Chapter Ten
LIDDESDALE
We rode down from the Nine Stane Rig where my faithfulness to Robert had been tested and my passion had emerged victorious, and we rode up Liddesdale in full view of everybody.
Now, you may not know that in the Borderland all the major people were known to each other and were recognisable by sight and by name.
Despite the size of the area and the number of people, it was really quite a close community, so when we walked our horses down from the ridge and stepped boldly up the valley, I felt certain that somebody would realise we were strangers and shout out a challenge.
What I had not reckoned with was the nocturnal nature of the Borders.
It was an elemental mistake I made. Hugh had not made the same error.
With so many of the men engaged in night-time reiving, only women, children, and ordinary farmers were abroad in the early morning.
That, added to the shifting, uncertain light of autumn and Hugh's iron nerves, worked in our favour.
I was inclined to rush, to try and pass through the valley as quickly as possible so pushed in my spurs to hurry things along.
'Slow down.' Hugh's voice was calm as his hand rested on the bridle of my horse. I could not resist the temptation to touch it. 'We are ordinary men going about our business. There is no need to rush.'
He was right of course. Respectable travellers, even in such an extraordinary locality as Liddesdale, did not rush. They move at a steady pace, as Hugh insisted we do, and nodded to people they passed, even taking the time to remark on events to whosever they met on the road.
'Well met, fellows!' The cheerful call took me by surprise, so I nearly jumped up from my saddle.
'Well met.' Hugh responded with a lift of his hand as the small group of people reined up in front of us to pass the time of day. I looked up briefly from beneath the brim of my helmet. There were five in the company, two women and three men.
'Are you bound for Hawick, friend?' The leading man seemed inclined to speak. He was a young-looking man with a neat beard and an air of obvious authority.
'Hawick and points north,' Hugh said. 'Peebles if we can get there by nightfall. And yourselves?'
The bearded man laughed. 'Hermitage Castle for a night or two,' he said, 'and maybe some sport.'
'There is ill sport in Liddesdale,' Hugh responded.
I was less interested in whatever sport this gallant young blade intended than in the attention that both women in his train were paying in me.
Perhaps men believe that they can spot a pretty woman a mile away, as many of my Lethan boys claimed, but it is a fact that women are more perspicacious than men.
These two were studying me and whispering together behind raised hands and with wondering, calculating eyes.
'Ill sport?' the gallant man asked. 'Why is that, pray?'
'Why, sir,' Hugh said with a laugh. 'We passed by the Castleton and Whithaugh yestreen and the whole place was astir.
There were horsemen and riders galloping all around the place, beacon fires a-burning and great bands of horsemen all calling havoc and murder on the land and on the Scotts in particular. '
Now that was a blatant lie. At no time had I heard anybody crying for murder on the Scott family. The Armstrongs and the others had been intent only on the two of us. However, I saw the bearded man stiffen in his saddle at Hugh's words. 'Were they indeed?'
'That is what I heard,' my brazen liar said. 'Why, Wild Will himself was there, shouting that he would capture the Bold Buccleuch in person and hang him naked from his rooftree, him and his women and all his household.'
I said nothing, merely lowered my head from the acute examination of the two women as the bearded gallant touched a hand to the long blade he wore at his saddle.
'We'll see about that,' he said in a voice that was suddenly grim with menace.
Whoever this man was, he was no earl spoiled with fur and ermines, not with that determined thrust to his jaw.
Any sane man or coward would have turned back at the news that Liddesdale was riding, while this forward man signalled to a flaxen-haired youth who sat his horse two strides behind the women.
'Sound the horn,' the bearded gallant said. 'Bring our lads in closer. It seems that we shall be hunting before we reach Hermitage this day.'
As flaxen-hair lifted the horn to his lips, one of the women walked her horse to the gallant man. I held my breath as she spoke to him, nodding toward me, and then the horn sounded a long, wavering note that rose to the sky and brought a host of wild geese rising from the grassland nearby.
'We shall bid you farewell, my Lord.' Hugh touched a hand to his head.
'You know me, then?' Yet it was to me the gallant looked and not to Hugh.
'Why yes, My Lord, you are Walter Scott of Buccleuch.
' Hugh touched spurs to his horse and walked on, with me a hands-breadth behind him with my heart in my mouth.
The gallant was Walter Scott of Buccleuch himself: The Bold Buccleuch, the man who led the mighty Scott family, able to call up three thousand Border lances at a lift of his little pinkie.
And as I watched I realised why Hugh had made up his tales about the Armstrongs.
All along the ridges on both sides of us, men appeared, carrying their lances in their right hands.
'Ride on,' I said, 'quickly.'
'Safe journey to you, friend.' Scott of Buccleuch lifted a hand to Hugh.
'And to you, my lady.' His smile to me was entirely conspiratorial.
Suddenly my disguise did not seem impenetrable in the slightest and my thoughts that men were not as perceptive as women also seemed wide of the mark.
I mustered a half-hearted smile, kicked in my spurs, and rode on, feeling very vulnerable and just a little humiliated.
'We need no longer worry about the Armstrongs,' Hugh said. 'With Scott of Buccleuch and his men riding through Liddesdale they will have enough to contend with.'
I nodded. Until that moment I had been more concerned with discovery than anything else but now more personal matters came once more to the fore.
I thought of what I had done and how it altered my entire perception of myself.
I had allowed my baser instincts to take over.
I had betrayed Robert. I had failed myself and my family.
How could I face him? We had been friends all my life. We had made an agreement to wed and we had been faithful to each other until I gave way to my own weakness and my own passion. How could I tell him? What could I say?
'You are quiet,' Hugh said as we negotiated a pass between long green hills. I heard the call of a yorling and remembered that laughing, enigmatic man who had begun this whole adventure. Whoever he was, he had started a long train that led to my downfall and personal discovery.
'I am thinking.' I looked sideways at him.
'About what we did last night?' Hugh asked.
'About what we did last night.' I said no more.
'I will come with you if you decide to tell Robert,' Hugh said. 'If he decides to kill me then the world will be rid of an ugly man. I will die knowing that my world could never get any better than it was with you.'
I did not say that my world would also have been the poorer if I had not experienced the previous night. I was learning. Instead, I nodded. 'It is kind of you to say that.'
'It is no kindness,' he snapped that, which pleased me although I could not say why.
'I do not wish you to be there if I tell Robert. You are at feud with us; my Tweedies would kill you as soon as you appeared near the Lethan.' That was only the truth. It was another reason that I was confused, for if I admitted that I had bedded a Veitch I would be even less thought of.
'You do not have to tell him,' Hugh said. 'That would be the simplest solution. Or perhaps…'
'Or perhaps?' I hoped for a solution to my problem.
'You do not have to return to the Lethan,' Hugh spoke quietly. He reached across and took hold of Kailzie's bridle. 'There are other valleys just as sweet, other towers as comfortable as Cardrona and other men who want you as much as Robert Ferguson does.'
I shook my head. 'I have given my word,' I said. 'And there is more.'
'What more is there?'
We reined up there, with that evil valley of Liddesdale behind us and ahead, the ragged road leading us home to Peebles-shire and the Lethan Valley.
The sun had risen, casting our elongated shadows long and dark over the autumnal heather until they merged together at the head.
I faced Hugh and told him what nobody else knew except my mother.
He listened in silence until I had finished. 'You saw yourself with Robert in a vision?' he asked.
'Every year on my birthday.' I waited for the inevitable ridicule. People who have not experienced such things tend to mock, either through fear or scepticism, which is one reason that I did not tell anybody. My other reason was through fear of being called a witch.
Hugh neither mocked nor called me a follower of Satan.
'I have never met anybody with such a power before.
' If anything, he sounded sad rather than doubtful.
Releasing the bridle of my horse, he began to move again.
'When I heard your voice in the dungeon, I knew that you were above the common set of people, and as soon as I saw your face, I knew you were a most noble piece of work, a paragon. '
'I am none of that,' I told him. I did not tell him of the ache in my heart every time I looked at him, or the lust in my loins.
Some things are better left unsaid when one is riding alone with a vibrant man in the stark hills of the Borderland.
Nor did I tell him of my sense of desolation when I compared him to my Robert.
That, I decided, must remain forever unsaid and only admitted to myself.