Border Storm (2 page)

Without further protest, he ran off to look after the rest of his family.

“You climb higher, Sym,” Laurie said. “Climb as high as you can, but take care that you do not fall. I shall be right behind you.”

Sym began climbing, but he had not gone much higher when he stopped and whispered over one shoulder, “Some’un’s comin’ close.”

His words barely reached Laurie’s ears, but she understood them, for just then she too heard the soft splat-splat of a horse’s hooves on the wet leaves of the forest floor. A moment later, she realized that two horses approached.

She could not climb higher without forcing Sym to do likewise, and not only were the branches above him slender and thus less safe, but the two of them could not risk noise or movement. Taking comfort from the fact that dense leaves almost completely concealed him, she decided that no one would see him from the ground. But she knew that they might see her if they looked up at the right moment.

Not daring to speak, she hugged the thick trunk of the tree and tucked her skirts beneath her, trying to make herself small. Her overskirt was a soft green, close enough to the leaves’ color to go unnoticed, but her underskirt was the usual red flannel, and she prayed that none of it was showing. On such a gray day, even a wee patch of red would stand out like a spark in Davy’s black cave.

The horsemen drew nearer. She was surprised that they had managed to get so far without encountering difficulties in one of the bogs.

The two men did not converse, and she realized that they were probably listening for sounds of flight or alarm. If they knew about the three cottages in the clearing, doubtless they were hoping to surprise the inhabitants.

A moment later, she saw them in their gleaming steel bonnets and plate. One was tall and broad-shouldered, riding a dun-colored pony with black points that was larger than most she had seen. The other man rode a chestnut roan. He was shorter and square of shape, his waist and hips nearly as wide as his shoulders. He carried a bill, an English weapon, part spear and part ax. His companion wore a sword at his side and a longbow strung across his back where he could easily reach it. In one ungloved hand, he carried an ominous looking pistol at the ready.

Scarcely daring to breathe, knowing that the boy above her would keep still, she sent a prayer heavenward. Although it was not unheard of for the English to kill women, even women of her rank, she did not fear for her own life as much as for Sym’s. English raiders were not noted for asking questions or for encouraging conversation of any sort before putting their victims to the sword. Nevertheless, she felt oddly calm. Had Tarras Wood suddenly swarmed with horsemen, she told herself, she might have felt more fear, but the two silent men seemed harmless—unless, of course, one of them looked up.

In any event, if they caught her, she would do whatever she had to do to save the lad.

When the pair drew rein almost directly beneath the tree where she and Sym hid, she stopped breathing. A chill of pure terror shot up her spine. Quaking, she realized that she had grossly underestimated her composure.

The man carrying the bill said in a gruff voice, “There be two or three cottages ahead. Like as not, they’ve heard nowt, so we should take ’em easy.”

The other man wiped a leather-clad arm across his face and brow, and then, resting his pistol on a muscular thigh, he took off his steel bonnet, revealing a shock of red curls a shade or two darker than his neatly trimmed, reddish-blond beard. As he thrust long fingers through his hair, he tilted his head back.

For one horrible, frozen moment, Laurie’s gaze locked with his.

“Brackengill?” The man with the bill spoke sharply, and the red-haired man turned to look at him.

“Aye?”

“If ye’ve finished combing your pretty locks, we’ve work yet to do.”

“Let’s get to it then.” His expression did not alter.

When he replaced his helmet, raised his pistol again, and rode on, Laurie decided with a surge of relief that the dark foliage surrounding her had prevented him from seeing her after all.

He rang’d all around down by the woodside,

Till in the top of a tree, a lady he spyd.

S
IR HUGH GRAHAM, LORD
Scrope’s deputy warden, had seen the girl in the tree. Indeed, he had seen her clearly enough to know that her eyes were large for her face and so dark as to look black. But he had seen little more than those dark eyes and the small, pale, heart-shaped face framed in a halo of dark, damp curls.

It was the face, he thought, of a child. Doubtless, her eyes had seemed enormous because of her terror.

As he followed Martin Loder, Scrope’s chief land sergeant, Sir Hugh was not certain why he did not mention seeing her. He knew as well as anyone—perhaps better than most—that a female could be as dangerous as any man. For all he knew, the girl in the tree held a pistol cocked and ready to shoot.

A nerve between his shoulder blades twitched.

The girl had seemed young, though, and more terrified than terrifying. At all events, despite the nervous twitch, every fiber of him rebelled at the thought of telling Loder about her.

Martin Loder was a villainous creature, envious of his betters and overeager to prove himself to Scrope. Moreover, given a choice in the matter, Hugh did not make war on women or children. What he had seen that day had already been enough to turn his stomach, though his reputation was that of a hardened soldier.

The last straw was seeing armed men forcing women and children to remove their clothing, then leashing them in pairs like dogs and driving them naked through the dale. That sight had stirred his impulse to follow Loder into Tarras Wood.

Loder’s courage—or foolhardiness—had surprised him, for the man was not aware until Sir Hugh had shouted that he was following him. Sir Hugh considered himself a brave man, but he would not have ridden alone into that infamous bog-ridden area.

He understood Scrope better than he understood Loder. Scrope was determined to teach Liddesdale a lesson, and Hugh understood his fury, for Liddesdale was a notorious reivers’ nest. The whole, wide valley was a grim, forbidding place dotted with robber towers. Shut in by bleak fells, it consisted largely of quaking morass and vast primeval forest. Reivers flourished in every march, but in Liddesdale, every able-bodied man was one.

Just months before, a small army of Liddesdale men and other ruffians—doubtless under the direction of their powerful leader, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch—had raided Carlisle Castle to free one of their own. Carlisle was Scrope’s stronghold.

Having made the English warden look foolish, they had to pay. Sir Hugh had understood that from the outset. He had supported Scrope when, immediately after the Carlisle raid, determined to punish the raiders, Scrope had organized several forays against them with the official blessing of the Queen and her Privy Council.

Those forays accomplished little of note, however. Buccleuch had retaliated each time, with the result that livestock moved back and forth across the line so frequently that men said the poor beasts were losing weight as fast as they gained it. As a result, many would likely be too weak to survive the winter.

Elizabeth of England was as offended as her warden over the high-handed way the Scots had freed his prisoner and royally indignant at Buccleuch’s continued forays into her realm. She had written angrily to King James of Scotland, demanding the Borderer’s immediate surrender to her authority.

So far, the King had refused to comply with that demand, and Hugh was certain that if James enjoyed the same freedom that some of his predecessors had, he would have continued to repel all her demands. But James hoped to succeed to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death. Knowing that she could squash those hopes with a word, he feared her anger and thus bowed to the inevitable.

James did not prostrate himself, however. He merely ordered Buccleuch into ward at Blackness Castle, which overlooked the Firth of Forth a few miles outside Edinburgh. If he had hoped to placate Elizabeth with the compromise, however, he had failed.

The English Queen, like nearly everyone else in England and Scotland, soon began to hear tales of Blackness luxury and of James and his favorite out hunting together. She heard tales of dicing and playing chess and, worse, tales of the two of them laughing together at Scrope’s fury. Her demands became more imperious. James, she insisted, must hand Buccleuch over to English authorities.

In the meantime, with Buccleuch safely out of the way in Edinburgh, Scrope had stepped up his activities until, in Hugh’s mind, the present one overstepped the bounds of what was fair and reasonable. He had dutifully supported the warden’s earlier raids, understanding as all Borderers did the need for immediate retaliation. But it was not long before he began to suspect that Scrope was not acting out of a sense of duty but out of plain vengeance against Buccleuch. The rescue of the prisoner had deeply wounded Scrope’s pride, and now he was extracting a far heavier toll than even blackguard-ridden Liddesdale deserved to pay.

In truth, Hugh reminded himself, Buccleuch had taken Carlisle by stealth and cunning with less than a hundred men. Many were not even Liddesdale men but were followers of Rabbie Redcloak, the man Scrope still pretended to believe he had captured.

And to be fair, they had had reason for the raid. Scrope’s erstwhile prisoner was actually Sir Quinton Scott, Buccleuch’s cousin and deputy warden, and Sir Hugh’s cousin, Francis Musgrave, had seized him unlawfully during a truce.

Scrope had ignored these details, however. He had also ignored the fact that no one had suffered in the raid (since he had mounted no resistance), and as time passed, he developed a veritable passion for revenge, culminating in the Liddesdale raid. Hugh knew that Scrope had acted out of pique and thought less of him for it.

“Looks like the cowards have fled,” Loder said, snapping Hugh’s thoughts back to the present.

Realizing that they had reached the clearing Loder had mentioned and that the three cottages showed no sign of life, Hugh felt a wave of relief. Was he growing soft? Surely Scrope would say that he was if he ever learned about the girl in the tree.

Loder said, “We’d best fire these cots.”

“Leave them,” Hugh said curtly. “Only the thatch and doors will burn, and the smoke is likely to draw our men nearer. This deep in the woods, we’d lose any number of them to bogs, if not to armed Scots perched in those damned trees. I don’t know what drew you here, Loder, or how you found this place without miring us in a swamp, but I’ll be happy just to get out of here alive.”

“I know the way,” Loder said. Shooting a look at Hugh, then looking away again, he muttered, “Had cousins hereabouts when I were young.”

Since he said no more, Hugh assumed that the cousins were not friendly now. Such was the way of life in the Borders.

He expected an argument over whether to leave the cots or burn them, but Loder offered none. He merely suggested that they look inside each cottage to be certain that the occupants had gone and had left nothing worth the taking.

“You check,” Hugh said. “I’ll keep watch out here in case of ambush. At least the rain seems to have stopped.”

Nodding, Loder walked his horse to the first cottage and dismounted.

Hugh kept his pistol at hand. The presence of the girl in the tree meant that there were folks about, but instincts honed over years of service told him that no danger threatened him. He watched alertly while Loder took his time to search the first cottage but relaxed when he entered the second without incident.

They had made little noise, but there were still only two of them. If armed men waited in the trees, they would likely have seen or heard some sign of them by now. Indeed, they would likely be dead. Although he and Loder were both skilled at defending themselves, the odds were not in their favor. He wondered again why Loder had seemed so willing to enter the woods alone.

Loder was not a friend. Having made no secret of his belief that Hugh served as deputy warden only because he had a powerful kinsman in London, he also made it plain that he thought he, Loder, would make a better deputy. If he laid eyes on the girl, he would surely tell Scrope that Hugh had seen her and tried to protect her. He would do that just to make trouble, and Hugh knew that Scrope would listen.

He did not trust any of Scrope’s men. Most were mercenaries who, for a price, would do whatever Scrope told them to do. They cared little for folks on either side of the line. On the other hand, Hugh believed that his own men generally felt as he did about the attack, especially with regard to the burning of so many crops and cottages, and the terrorizing of women and children.

The burned cat-and-clay cottages did not matter much, because their owners could rebuild them quickly—usually in a day. Stone towers were easily patched, and doubtless many people had managed to remove their belongings, just as those in the clearing had.

As for cattle and other livestock, Hugh told himself sardonically that any loss would be a temporary annoyance at best, because the Liddesdale men would just steal others to replace them. Crops were a different matter, though, for without them people could starve, which was why Scrope was so bent on destroying them.

Borderers on both sides of the line disapproved of burning crops and had since the beginning of the violence a century before. When the Earl of Hertford had served as a march warden, he had once had to hire Irishmen to burn the Scots’ standing corn. His English Borderers had refused to burn their neighbors’ crop.

The size of Scrope’s army precluded such refusal, and Hugh’s men dared not disobey Scrope’s orders, in any case. They knew that many Grahams were already at risk, because Scrope suspected that members of the tribe had helped Buccleuch with the raid on Carlisle. He blamed them as fiercely as he blamed Buccleuch, and he was bent on punishing as many as he could catch and convict.

Still, Hugh thought, it was one thing to order men to pursue someone who had just stolen one’s cattle, or to help carry out a righteous act of vengeance. But Grahams, like other clans with members on both sides of the line, disliked setting off in cold blood to harry folks who might be allied in marriage or otherwise to them or their kinsmen. Their way of life, after all, was much the same.