THE CHAINS OF FATE an utterly compelling and romantic historical saga (The Heron Quartet Book 2), page 9
‘For as long as it takes to bring him back,’ I said, with a stout certainty I did not feel at all. Malise smiled, a wide infectious smile that had nothing of shyness in it now. ‘Then I wish you the best of luck, Cousin, and I’ll do all I can to help. But you may not have much time — have you heard yet why we’ve returned?’
We shook our heads.
‘Well, you know how we went to Dumfries, after the Cumberland men deserted. That was a poor business, though they were a sorry enough lot when all’s said and done. Two days, it took them to decide they’d had enough, and then they just turned round and went home again, leaving us in the lurch. So, we pushed on to Dumfries, and they opened the gate to us — and the men who did that will live to rue it. And we hadna been there more than two days when a messenger came in from the Lady Keir, who’s a Napier and Montrose’s niece, telling him to go straightway to Stirling, where he would find the garrison ready to change sides. But he had no help other than the soldiers from England — all those trimming Border men, Homes and Maxwells and the rest, and Roxburgh, never trust a Kerr, they’re an unchancy race — none of them would take the King’s commission. It would have been lunacy to try to cut across to Stirling, and Montrose may be daring and opportunist, but he isna stupid. When we heard that Callender — he’s the general Leslie left behind to watch over Scotland — when we heard he was coming with five thousand men against us, there was no choice but to go back to England. But he told Francis and me to come here, and keep watch for him, send word when time is ripe to try again, and try to sound out some support from the lesser lairds along the Border. He’s going to stay in the North of England, ye ken, and make Leslie’s life a misery.’
‘What’s he like, the Earl of Montrose?’ Grainne asked curiously, and Malise spread his hands, calloused with riding and lute-playing. ‘I could tell you what he looks like, and sounds like, but for what he is, you’d have to meet him. He isna very tall, nor very broad, he has reddish hair and grey eyes … I could paint his picture in words, but you wouldna have the essence of him, his character, what makes men follow him …’
‘I think I know what you mean,’ I said slowly. ‘I met him in Oxford, you see, he brought Great-Aunt’s letter telling me that Francis was here. He was very quiet, and calm, and friendly, though I know he’s been accused of overmuch pride, and he looked to me like a man who knew exactly where he was going, and what he had to do, and would do it regardless of cost to himself.’
‘That describes him verra nicely,’ Malise said. ‘Add to that, that he perhaps sees a greater purpose in all this; he’s like a man who follows a light, the light of his own destiny. I think all his life he has wanted to shine, like a candle in the dark, and now in this darkness is his chance. He risks his life in a venture many would call madness, and yet he is happier than I have ever seen him, because he knows it is what he has to do; to win Scotland for the King’s cause. And because he has that quality about him, we follow him, though left to ourselves we might not care so deeply for a King who after all has cared very little for us.’
‘Will he do it, do you think?’ Grainne asked. ‘Will he take Scotland?’
Malise smiled. ‘If he were any other man, I’d say no, not a hope of it — the dream of a lunatic, or of a King three hundred miles away who doesna realize the situation, and likes to live on fanciful schemes and foolish hope. But James Graham believes he can do it, knows he can, or die in the attempting.’ He paused, thoughtfully, and added, ‘He showed me a poem in Dumfries. He’d written it, oh, two-three years ago, when he was up at Kincardine in disgrace. It wasna verra long, and most of it I canna remember, but one piece stuck in my mind, you might say, and if you’re looking for the key to Jamie Graham, you couldna do better, I’m thinking. Listen:
He either fears his fates too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all.
‘He sees his destiny, as I said,’ Malise finished, ‘and in the balance he has cast himself, and his wife and children, all his friends, the Grahams … to win, or lose them all. But I do know this. He alone has the will, and the ability, to conquer Scotland for the King: and when he does, I’d like nothing better than to be there to see him do it.’
Far away, spring thunder muttered unseasonably. I shivered suddenly and said hesitantly, ‘What will Francis do? Will he go with you, to Montrose?’
‘God knows,’ said Malise. ‘I think he will, if you don’t convince him that you are sincere in what you offer him. If he persists in rejecting you, he isna going to stay here stonily eyeing you over the dinner table, he’ll want to escape; and Montrose offers the best means of doing it. So you have until the next invasion, if there is one, to persuade him otherwise.’
‘Don’t you mean, “we”?’ Grainne said, her beautiful eyes resting on Malise’s eaglish face, and he laughed. ‘Yes, I reckon I do. But we all know him well enough to realize it must be slowly and subtly done, for Francis can be as stubborn as an old mule if he knows he’s being pushed.’
*
That did not stop Great-Aunt adding her forceful personality to the argument. The next morning, I went down to the stable to see Sim about which horse I could have for our foray up into the hills to find Jasper’s new pony. As I slipped under the lintel, my eyes slow to adjust to the thick odorous gloom, I heard her sharp voice, still as young and positive as her attitude to life, saying, ‘I never thought I’d live to have to tell you this, but you’re a fool, Francis Heron!’
‘Why?’ He spoke softly and clearly, but there was an incipient hardness somewhere in his speech. I tiptoed inside the stable, and slunk into one of the stalls. It contained Malise’s nervy chestnut mare, who eyed me and stamped a round hard pink forefoot in warning. I ignored her and stretched up to peer over the low wooden dividing wall. I could see Francis standing just by one of the two tiny windows: the light filtered through the cobwebs on to his face, lending his fine, delicately-drawn features a new, harder, more ruthless maturity. The same light gave Elizabeth Graham an almost witchlike appearance. She said, ‘You know very well why. That girl has sacrificed a very great deal for you. She could have made something of her marriage, she had everything most young women would sell their souls for, particularly that flibbertigibbet sister of yours — a handsome, rich young husband, a title, a baby son … all those she has given up for your sake, and you throw them back in her face. Francis, she cannot go back, her boats are burned and she has no one else, no other place to go … why can you not admit it, and be reconciled?’
‘Admit what?’ Francis asked, his voice caressingly, deceptively gentle. In all his new strangeness, this was a landmark I did recognize, and I clenched my hands against the rough wood. ‘And she did not sell her soul, she sold her body … Admit what, Great-Aunt?’
‘Admit you still love her,’ said Elizabeth Graham, straight and undaunted behind her eagle’s beak nose. ‘Admit that you still want her, and that lacking her your life has as much meaning as a day-fly’s … Go on, Francis Heron, admit it! I dare you to!’ She jutted her nose at him, and he smiled mockingly in return. ‘Why should I admit it, madam, since it so patently is not true? Now if you will excuse me, I have much to do.’ He turned and walked away from her, past the stalls towards the door. I instinctively crouched low, hunching into the damp straw by the mare’s threatening feet, but it was no good: Drake was with him, as he had been since the previous day, forsaking me and Jasper entirely, and now he came sniffing in friendly welcome at my skirts. Feeling foolish in the extreme, I rose reluctantly to my feet, to meet Francis’s unblinking, hostile eyes. ‘Why don’t you give over and go back to your unspeakable husband?’ he enquired coldly. ‘Instead of following me around like a mooning child in the throes of her first infatuation.’
‘Francis!’ said Great-Aunt’s voice, reprovingly, and I looked at his dim-lit face and decided, with a calculation that astonished me, to lose my temper. ‘If that’s the only way I can come face to face with you, then I’ll do it and be damned to your stupid hostility. Why can’t we at least have a civilized conversation instead of glaring at each other? Or are you afraid of having a conversation with me? Can’t we at least,’ I added, unable despite all my efforts to keep the wobbly note of pleading out of my voice, ‘go riding in the same group? I know Malise asked you to come with us today, and you refused. Why? Why did you?’ I broke off, swallowing fiercely to contain my grief, and searched the blank, callous, bored face before me for any sign, any vestige, of the love and companionship we had once shared. And Great-Aunt snapped, ‘I think I can tell you why, Thomazine — because he’s afraid. He’s never been in the habit of running away before, has Francis Heron, but he is now. He fled from Oxford, rather than find out the truth about your marriage, and he’ll escape now, to Montrose, rather than admit to himself and to you that there’s something left between you. You’ve built up a fine armour to cover your hurts, Francis, and to prevent anyone ever coming close enough to hurt you again, and now you can’t summon the courage to fling it away. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s not her lies you’re fleeing, it’s her truth.’
There was a brief, fraught silence in the gloomy stable, and then without a word Francis turned again and went out. The plank door banged behind him and his dog: and for the second time in two days, I found some comfort in weeping on to Great-Aunt’s stiff black-clad shoulder, and being prickled by the starched gofferings of her old-fashioned ruff. ‘Don’t worry, child,’ she said quietly, against my muffled desperate sobs. ‘It will come right in the end, I’m sure of it. He will not hold out against us for very long, you’ll see.’
But I had my doubts, recognizing in this new twist to his character a strong resemblance to his eldest brother Simon, who had an infinite capacity for clinging to unreasonable beliefs, despite all proofs being offered to the contrary, for far longer than anyone who was not a Heron would do. Simon had been brought to his senses at last by Francis’s supposed death: I hoped fervently that it would not take a similar disaster befalling me to make Francis see the error of his ways.
*
But he did come riding with us that morning. We gathered in the barmkin, Grainne and myself and a highly-excited, capering Jasper, to find him sitting the Goblin impassively beside Malise. He ignored me, but there was a slight twitch of his lips for Grainne, and a full-blown smile for Jasper, who rushed up shrieking a welcome, this being the first time the child had seen Francis since his arrival. ‘Hullo, shrimp. You’re a deal bigger than when I last saw you. No petticoats now!’
‘I’m five,’ said Jasper breathlessly, ‘I’ve been five for a whole month, nearly. And I’m going to have a pony, Master Graham says I can have the pony he had when he was a little boy, that’s where we’re going, he’s up on the rig with the sheep and we’re going to catch him and then I can have him for my very own and Master Graham’s going to teach me to ride!’ He paused for a much-needed breath and added, ‘Are you coming too? Where’s Drake?’
‘Drake’s tied up to keep him from the sheep, and yes, I am coming too, for my sins,’ said Francis. ‘Do you want to ride with me, for a little?’
I watched as he bent to take Jasper’s eager outstretched hands, and swung the little boy up to perch in front of him, and then turned away, biting my lip. That, I thought miserably, was the Francis I had known of old, who had delighted in Jasper’s company even in the child’s infancy, and the two had slipped back into their old happy unpatronizing friendship as though that terrible sixteen months had never intervened. Sim, eyeing me curiously, helped me up on to my horse’s back: a smallish, furry, dapple-grey gelding with long legs and a deceptively sleepy appearance. He was known to all at Catholm as The Thunderflash, and unless kept on a very tight rein was apt to prove his name at the most awkward moments. After all those months with Hobgoblin, he seemed very homely and rustic, but I had ridden him a few days previously and asked Sandy if I could have him for my use. At least, I reasoned, keeping The Thunderflash in control would take my mind off the disturbing proximity of Francis.
He was riding through the gate now, talking to Grainne: I was left with Malise, who gave me an understanding, friendly grin. With Sim dour and silent on a brown garron behind us, we followed them out of the barmkin, along the wall, and turned left up a little muddy track which led between the fields near the tower towards the upland moors of Ninestane Rig. It was not warm, although the sun shone with the bright hard light of a spring morning, and the new crop of oats and bigg was showing fuzzily green in the infield. We climbed in leisurely fashion up the long, shallow hill, and shortly reached the head dyke, which separated infield from outfield. There was a gate here, low and roughly made between the banks of earth, and Francis passed Jasper to his mother and then put Goblin at it. She soared over the obstacle, ears pricked and the plume of her tail flying proudly behind her, and then galloped ahead of us through the brown and green grass and heather and swathes of bracken, her rider crouched low over her neck. We followed more sedately, though I had a job to keep The Thunderflash from flying in pursuit, and Malise’s mare snorted and shuffled and sidestepped, flinging up her proud white-blazed head in her impatience to be free. I admired her, for though not with the Arabian breeding of Hobgoblin, she was a beautiful horse. Malise grinned. ‘Yon’s a terrible trial. An Englishman’s horse, she is, or so Sim says — fine for racing at Carlisle on flat firm ground, but if you galloped her over some of these hills she’d break a leg inside five minutes. Too big, ye ken, and no’ verra careful where she puts her fine white feet, eh, my lady Tanaquill?’
The mare flicked her russet ears in response, and dipped her head restively. ‘Tanaquill?’ I said. ‘Isn’t that from The Faerie Queen?’ An irresistible memory of Lucy and her endless stream of horses with literary names rose to amuse me. Malise said, slightly sheepishly, ‘Aye, from The Faerie Queen she is, one of Gloriana’s names if I remember rightly. Ye ken Spenser, then?’
I said that I did, but did not like him so well as Shakespeare or Doctor Donne, and we fell to discussing poetry and plays with enthusiasm, Grainne joining in whenever she could get a word in between us and Jasper’s chatter. Behind us, Sim whistled tunelessly through his remaining teeth, and above us was an infinity of sky, blue and cloud-crossed, and before us the wide rippling dun grassy moors, where the sheep roamed in their ceaseless search for new fodder, their bleak melancholy cries blown across to us by the wind. A long way ahead, Francis turned Goblin and sent her racing back to us, and a brown bird shot out of the grass with a ghastly echoing shriek of warning. ‘A whaup,’ said Malise, ‘you’d call it a curlew, I’m thinking. Many’s the reiver whose hiding-place has been discovered through yon bird. And he shouldna be galloping her over this ground, she isna used to it.’
Francis pulled Hobgoblin up in front of us with a flourish. The weeks of standing in the stables or being briefly exercised by Holly or myself had not diminished her fitness: she hardly sweated at all. ‘Archie’s up ahead, by the Stones,’ he said, ‘he’ll know where the pony is.’
We rode on through grass and heather, whin and dead bracken, skirting the tempting greener areas of wet moss, where a horse could swiftly be stuck fast if it strayed too far. Staring ahead, trying not to be aware of Francis, I could discern what appeared to be an outcropping of rocks. However, as we drew nearer the shapeless grey mass revealed itself to be a circle of stones, man-high, on the right-hand edge of the long ridge where it started to fall away more steeply towards the Roughley Burn.
‘There they are,’ said Malise, pointing, ‘the Stones of Ninestane Rig. God knows who raised them, whether it was men at all, or done by olden giants, or magic. Some say Merlin had a hand in it, as he seems to have had a hand in most strange things hereabouts — if it was not Thomas the Rhymer, of course. There’s evil tales of yon, and not all of them fanciful, and when they come up here for the summering with the cattle, the shieling huts are a good way off.’
‘What tales, Master Graham?’ Jasper asked. ‘Can you tell me some of them, please?’
‘I doubt they’re suitable for a wee lad,’ Malise began, but Jasper interrupted. ‘Oh, please! Mother tells me horrible stories about Ireland and Cuchulain and the Red Hand and I haven’t had a single bad dream — oh, please!’
‘It’s true,’ said Grainne, ‘he’s tougher than he looks, my Jasper, and he’s long exhausted my stock of tales, and Thomazine’s too — and anyhow it’ll sound better up here in the wind and the daylight.’
‘Well,’ said Malise, ‘the story tells of a certain wizard called Lord Soulis, who was the Lord of Hermitage in the bad old days, hundreds of years ago. Now Lord Soulis was evil, as evil a man as ever walked in Liddesdale, and that’s saying a good deal. He killed a giant called the Cout of Kielder — Kielder’s in Tyneside, just over the Border — by drowning him in Hermitage Water.’
‘But he couldn’t if he was a giant,’ said the literal-minded Jasper, ‘the water isn’t deep enough, I can walk across it if I hop on the stones.’
‘Aye, and the Cout had magic armour into the bargain. No usual way of killing him would work. But somehow, by magic or trickery, Lord Soulis got him to go down to the burn, and then he and his spearmen forced the Cout’s head under the water until he was dead. There’s a grave-mound by the old ruined chapel just upstream from the Castle and that’s supposed to be where the Cout’s buried.’
‘And what happened to Lord Soulis?’ asked Jasper. Malise grinned. ‘Oh, you needna worry, he met his just deserts. There was a tale that he couldna die till he was bound with three ropes of sand, but of course you need magic for that, ye ken, Jasper? So when his wickedness grew too great for even his followers to stomach, they sent for Thomas the Rhymer, True Thomas of Ercildoune, and he helped them make the rope to bind Lord Soulis.’
Jasper’s eyes were huge. ‘And then what did they do?’
