet in secret or hard by the dizzying waterfall or the great stepped drop where someone falls. The voyeur, he has a part in this. At the very least he is eyes and a voice.

  Be still Listen behind the wind. His voice comes through, light and throaty.

  I kenned it a man, even without binocs, the first time. Something about the sure gait of yon distant figure walking out of the haar that hangs by the river, swinging a leg over the first stile then louping down and pressing on without pause. Something in the bold, braisant way the head swivelled left then right as though checking everything was where it should be, then jinked surely across the bog and up the brae as though he owned the dale itself.

  He veered closer to the trees and the dark hidden waters that split these long braes and riggs. This was no tourie out for a daunder. Nor a loon from the village – I knew the walk of every one of them, poacher, loner, or spunkie lad.

  I eased back into the shaw of birch behind Ballantyne’s Farm. There was no cause to hide nor watch, yet I did so. I was puzzling where the mannie had come from. There’d been no one on the river bank when I’d scanned it minutes afore, just the road into the village and not a car on it at that time of evening. Then a drifting mist closed over the water like a fist, and when it opened again the walker was there. At first I thought there was another went ahead of him, smaller and a woman forby, then the wind blew and there was but one moving strongly up the brae. It was as if he’d just walked out of the river or snouted like a mole up out of the land itself.

  I lit a wee cheroot and tasted again the rightful bitterness. My mind, such as it is, was working fine yet just in behind the low ribs, I felt now as at all times, like a cancer in reverse, some dwindling inside.

  *

  The stravaiger moved on steady through the chill gloaming of what passes for early spring round here, following the trees up by the dark heuch, past the byres of Crawhill Farm, and pressed on for the cottage at the top of the lands. But Elliot had cleared and locked up the place once Patrick Johnstone left with the bairn after the trial, never sold or rented it. Once or twice a year he’d send me or Annie to paint the window frames, repair the roof, generally redd up inside, but no more than that. Daft, I told him often enough, get rid of it, man. And he’d look at me with eyes black and empty as the windows of that abandoned house, till I learned some thoughts like some loves are better left unspoken.

  Now I let smoke slip like a wraith from my lips and lifted the glasses. My walker bent forwards, as if slightly humpie-backed or under a burden, stepped up on the stile and stood tall there a moment.

  Then two things became clear. He was a she. For a moment I thought maybe a long-haired young man, one of the new travellers maybe, but no. Tall, upright and bold like a man, but solid in the hips as if the world spun round her hurdies – that and the other usual female appurtenances. She wore breeks, boots, some kind of moorit-coloured material round her shoulders. And as she jumped down the far side of the stile, I saw she was carrying a sack, a bag, something heavy slung over her shoulder that weighed her down.

  I palmed my cheroot and began to shadow her up the brae.

  I am not Sim Elliot’s man, though I defend him against the blether and clash of this valley. I am not his spy, though it’s understood I keep an eye on every coming and going around the estate. Nor his protector, though whiles I carry the gun to affricht craws and vermin. Whatever they say in these parts, I am not his shadow nor his confidant. Though I do the accounts for what’s left of the estate, and ken something of certain payments which never appear on those accounts, I could not say we are close.

  I wouldn’t want to be close to a man to whom I am so bound. Who is so bound to me he flinches if our eyes meet. And if Elliot gives me the house and the pay that allows me my passions and still puts food in the mouths of me and Annie and the bairns, it is not for my silence. That has been long secured.

  After my bairns were born I had a greit to myself in the hospital car park because I knew then even they weren’t going to put me right. A nurse passed me my first cigarette. On ye go, Tat, she said, and I accepted, needing then as now some sort of friend touching my lips. But Annie and me are a good team, she does her job at the big house as I do mine on the estate, and she never speirs about what went before. Far as she’s concerned, it’s just an old scandal, a bit local clack best laid aside with the dead. But ever since then I’ve kept sooking smoke from time to time. When all else fails, there’s aye habit.

  So I shadowed this woman out of habit, and a bit curiosity. I couldn’t jalouse where she might be headed as she louped another fence and picked up her burden again. I followed her because I was in no hurry for hame, and late air helps me sleep nights.

  I used what cover there was among the hillocks, scrags and burns, just as I had twenty years before as a young laddie burning to find out what men and women did when they met secretly. Were it not for my curiosity I would sleep well of nights, far from here.

  She never looked back till she came at last to the dyke that borders the moor and the old road. Then she put down her satchel and took a long look back down where she’d come from. I didn’t hunker down, for she was the one on the skyline, not me. I just kept still, and have no reason, then or now, to think she saw me. Yet that long stare made me shake and grue. A man’s look, I would have said, quite unlike Annie’s sharp sideways keeks in my direction when she thinks I am about to ‘go strange’ as she cries it. Strange it might be to her, but it’s the only honest thing I do though I have to go to the city for it.

  She sclimmed the dyke and crouched on top, agin the skyline. The colour had drained from the sky and mirk was seeping from the ground. The corbies were silent now, only wind twitched and reishled through the long grasses of the windlestrae as her shawl blew up and hung a moment like a dark wing over her head.

  She jumped down and disappeared.

  I followed, shaking the shiver from me. Because for a bit moment, most like water raised in my eye by the snell wind, again I’d seemed to see another, a smaller, light-footed woman standing just ahead of her, but that was impossible and the lass long dead.

  This one walked strong through the failing light, puffs of dust biffing from under her boots, along the old drove road where for hundreds of years men, women and beasts have passed. You’d not have to be fanciful to see them still, the sheep and kye heading for the market towns, goods coming north on the hobbie ponies and on the backs of the dusty-feet, the peddlers, tinkers and Romanies. Vanished tribes, the silenced Picts and the lost legion, all strode down that road. And the reivers, the armed men moving even as she did, fleet and silent, to do fell business on either side of the Border, seeking cattle or bloody revenge. And the lovers hastening from forbidden trysts.

  I could see them all as I followed her through that gloaming, close enough to wonder at the muffled clink from the load over her shoulder.

  It was near dark as she passed the last of Ballantyne’s byres. I thought perhaps she’d doss down there, for surely to God she had to lay her head somewhere. Could be she had a tent and a man waiting for her up on the moor, that would be it. But she pressed on towards the Liddie gorge and the woods. A low dark rectangle against the last of the light. The roof of Crawhill Cottage. No lights there, of course, there hadn’t been in over twenty year.

  She stopped hard by the door. I ducked down ahint the dyke and heard the faint clink again. Her muttering to hersel. A creak, a tinker’s curse. I didn’t have to keek over the dyke to know what she was about. Well the lassie could struggle with that padlock ha
lf the night – the key was on the board at Elliot’s and though the door was old as everything at Crawhill, it was secure enough.

  A rattle then a different kind of creak, a long groan. I was hunkered down with my mouth open like a simple. I’d changed that padlock a month back at Elliot’s word – he’d been getting right timorsome of late, in a way I’d not seen of him before. Another creak then thud as she put the door to.

  My heart was beating the retreat on its side-drum as I looked over the dyke. The light of a candle – no, a mantle lamp – bloomed in the side window of what used to be the kitchen all those years back, when Jinny Lauder waited by it for that wee tap at the glass, and her man Patrick away at the tree-planting, and her secret hurrying across the wooden brig over the falls. I minded it as I minded the laddie who crouched where I did now, his heart shoogling like a pheasant gripped in the hand.

  I’m not a fanciful man and have no truck with superstition. Though I ken something of the bogles that lurk in the mind, they have no life outside it. She was only a lassie come from nowhere to bide a night in an empty cottage. Nothing to be affrichtit by, and she had no business there. I raised one leg high on the dyke.

  She was singing, I could hear it faint but clear, the tune and the half-murmured words. Perhaps that stopped me. Or the notion that her and me, alone inside that place at night, it wouldn’t be wise. It could be taken wrong. And maybe Elliot had given her permission and the key, and didn’t think to mention it to me. No point making a right fool of myself till I’d checked the facts.

  I lit again my short bitter smoke then hurried down the braes for home and Annie, John and Laura. All good reasons for turning away from that door. But the strongest and worst reason, the one that clutched in my gut like a man going down, was the song the unknown woman crooned. I never wanted to hear a woman’s voice sing Barbara Allan again, and for sure never there, not in that place where I’d crouched below the sill, a tremmlin loon of fourteen, and heard Jinny sing it as she waited for Sim Elliot coming one more time across the wet and narrow bridge that spans the torrent of Lid-dieburn, twenty-plus years syne.