After Flodden (22 page)

How true, Crozier reflected. ‘But now you feel safe to drop your guard,’ he asked, ‘in this nest of thieves and abductors?’

Louise’s flush deepened. She could not admit to herself, let alone him, that she had not wanted Gabriel Torrance to see her in such a guise. At the thought of the injured man, she found
her tongue.

‘The boy and I must eat, and after that, we must do what we can for Gabriel, before making our departure.’

‘You’re not travelling with him?’ Crozier sounded surprised. ‘I thought you were a party. You seem to know him well.’

‘Not well,’ admitted Louise, aware she had been forward in showing her attachment to a man who was little more than a stranger. ‘He came searching for me, at my mother’s
request. He is what you might call a family friend; certainly he has been kind to us. But no, we are not travelling with him. I must get on, whatever his plans.’ Her eyes widened as a thought
occurred: ‘Perhaps we could leave him here to recover, and return for him when our journey’s done?’

Crozier returned her look with a glance that was at best unfriendly, but felt more like contempt. ‘You cannot leave, ma’am. Have some sense. You are in the Borderlands, in a time of
ferocious danger. Even the woods around us might be thick with the enemy. I cannot let you set foot outside the keep on your own. And no . . . ’ he raised a hand as the girl raised her chin,
‘that does not mean I am holding you against your will. Your father, were he aware, would approve my sentiments, I am sure.’

Louise flinched.

‘Deid, like mine,’ said Hob, looking at his feet as his own memories returned.

‘Forgive me,’ said Crozier curtly, ‘I did not know.’

The woman’s pallor disturbed him. With an ungentle hand he took her elbow and guided her towards the keep. The resistance he met from that joint, a piece of bone and gristle one might have
thought incapable of such self-expression, made him drop his hold at once.

‘Perhaps I should have guessed you are fatherless,’ he said, ‘since you are reckless enough to be out on the road. In times like this, though, I need to know why you are
abroad, and prepared to take such risks.’

Louise said nothing, and he softened his tone, replacing granite with gravel. ‘But first, you must eat. The boy too. And,’ looking down at the small dog padding at his spurs,
‘no doubt this tyke needs a few scraps.’

As if she understood, the vixen gave a yelp. ‘Looks as if she is recovering from her kicking,’ said Crozier, in a voice warmer than Louise had yet heard. He bent to rub the
mongrel’s ears and in that moment made a friend, the first in many years, who did not care about his ramshackle manners or the uncouth company he kept.

Over barley bread and cheese, laid before them in silence by Crozier’s darkling mother, Louise and Hob told their story. Louise began like a child reciting a lesson for a tutor dandling a
tawse in his hand. Forced to reveal her family’s business to a man like this, with as little choice as if he was holding a sword to her throat, she would offer him no more than the bare
facts.

But in the telling, she found her resentment fading, determined only to make it clear why he must allow her to leave the keep. Caught up in her tale, her cheeks glowed. Glancing across the
table, she caught, unguarded, a look of sympathy on the Borderer’s face. She paused for a moment, and as she continued, her suspicion of him began to recede. It was a retreating tide that,
after so violent a first encounter, would take time fully to ebb, but in that wordless exchange, chill grey eyes meeting summer green, they began to understand each other.

Hob had wolfed down his platter, and despatched a second serving by the time Louise reached the part of their story where she had found him on the moors. Like a fairground mummer, his mouth
floury from Mother Crozier’s bread, the boy started to prance around the kitchen, enacting the scene. His impression of the horse was particularly lively, but the orphan’s ordeal was
pitiful to hear. His refusal to be child-like in his misery, despite his extreme youth, touched the older man. Hob was far younger than Crozier had been when his father was killed, and there was a
spirit about the boy that impressed him. Already, he seemed to be taking on the position of protector to this hot-headed young woman, who had no idea of the danger she might encounter in these
parts – or any other, for that matter. She could have met with trouble in the backstreets of Edinburgh, let alone on the country’s frontier. Such eldritch looks would bring her
attention wherever she went.

‘Now you understand,’ Louise was saying, ‘why I must get to Flodden or Berwick. Every day counts. I can’t . . . ’ – she broke off, and swallowed –
‘I can’t bear to think of my brother in distress. Better, almost, that he is dead and beyond care than that he needs help and I sit here doing nothing.’

‘I understand that, ma’am,’ said Crozier, ‘and I can imagine only too well what you and your family are suffering. But explain to me, if you can, how you come to be in
tow with one of the dead king’s men? That part eludes me. How do I know you are not part of some trick to inveigle the court’s reporters into our ranks? They’ve long wanted our
heads, and never more than now.’

Louise’s reluctance to talk about her sister was evident, but Crozier was not a man to accept a half-truth or evasion. Hesitantly, under his hawk-like eyes, she spelled out
Marguerite’s relationship with James, and its mortal outcome. There had been a time when she would have bitten her lip till it bled rather than give a stranger the idea that the women in her
family were open to free offers of love. Now, such prudery seemed ridiculous. Who cared what the world thought? What did it matter?

In the past few days, as she had brooded on her sister’s plight, and found herself thinking too often, perhaps, of the king’s courtier, she had had the first stirring of
understanding. Maybe love was more important than convention, and happiness to be grabbed, wherever it was found. As she had seen, joy could be fleeting, as was life itself. Even at nineteen, when
Marguerite had caught James’s eye, and the age Louise had reached now, the future could slip from one’s fingers faster than an oily spoon.

As she spoke of her sister, Louise did not need to voice her fury at the king, or his people. Crozier heard the anger in every word. As she described her meeting with the king’s secretary,
Patrick Paniter, it would have astonished that figurehead of the realm to know with what little respect this young woman regarded him and his kind. It was all the more telling, therefore, that her
tone changed when she discussed the courtier, and his affiliation with Paniter.

‘He is his companion, and advisor, I believe,’ she said, scraping bread around her bowl, and avoiding Crozier’s eye. ‘A nobleman of small but good Irish family, living in
the west of the country. He much prefers fields to the city.’

If she hoped to make Crozier recognise a kindred spirit in his prisoner, she failed. Innate mistrust of the crown coloured his view of any from that quarter, and the golden-haired Torrance, with
his fine rings and diamond ear-stud, fell foul of that prejudice. He might be the most true and gallant soldier this side of York minster, but he would have a hard time persuading the Borderer of
his credentials.

‘He will not be fit for a time yet, anyway, to accompany you, even if you wished,’ he said. ‘Wat tells me he slept well, and has eaten this morning, but he needs more rest
before he fully gets over his cracked head.’

‘It looked bad, last night,’ said Louise. ‘His arm too. Will he recover?’

‘Sure to,’ said Crozier. ‘He’s strong, and his wound is not serious. I am willing for him to stay here while he recovers, but not’ – he looked at her, unable
to disguise the strength of his distaste – ‘not a day longer. I am no friend of the court and its hangers-on.’

Louise nodded, aware that, even by this meagre dole of hospitality, he had stretched a principle as far as it would go. ‘I am grateful to you,’ she said, conscious as she spoke that
the words would have been unthinkable a few hours earlier.

‘As for your brother,’ Crozier continued, ‘perhaps I can help. Once I’ve spoken with a pair of young lads, who are just arrived from the coast and awaiting orders, I am
going to Berwick, on my own business. While there, I will find out what I can about who lies in the cells.’

Louise cast him a warm look. He nodded, as if offering no more than a simple courtesy, but both knew that Berwick was hazardous, a nest of English soldiers and local informers, and nowhere more
perilous than the castle and its gaol. It was not a place to linger, and adding the hunt for Benoit to his own search for information doubled the danger.

‘First,’ said Crozier, ‘you must tell me everything about your brother that would help me find him. Remember, the place will be teeming, and in filth and rags everyone looks
alike. Is there anything remarkable about him?’

Louise took her time, choosing her words carefully as she described Benoit’s appearance, and his accent, his favourite words and his habits, as if in drawing a close and vivid portrait she
was keeping him alive, and not just in her own mind.

Before leaving for Berwick, Crozier sliced the ropes from the courtier’s wrists, and posted a permanent guard on his door. He reminded Wat that he was in charge of their high-born patient,
and his well-being. ‘No roughing up,’ he said, ‘unless he asks for it. I want him fit, and out of here, as soon as can be arranged.’

‘And the other pair, the wifie and her boy?’

‘They are house guests, and to be treated as such. But keep an eye on them, nonetheless.’

‘It’ll no be hard keeping track of yon laddie,’ replied Wat. ‘If there’s a horse or cow in sight, he’ll be at its side. He’s already milked half the
byre, wi’out a kick even from Bonnie, and ye ken whit wey she is wi’ strangers.’

Crozier nodded, but already his thoughts were far from the keep. A few hours later, as dusk was falling, he caught up with them, his mare slowing to a walk as she reached the muddied tracks that
led from the woods down to the river and sea where Berwick sat, a barnacle on the very border between England and Scotland.

*    *    *

Cupped between sea and river, with rich fields at her back, hers was so desirable a location that, like the Old Testament infant, Berwick was tugged this way and that between
Scots and English, claimed by one and then the other over the years. Without King Solomon to make a final decision, the citizens scarcely knew who or where they were. To save unnecessary confusion
they had long since retreated into a brooding taciturnity that took no sides, showed no favours, and made for a dour and fractious population.

The tussle had ended some time back with English victory, and for the past few decades the town had been paying its tithes and taxes into the House of Tudor’s treasury. But the coins
flowed both ways. This outpost was precious to the English crown, and so much money was poured into its ramparts and fortifications that by now it was as well defended as Jericho, a town encircled
by its very own Hadrian’s Wall, and even more fiercely policed.

In late afternoon, the sea was a darkening scowl behind the chimney smoke of the narrow, rugged streets. A sandstone fortress dominated the skyline, seeming to cast a shadow the length of the
town. There was no missing the castle, crouching as if ready to attack, nor the bristling pikes of its sentries as they walked its walls in full fighting gear.

Crozier got off his horse and led her along the riverbank until he reached a common where she could graze. He preferred not to enter the city gates until it was dark, when he could pass himself
off as an English farmer, arrived for the morning’s market. He sipped aqua vitae from his flask, pulled his leather hood over his eyes, and waited for the sun to set.

The portcullis was raised, but the thickness of the town’s walls reflected the depth of its guards’ suspicions. Crozier produced a smeared and creased old document, stamped with the
English march warden’s seal, the only object he had stolen from Dacre’s messenger’s knapsack, beyond the letter he carried. In a spidery hand it testified to his name and
profession – Dick Hawley, cattle-breeder on a smallholding near Wooler.

‘Your business tonight?’ asked the soldier, squinting to read the pass by a flickering torch. ‘A stud bull,’ said Crozier, in a voice none of his family would have
recognised, not just for its cringing meekness, but for its southern lilt. ‘I had hopes of finding one the mornin to drive hamewards, ahead of winter. The dams need a good sire, since the
last yin died of the bloody flux. I’m keen on a Galloway, but I’d settle for a longhorn, or mibbe even a Swiss Brown.’ Crozier drew his sleeve across his nose, and gave a mucous
sniff.

Bored, the sentry waved him into the town. The mare’s hooves sounded thunderous in the low cave of the gateway, and her shoes struck a spark as she skittered, uneasy in such confinement.
Crozier was relieved when they were out once more in the open street, away from the evilly curved blades on the soldier’s billhook.

The town was noisy and jostling as tradesfolk touted for final scraps of business before curfew, and citizens scurried between booths and stalls, anxious at the approaching hour. In the wake of
Flodden, the streets were to be cleared by eight. Only those with legitimate reason to be abroad were allowed to pass after that time, so that a garrison, apprehensive at its catch of felons from
the late battle, and plain scared at the thought of retribution from the north, would not fear being taken by surprise.

Before the church bells tolled the hour, Crozier needed to find a bed. First, though, he made for a booth by the town cross where chestnuts were roasting on a bed of hot irons beneath a canvas
canopy.

The owner nodded at his customer, and appeared to ignore him, beyond placing a twist of chestnuts in his hand, and receiving a grubby coin in return. Only the keenest eyes would have seen words
exchanged, the Borderer’s hood hiding his face, and the stall holder so practised in discretion he could speak with barely a twitch of his lips.