him an opportunity.
‘I also look out for his wife,’ he said carefully. ‘When she is travellin’ up and doon the roads, like, on the business of Buchan.’
Tam said nothing.
‘I was thinking, perchance, ye had heard if she’d passed this way,’ Malise persisted. ‘A Coontess. Ye would know her in an instant – she rides a warhorse.’
Tam turned the cheap red earthenware round and round, pretending to think and studying Malise. A weasel, he decided, with a tait of terrier there. No contract scribbler this – a rache, huntin’ the scent of some poor soul. A Coontess, he added to himself, my arse. Alone? On a warhorse? My arse.
Malise grew tired of the silence eventually and spread his hands, choosing his words carefully.
‘If the road keeps clear and the garrison at Bothwell chases away its enemies, ye might get a customer or two.’
‘God preserve the king,’ Tam said, almost by rote and leaving Malise to wonder which king he was speaking of. Malise was about to start placing coins on the table when a frightening apparition appeared at the head of the staircase.
The face had once been pretty, but was puffed and reddened by late nights and too much drink. Malise saw a body made shapeless by a loose shift, but a breast lolled free, darkened by a bruise.
‘What a stramash,’ she whined, combing straggles of hair from her face. ‘Can a quine not get sleep here?’
She saw Malise and made an attempt at a winning smile, then gave up and stumbled down to slump on a bench.
‘Where’s your light o’ love?’ demanded Tam sarcastically.
‘Snoring his filthy head off – Tam, a cup?’
Tam grunted and poured.
‘Just the single Lizzie, my sweet. I want you at the work the day.’
‘What for is wrong with that bitch upstairs?’ Lizzie whined and Tam grinned, lopsided and lewd.
‘You ken the way of it. It is your affair if you stick yer legs in the air when you should be sleepin’, but this is your day for the work.’
Lizzie’s teeth clacked on the cup and she drank, coughed, wiped her mouth, then drank again.
‘Ye have to have rules,’ Tam said imperiously to Malise, ‘to run a business in these times. This place will be stappit with sojers the night, seeking out a wee cock of the finger an’ a bit of fine quim.’
He nudged Lizzie, who forced a winsome smile, then looked at Malise, sparked to curiosity now that wine was flooding her.
‘What are you selling – face paints and oils?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Seeking, not selling,’ Malise answered and the whore pouted and lost interest.
‘So,’ said Tam expansively, sliding into the shirt which had been brought to him at last. ‘Ye were sayin’. About a Coontess.’
‘The road is clear,’ Malise answered. ‘though few travel. Too many sojers of the English, who are just as bad as Wallace’s rebels.’
‘Never speak of him,’ Tam spat, thinking moodily of wagon drivers bringing stone for the completion of the castle, their thirsty helpers, the woolmen and drovers and pardoners and tinkers, all the trade he was not getting.
‘The road would be clear save for they bastits, God strike them,’ he added. ‘They’ll not come here, though, so close to the castle.’
‘I heard it was not completed,’ Malise mused.
‘The walls are big enough,’ Tam retorted, wondering if this stranger was a spy and regretting what he had said about Wallace. Then the stranger wondered out loud if the Countess had gone there.
‘Coontess?’ Lizzie declared before Tam could speak. ‘No Coontess has rested here. No decent wummin since the Flood.’
She shot Tam a miserable look and he parried it with a glare, seeing his chance at money vanish. If he had planned to inflict more on her, it was lost in a clatter and a curse from upstairs.
‘So he’s up,’ muttered the whore, glancing upwards. ‘A malison on his prick.’
‘To speak the De’il’s name is to summon him,’ chuckled Tam as a second figure appeared at the top of the stairs, took two steps, stumbled and slithered down another four, then managed to make it to the table, whey- faced and with a beard losing its neat trim. He had a fleshily handsome face, dark hair fading to smoke and spilling in greasy curls to his ears, a stocky body and wore shirt, boots and not much else – but Malise saw the bone knife- handle peep from the boot top.
He did not see the face until the man spilled down the steps and into the sour, dappled light dancing wearily through the shutters.
His heart juddered in him; he knew the man. Hob, or Rob – one of the men from Douglas who had been with the Sientcler from Lothian. His mouth went dry; if he was here, then the other one might also be, the one called Tod’s Wattie, and he had fingers at his throat, massaging the memory of the gripping iron hand before he realised it and stopped.
‘Lizzie, my wee queen,’ Bangtail Hob said thickly, ‘pour me some of that.’
‘If you can pay, there is another flask,’ Tam declared and the man nodded wobblingly, then fished a purse from under his armpit and counted out coins. Malise fought to control his shaking, to stop glancing behind him, as if to find Tod’s Wattie there.
‘Ah, God take my pain,’ Bangtail said, holding his head. The wine arrived, the man poured, swallowed, puffed, blew and shuddered, then drank again. Finally, he looked at Malise.
‘I ken you, do I not?’ he asked and Malise could not speak at all, but wondered, wildly, if he could get to the dagger through the tangle of his clothes and under the table.
Bangtail drank deeply again and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand as his brain caught up with his mouth and he regretted admitting he knew this man. In Bangtail’s experience, almost all the half-remembered men he knew were husbands or sweethearts of the quim he was stealing from them; he did not not want to press this in case memory returned for both of them.
‘See men?’ he asked, swallowing more wine. ‘Carts. Horses. Men on the road ye came up?’
Malise swallowed, found words and croaked them out, nodding.
‘Took the turn for Elderslie,’ he lied and saw Bangtail jerk his head up.
‘Ach, no. Away. Ye are jestin’, certes.’
Malise shook his head and then had to fight to stop shaking it. Bangtail Hob cursed and slammed away from the table, heading for the stairs.
‘You told me they would be here the day,’ Tam yelled truculently to the vanishing back of Hob. ‘A wheen of sojers an’ a knight, you said, needin’ lodgin. I have been sair put out to accommodate them.’
‘Away,’ scoffed Lizzie, slack smiled and bathing in warm pools with the drink. ‘Ye have had no visitors at all, ken.’
Tam’s hand smacked her in the mouth, just as the cup was rising towards it. The cup and the wine went one way, Lizzie went the other and she lay for a moment, dazed. Then, slowly, she climbed back to her knees and then feet.
‘Any further lip from you, my lass…’ Tam added warningly.
Malise sat still as rock. He could not have moved if he had wanted to and all the time he ached to turn round and yet did not dare, for fear of seeing Tod’s Wattie and the face on him for what had been done to the dogs. Not pleasant, Malise admitted. Henbane, realgar and hermadotalis, better known as Snake’s Head iris, was a vicious poison on man or beast and they did not die peacefully.
Hob clattered back down the stairs, this time dressed in boots and braies and shirt, with a studded leather jack, a long knife and a sword at his waist and a round-rimmed iron helmet in one hand. He shouted for his horse to be got ready and Tam jerked a sullen head at Lizzie to tell the ostler.
Hob paused at the table and snatched up the flask he had paid for, grinning from his broad-chinned face.
‘Elderslie, ye say,’ he said, then frowned and shook his head. ‘Bastits. They were to come this way. No man tells me a thing.’
