Fair Helen

by Andrew Greig

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2014. 'One of the best historical novels of recent years, Greig dusts off the past and presents it with tremendous skill' - Literary Review 'A Triumph of suspense' - Guardian Saltire Award-winning author Andrew Greig reimagines the Border Ballad Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea as a dark romance and stirring adventure. Often called the Scottish Romeo & Juliet, here it is re-presented as the source of an equally famed, more complex drama. The Scottish Borderlands, 1590s Harry Langton is called back to the country of his childhood to aide an old friend, Adam Fleming, who believes his life is in danger. He's fallen for Helen of Annandale and, in turn, fallen foul of her rival, Robert Bell: a man as violent as he is influential. In a land where minor lairds vie for power and blood feuds are settled by the sword, Fleming faces a battle to win Helen's hand. Entrusted as guard to the lovers' secret trysts, Langton is thrust into the middle of a dangerous triangle; and discovers Helen is not so chaste as she is fair. But Langton has his own secrets to keep - and other friends to serve. Someone has noticed his connections, and recruited him in their bid to control the hierarchy of the Border families; someone who would use lovers as pawns in a game of war.

Release date: August 22, 2013

Publisher: RiverRun

Print pages: 270

Sample

I had not seen Adam Fleming since his mother’s wedding. He had been silent and inward then, remote across the crowded hall. Tall, slim and agile, in his black cloak of grieving for his father, tallow hair cut straight across in the new Embra style, dagger in embroidered pouch, he had been every inch the young Borders gallant.

Now as I stepped onto the battlement of the peel tower, my dearest friend stood mouth agape with muddy britches, unmatched slippers, his shirt stained and torn. Short sword stuck skew-whiff in his belt, he was bouncing and catching an old cork tennis ball as though his life depended on it.

And he was right, I concede now to the bleary pane, the scratching quill. It probably did.

He looked up at me. His eyes flickered over the laddie who had showed me up. He bounced the ball off the bale-fire cage, caught it, swayed a little. So it is true, I thought. Not yet noon and drink taken.

‘It is Harry Langton, sir,’ the boy said uncertainly.

‘No doubt, no doubt.’ Adam kept stotting and catching the ball. In our university days tennez royale had been all the rage, along with the speaking of French to mask our uncouth mother tongues. He had been effortlessly good with racquet, rapier and small pipes, while I was a dogged trier.

Plus ça change, I murmur to none, and huddle deeper within coarse blankets. This stern house is silent. It is hours till chapel service, which I attend for the sake of dinner if not my soul. No choice but to sit here and feel again, like a dirk slipped between the ribs, dismay as he cut me dead.

The sleekit laddie – Watt his name, and I regret his end – hesitated. Judging me hairmless, he turned and padded down the tower stair. I heard him slap slap slap on the worn sandstone, hesitate at the trip-step, then gone.

Stott stott stott of the tennis ball into the drunken hand of my bedraggled lost friend. I could smell stale wine across the distance between us. Still, he never fumbled the bouncing ball, even when he looked out absently over the valley, the Kirtle burn, the woods and braes of his small corner of the Borderlands.

He flicked the ball between his legs, caught it as it rebounded off the castellation, then hurled it far into the walled garden. He turned to me and his grey-green eyes were now bright, perhaps too bright.

‘Harry,’ he said quietly, and we embraced. ‘Thank God you are here,’ he murmured, breath hot in my ear. Hot, but not vinous. Only his stained shirt stank of claret. ‘I need your help and counsel, old friend.’

Once he had said those words I could not have ridden back to the city, the courts, the college where we had once disputed fine points with words and argument, not the finer point of dagger and short sword. In any case, I was not quite the free man my friend imagined.

‘So,’ I said. ‘You seek advice from the daft, or a loan from the penniless?’

‘Still poor and honest, then?’

‘Poor, at least,’ I said.

He smiled, though I had spoken but careful truth. From the courtyard below a lassie’s song rose. An axe thudded in the stables, kye moaned from Between the Waters. Doos flew in and out of the storey below, all grey flutter and reproach. The pale sun lit on our faces, the Kirtle water glittered, and for a moment the Borderlands lay at peace.

He slung his arm across my shoulder, the way he would when we were students, no more than boys, slipping into the Embra night, bound for mischief, or heading into the examination hall of the Town’s College.

‘I am in love,’ he announced. ‘And they mean to kill me.’

I addressed the less implausible first. ‘Who is she?’

‘Helen.’ He turned his gaze away from the circling pigeons. ‘Helen Irvine, of course.’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying to sound surprised. ‘Fair Helen.’

And who else would he have set himself on but my childhood confidante, Cousin Helen? Even in the city I had heard the new flower of Annandale lit soul, heart, loins. And she was Irvine of Bonshaw’s daughter, and the families were long at feud.

‘So Will Irvine plots to kill you for fancying his daughter? Even by Borders standards that is high-handed.’

I was trying to calm his fervour, and my own.

Adam shrugged. ‘Feud is like fire in a peat-bank. It smoulders, it burns, it sleeps again. Irvine could perhaps be persuaded to the match – despite my mother’s remarriage, I am still heir to these small lands – were there not another asking for Helen.’

‘Who?’

‘Rob Bell.’

‘Ah.’

In student days I had passed Robert Bell of Blackett House, striding down the crowded High Street past St Giles, sword set high in his belt, Flemish pistolet on a sling, swerving not a jot for anyone but Jamie Saxt. Upon his father’s death amid a storm of daggers in a wynd in Gala, he had lately become the Bell heidsman. Folk said young Robert Bell had a future, though most hoped it short.

‘Bell’s not half the swordsman he thinks he is.’ Adam grinned, looked carefree for a moment. ‘He swings that long pistol like it was his cock, and we are meant to be impressed.’

‘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.



Fair Helen, cousin Helen, Helen Irvine, Erwyn,* Irwin, Ervyn, Irving, of Bonshaw or Kirkconnel or Springkell – call her as you will, she did once live and breathe, and when she smiled the joy of the world declared itself at the in-by of her mouth.

She is long gone, yet still her step stirs dust along the whispering gallery. The folk tales and the ballad have many versions, the chaste, the bawdy and the sensational (‘He cuttit him in pieces sma’), none of them sound and siccar. I, who was there at the margins, have come if not to set the record straight then at least to add my honest errors.

She was born plain Helen, daughter of Will Irvine of Bonshaw. She would die Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea. Her whole life extended twenty-one years wide by some five miles long, all it takes to get from Bonshaw to Kirkconnel.

In the days before her blooming, when we still shared much, she told me of the first time she came to know herself living – our second birth in this world.

She said she was by the peat-stack ahint the barnkin wall, setting her nose to smells of field and burn and muir. She rubs her hands on the peats, enjoying the crumble and mush. She sniffs her palms. The lines are now brown as burns after heavy rain. She studies how they run down the wee braes and heuchs of her hands.

The burn below their house is the Kirtle. A kirtle is also what she pulls on after her smock then waits for her mother to lace up. The burns in her palm, the peat they burn in winter – how oddly things come together!

Doos clatter from the peel tower, and for the first time she kens herself.

She sits on in the yard, crumbling and rubbing the fields in her hands. A telling-off will come, for breaking up the peat, for getting her kirtle mucky, but for now everything is connected and siccar.

So she told me as we sat within Bruce’s cave, cross-legged in the stone-smelling dimness, hearing the river crash by below, her thin child shoulder warm on mine.

*

Adam and I waited below Kirkconnel Brig. The arch over our heads rippled with reflected afterglow from the western sky. I was being bitten by things near-invisible, he was tight-strung in the gloaming, exultant in the way of those who are about to learn they are loved.

He had changed shirt and britches, run fingers through hair, dragged it down about his lugs then carefully adjusted it to show the lobes and the gold snake ring he had bought from a Romany in the Lawnmarket. Green half-cloak about his shoulders, dagger at his hips, he was quite the thing of the ton. Apart from the fact we wore heavy boots and were lurking under a bridge on the margin of his violent rival’s lands, we might have been two young callants about to salute the salons and bawdy houses of Embra.

Mostly we were silent, for each had much to think about. On our way here, skulking like broken men as we followed the Kirtle water downstream from Nether Albie, pushing birch and elder aside, alert to bird cries, starting at roe moving in the woods, he had been whingeing. Of late Helen had insisted on secret trysting, and he did not like it.

‘Do you think her honest?’ he had demanded of me as we set out from the family compound, supposedly to check the kye safe-gathered in the in-by pastures. ‘At Langholm mart a fortnight back, she was with her father and Bell, laughing! She gave me the high nod as though we were scarcely aquaint. She says she needs time to prevail upon her father, to end the blood-feud and help my family be reinstated. I do believe her!’

And who would not believe Helen’s eyes so wide and candid? We strode the old Roman Way where puddles shook in the wind, scrolling up the sky. I wrapped my old cloak round me, said nothing.

‘Then I think she is waiting to see the airt of the wind.’

I said nothing, knowing lovers to be touchy. When we were bairns I learned my fair cousin cheated, so innocently and so well, at our games of Dirk, Paper, Stane, or Parlour-Men. Through summers spent in Annandale among my mother’s people, we had been close, maybe very close. It had gone hard each year when Lammastide came, and I went back to my life in the city.

‘Can I trust her, Harry?’

Startled, I stepped into a puddle, looked down to see my boots muddied and the evening sky shattered.

‘I would trust her mind to pursue whatever ends her heart was set on,’ I replied carefully. ‘What that is, you should ken better than I.’

‘I swear her beauty is in her soul!’ he exclaimed. ‘She makes aa’ this –’ he gestured at the escarpment, the river, the distant Lea, the shallow wooded valley that was now his world – ‘seem murky and dim.’

He had turned to me, arms out wide, as if helpless.

‘I ken how that is,’ I muttered.

Perhaps my voice betrayed me. He looked at me with some curiosity, then around about. This evening no one travelled the old road to Ecclefechan. We were in a dip, unseen. He darted onto a track, overgrown and faltering as hope itself, that wandered through the heuch then back to the burn, to bring us here to wait beneath the brig.

*

In my old age, eyes far gone from scrivening and scholaring, the moments that stay with me are as faded manuscript pulled into lamplight. Through long nights I peer into them, trying to decipher their meaning.

This is one of my favoured passages, where we stand in wait for fair Helen Irvine. The sky is turning sere and scarlet through the arch where he stands, head bowed. It outlines his long straight nose, that fine forehead. His eyes are hidden. Darkness silts up the valley, thickening over the Lea and the Long Barrow. Only the roof of Kirkconnel kirk above the trees catches the last light.

We are listening for a sound that is not river-run nor last bleats, or birds settling to roost. He paddles the toe of his boot in the stream in little sweeping curves, frowning with concentration.

There is pattern to what he does, but I cannot decipher it. I nudge and soundlessly enquire. He looks up, startled. Leans his lips to my ear, his breath warm as he whispers.

‘My name in water – see how quickly it is lost.’

Once again his toe inscribes Adam Fleming. I whisper to him in turn.

‘Write hers, and be lost together.’

His teeth flash in the gloaming under the brig. In that moment we are close again, the troubled, intoxicated lover and I. With his other boot he delicately toes Helen Irvine, then we stand side by side to watch it unravel and be gone.

‘You are sic a daftie, friend,’ I whisper.

He grins back, delighted. In the shadows he looks young again, playful as he was before his brother’s then his father’s death.

‘But a sincere one, I think!’

Ah yes, sincerity. That is perhaps the difference. I have lived by truth of tale and translation, that serve another master.

*

So silently came she, we heard nothing. The late glow gilded her face as she smiled upon me.

‘Cousin Harry,’ she murmured, pressed her smooth cheek to mine. Then she cooried into him as though passing into his very core.

I looked down at the water that had borne their names away, and awaited my instructions. When she unclasped Adam, I could see she was indeed more than bonnie these days. She made all else seem a shuttered lantern.

‘You will be lookout for us at our trysting, Harry?’

I nodded. There was no place for me where they were going. Their shoulders, hands and thighs leaned into each other, two saplings caught in prevailing gusts. Their fingers tangled already.

She kissed me again, looked briefly into my eyes. For a moment nothing had changed since we were bairns on these very banks. He gripped my shoulder, grinned.

‘Merci,’ he said. ‘Gie the kestrel cry if needs be.’

It was our old signal to each other, when one stood below our lodgings, or needed assistance in a tavern brawl.

‘Surely,’ I said. ‘Ca’ canny.’

He laughed under his breath, took a quick look round, then followed her through the last green light into the trees, towards the kirk and Lea where the grass grew long.

I followed them downstream, then eased myself down against a great beech whose branches trailed heavy in the water, and tried to think of anything except what they were now about.

*

Let me hold her face and form before me in the lamp-troubled dark, ‘Fair Helen’, as the ballads cry her.

I see her best as I knew her first, as a child with me in the fields, so quick and canny. Her eyebrows were set straight and honey-dark above her eyes, and those the colour of sky right overhead. Close up, they had queer paler flecks in them like bits of scattered glass.

Among the corn we made our dens, and filled them with our make-believe, confessions and lichtsome games. We fossicked every Roman camp and abandoned tower, wandered far downstream to find her family’s cave where they had once hid the Bruce a winter through. She pressed an ivy rope into my hand, seized another, then slid out of sight down the cliff, eyes shining, mouth agape in the thrill … Into how many sleepless nights has she descended so, to light my darkness!

Though younger than I, she was strong-willed and liked to win. At Dirk, Paper, Stane she would bring her hand from behind her back a moment after mine, adapt it in mid-air and laughing wrap her paper round my stone, or break my dirk with her stane. I did not hold it against her. It seemed already I loved some things more than winning.

One long afternoon, cooried in our den on Kirtle bank, she persuaded me to show her mine. I did and lay there as she stared. She did not laugh but nodded thoughtfully, lips parted, faint lines knotting between her eyebrows, as though she were studying a featherless chick fallen from the nest.

I pulled my britches up. ‘Now you,’ I said.

In truth I was relieved when she ran giggling. When I caught her, she cried, ‘It’s nothing! Harry, there is next to nothing there!’ And laughed so merrily.

When I sit in the corner of a howff, fuddled with ale or bad claret, and someone begins to sing the dolefu’ ballad of ‘Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea’, forgive me if I smile awry.

*

I was in a dwam, they were expert, I had lived too many years in the city. An arm crooked round my throat, gloved hand clamped across my mouth. I was hoisted up and hit once in the face, twice in the belly. I slumped and was dropped. Seized by the hair, my face was lifted to what moonlight there was.

‘It is not he.’

There were three. The man who had whispered I did not know. The one who stood looking down at me was Robert Bell. A third turned away and stood guard.

Bell hunkered down and stared at me. He had abandoned his Frenchified look, let his beard and black hair grow full. He looked every inch a Border bully in his pomp, hardened and skilled. The moonlight glinted off the Flemish pistol at his hip, the dagger in his fist. My life had been too short. I would be another body found in the woods.

‘It is Fleming’s bum chum,’ he said quietly. ‘I had heard he was back.’

What madness possessed me then I do not know. With my death towering over me, I made the kestrel cry. It rang sharp and clear before a fist knocked me sideways. The first man put his hand to his sword, looked to his master.

Would I could say courage came to me at my last.

‘I am unarmed,’ I whimpered.

‘More fool you.’

‘I am a priest now. I am here only to see my mother’s people.’

Neither of these was strictly true. The man in the shadows spoke in a muffled voice.

‘It is o’er late now.’

Robert Bell lifted me by the throat as if I were a scrap of prey and stared into my soul and I into his. Then he drew back and hit me full in the face.

*

For some years my crooked nose brought, I liked to think, a certain distinction to my features. Now in old age it just adds to my battered and agley appearance, and it aches when the snell winds blow.

I came back to the taste of blood, thickening in my throat. I rolled on my side, coughed and spat it out. Ribs and belly ached with each breath and movement. They must have given me some parting kicks before disappearing into the night. But I lived. I had not thought to. (Only later would it come clear why I had been spared, and at whose direction. Or perhaps Rob Bell had looked into my face or his own soul, and seen some grounds for mercy there. Que sais-je?)

I staggered downstream through the trees, breathing only through my mouth. I knelt at the river, washed my face, swallowed and spat blood. The flow had lessened now. I could not bear to touch my nose. I looked at my hands, pale in the broken moonlight. They shook not. Strange.

The man who spoke but once, the one who turned away as if not wanting to be recognized, I had seen him before. Not in Bell’s company, but another’s. In the city? Short hair and jawline beard, stoop-shouldered but strong. Not a servant, nor quite a master. An adviser of some sort?

I came to the place where long grass was flattened, out of sight of the path and the far bank alike. This was where young love had lain, heard my warning cry, stolen away into the night. The stone preaching cross from older times stood . . .