Fair Helen Page 2

  And who would not believe Helen’s eyes so wide and candid? We strode the old Roman Way where puddles shook in the wind, scrolling up the sky. I wrapped my old cloak round me, said nothing.

  “Then I think she is waiting to see the airt of the wind.”

  I said nothing, knowing lovers to be touchy. When we were bairns I learned my fair cousin cheated, so innocently and so well, at our games of Dirk, Paper, Stane, or Parlour-Men. Through summers spent in Annandale among my mother’s people, we had been close, maybe very close. It had gone hard each year when Lammastide came, and I went back to my life in the city.

  “Can I trust her, Harry?”

  Startled, I stepped into a puddle, looked down to see my boots muddied and the evening sky shattered.

  “I would trust her mind to pursue whatever ends her heart was set on,” I replied carefully. “What that is, you should ken better than I.”

  “I swear her beauty is in her soul!” he exclaimed. “She makes aa’ this—” he gestured at the escarpment, the river, the distant Lea, the shallow wooded valley that was now his world—“seem murky and dim.”

  He had turned to me, arms out wide, as if helpless.

  “I ken how that is,” I muttered.

  Perhaps my voice betrayed me. He looked at me with some curiosity, then around about. This evening no one travelled the old road to Ecclefechan. We were in a dip, unseen. He darted onto a track, overgrown and faltering as hope itself, that wandered through the heuch then back to the burn, to bring us here to wait beneath the brig.

  In my old age, eyes far gone from scrivening and scholaring, the moments that stay with me are as faded manuscript pulled into lamplight. Through long nights I peer into them, trying to decipher their meaning.

  This is one of my favoured passages, where we stand in wait for fair Helen Irvine. The sky is turning sere and scarlet through the arch where he stands, head bowed. It outlines his long straight nose, that fine forehead. His eyes are hidden. Darkness silts up the valley, thickening over the Lea and the Long Barrow. Only the roof of Kirkconnel kirk above the trees catches the last light.

  We are listening for a sound that is not river-run nor last bleats, or birds settling to roost. He paddles the toe of his boot in the stream in little sweeping curves, frowning with concentration.

  There is pattern to what he does, but I cannot decipher it. I nudge and soundlessly enquire. He looks up, startled. Leans his lips to my ear, his breath warm as he whispers.

  “My name in water—see how quickly it is lost.”

  Once again his toe inscribes Adam Fleming. I whisper to him in turn.

  “Write hers, and be lost together.”

  His teeth flash in the gloaming under the brig. In that moment we are close again, the troubled, intoxicated lover and I. With his other boot he delicately toes Helen Irvine, then we stand side by side to watch it unravel and be gone.

  “You are sic a daftie, friend,” I whisper.

  He grins back, delighted. In the shadows he looks young again, playful as he was before his brother’s then his father’s death.

  “But a sincere one, I think!”

  Ah yes, sincerity. That is perhaps the difference. I have lived by truth of tale and translation, that serve another master.

  So silently came she, we heard nothing. The late glow gilded her face as she smiled upon me.

  “Cousin Harry,” she murmured, pressed her smooth cheek to mine. Then she cooried into him as though passing into his very core.

  I looked down at the water that had borne their names away, and awaited my instructions. When she unclasped Adam, I could see she was indeed more than bonnie these days. She made all else seem a shuttered lantern.

  “You will be lookout for us at our trysting, Harry?”

  I nodded. There was no place for me where they were going. Their shoulders, hands and thighs leaned into each other, two saplings caught in prevailing gusts. Their fingers tangled already.

  She kissed me again, looked briefly into my eyes. For a moment nothing had changed since we were bairns on these very banks. He gripped my shoulder, grinned.

  “Merci,” he said. “Gie the kestrel cry if needs be.”

  It was our old signal to each other, when one stood below our lodgings, or needed assistance in a tavern brawl.

  “Surely,” I said. “Ca’ canny.”

  He laughed under his breath, took a quick look round, then followed her through the last green light into the trees, towards the kirk and Lea where the grass grew long.

  I followed them downstream, then eased myself down against a great beech whose branches trailed heavy in the water, and tried to think of anything except what they were now about.

  Let me hold her face and form before me in the lamp-troubled dark, “Fair Helen,” as the ballads cry her.

  I see her best as I knew her first, as a child with me in the fields, so quick and canny. Her eyebrows were set straight and honey-dark above her eyes, and those the colour of sky right overhead. Close up, they had queer paler flecks in them like bits of scattered glass.

  Among the corn we made our dens, and filled them with our make-believe, confessions and lichtsome games. We fossicked every Roman camp and abandoned tower, wandered far downstream to find her family’s cave where they had once hid the Bruce a winter through. She pressed an ivy rope into my hand, seized another, then slid out of sight down the cliff, eyes shining, mouth agape in the thrill . . . Into how many sleepless nights has she descended so, to light my darkness!

  Though younger than I, she was strong-willed and liked to win. At Dirk, Paper, Stane she would bring her hand from behind her back a moment after mine, adapt it in mid-air and laughing wrap her paper round my stone, or break my dirk with her stane. I did not hold it against her. It seemed already I loved some things more than winning.

  One long afternoon, cooried in our den on Kirtle bank, she persuaded me to show her mine. I did and lay there as she stared. She did not laugh but nodded thoughtfully, lips parted, faint lines knotting between her eyebrows, as though she were studying a featherless chick fallen from the nest.

  I pulled my britches up. “Now you,” I said.

  In truth I was relieved when she ran giggling. When I caught her, she cried, “It’s nothing! Harry, there is next to nothing there!” And laughed so merrily.

  When I sit in the corner of a howff, fuddled with ale or bad claret, and someone begins to sing the dolefu’ ballad of “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea,” forgive me if I smile awry.

  I was in a dwam, they were expert, I had lived too many years in the city. An arm crooked round my throat, gloved hand clamped across my mouth. I was hoisted up and hit once in the face, twice in the belly. I slumped and was dropped. Seized by the hair, my face was lifted to what moonlight there was.

  “It is not he.”

  There were three. The man who had whispered I did not know. The one who stood looking down at me was Robert Bell. A third turned away and stood guard.

  Bell hunkered down and stared at me. He had abandoned his Frenchified look, let his beard and black hair grow full. He looked every inch a Border bully in his pomp, hardened and skilled. The moonlight glinted off the Flemish pistol at his hip, the dagger in his fist. My life had been too short. I would be another body found in the woods.

  “It is Fleming’s bum chum,” he said quietly. “I had heard he was back.”

  What madness possessed me then I do not know. With my death towering over me, I made the kestrel cry. It rang sharp and clear before a fist knocked me sideways. The first man put his hand to his sword, looked to his master.

  Would I could say courage came to me at my last.

  “I am unarmed,” I whimpered.

  “More fool you.”

  “I am a priest now. I am here only to see my mother’s people.”

  Neither of these was strictly true. The man in the shadows spoke in a muffled voice.

  “It is o’er late now.”

  Robert Bell lifted me by the throat
as if I were a scrap of prey and stared into my soul and I into his. Then he drew back and hit me full in the face.

  For some years my crooked nose brought, I liked to think, a certain distinction to my features. Now in old age it just adds to my battered and agley appearance, and it aches when the snell winds blow.

  I came back to the taste of blood, thickening in my throat. I rolled on my side, coughed and spat it out. Ribs and belly ached with each breath and movement. They must have given me some parting kicks before disappearing into the night. But I lived. I had not thought to. (Only later would it come clear why I had been spared, and at whose direction. Or perhaps Rob Bell had looked into my face or his own soul, and seen some grounds for mercy there. Que sais-je?)

  I staggered downstream through the trees, breathing only through my mouth. I knelt at the river, washed my face, swallowed and spat blood. The flow had lessened now. I could not bear to touch my nose. I looked at my hands, pale in the broken moonlight. They shook not. Strange.

  The man who spoke but once, the one who turned away as if not wanting to be recognized, I had seen him before. Not in Bell’s company, but another’s. In the city? Short hair and jawline beard, stoop-shouldered but strong. Not a servant, nor quite a master. An adviser of some sort?

  I came to the place where long grass was flattened, out of sight of the path and the far bank alike. This was where young love had lain, heard my warning cry, stolen away into the night. The stone preaching cross from older times stood moonlit higher up the bank. Surely not. Not here.

  I looked back up the slope. Fifteen years of growth to these bushes. A great beech trunk split just above head height. It had once seemed much higher.

  I flopped down. I knew this place, this exact place where a skinny boy on a shimmering afternoon was told to show himself, and did. And she had looked her fill, then giggled and run. That she should bring Adam here.

  I lay back, dumfountert, staring up at the broken moon through leaves. It was autumn-dark, the stars were faint. I felt cold, then felt nothing.

  Perhaps I slept. Certainly the moon had moved. A man stood over me.

  “Harry,” he whispered, knelt and held me.

  “Ow!” I said. “Sois gentil.”

  He pulled aside my cloak, felt gently. He gazed at my face.

  “Bell?”

  “Surely. And two others.”

  He nodded, dark and sombre.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “This was never . . .”

  I shrugged as best I could. “She escaped them?”

  “She will get hame. She has many secret ways.”

  “I bet she does.”

  He looked at me. I looked back. “You saved my life,” he said. “I’ll aye be owing.”

  Then he sighed, stooped down and helped me to my feet. Together we went cautiously on to the old kirk at Kirkconnel. Even by moonlight it looked half ruinous, windows long smashed by Reformers’ stones. He helped me up the stone steps at the side, produced a fat key, opened the door.

  In a room off the vestry were some horse blankets. He lit a candle and made a den for us on the floor. He seemed on familiar ground.

  I lay out, head propped up, swaddled in horse blanket, their sweet stink. My head rang like a heavy bronze bell. Nothing to do but thole it till dawn. Faint moonlight through the round window set in the gable.

  He sat cross-legged at my side, head to his chest. Then he looked at me, face gaunt and vivid in candlelight. His long nose, his clever lips, his eyes unfathomable.

  “I will kill Bell for this,” he said.

  “And never see Helen again?”

  He grunted. He knew I was right. With the Warden Earl of Angus and the Bells so tight, he would be banished at best. Hung more likely, left on the gibbet for the hoodie crows to pike out those bonnie een.

  “He could have killed me, and did not.”

  “So?”

  “So consider your immortal soul before you speak of murder in a church.”

  “Since when did you believe in my immortal soul?” he muttered, licked his fingers and pinched out the candle.

  “Helen.” Did he sleep or wake when he said her name so saftly in the night, and his hand came out to stroke my arm?

  Family

  My last days peter out in this backwater of Hawthornden. I keep the library, argue amiably with Drummond over The Faerie Queene, tease him for the rampant royalism that makes him favour the Book of Common Prayer. I serve too as a curiosity when his friends arrive. (“He rode with the reivers, you know! He was aquaint with Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea!”)

  I instruct Drummond’s many children in Latin and Greek, potter in the garden, gaze vacantly over the sheer drop into the North Esk. I lie down at night, ready to depart. I wake in the night and lie by candle or lamplight—a terror of pure darkness lingers yet—thinking on her and him and those few weeks to which the rest of my life has been but a coda. Morning finds me amazed to be here still.

  My soul cannot be much improved, and can only be saved by an act of mercy that I do not anticipate. All that remains is to set down events of those days as I best understand them. Most like, these papers will be burned when I am gone, then there will be nothing left of me and mine.

  You will not find my stone in Kirkconnel kirkyard, though all I have loved lies there.

  Janet Elliot Fleming was a handsome woman yet, and no fool. Her son’s love of poetry and song, of French, Italian and the Divine Comedy, came from her. As a girl she had seen Paris and Rome before returning home with her father to an agreed marriage in this most debatable corner of the Borderlands. She sat in her fine body with languorous ease.

  She placed me by her at dinner, and asked after my time in Wittenberg and Leyden, my brief trip to Florence as secretary to a scheming bishop. She sighed to hear me talk of the light that poured there from the sky, over bell towers and kirks that were not black and grim, the sculpture, paintings and frescos that seemed a foretaste of Heaven (and, in some cases, Hell).

  “The soul might sing there, Harry,” she said quietly. I was disturbed when she looked into my eyes like that. “Still, it is not hame.”

  “More’s the pity,” I replied. She gave me a doubtful keek, then speared some beef.

  We talked then of the carvings of the Low Countries, besides which our best pulpits are apprentice hack-work that set on high our fanatics, and our finest paintings but cack-handed daubs.

  “They say you are become a scholar of our time, Harry.”

  “More mendicant than scholar,” I replied. “I go wherever will feed me.”

  She laughed, her lips full and moist. “And did you really have to leave Leyden overnight?”

  “The horse was waiting and the night was fair.”

  “I trust she was worth it!”

  I gave her the Italian shrug. Let her think what she may. The truth had been more simple and more curious.

  She speired after the general clash from Embra—the Court, the fashions, the turmoil among the Reformers, which way the wind blew now. Also my living, my studies, my friends. I replied my living was thin, my studies desultory, my friends few.

  She laughed. “I think not,” she said. Her eyes flicked to her son, moodily slurping at the further end of the long table, ignoring the bonnie young second cousin carefully placed to his right. “It is good to see you back among us after so long,” she said. “Is it not, Dand?”

  Her husband of three years raised his head from his meat, licked gravy from his fox-brush moustache. Red-haired and powerfully made as his brother had been fair and lean, he struck me a sensual man, with all the energy and laziness that comes with sensuality gratified.

  “A friend of our son is a friend of the house,” he said gravely. In truth he barely knew me, but I appreciated the sentiment and said so.

  Janet’s smile was so much her son’s. As was the long oval face, the heavy tallow hair.

  “Not your son,” Adam said. His words were quiet but audible to everyone at the table. He went on
drinking. The ripening cousin blushed and looked about to flee. Janet looked to her husband. Dand drew a hefty hand back across his mouth as though wiping away unsaid words, then called on young Watt to fetch in more bread, honey and curds.

  Impossible to miss Janet Fleming’s look of gratitude. Nor, as she moved our conversation to the ongoing harvest, her outrage and baffled love at her oafish son. Who, after briefly and crudely flirting with the cousin, seized his cup, swayed to his feet. I thought he was about to propose a toast, and feared what it might be.

  “Excuse me from the table, Mither,” he said. He seized the bottle from Watt—whom I noted looked to Dand Fleming in appeal, not his mistress—bowed with exaggerated courtesy to the suffering cousin quine, then left the hall.

  We heard the main door bang, his dog bark once as he crossed the yard to the peel tower.

  The lamps burned dirtily, the log in the fireplace shifted down, sent up a flare. Watt cleared the table, the girl brought in apples from their orchard, oranges fresh sent down from Leith.

  “So, Harry,” Dand said cheerily, “you got yourself in a stushie already?”

  He waved his red paw towards my face. Even cleaned up, I was not a bonnie boy.

  “That damned rent horse,” I replied. “She has a nasty streak. And I am no horseman, for all my Irvine blood.”

  I meant nothing by it but that my mother’s family had been famed for horsemanship. Dand and his wife both flinched at the name, just for a moment. Perhaps it was just on account of the long feud between Fleming and Irvine, or perhaps they had rumour of the trysting.

  “I thought you had got in a brawl at the Ecclefechan Inn,” Janet said. She leaned closer, smiled like her son upon me.

  “I am no fighter,” I said. “The local callants have nothing to fear from me.”

  “Nor you from them!” Dand said loudly. “They are hairmless if you do not interfere with their affairs.”