Corrag: A Novel Read online

  They looked down at the herbs, understanding them now.

  There was a small hush, so I heard all our breathing and the rain going drip. Then they muttered in their own Scotch words. They looked on me for such a long time I felt hot, awkward.

  I didn’t say yes I am—for I’ve never called my own self witch. I held my tongue and scratched the mare’s neck how she likes, to calm her.

  How old are you?

  I pouted. I was cross because they’d troubled her and because they’d made Cora’s herbs fall out of her purse, and now they were treading on them, which was a proper waste and sadness.

  This winter will be my sixteenth I said.

  What’s your business?

  What’s yours? Saucy of me. I can be, and that’s Cora.

  The plum-faced one considered me. An English girl? In a woman’s cloak? On a stolen horse?

  Maybe it was the softness which had come into his voice. Or the half-light. Or maybe it was my lonesomeness that made me talk to him—I don’t know. But I said my mother sent me away. They call her a witch, and hate her, and she will die soon, so she told me to flee north-and-west away from Thorneyburnbank so that they might not kill me, too. I looked at the ground. These were her herbs. They are mine, now—to sell, I think, and to keep me safe. They are all I have in the world—except for my wits, and my mare.

  This all came out in a rush. It was like my words were water and out they came, and now what? We all stood amongst my words like leggy birds in a stream. I was breathless, and a small part of me felt like being teary-eyed because I thought of Cora dying, but I wouldn’t let them see it.

  I thought fool to myself. No-one likes a chatterer. It’s best to keep your mouth tied up, but I never did it.

  It was even stranger, what was next.

  They did not come to me. They did not grab my purse or my mare. It was like they were creatures who put their claws away because I had shown my proper face—like how the air is always better when the storm’s come in and gone. We all looked upon ourselves, brushed our clothes of rain. I straightened out my skirts and tried to make my hair less of a thatch.

  The plum-faced one said hanging is a greater sin than most folk are hung for. Like he was trying to comfort me.

  I sniffed. I said yes.

  He looked at me. I know Thorneyburnbank he said. Near Hexham? Does it have a cherry tree? And then he looked so sad, so empty and sad that I felt sorry for him, and had no fear at all. He looked about the ground at my herbs, and he said what can you do? Can you mend?

  Some things.

  Can you mend his eyes? For the poor one on the ground was still bloodied.

  I said I reckon so.

  How about sewing? Cooking?

  These were not my best things but I could do them. I said yes.

  He nodded. Mend his eyes, he said. Mend my cough and that one’s foot and sew a jerkin or two, and we’ll give you some meat. And you can rest a while.

  He helped me to gather Cora’s herbs, and put them in my purse.

  I FOLLOWED them through the trees. I walked with the drip drip and my mare blowing her nose, and I whispered to myself, to her, to what it is that sees us and hears us—God, or spirits, or the hidden self, or all these things—this, now, is my second life.

  It began as Cora’s ended.

  My second, galloping life.

  They were ghosts, Mr Leslie.

  Not spectres made of mist, and air—not lost souls. Just ghostly men. The last of their kind, for reiving days were gone. I’d thought all the Mossmen had been hung, or sent away. But here they were. With their sweat and goatskin boots.

  They took me to a clearing of moss, and damp. A goat’s leg boiled in a pot. A lone hobbler dozed beneath a tree, and three hens pecked in the dirt. The evening light was dusty, like it is in barns, and when I looked up I saw the evening star, shining through the trees.

  Here. Some of the cooking water was given to me, in a cup.

  I thought of how I used to be—of what I’d believed in, a few hours before, which had not been these things.

  I MENDED his eyes that night. I was glad of the eyebright, and pressed it on with flaxweed, and said hush, now, and laid them on his lids. Then I also took a splinter out from a heel. For the cough, which rattled like pins in a pail, I took coltsfoot and warmed it up in milk. I said sip this tonight, and your cough will go directly. There is no herb better for the chest.

  I ate a little goat’s meat, which was good. The fire crackled. My mare dozed with the hobbler, side by side.

  We’ve met ones like you, said the plum-faced one.

  Like me? I looked up.

  Runners. Hiders. These woods are full of folk who are hunted for things—small and big things. He put goat in his mouth, and chewed. For a stillborn child. A wild heart. Faith.

  I nodded. My mother’s heart is wild.

  He looked up. But she doesn’t run with you?

  No. Because they would follow her. They would follow her, and find her, and find me too. It made my eyes fill up with tears which I think he saw.

  We are the same—you and us. You might think we are not, but we are. Our ancestors are mostly dead by the hangman’s doing. We also live by nature’s laws—which are the true laws. He shook his head. Man’s laws are not as they should be.

  I agreed to this. I ate.

  We’re Mossmen, he said. My father’s father was a reiver, and my father was—and I am the last of them. But where they raped and burnt—and I know they did, God forgive them—I’ve only ever taken what I needed to, and no more. An egg. Perhaps a lamb. And only from the rich. He eyed me, as if he wanted me to nod at this. Then, to himself, he said they call us murderers but I’ve not killed a soul. Not even hurt one.

  Like Cora, I said. They blamed her for a baby that came out blue.

  Not her fault?

  No.

  The fire lapped on itself. I heard the mare’s belly rumble, which was the hay in her.

  Thorneyburnbank… he said. Yes, I know it. Clover. It had the sweetest cattle when I was a boy. A half-moon bridge. That cherry tree…

  They were good cherries.

  He nodded. They were. My brother liked them. He liked all of it.

  The whole tree?

  The whole village. With its fat cows. Its stream full of fish. The folk too… He threw a piece of grass into the fire. My brother said they were sour. That they were sour to each other, and that thieving from sour people was less sinful than thieving from the good.

  Some were kind I said, sharply. I thought of Mrs Fothers with her hand-shaped bruise. Mr Pepper who had never minded Cora’s ways, or mine.

  He wiped his chin with his forearm. Some. There’s always a star or two, on dark nights, I’ll say that. But… He looked into the fire, then. He looked so hugely, deeply sad that I wanted to ask him of it—but I did not need to ask. He said, we took from there. When I was younger, we took some geese from there. Then my brother wanted more, so he rode back for two plump cows. He took them from a farmer who beat his herd with sticks until they bled, which wasn’t good. I was there. I helped him. He held up his fingers. Two cows. We never took more than we needed, and never left a person with nothing at all.

  What then? I asked this. But I think I knew.

  They rode out a third time. He shook his head. He was quiet for a long time, so that I heard the wind move high above us. I smelt the pines, and the smoke. Hung by the neck in Hexham. Three years ago, this winter.

  I saw it. I was there again, and saw it—the crow waiting, and the crowd’s cheer as the doors went bang.

  Was his beard yellow?

  He glanced over. Yes. You saw?

  I did not tell him I often saw it, in my head—the one, small bounce when the rope reached its end. They were all your men?

  My brother, an uncle, three friends.

  HE said no more on this. He said no more at all that night—only you can sleep soundly here, which I believed. And I did sleep soundly—beneath my mother’s c
loak, breathing night-time air.

  But no, there was no more, on those deaths. I know some people think that to talk of others dying is not right—that it makes them die a second time. Maybe he thought his brother died a new death that night, by the fire, with goat’s meat in our mouths. He had looked so woeful. He’d rubbed at his eyes. And thieving is wrong—even a hen, or turnip or two—but not much deserves the scaffold, and these men never did.

  I’m sorry I said.

  He nodded. We took two cows and they took five lives.

  I don’t think to talk of how people died makes them die twice-over, though. I think it keeps them living. But we all think different things.

  He was the one I knew. Him with the reddish bloom on his face which I reckoned came with his birth—and which no herbs could fade. It ran from his brow, over one eye. It was plum-coloured, and shiny, and Cora would have liked it. She liked differences. She said true beauty lay in them.

  The other Mossmen kept in shadows, or slept, but the plum-faced one stayed near me—as if he wanted to. Maybe he did. Maybe he felt closer to his brother by being with a girl who’d seen his bad death. I don’t know.

  Are you coming? he’d ask.

  Where to?

  Into the forest, always. He trod old paths. He led me to streams which silvered with fish, and we gathered berries there, and fire-wood. This, he said, is how to catch the fish—and it was slowness that did it. He moved his hand so slowly that the fish thought it was weed until it scooped it up, into the air, with there! See? He showed me how to smoke it, and lift it from its bones. I whispered thank you to the fish, as I ate it—and the Mossman smiled a little, said Corrag—it cannot hear you now. By the fire he showed me how to skin a rabbit, how to use its fur. We mended the small roof which we all huddled under, in hard rain—with moss, and thick branches. He showed me how. And one day I said do you know about mushrooms at all? Which he did not. So I took him out to the dankest parts and gave him their names, showed him their pale, velvet underskirts—and I was glad of this, for I felt I’d been taking more than giving, and I like giving more.

  And he was the best for stories. He had many—so many. Maybe he knew that I loved strange and wild tellings, for when we picked thistles out of manes together, or shook trees to bring the grubs down, or sat by the fire with broth, he’d speak of them. I’d say tell me of… And some tales were of such wonder that I could not breathe, with them. Unearthly, whispering tales—of red-coloured moons, or a boy who spoke more wisdom than any grown man could, or of a green, northern light in the sky. Of an eggshell with three eggs inside it. He spoke of how he fell, once, with a wound and woke to find a rough tongue licking his blood away—a fox’s tongue. A fox? I said. But he was sure of it.

  He had reiving tales in him, too. Not his own—for he said he had never reived in the true sense of it. But my father, and his father, and his…Their times were brutal times—hiding, raiding, creeping in the dusk, fighting with March-wardens, breaking free from cells…They burnt all the farmsteads they reived from so the night sky was orange. Filled with sparks.

  Like the sun had come early, I said. But what I also thought was why? Why would a man choose such a life? To butcher and burn? To hurt other souls. It made no sense to my small ears, and had no good in it—I said so. There are other ways to live.

  He sighed. Aye—perhaps. But it was always the way in these parts. Such hatred in the air…You could smell it in the wood-smoke, and hear it in the wind…Still can. A Scot may cut an Englishman down but he’d give his own life for the Scot by his side, and so it is in England, also. That hasn’t changed in my lifetime. Nor will it. There’s been too much fighting and slyness to ever clean the air of it. He shook his head. Politics…

  This made me think. In the dusk and in the dripping trees, I said Scotland to myself. If it was not for their accents, this place felt like England to me.

  Slyness?

  He turned his eyes to look at me. He narrowed them. You don’t know much of countries, do you? Of thrones? Loyalties? He shook his head a little. If you’re going north-and-west, my wee thing, you should know more than you do.

  WE SAT by the fire, that night. I stitched at a jerkin which was half-undone, and as I sewed he told me what he called must-knows, and truths.

  Scotland is two countries.

  I pricked my thumb. Two? Scotland? Two?

  England says one. But England’s wrong about that. Highland and Lowland, he told me. Like two different worlds. He threw on a pine branch, and out came its smell—sweet, and like Christmas.

  Which one is this? That we’re in?

  These are the borders, he said. Which is its own country too, in many ways. But they lead into the Lowland parts not far from here—and the Lowlands are green, and lush. More people live in them. They are civil people, too, or so they like to say. They say they’re more learned, more wise of the world than the rest. They speak English as we do. ’Tis the regal part—the Queen Mary who is dead now rode to her Bothwell’s castle, near here, and there is Edinburgh which is reekie and tall but that’s a true city. He shook his head. I’ll never see it. Carlisle’s as big as I’ll see in my life.

  That’s big. Cora said so.

  But not like Edinburgh is. They say its castle is so high that you might see London from it. It’s where they hung a bishop from the palace walls, and every new king or queen rides the Royal Mile so the crowds may cheer and wave at them.

  I don’t like kings I said.

  I’m not too fond myself. But most Lowlanders are favouring this new Orange king, and—he pointed—you should remember this.

  I scowled. It was the Orange king’s wheezes that had helped to put witch on Cora, and I sewed very firmly. I tugged my needle through.

  But the Highlands…

  I glanced up.

  They are another world. I have never seen them either—they are far, far to the north and I’m too old to see them now. But they say it’s a properly wild place to be. Wind and rain, and bogs, and wolves calling. And ’tis a fiercer folk who live in that wild land, for it takes a hardy soul to survive it.

  Hardy?

  Aye. Savage. No laws—or not the laws that Lowland folk live by. They have their own language. Their own faith. He sipped from his broth. He found a bone in it, plucked it out, looked at it. Then he put it in the fire, said they are hated.

  By whom?

  Lowland hates Highland like horses hate flies. You’ll see that, soon enough.

  Why?

  He shrugged. For being lawless. For having their Catholic ways. They say the Highland parts weigh this nation down…That the clans are barbarous. They scrap amongst themselves, is what I hear—and there are many known rogues up there. Even I know of them—me! Down here! The MacDonalds, mostly.

  Who?

  A clan with as many branches as a tree has. The Glencoe ones are spoken of plenty—their flashing blades…Thieving.

  I did a stitch. I thought of how little I knew of the world. Of how far away my old life was, with its holly, and frogs in marshes. It seemed a good life, briefly—that Thorneyburnbank one. I had known it, and its people. I’d not met a person who spoke a language of their own. This life, now, seemed harder. More shadows to pass by.

  I was quiet for a time. Then I whispered what of us? Of people like me? What does witch mean here? They hang them or drown them in pools, where I’m from. Or they try them by a judge, and do not kill them—but they are called witch for forever, then, and have stones thrown at them all their lives.

  He watched me. How he looked at me made me wonder if he’d ever had a child at all—for it was the kind of gentle look a parent gives. It was partly sad. Maybe he wished I might have more than this—more than witch, and sewing jerkins in a wood. He rubbed his plum-red patch with the heel of his hand. There were fevers in my youth, I’ll say that. Witch-hunting times—as there were in the south. They burnt a woman in Fife and in the market square they trod on a wetness that must have been her. Her body. Maybe he saw
my face, for he said very quickly that was east. That was out in fishing villages, where it’s been worst. So don’t go east.

  How is north-and-west?

  He drank, chewed his broth. He swallowed. Aye. That might be best. You may be safest in the wild parts—for Highlanders are hated more than you’ll ever be, I think.

  I nodded.

  I wanted blowing skies. To be where wolves still called.

  RIDE north-and-west, Cora had said. She’d had the second sight, maybe, and knew. Don’t come back. North-and-west.

  Aye, I said, like he did. And I mended the jerkin, so he looked smart in it.

  Sir, I tell you these things so you know, too. You need to know—how Scotland is. Maybe you do know—how it is two countries, with low parts hating high. Civil hating savages. Cities hating glens.

  Highland and Lowland. Write that down.

  Write also, of this.

  That it was as I lived with those Mossmen that my mother died. I saw it in my head. I was knelt by a pool, drinking from cupped hands, when I saw my reflection and I thought briefly it was her. The water flashed about her. Light flashed about her neck, so I knew. I knew her time was done.

  Here is what I think. That a rope was placed tenderly over her head, by tender hands—like the hangman half-loved her, and did not want her gone. Her hair blew about her. Her thumbs were tied neatly behind her back, and in the last few moments she looked up at the sky and thought it is so beautiful… I also looked up. I saw the swaying trees, and the grey clouds rolling by. I breathed in, as she breathed in. I closed my eyes.

  Mr Leslie, I sent all the love I’d ever had to her. I sent it to England, wanting it to find her so that she might die on the scaffold feeling loved. By me.

  Tell her I am living. Tell her I am safe.

  That night, I saw her ghost.

  She came into the clearing with her thumbs untied, and her red skirts rustled as she came. She was in the realm, where no harm is. She looked across, and smiled.