A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 20
‘I will, but we must be quick. It is imperative I overtake them before they get to Liddesdale. When did Geordie Burn leave?’
‘He woke a little stronger this morning and so he left with them; but he’d fain have come after the pair of you if the Lord of the Waste had allowed.’
‘That he would never do: the honour of the Waste stands on the shoulders of the lord’s command; but I must after them as swiftly as I can, and now I bethink me, I had best take along the lady Janet into the bargain...’
‘You may take her and welcome, for she is certainly no lady, not after the way she danced the volte last night! But I fear you will have to consult her at the least, for she will doubtless have her own mind in the matter and you are in no condition to enforce your will upon her should she prove intractable.’
Tom sent for her nevertheless, and as the Lady Ellen had worked upon him, so he worked upon her.
‘To Hermitage!’ exclaimed Janet, her tone more calculating than horrified.
‘You must come. You know you have unfinished business there,’ he tempted, like the devil in the old plays.
‘Perhaps. But what do you know of that?’ she countered.
‘More than you suppose. I will protect you,’ he promised manfully.
She gave a bark of laughter at that. ‘From the look of you, you will stand in need of my protection when Black Robert gets his hands on you.’
‘In that assumption also you are deceived, Janet,’ he countered with quiet confidence. ‘But let us both own Black Robert our enemy for the moment, and let us stand confederated against him and each of us help the other as we beard him in his den. Was it rape, such as your mother warned you of when we talked in the Blackpool kirk?’
‘Rape as ever was. A pretty lass among the Kerrs taken by force on an afternoon’s hunting near twenty years since. I’m the result. The vessel of my mother’s rage and sorrow and of all my family’s shame. I am bad blood and bad cess and Black Robert’s bastard. And I doubt he even knows I exist for all he’s seen me often enough of late.’
The Lady Ellen’s eyebrows rose irresistibly towards her hairline as she worked and pretended, unconvincingly, to be too preoccupied to listen to this sad bitterness.
‘And we seek the lady Eve,’ continued Janet with a jealous frown; but it was a short-lived expression: Tom had already won her.
‘We seek so much more than that, Janet,’ he concluded.
Janet sighed and nodded. She was his. So he sent her to change back into the clothes of the seeming boy he had almost killed at Housesteads. Lady Ellen finished her work while she did so, and the pair of them moved on.
Tom took the first pony he could find. He reserved for Janet the little steed that had carried him through the hunt, and was glad to do so. It was a beast he knew well and respected. He soon found that his own was the match of it, however. He could rely on both of them to run their hearts out catching up with the others. He believed that, no matter in what state his wounds or Lady Ellen’s tending had left him, he could rely on his own plucky little animal to carry him up with the procession of guests as they headed for Hermitage. He could rely on Janet’s to do the same, though he could only guide his mount clumsily enough with the reins in his left hand.
As Janet had changed her clothing and found a light jack to match his own as well as a stout travelling cloak, Lady Ellen had completed her ministrations. His right hand was wrapped in bandages thick enough to make his arm seem almost like a club. Like the wounds to the back and front of his head it had been rinsed and spread with unguents. Unlike them it had also been bandaged, but as lightly as Lady Ellen would allow – too heavily for Tom to resume his glove or grip his sword, but lightly enough for him to move the fingers a little still, as long as he could stand the pain. It should have been in a sling, but his vanity forbade that it should be so and he rode with it at his hip, resting on the pommel of the sword it could no longer hold. Janet rode at his right hand; if he drew a sword, it would be with his left.
Tom and Janet set their ponies’ heads a little north of west and they cantered easily over hill and dale, south of Blackpool Gate, crossing the River Lyne at Oakshaw ford and following the steep little valley straight on up past Sleetbeck on to the saddle between Chamot Hill and Wakey. The pair of them came a little south past Beyond the Moss and caught up with Sir Thomas’s party on the border itself at Penton as they prepared to cross Liddel Water and swing north into Liddesdale and Scotland. While they rode, they talked: of Janet’s birth and background; of her upbringing amongst the Kerrs, by Hugh of Stob himself, and his wife, and Janet’s mother, while she was still alive.
They caught up with Hobbie and the huntsmen as they splashed across the ford, tight-packed and laden with the hindquarter of the hart. There was no way past them and up along the festive column towards Sir Thomas and de Vaux at its head; and, were there no way pass the column now, no more would there be for a good few miles still. For on the west side of the valley, over the river, which grew wider and shallower as it prepared to join the River Esk, the steep hillsides gathered swiftly into cliffs. The roadway all too soon became a pathway, and that narrow thoroughfare swooped off up the valley side into a steep and precipitous little ledge just wide enough for a sure-footed hobbie horse to follow.
With the wild rock reaching upwards on the left hand and the bewildering cliffs falling downwards on the right into a roaring wilderness of russet foam, there was no place to hurry, let alone to overtake. Tom and Janet perforce remained with the quizzical Hobbie, therefore, as Sir Thomas, unreachable, the merest bowshot up ahead, pierced the Laird of Hermitage’s stronghold of Liddesdale all unaware of the situation into which he was riding.
‘Tom!’ called Hobbie. ‘Where ye been? And why in God’s name have ye brought the lass with ye?’
‘‘Tis a long story. Is Geordie Burn with Sir Thomas?’
‘Aye: at his left hand up ahead, with Fen-wick the Factor and Sir Nicholas de Vaux. Or more likely in line behind him now, for they’re up on the narrow path already, I see. The Lady Ellen’s cures have strengthened Geordie beyond measure. He’s none too hearty, mind, but hale enough for this. Now ‘tis your turn to answer me.’
‘If I can. What?’
‘Where’s Eve that ye stole off with like some thief in the night?’
‘Eve’s up ahead, and I pray she’s awaiting us.’
‘Up ahead? Where up ahead?’
‘At Hermitage. One-Hand Dand carried her off last night and the last I heard they were headed thither.’
‘Carried her off? And ye’re alive to tell of it? Tom, ye’re not the man I thought ye!’
‘I was near enough dead when they left with her. When you’ve leisure, you can feel the blood that’s set my hair like marble and marvel at the colours – and shape – of my hand.’
‘Aye, now I have the leisure to look, I see ye’ve a great bruise like the eye of a Cyclops right in the midst of your forehead; and that explains young Janet here: a bargaining counter. She’ll not be worth much put up against Eve herself, mind.’
‘The bruise is least of my hurts, I assure you; and Janet may be worth more than she seems, for she’s Black Robert’s only daughter.’
Hobbie mulled that over for a while before he asked, ‘Who hit ye? Dand?’
‘The only one of them I am sure did not hit me was Dand; but ‘twas he who walked his horse across my hand as I lay fainting on the floor.’
‘Ye should have let me kill him – aye, and her, while we had the chance.’
‘I know. It is always our good deeds that come back to do us most harm.’ His laughing words were called out loudly, to cover Janet’s angry retort.
Hobbie grunted with a half-laugh himself and had the grace to look shamed under the girl’s indignant gaze. ‘True enough; but Dand was for taking Eve to Hermitage, ye say?’
‘If not Dand, then one that rode with him – rode with him and stood above him, for Dand answered to his commands.’
‘And who was this that gave orders to the Kerrs?’
‘I’d have said it was Geordie Burn.’
‘But he was ill in bed all night, with many an eye to swear to it.’
‘Then it was Tam himself, that fell out with Geordie for love of her all those years ago. Tam has got her at last – but not for himself, of course: he’s taken her to Black Robert.’
Their conversation had to end there because the ground beneath their ponies’ hooves rose up abruptly and they were suddenly on the narrow path. It was many years since Tom had ridden this route. Then he had been an able, scrawny horseman in full control of his large and steady steed. Now the position was very different. He was a large and heavy body on a little pony, his left hand only clumsily in control of the reins, the pair of them in the grip of a wild north wind that bounced off the wall beside them like the old king’s tennis balls, and threatened to topple them into the abyss.
Tom was the rearmost of the procession. The position gave him a little blessed relief from the dangerous wind and pricked his pride into the bargain. All the others – Hobbie laden with a quarter of a deer, Janet with her plaid cloak flapping in the wind – seemed to be trotting forward without a second thought. So he settled himself in the saddle, gripped his right-hand sword pommel until the pain in his hand became too much to bear, and followed the Lord of the Waste into the dangerous valley of Liddesdale and the lair of the laird himself.
Twenty-four: Hermitage
The valley side circled round below Hermitage. As they approached the dark old castle, the pathway widened and faded into the slope, becoming a pathway, then a rough roadway, leading up towards the forbidding place; but as soon as it did so, the roadway became contained within defensive walls, so that even now Tom could find no way past the riders ahead to get his message to Sir Thomas.
Tom had no choice, therefore, but to use his eyes instead of his heels and scour the castle itself for further clues that he might use in the coming confrontation with its dark and dangerous captain. To Tom’s eyes, Hermitage seemed to have an evil and sinister aspect, fit indeed to be the lair of Black Robert Douglas. The walls were absolute, reaching nigh on fifty feet sheer, grey stone standing on the frost-grey crag outlined against the winter-grey sky without any softening or decoration. Even the smoke that rose from its invisible chimneys was thick and grey and at one with the place and its setting. It was what it was designed for: a perfect blending of form and function, thought Tom – a place of impenetrable defence, a source of absolute leadership, a threat of unrelenting terror. For terror alone would keep the Armstrongs, whose bothies filled the valley below, from the throat of the men who garrisoned Hermitage Castle. A previous captain had been boiled alive in the castle yard before the keep, and the current captain was not about to share his fate.
On the other hand, the man who had built the castle in the first place had been in league with the devil, and that was a dark part of its history that Robert Douglas was, apparently, happier to share. If any man had raised the Barguest from its kennel in the deeps of hell through the exercise of black, forbidden arts, then it was he.
‘Witchcraft?’ said Hobbie in answer to Tom’s enquiry. ‘Oh aye. That’s what they say. But what grounds they have I cannot tell ye...’
‘It is the lights,’ said Janet, suddenly, ‘and the sounds in the night. Deep sounds that make the whole head of the valley shake. They do not come from the castle, but they spread out down the dale...’
‘You had this from Dand, I assume?’
‘And Hugh. When the Kerrs do business with Black Robert, they keep their longest pikes to hand.’
‘"Who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon,”‘ confirmed Tom, his eyes looking upwards towards the great gateway that stood astride the road immediately in front of them.
There were two Kerrs hanging at the main gate to Hermitage as Black Robert had promised. If they disturbed Janet, then she showed no sign of it as she rode between and below their swinging feet. Everyone, in fact, trotted into the castle without hesitation or, apparently, any second thought at all – except, that is, for Tom.
Tom reigned up below the slowly revolving corpses and stood in his stirrups, looking up and frowning with thought. They were hung too high for anyone to see their faces clearly, but it seemed to him that their bulging eyes and gaping mouths bespoke terror as eloquently as did John’s or Father Little’s; and that put him in mind of executions he had seen in his new home of London, where there was a gallows on every major crossroad, with a whipping post, a cage and a set of stocks to match them. For now he thought of it, the faces of all the dead men he had seen of late might well have shared with many a felon in the South that terrible look of someone slowly choking to death, aswing and kicking helplessly in a hempen noose.
Except, of course, for the facts that there had been no reddening of bulging, bloodshot eyes and no thick, bloody tears; no tearing of tongue and lips by wildly gasping jaws; no emptying of bodily wastes. Most especially, there had been no thick black cicatrice around the neck, such as marked an official execution done according to the law. Just how many of these tell-tale signs adorned the corpses hanging at Black Robert’s gates Tom could not quite make out. He would have given much to look more closely at that pair of Kerrs who hung like a brace of pheasants ripening for the table.
‘As I promised, Master Musgrave,’ came Lord Robert’s icy voice, as gentle as a devil’s sliding through the wind.
‘Give ye good den, Lord Robert,’ said Tom, swinging a little clumsily down off his horse and recovering into a courtly bow. ‘Did the lady Eve arrive safely last night?’
Lord Robert had turned away, however, and was taking his place at the head of his reception line, every bit as formal as the Lord of the Waste had been before his Christmas Hunt. Now at last Tom found himself beside Sir Thomas. He had precedence as honoured guest, as Queen’s messenger – or the Lord of the North’s at any rate – and as the old man’s nearest living relative; but the position at his uncle’s side was of no use now, for the man against whom he wanted to warn Sir Thomas was at his other hand, unctuously introducing him to the garrison and their guests in turn – men whom he knew already; but with more detail in the description.
As Lord Robert introduced his uncle, Tom had time for a glance over his shoulder to see Janet indistinguishably join the mass of the Bewcastle garrison at Hobbie Noble’s shoulder. Then he allowed himself a swift look around the sparse, functional interior of Hermitage Castle. They stood assembled in a flag-floored yard with what looked like a well at its heart. Here, as in Bewcastle, there were stables and smithies and storehouses leaning against the inner side of the outer wall; but over all loomed the keep. Huge and threatening it loomed on them, rising without any feature at all for three sheer storeys before a balcony thrust out with a great door behind it – a main door fit to welcome kings – three storeys too high for them to reach without wings. Everything below that was impenetrable and unassailable, a killing ground for any unwary invaders caught within the portcullis with nowhere else to go.
Suddenly the dark keep’s black captain was talking to Tom himself: ‘Of course you must know Sir Nicholas de Vaux, the noted courtier and friend of the Earls of Essex and Southampton. You are aware, I am sure, of his great houses, Camborne House, London, and St Erth under Redruth...’
‘Sir Nicholas.’ Tom bowed just enough for courtesy: a duellist at the piste.
‘Sir Thomas. Master Musgrave...’ De Vaux nodded.
‘And Senor Juan Placido Flores de Sagres, lately returned from his most Pacific Majesty Philip’s dominions in New Spain.’
‘I’m surprised that Drake and Raleigh let you through,’ said Tom pleasantly, bowing and smiling. Then he continued after a moment of silence in which even Lord Robert was shocked speechless by his crass incivility. ‘Ah, a thousand pardons, senor. I see you do not speak English...’ The latter words were spoken in his inelegant, if serviceable, Spanish.
‘There seems to be no end to Master Musgrave’s accomplishments,’ Lord Robert inserted smoothly in Latin. ‘Let us hope we do not come against an end to them today; but we speak in English here, sir, as Senor Sagres understands, in notion if not the words themselves. There are too many ignorant ears that grow dangerously suspicious of anything they do not understand.’ He stepped sideways again, taking Sir Thomas and Tom with him almost irresistibly. ‘And this is my factor, Mr Beattie,’ he continued in English, as though the foreign syllables, living and dead, had never tripped so smoothly off his tongue.
There was no Hunt Mass. Instead, they were all remounted at once when the introductions had been done. In their saddles, as in Bewcastle, they partook of a brief hunt breakfast – mostly of baked and roasted birds.
‘Our hawking went well yesterday,’ said Lord Robert, ‘and you reap the benefit of it doubly. Not only does it furnish breakfasts now, it also presents us with vital intelligence as to our quarry for today...’
With every eye upon him, Lord Robert rose in his saddle, easily commanding the moment, so that even the restless, excited horses fell quiet under his spell. ‘For weeks we had been hearing rumours that something big and dangerous had come avisiting into the darkest of our thickets down the dale; but rumour was all we had and Armstrongs, though brave and resourceful, are not always absolutely reliable in matters such as telling the truth. In any case, for some time since the whole of the Borders has been alive with whispers of the Barguest – which is what the Armstrongs seem convinced our mysterious visitor must be – and the Barguest, as we all here know, is a thing of fable, a toy for a winter’s tale – a thing for women to frighten children with; nothing such as would invade the wise credulity of men such as ourselves.
‘But yesterday at hawking, down by the mouth of the dale itself, my guests and I found unmistakable signs of the beast. It is there; and I have invited us all here, the best of the Borders, north and south, the flower of Scotland and England, to hunt it.’
