Burning the Water Read online

  Burning the Water

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue Spring, 1544 – White Hall, London

  One year later – Ancrum Moor, near Jedburgh

  Chapter One Berwick on the Tweed Spring, 1545

  Berwick on the Tweed Eight days later

  Chapter Two South of Berwick on the Tweed A day later…

  Chapter Three Near the bastel house of Akeld A day later

  Chapter Four In the tower at Akeld Not long after

  Five miles away At the same time…

  Chapter Five In the tower at Akeld Dawn the next day…

  Not far away…

  Even closer…

  Not long after…

  Chapter Six In the tower at Akeld Sometime later…

  The tower at Akeld Later…

  Chapter Seven In the tower at Akeld The second day…

  Chapter Eight In the tower at Akeld Afternoon of the second day…

  Chapter Nine In the tower at Akeld Night of the second day…

  Chapter Ten Later, out on the Cheviot hills…

  The bastel house of Akeld The next morning…

  Somewhere in the Cheviot hills At the same time…

  Chapter Eleven Eglingham Hall, a day’s march south of Wooler At the same time…

  Akeld At the same time…

  Twa Corbies At the same time…

  Chapter Twelve Later, at Akeld…

  Chapter Thirteen Later, at Akeld…

  A few miles away, at Twa Corbies…

  Chapter Fourteen Later, at Kirknewton near Akeld…

  Akeld, at the same time…

  Chapter Fifteen Next day, on the moor road to Norham…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen The Cheviots, not long after

  Chapter Eighteen Windylaws, not long after

  Chapter Nineteen Twa Corbies Tower A week later

  Edinburgh Winter 1545

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  Border Reivers

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Jack the lad Horner,

  Crouched in his corner

  Fingering a Christmas pie

  Stuck in a thumb,

  Pulled out a plum

  And said ‘Clever boy am I!’

  Prologue

  Spring, 1544 – White Hall, London

  They went through three tapestry-hung salons hemmed with lines of bodyguard brilliant in Royal livery. There were birds somewhere in the high reaches of it; Henry Rae heard their wings whirring even as he was marvelling at the third salon, with its chair and canopy of rich embroidery. He should never have got so far – and certainly never expected to be ushered into the privy chamber beyond.

  And out again. There was a flurry behind him and he half-turned into the sheened face of a rough-dressed man clutching a heavy box; behind him came two more, one carrying the largest pincers Rae had ever seen. In such a Royal sanctum they were as unlike the liveried servants and languid courtiers you would expect to find as a cow-pat is to a steak and ale pie. They looked at Henry Rae, embroidered and riotous with thread, as if he had dropped from the moon.

  ‘Beg pardon, yer lordship,’ the man said and knuckled his forehead as he was forced along by the scowls of the servants. The usher smiled apologetically, though Rae could see sweat on his forehead and the sight made him break out in sympathy.

  ‘A mishap,’ the usher muttered, then saw Rae’s alarmed look and waved a hasty, placating hand.

  ‘Nothing serious… His Majesty insisted on seeing you at once, Master Herald…’

  They went on through doors and down corridors until they burst out into the tilt yard. Even so far away, the figure at the centre of the huddle could be heard roaring and the usher blanched.

  Nearby, ostlers held a brace of caparisoned warhorses, partly under a huge contraption which Rae thought was a siege engine until he got closer, picking his way fastidiously over the churned, dung-slathered ground.

  Then he saw that it was a lifting device and, dangling from the end of it, a figure in beautiful tournament plate armour turned slowly, the curses drifting and fading as he circled. A man held the removed helmet while others struggled to steady him; Rae saw the man with the wooden box start to fetch out tools, one after the other.

  The hanging man turned and Rae saw the red, sweat-soaked face, the artificed auburn of beard pushing over the constriction of throat metal like the inside of a burst saddle, the eyes boar red and glowering. The king.

  He knelt.

  ‘Steady me, steady me, you bastard-born whelps.’

  Men strained to stop the king turning. The man with the tools was a smith, Rae saw, already moving to one huge armoured leg. He banged it hard with a hammer and the king roared.

  ‘Have a care, you dolt. You cunny-licking son of a whore, I’ll rip your entrails out…’

  ‘Can’t get it offen, pardon Your Grace’s indulgence, unless I bangs ’er ’ard.’

  The king did not reply and the smith struck again, the bell-tone echoing round the yard. The king winced and said nothing and Henry Rae remembered the legendary leg, foul and festering and not allowed to heal by his physicians, who stated that the wound should be allowed to drain bad humours out. Every time it started to heal over, they’d cut it open, tie back the sides and fill the rawness with pellets of gold.

  If anyone knows pain, Henry Rae thought, it is King Henry Tudor, Eighth of that name, God save and keep him…

  ‘That man – is that the Berwick Herald? Is that Harry Ree, Sadler’s man?’

  Rae, jerked from his reverie, stepped forward and bowed, hoping his tremble did not show.

  ‘It is, Your Majesty. Henry Rae, Berwick Pursuivant if it please Your Majesty, attached with Secretary of State Sadler while he is treasurer of the Earl of Hertford’s army…’

  ‘My army, you dolt – stop wittering. Give him the letter… the writ. Give him it.’

  An unsmiling clerk handed Rae a fat package, bound and sealed with at least three great wax dangles. He had time to see it was marked for Sir Ralph Sadler, Secretary of State. It was also addressed to Sir Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Warden of the Scottish Marches.

  ‘That’s the writ to extend my hand in the north. Have both of them read it with care,’ Henry bawled. ‘It tells them exactly what has to be done. Get you gone, man and tell them to read it with care… God’s blood, you arse, what are you now doing?’

  The smith was prising at the armoured knee joint, his efforts forcing the holding men to strain harder to keep the king from turning; the clerk stepped close to Rae, speaking fast and soft.

  ‘You are dismissed, Sir Herald. Remove yourself soonest – he has discovered that an hour in armour has swole his bad leg so large it cannot be got out but by cutting off the plate. His Majesty is now in the worst of moods.’

  Henry Rae backed away, bowed, turned and started to scurry off, thinking on how the king was supposed to be leading his army against France this year while the Earl of Hertford punished the Scots.

  He could not see how the king could lead if he had to be winched on to a horse – if one could be found stout enough to carry him – and had to be cut out of his armour after an hour.

  The bell sounds of the smith’s hammer did not drown the roars, all the scurrying way back out of the tilt yard.

  ‘Tell Hertford. Burn their homes. Raze their lives. Burn their ships. Burn their children and their wives and any who resist. Burn their damned dogs and sheep.’

  The bell rang out like a knell and the king’s roar followed it as a baleful echo.

  ‘Tell the Earl, man. Burn them out. Burn e
verything, God curse them.’

  Another knell and a fading tendril of hate from the false gold, hoarse-voiced Henry, King of England, chased Rae into a corridor.

  ‘Burn the very water…’

  One year later – Ancrum Moor, near Jedburgh

  The stink was old and familiar, that iron pervade of spilled blood laced with dung and bile and the weft of men’s fear. Fiskie was well used to it now, all the same, so that he barely snorted once and Batty had no trouble picking him over and round the great sprawl of corpses.

  Knots of men had gathered, some silent, some jabbering nervously and all of them with the air of folk who no longer knew what to do. Batty recognised this, too – the aftermath of foulness, when men could not meet each other in the face for what they had done, nor never would manage the same in a looking glass.

  There were some, all the same, whose hate made thin grim lines of their lips and the tightest stitch of them turned his face up as Batty approached. He was streaked with mud and worse, his gilded Nuremburg half-armour dinted with new scars, his slashed, puffed breeches and big overtopped boots scuffed and muddied. He nodded wordlessly to Batty, then stuck out a grimed hand with a leather bottle in it.

  ‘The victors deserve a lick of eau-de-vie,’ he growled, then glanced round at the carnage. ‘The losers need it – but to the Devil with them.’

  ‘Aye, aye, General,’ Batty said, raised it in a toast, swigged a long time, then handed it back and glanced at the sour fruit swinging from the stunted tree.

  ‘Your Grace,’ the growler corrected, taking the flask and Batty acknowledged his error of protocol with a flap of his one hand; the Douglas Earl of Angus valued his station and lineage like a woman her new babe.

  Though he was not nearly as innocent as one, Batty added to himself. It had taken the Earl long enough to find it, but he had had men scour the bare, bird-wheeping roll of the moor for a tree, since Eure, as commander of the English host, deserved no less. His second, Layton, they had drowned. The third Englishman everyone wanted to kill, George Bowes, had escaped.

  ‘Remember Broomhoose,’ Douglas had growled while Layton thrashed and burbled, spluttered and, after too long a time, died. Broomhoose, Batty recalled, had been a wee bastel fortress, a two-floored affair and one of the many burned out by the harrying English under Layton and Sir Ralph Eure the year before. An auld wummin of note had died in it, but why that place, above all the others, had to be remembered in particular was a mystery to Batty Coalhouse.

  After all, the larger part of southern Scotland was a black desert. Jedburgh and Kelso were smouldering ruins, nearly a brace-hundred of other wee bastels and sundry dwellings scorched to the ground, four hundred folk slain, eight hundred more taken, ten thousand cattle, twelve thousand sheep – the list went on and on. Batty had heard it litanied out by the Earl of Angus, marvelling as usual at how wee rolls of paper could hold all this memory.

  Batty could not read at all, but he saw between the lines for all that – the Douglas Earl of Angus was less bothered by his lists, or a wee noblewoman turned to ash in Broom House than the fact that Eure and Layton had pissed on the tombs of the Douglas while his estates burned.

  That had brought the bitterest of rivals together – the Douglas Earl of Angus and the Regent of Scotland, the Earl of Arran – and took them here, to the wind-hissed moorland below Peniel Heugh and a victory over the English, marvellous as an eight-legged horse.

  ‘You found a limb, then,’ Batty said, nodding at the swinging figure and Douglas scoured up some spit, thought better of it and swallowed.

  ‘We will cut him down soon and then send his head home.’

  The men nearest him shifted uneasily at that and Batty thought the Earl would have trouble finding men with the belly left to take the head of Sir Ralph Eure, having to step through the slorach of badly-smouldering fire and mud to take his blackened feet and legs and lift him down. Still, it was none of his affair – he was interested in the living.

  ‘Ye have prisoners, Your Grace,’ he said and the Earl nodded, scowling, then hauled off his burgonet as if it suddenly weighed too much for his head; under it, his hair was plastered thinly to his scalp.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘They claim to be assured men who saw the light and came to our aid. I have my doubts of it.’

  The men were hunched and trying not to look at anyone. They had been stripped of steel bonnet and weaponry, but kept their dung-coloured jacks, the pale mark of the X clear to see on the torn, stained quilting, wisps of stitching where they had torn off the red cross of the English when they saw which way the icy war wind was blowing. It left a pale shadow of itself, but since their counterparts wore a white X in the same place, it was as acceptable a way of changing sides as any and as old as the Border hills they rode over.

  They were mainly Cessford Kers, the left-handed men from the Scots side of the Border. Among them were Nixons and Olivers, the latter arguing that they had been forced to it since Eure had ‘taken their heidmen, Dandy, Rinyan and Patty, for hostage’. They had been united as ‘assured men’ enjoying pay and plunder from Fat Henry and his captains, under duress or not; they had become a lot less assured when they tasted powder and death on the wind-mourned moor at Ancrum.

  None of them mattered to Batty; he saw the one man he wanted, the one in the stained, torn remains of a richer fabric – a tabard still coloured despite the slime and mud and worse. He had not removed it, of course, because a Herald’s cote was better than armour.

  ‘You,’ Batty growled and the man looked up, his face streaked with filth and fear and misery. There was a moment when Henry Rae thought that, for all his Herald immunity, his time on earth was done and that was when he looked Batty Coalhouse in the face.

  It was a harsh face, an undershot jaw curving up a scimitar beard of tow-coloured hair to meet the scowl of a lintel of brows coming down on a blade of pitted nose. Bog-water browned by weather and poor washing, marked and scored by age and bad usage that face, Rae thought. Yet the eyes were clear and grey as a storm-sea, even if they nestled above bruise-blue pouches.

  ‘You are Berwick Pursuivant,’ Batty said to him. ‘If you want to escape the hemp, you had better tell all.’

  ‘Who are you to say who escapes the hemp? A Herald cannot be harmed.’

  The Earl stepped forward, truculent and with that boar-pig scowl all the Douglas had. From the one who fought with Bruce to this, Batty thought – but he had the measure of it.

  ‘The man whose brace of guns gave you victory,’ he replied shortly. ‘Up there on the far slope of Palace Hill. We fired them until they turned too hot for safety, my good lord. Until one burst and killed two good men of mine.’

  The Earl of Angus scrubbed his beard and then ran his hand over his sweated hair as if suddenly weary. It was true enough – this fat-bellied, one-armed ingenieur and his brace of sakers had ravaged the Landsknecht and Spanish mercenaries as they rolled over the hill, all triumphant shouts and ribboned weaponry. Torn them to shreds with hot gusts of sharp metal and sent them running back the way they had come, slashed and stabbed and hacked by a vengeful pursuit of exultant Scots.

  Batty Coalhouse was due more than a shivering, shit-legged fool in a fancy cassack – but while the Earl of Angus might escape censure for the killing of Eure and Layton, a Herald was a different stamp. No one would survive the killing of the Berwick Pursuivant.

  ‘He is mine,’ the Earl said, ‘whether you care for it or not, Master Coalhouse. You may put him to the question if it be not too harsh – though it is a maze to me what he can tell you.’

  But he already knew what Batty Coalhouse, master of the great gun, the slow match and the granada, wanted to know. It was what he always wanted to know – the whereabouts of one Maramaldo, who had done him some hurt years before. Cut his arm off, Douglas had heard, which was no surprise when you knew Maramaldo. There must be a long line of folk seeking redress of that mercenary captain, the Earl thought, for he is a blood-drenched chiel. T
hen he tried to ignore the swinging remains of Eure, an accusing dead stare in the corner of his eye.

  He waved and Batty leaned on the high pommel of Fiskie and looked down at Rae.

  ‘You carry messages, I jalouse,’ he said. ‘From court to court. Harry Ree – I have heard of you.’

  Rae looked from him to the Earl and back again. Master Coalhouse was not a name he knew but for all this was a fat, one-armed man the look from him washed Henry Rae in a sluice of cold sweat.

  ‘I do not know of you, Master Coalhouse. Yet His Grace the Earl has captured the baggage and I have been searched – there is nothing privy you do not know or cannot read.’

  ‘Aye, indeed,’ the Earl growled. ‘We have read it. Put all to fire and sword. Man, woman and child without exception where any resistance is raised against you. I have seen your king’s instructions to the Earl of Hertford, sir. Burn the very water, he was told. It is scorched into the hearts of all here. But if you have more, we would hear it.’

  Rae had the grace to flush through his filth, but Batty merely scowled at the Earl.

  ‘You have given him to me for this moment, have ye not, Your Grace?’

  When the Earl nodded reluctantly, Batty turned back to Harry Rae.

  ‘Then you are safe enow, Master Ree, if you have an answer to my next question and one I like. I cannae read.’