The Disorderly Knights (5 page)

‘That’s right,’ said Tom Erskine, removing his gaze reluctantly from Sybilla’s face. ‘They used to allow the country folk into the castle with eggs and meat and suchlike, until Hume Castle was taken by a trick of that sort, and now they let the men in only as far as the forecourt, and ban the women altogether. But not before they and the English garrison had become … acquainted. What’s Francis
doing there?’ asked the Master of Erskine bluntly. M. de Villegagnon’s eyebrows shot up.

‘
Well
,’ said Sybilla, taking her time. ‘I’m very much afraid he’s chastising the English. You see, if any Englishman serving in Roxburgh actually felt homesick to the point of desertion, a friendly face and a roof nearby would be the first thing he’d want. So—’

‘So Isa and her friends are helping English soldiers to desert?’

‘They don’t
help
them,’ said Sybilla with dainty precision. ‘They merely encourage the disaffection of their clients, and provide good advice and shelter to those who desert. Surprising numbers have gone, you know. Astonishing numbers, in fact.’

‘With Francis behind the friendly ladies, I’m not surprised,’ said Tom Erskine.

‘And with Will Scott there as well, you can imagine,’ said Sybilla calmly, ‘that not all the English visiting Hough Isa survive the experience. They are not, to do them justice, all desperate to desert.’

‘But when they do not come back, their fellow soldiers think they have. A most ingenious game,’ said the Chevalier de Villegagnon. ‘But not one which may continue for ever?’

‘That’s why Francis has gone,’ the Dowager admitted. ‘He thinks the English have begun to realize what is happening. Would you like him to call on you, Chevalier? He will return no doubt before long. He will find you at Leith?’

‘Ah, but no,’ said Nicholas Durand, Chevalier de Villegagnon, rising to his abnormal height and lifting his bonnet and cloak. ‘I must meet him before then—I think at Hough Isa’s.’

*

But it was Sir William Scott they met first, with a score of Kincurd men at Bonjedward, trotting cheerfully through green Teviotdale rehashing his last quarrel with Grizel. ‘Use that word to the bairn’s face and I’ll clout ye!’ Grizel Beaton had shouted.

There was no child—yet. He had said as much. ‘Is there not!’ had cried his bride. ‘Is there not, Will Scott! And if it comes this night, what will I tell it, and its faither getting its kin in a bawdy-house?’

‘Christ, I
told
ye why I had to go to Hough Isa’s!’ yelled Will Scott, his neck as red as his hair.

‘Yes, you did,’ agreed his lady. ‘A matter of duty, ye said. And her cooking’s rare.’

‘Well it is! Better than the auld, done collops ye get at this table!’

‘Then bring her home wi’ ye, ye red-heided gomerel!’ said Grizel Beaton, Lady (Younger) of Buccleuch. ‘Would ye let us all starve? Doesna the Church tell us all, the act o’ love is a sin, wanting a purpose?’ There was a long, harassed pause. ‘Or does she not like ye
enough?’ Grizel had added and lumbered off, squealing with laughter as her husband chased her through to the solar. The odd ways of women were new to Will Scott, but some of them he was getting to like fine.

He was still thinking about it when he met Tom Erskine and his Chevalier friend, and they went on to Crailing together. At roughly the same moment, the English captain at Roxburgh fortress, six miles to the east of Hough Isa’s, decided to pay the lady a visit.

It was a decision not entirely supported by the exiled English soldiery under his command. Those who still had voices with which to speak muttered. The rest wound and rewound the scarves round their jerkin collars and croaked. With each fresh command from the old man, their prospects for both tender friendships and a safe passage homewards to mother were dwindling. The captain had found out about Hough Isa and her friends. That is, the captain knew about Hough Isa already, but not about her specialized role
vis-à-vis
his vanishing garrison. And today the captain intended to act.

With a company of picked men therefore, about whose qualifications strange rumours were rife, Sir Ralph Bullmer with his cousin Sir Oliver Wyllstrop left the castle of Roxburgh and ventured into the enemy country around to visit the too-welcoming homes of single ladies of ample means.

The queen of these, Hough Isa, lived in a stone-built thatched house just outside the village of Crailing. Its windows, part board, were clean and neatly painted, her herb garden was trim, and her chimney place, with its blackened whinstone and its festive hooks and chains, smelt of good soup and mutton stew, witness to the fact that the local shepherds had hearty appetites and the means to satisfy them. There were fresh rushes on the floor of the kitchen, and in the next room a piece of painted carpet even, beside a double bed like a table, with the joiner’s initials and Hough Isa’s, though her English visitors did not know that, entwined on the headboard.

Nothing was entwined on the bed. The house was empty.

Sir Ralph Bullmer, seated aloof on his horse, ordered the residence to be burnt.

It was a bright, clear day in late spring, and the straw burned quickly, the smoke shadows trotting over the grass to their horses’ hooves as they watched; the flames mere distortions of the blue air. A wave of anecdote went over the English troop as, scratching their necks and pushing back their helmets, they watched. They wondered, in an undertone, if The Bullock knew of the other two ladies who obliged, down Oxnam Water and the widow at Cessford village itself.

Sir Ralph Bullmer knew none of them, in the most congenial sense, but his military intelligence was so far adequate, at least. His pale,
long-sighted gaze lifted to the road south beyond the cottage, and raising an arm, he waved his men past the crackling shell of Hough Isa’s home and almost missed, so intent was his purpose, the fluttering movement of woe on the hilltop beyond. Then a woman’s scream, blunted mercifully by distance, repeated itself like a seagull and there, on the rising ground behind the friendly Isobel’s house, was Hough Isa herself, haloed in sunshine, her scarlet pattens sunk in the turf and her striped skirts tied up to her calves, shaking an arm like a rolling pin over the English soldiers below.

Nor was she alone. On one side, the ladies of Oxnam shouted curses, their mouths pale cavities inside red, painted lips. On the other, the lady of Cessford flung a stone. And behind, jumping and shrieking, were surely the comeliest lassies of Bonjedworth and Ancrum, Lanton and Bedrule, their bosoms veiled in sunlight but their voices unsheathed. What among the English had been disjointed talk turned instantly into babble. Sir Ralph Bullmer and his cousin shouted into it, silenced it, and wheeling, led their troops up the hill.

For a moment longer, the furious figures at the top skirled defiance; then they clung together, gown to gown, like silenced bells as the drumming hoofbeats approached. Then someone knelt; others sprang aside; some broke away and vanished altogether beyond the rise of the hill.

Useless panic, for where could they go? What farmer, in the shadow of Roxburgh, would defy the English and take them in? What farmer’s wife would succour the flesh with whom she and her husband were three?

Sir Ralph Bullmer said to Sir Oliver Wyllstrop, ‘Why d’you think they were met at Hough Isa’s, Olly?’

Sir Oliver, trotting on, shook his head. ‘If you ask the men to shoot, I fear they won’t obey.’

In armour, no one can shrug, but the captain of Roxburgh castle laughed hollowly inside his helmet. ‘So long as they die, I’m not going to watch how they do it.’ An unoiled joint at his knee began to sob and he swore sulkily. There was a very sweet armful indeed, like a young cornfield in sunlit green silk, standing alone on one side of the hilltop, her pale face bathed in run mascara and tears. In the same moment she must have seen Sir Ralph too. She hesitated, turned to run, and then instead, trembling like a driven ship with her buffeting robes, stretched out a supplicating arm.

Five cannon, hitherto concealed on the hillside by heaped grass and Hough Isa’s petticoats, fired promptly as one, blowing four hundred pounds of stone shot like an open hopper downhill through the packed men and horses of the English garrison of Roxburgh, killing one third outright with their eyes glistening still. Then, as the
falcons’ thunder deadened the ears, the tatters of Sir Ralph Bullmer’s force saw the smoke lift and several kneeling ladies, their headgear knocked awry, touch a match to their hackbuts and fire. To one side of the guns, a broad-built wench with a beard let off a crossbow, and from just behind her a flock of arrows arched through smoke and shot and fell, thinly slitting, among the petrified troops. Then the five falcons fired again, and those English who could, ran like stoats.

Sir Ralph Bullmer, from pride and a burst girth strap, was the last to go. Bleeding from a scratch on his cheek, he recovered as the slipped saddle fell, kicked it free and bareback hugged his horse with his thighs and turned its head.

A light hand on his arm stopped him short. Below, her floating gown filthy, the girl of the hilltop beseeched him, her eyes anxious cisterns of blue. For the merest second, Sir Ralph Bullmer studied her. Her hands were empty and her thin dress innocent of weapons. ‘All right. You’ll tell me what it’s all about, or I’ll know why,’ said Sir Ralph Bullmer hastily, and swung her behind him.

The horse careered down the hillside after his men. From behind, the arrows still fell although the firing had stopped. For the moment, it seemed, no one pursued. The girl behind him laid her cheek on his neck and began unlacing his armour. He knocked her hand away and then grabbed his reins as the horse danced, nearly out of control. The fingers stole round again. His cuirass was half off. The more intelligent of his men had slowed a little and turned to await him; still there seemed to be no pursuit.

He knocked the girl’s hand away again and kicked out behind with his mailed foot, then floundered as, saddleless, he nearly lost his own seat. Melting behind him, the girl’s limbs were untouched. She unfastened all the straps round his middle and undid his shirt; his swipe met thin air. Inward to his sweating body ran streams of cold air, through all the loosened flanges of plate metal. Clanking cuirass on thigh-piece, Sir Ralph Bullmer on his horse flew across the gentle valley of Teviot like a well-plenished tinker’s curse, and did not know until he pulled up, dismounted, and his breeches fell down, that there was no one behind him by then.

Soon after that, a half-naked gentleman in breech hose knocked at a door in Upper Nisbet, requisitioned a jerkin and a pony with great charm, and went whistling on his way to Jedburgh, where by arrangement a second cousin of Will Scott’s was to look after the homeless Hough Isa and shelter the ambushing marksmen, if need be, on the first stage of their journey back home.

Not long after Bullmer with his survivors had got back to the English fortress at Roxburgh, Will Scott and his men arrived at the tall wooden house of his cousin, peeled off their kirtles and bonnets and crowded into the kitchen where already Hough Isa and her two
genuine friends were at the cooking pots. Then, having settled his men, Sir William dressed in his own clothes and took his two unlooked-for observers, Thomas Master of Erskine and Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, upstairs to the small room to talk.

They spoke in French. It was not that the Chevalier’s English was lacking, but simply that he mistrusted, that day, what he heard. That a Roxburgh deserter had warned Will Scott of the impending English raid on the ladies—that he understood. That this might be made an excuse to ambush the garrison—this again was clear. Wise also to have the five cannon dragged from Jedburgh—instant annihilation of superior numbers was thus made quite possible. And certainly, the sight of the ladies had brought the Englishmen half up the hill and within easy range, while the falcons were hidden by skirts. But, the Chevalier de Villegagnon had pointed out, they had been unable to ride pursuing the English, had not even tried to conceal mounted men behind that small hill, who could sweep over and kill …?

‘Aye,’ had said Will Scott on the battlefield, as they loaded the English wounded in carts and searched the dead for their money and weapons. ‘Well, ye see, I got orders from the old Queen not to meddle. If I lost a man through defending a whore, she said she’d see me in jail for a year. So I made sure when the English came on,’ said Will Scott simply, ‘that my lads’d be after better sport than killing.’

‘And what will the Queen Dowager say,’ said Tom Erskine drily, ‘if Crawford of Lymond is lost?’

‘He’ll be back at Jedburgh to meet us, you’ll see,’ said Scott a little quickly. And the Chevalier de Villegagnon, shrewdly observing, chose that moment to say, ‘Will it please you to speak French?’ and added rapidly, ‘I understood on joining you that M. of Lymond had left the ambush altogether?’

Tom Erskine answered. ‘He was in front with the ladies. He gave the signal to fire.’

‘But he has not returned? Which was he?’

‘The one in green that rode off with Ralph Bullmer,’ said Will Scott; and without waiting for Tom’s smooth translation added, ‘And if Ralph Bullmer’s still alive to tell of it, I’ll wager he’d rather he wasn’t.’

They were at their soup when Lymond arrived. A voice cut through the uproar below and Will Scott missed his mouth and got to his feet dripping; then sat down and wiped off his chin. Then the door opened on the tenuous girl in the green dress, now in staid brown hose under a tunic, the blond hair visibly short.

He was carrying a bowl of soup. As he kicked shut the door to the stairs, Scott spoke with reverberating gusto. ‘Francis! What in God’s name have you done with Sir Ralph?’

‘Bullmer?’ The voice was pleasant, the air one of mild surprise.
‘I undressed him, I believe. Cousin Oily had a grin like a viaduct.’ Francis Crawford laid down his soup and, without sitting, said to de Villegagnon, ‘What would you have done, sir?’

M. de Villegagnon, Knight of the Order of St John, answered in French, one meaty shoulder negligently to the wall. ‘Was Monsieur armed?’ he asked.