The Disorderly Knights Read Online Free PDF Page B

matter of duty, ye said. And her cooking’s rare.’
    ‘Well it is! Better than the auld, done collops ye get at this table!’
    ‘Then bring her home wi’ ye, ye red-heided gomerel!’ said Grizel Beaton, Lady (Younger) of Buccleuch. ‘Would ye let us all starve? Doesna the Church tell us all, the act o’ love is a sin, wanting a purpose?’ There was a long, harassed pause. ‘Or does she not like yeenough?’ Grizel had added and lumbered off, squealing with laughter as her husband chased her through to the solar. The odd ways of women were new to Will Scott, but some of them he was getting to like fine.
    He was still thinking about it when he met Tom Erskine and his Chevalier friend, and they went on to Crailing together. At roughly the same moment, the English captain at Roxburgh fortress, six miles to the east of Hough Isa’s, decided to pay the lady a visit.
    It was a decision not entirely supported by the exiled English soldiery under his command. Those who still had voices with which to speak muttered. The rest wound and rewound the scarves round their jerkin collars and croaked. With each fresh command from the old man, their prospects for both tender friendships and a safe passage homewards to mother were dwindling. The captain had found out about Hough Isa and her friends. That is, the captain knew about Hough Isa already, but not about her specialized role vis-à-vis his vanishing garrison. And today the captain intended to act.
    With a company of picked men therefore, about whose qualifications strange rumours were rife, Sir Ralph Bullmer with his cousin Sir Oliver Wyllstrop left the castle of Roxburgh and ventured into the enemy country around to visit the too-welcoming homes of single ladies of ample means.
    The queen of these, Hough Isa, lived in a stone-built thatched house just outside the village of Crailing. Its windows, part board, were clean and neatly painted, her herb garden was trim, and her chimney place, with its blackened whinstone and its festive hooks and chains, smelt of good soup and mutton stew, witness to the fact that the local shepherds had hearty appetites and the means to satisfy them. There were fresh rushes on the floor of the kitchen, and in the next room a piece of painted carpet even, beside a double bed like a table, with the joiner’s initials and Hough Isa’s, though her English visitors did not know that, entwined on the headboard.
    Nothing was entwined on the bed. The house was empty.
    Sir Ralph Bullmer, seated aloof on his horse, ordered the residence to be burnt.
    It was a bright, clear day in late spring, and the straw burned quickly, the smoke shadows trotting over the grass to their horses’ hooves as they watched; the flames mere distortions of the blue air. A wave of anecdote went over the English troop as, scratching their necks and pushing back their helmets, they watched. They wondered, in an undertone, if The Bullock knew of the other two ladies who obliged, down Oxnam Water and the widow at Cessford village itself.
    Sir Ralph Bullmer knew none of them, in the most congenial sense, but his military intelligence was so far adequate, at least. His pale,long-sighted gaze lifted to the road south beyond the cottage, and raising an arm, he waved his men past the crackling shell of Hough Isa’s home and almost missed, so intent was his purpose, the fluttering movement of woe on the hilltop beyond. Then a woman’s scream, blunted mercifully by distance, repeated itself like a seagull and there, on the rising ground behind the friendly Isobel’s house, was Hough Isa herself, haloed in sunshine, her scarlet pattens sunk in the turf and her striped skirts tied up to her calves, shaking an arm like a rolling pin over the English soldiers below.
    Nor was she alone. On one side, the ladies of Oxnam shouted curses, their mouths pale cavities inside red, painted lips. On the other, the lady of Cessford flung a stone. And behind, jumping and shrieking, were surely the