"They say he shot one of the Farrer boys across the mart square in Moffat. I am impressed enough."

"A coward's weapon, killing a man at a distance."

"What would you do if he points his pistol at you, out of sword's range?"

"Duck, of course!"

After our laughter, a shout came faint from the far woods about Kirkconnel Lea. Blackett House, set high above the Kirtle water, was but another call away. From its watchtower on a calm day, a pistol shot would carry to Kirtlebridge, making one I cared for there start at her work. And if she in turn stood in her inn courtyard and loosed off a shot, the report would carry to the Irvines' stronghold at Bonshaw. (How small a stage our drama treads—Embra apart, one could ride to any of the principal locations, even the English border, within the hour. Aristotle would have approved.)

A horse whinnied in response, then silence but for the faint wheesh of wind and water that, like feud and memory, pour forth unceasing in the Borderlands.

"You smell like a coach-house drain," I said. "People say you are a sot, and not right in the head since your father died. You muck about with tennis balls. You can't be arsed to dress mannerly. You neither fight nor work nor study. What use—?"

He put his hand, long-fingered, scarred and weathered already, on mine.

"I think some among my family seek to kill me," he said.

"In a shirt like that, I am not surprised."

His dagger point lay at my throat. His eyes were watchfires lit.

"Dinna fuck wi' me, Langton."

I looked him in the eye, wondering at the rumours I had heard of his state of mind these last eighteen months. I kept my voice steady as a man may with steel at his thrapple.

"Does Helen Irvine not love you even as she teases you?"

His head went down, his shoulders shook. Now he was not greiting but laughing, his moods shifting like an aircock.

"She claims she does, the flirt!" His arm about my shoulder. "I have missed you as I have missed the better part of myself."

Fortunately, he was already turning away. As we headed for the stairwell, he murmured in my ear what he was about this very evening, and my part in it. Then we clattered down the echoing stone, past Watt loitering ahint the portal, and we were laughing and chattering like lightsome young men, careless of present danger and future grief.


The chapel bell tolls, my stomach rumbles. My host William Drummond asks little of me but that I organize his library and correspondence, look over his Latin essays that seek to harmonize Crown, Church and the People (not likely at the moment), and offer some helpful though not overly critical responses to his English verses in the Petrarchan manner. He likes having this relic of lang syne living in his garret, so he and his friends may enjoy tales of lawless days that now appear romantic. But he does insist I attend household services, which are of the unheated, penitential sort.

I sit a minute longer by my morning's work, seeing again Adam Fleming, mouth agape as though munching empty air as I first stepped onto the peel-tower battlement.

We have made a start.

From Fair Helen, by Andrew Greig. Copyright © 2015 by David Starkey. Reprinted by permission of Quercus, a Hachette company.