The Reavers

quite unaware that in the neighbouring gully Destiny is approaching …

… in the unlikely and repulsive shape of Black Dod Pringle, a fell Scotch thief of Teviotdale, returning with his thuggish associates from a raid into Cumberland; he is a squat, ugly, villainous figure clad all in steel and leather, has bad breath, bites his nails, and is commonly called Bangtail – all reivers had weird nicknames, usually based on appearance or behaviour, and Bangtail’s signifies that he is not immune to the allurement of the female form. His gang are called Fire-the-Sheep, Blacklugs, Grunt, Slackarse, and Wandered Tom, and all are members of the Pringle family except the last, who thinks he’s a Turnbull but can’t be sure because he has lost his birth certificate (he says). Like the Mafia, borderers operated in family groups, with close friends and allies to make up the numbers; the big tribes, like the Armstrongs, Elliots, Johnstones, and Maxwells (of Scotland), and the Fenwicks, Grahams, and Forsters (of England) could sally forth hundreds strong, but the Pringles, although under the protection of the powerful Kerr family, were second division players, and Bangtail’s was a typical small raid.

It was also a disgruntled one, because they’d had no luck. Bangtail had got them all excited with big talk of descending like a thunderbolt on the Foulbogsyke Women’s Institute during its annual meeting, raping the committee, and making off with their prize entries of crochet and home-made jam, but the ladies had word of his coming and defied the raiders from the W.I. tower, hurling down missiles of potted meat, jellies, raffia-work, and blazing handbags. Foiled, Bangtail had to be content with running off the livestock, which consisted not of cattle and sheep, but of half a dozen hens and a couple of cats. So it is a sorry band of ruffians that we see riding through the murk, herding their clucking plunder before them, while Bangtail rides well ahead, gritting his teeth in frustration at the memory of the plump and roguish Institute treasurer flaunting her curves on the battlements as she blew him jeering kisses and invited him to climb up and show her his muscles.

Archie Noble came out of his doze at the sound of the reiver’s hoof-beats, starting up from his bed among the bracken. Bangtail saw the bedraggled figure not ten paces away, concluded that here was some lonely wanderer on whom to vent his ill-temper, and with a “Har-har!” of wicked glee clapped in his spurs, couched his lance, and charged, intending to open him up just for laughs. But it wasn’t a good night for Pringles, for the victim leaped smartly aside, whipped a poniard from the back of his waist, and with a tricky underarm throw planted it neatly in Bangtail’s neck, causing him to crash to the turf, his sensibilities outraged and his throat cut. After which there was nothing for Bangtail to do but thrash about a bit, go limp, gasp the word “Rosebud” (which was the name of the plump W.I. treasurer, actually), and expire.

And that’s Bangtail out of the story, and Archie Noble nicely into it. Moving with cat-like agility he retrieved his poniard, glanced keenly about him in alarm (for even heroes don’t expect to find themselves committing manslaughter before they’re properly awake), congratulated himself on his reflexes – and then his eye fell on the dead face glaring irritably up at the pale moon, and a startled wince caused the clotted debris to fall from his unwashed brow.

“Black Dod Pringle, alias Bangtail!” he exclaimed. “Dead by my hand, all unintentional! Now, harrow and alas, but here was dire mischance, and as for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, forget it! Nay, he’s past mending, and I in jeopardy o’ my life, for those hoof-beats I hear betoken not th’arrival o’ the Salvation Army, I warrant!”

It was customary, you see, for Elizabethan performers to speak their thoughts aloud, for the benefit of the groundlings. But having got his dismay off his chest, our hero moved like a well-oiled ferret (belying his nickname of Waitabout, from his habit of philosophic loafing). Trained frontiersman that he was, his senses told him that five riders, driving hens and cats, were just over the hill (Slackarse’s shout of “Keep them bloody poultry away from the moggies, you four, or the boogers’ll stampede!” merely confirmed his deduction), and with Teviotdale’s top gun going into rigor mortis at his feet, and a bloody poniard in his hand, Archie could see awkward questions being asked by the deceased’s buddies if he lingered. On foot he was coffin-bait, for those expert trackers would read his trail like motorway signs, wheresoe’er he turned and doubled. On the other hand, Pringle’s horse was hanging about, looking bored … yet our hero, hard man though he was, hesitated to take away a vehicle without the owner’s consent, and that was now unobtainable. Anyway, broken men got hung for horse-rustling, didn’t they? Decisions, decisions … and then as a frantic cat came rocketing out of the mist, with an enraged chicken in hot pursuit, and Slackarse’s cry of “What did I tell ye – the bastard hen’s run amok!” reached his ears, Archie Waitabout waited no longer. With one bound he was in the saddle, accelerating smoothly from nought to twenty-five in four seconds flat, and by the time the Famous Five had come on their defunct leader and were speculating about suicide, divine retribution, or (Wandered Tom’s theory) whether Bangtail had stopped to shave and ballsed it up, our hero was a mile away and going like the clappers o’er the misty moor, muttering “Land’s End or bust!” as he counted the cost of his fatal encounter.

Why, what’s to worry, you may wonder – no witnesses, no incriminating broken cuff-links or cigar ash left behind … file the serial number off the poniard, ditch it, and he’s well away, surely? Oh, yeah – what about the horse? In these parts, where everyone knows everyone else, including their livestock, he might as well carry a full confession in Day-glo on his chest. But dammit, you point out, he’s on the moral high ground (self-defence), and no previous record, your honour … But unfortunately, there is: Archie’s past is not entirely unspotted; necessity has driven him to hire out now and then to heavy mobs like the Charltons and the Maxwells; he has lent a hand, and reluctantly committed G.B.H., in those just-lawful pursuits picturesquely called “hot trods”, he has no references or paid-up insurance, and being a broken man and therefore heavily suspicioned of everything, he is ripe to be put in the frame for anything. Like killing, however innocently, the local equivalent of a Chicago capo, whose family have been known to pursue a feud as far as York, and Batley even.

Our boy, in fact, is now without a future. Either the Pringle hitmen will sign him off, or the Wardens will give him a suspended sentence eight feet up in the air – for while a well-connected reiver may get off with a fine plus interest and a promise to behave, broken men can expect only the gallows, decapitation, or the drowning-pit in which offenders were economically dunked to death.

Either way, a parlous plight, and Archie’s brow is furrowed with care beneath the grime, and even the horse is shaking its head and shooting him glances of concern as he leads it through the wreathing mist a couple of hours before dawn. They are cold, wet, fed up with tripping over rocks and falling in bogs; Archie’s stomach is starting to rumble – that last clump of grass had definitely been off – and the horse is burping with fatigue; sustenance they must have, and that right speedily. And just as they are starting to eye each other cannibal-wise, the mist thins suddenly, and in the distance a light gleams in the gloom. The mist thins a bit more, and the outline of a large building comes into view, and then with a final ghostly whiffle the mist packs up entirely, and lo! it’s a great fortified mansion, with crenellations and mullions and a massy stone wall all around with a frowning gateway flanked by a sullen sally-port and a mildly annoyed tradesmen’s entrance above which is a battered notice board reading:

Thrashbatter Tower plc.

Scots KEEPE OUTTE!

Forays by appointment onlie.

Nobilitie, gentrie, Wardens fairlie welcome.

Broken menne are you kidding?

The whole place looks as though it’s been built in a bad temper, bats squeak round its dark central tower, bloodhounds growl in its outhouses, and in its cellar the very mice are bickering in their straw.

Archie is still too far off to hear them, or to read the notice, but even if he could it wouldn’t matter; his eye is fixed on that one small lighted window, which his reiver’s instinct tells him is a pantry containing a half-finished game pie, a mortress of brawn, savoury pasties, toothsome pizzas, sundry kickshaws, and enough booze to raise the Titanic. Slavering slightly, he mounts his steed, murmuring “Hi-yo, Silver!”, and is hurled headlong as the beast rears obediently on its hind legs, whinnying. Picking himself up, and with the William Tell overture whispering gently o’er the moss, he steals forward like a ragged ghost, ears pricked, eyes gleaming like grey fog-lamps, gastric juices fermenting, while the horse takes a dyspeptic glance at the gloomy mansion, obeys its animal instinct, and leans despondently against a convenient tree reflecting that it’s not that hungry …

* See the National Portrait Gallery, and sympathise with Her Majesty

* True, really

Well, it’s probably not the Inn on the Park, but it should furnish our hero a quick snack and a packed lunch for later. Unless … who knows what lurks within this estate agent’s nightmare – phantasms, man-traps, burglar alarms, a police stake-out? Does he realise he isn’t dressed for dining out? But let’s wish him Bon Appetit anyway, and move on to the rest of the cast, wherever they are … a Mad Villain, perhaps? A spy? A corrupt plumber? No, we’ve had enough of Heavies in Chapter One, and it’s time for a touch of glamour, the rustle of silk and whiff of perfume, as we bring on the girls …

Chapter 2

It’s quite a commentary on our so-called scientific progress that while we can send men to the moon (well, possibly you can, even if this correspondent can’t), getting stuck on the high fell road between Scotch Corner and Carlisle is just as liable to happen now as it was in the sixteenth century. In some ways it’s worse nowadays, when your carburettor’s flooded, not a call-box in sight, and nothing for it but a ten-mile walk; in the 1590s you could always huddle up in a corner of your satin-lined luxury coach, swathed in silks and furs, beguiling your impatience with peach brandy and sweetmeats o’ Peru, while outside in the raging blizzard your lackeys heaved and whimpered to get the show on the road, and Coachman Samkin clumphed around giving futile instructions to the grooms, like “Keep them nags in low gear, the chestnut’s over-revving!” – assuming, of course, that you weren’t just any old wayfarer, but the pampered and wealthy Lady Godiva Dacre, proud flower of the nobility, owner of half East Anglia, and accustomed to having every whim, let alone crisis, attended to instanter by droves of head-knuckling servitors. There were a round dozen of these floundering knee-deep in slush as they strove to force the great gilded carriage ahead, and Coachman Samkin waved his lantern and vanished in a snowdrift.

Inside, her ladyship tapped dainty foot and drummed slender fingers in Krupa-like crescendo, signs which her companion, mischievous little Mistress Kylie, watched with covert amusement as she waited for Krakatoa to blow, and tried to think of some remark which would get the eruption going.

“Perchance,” she ventured brightly, “the weather will clear ere long, or mayhap some travellers will fare this way, bringing timely succour. Or a road scout, wi’ spanners and gadgets –”

“– and a team of oxen, and wainropes, and a fork-lift truck!” stormed Lady Godiva, finally giving vent. “God’s light!” she seethed, “was ever poor debutante so sorrily served? Twelve reeking fat knaves that have gorged and swilled enough for a regiment since we left London, and cannot shift me a featherweight coach through a pinch of snow! Yeomen of England, yet! How we beat the Spaniards I’ll never know! Can nothing stir them, jelly-muscled churls?”

“Have ’em lashed with horse-whips,” suggested sweet Kylie. “Mind you, they’re probably too numb to feel it by now, but it’s worth a try.”

“And have ’em run whining to an industrial tribunal!” The fine eyes of scornful Lady Godiva flashed like violet detonators. “With my fair name bandied in the gutter press as merciless employer! Thank you, Mistress Thinktank! Who are you working for, me or the Sunday Sport?”

“Marry, ’tis a thought,” admitted Kylie. “Certes, the tabloids would eat it. ‘My Flogging Frolic i’ the snow with Gorgeous Goddy’, by Postillion Tim … And ’twould be just like them to use that kinky picture of you in Ben Jonson’s last masque – remember, Diana chastising the fauns? All right, all right,” she added hastily as her mistress began to gnash pearly teeth, “just speculating. I always said amateur court theatricals were a lousy idea, but you would fancy yourself in tights … Here, have another snifter.”

And while tactful Kylie sets the decanter merrily a-glug, and Lady Godiva extends smouldering goblet, let us cast an eye over these two ladies fair – or rather, in Godiva’s case, let us gaze in stricken admiration, for they’re not making them like that any more. Superbly tall, with the flawless ivory beauty of some Nordic ice queen, and a shape whose curvature could not be concealed even by the voluminous finery of the day, our heroine (yes, it is she) was a breathtaking mixture of Marlene above the neck and Jane Russell below. Her white brow was lofty, her eyes of deepest midnight blue, her nose classically sculpted, her lips an imperious rosebud, and her ears shell-like gems peeping from beneath magnificent fiery tresses which cascaded like glossy red curtains to shoulders of alabaster smoothness. Her chin and teeth were all right, too. Add to this assemblage a mien before whose frigid disdain accountants trembled and barristers fairly grovelled, clothe her in cloth of silver (by Balmain), and let Van Cleef (or Arpels) loose wi’ gewgaws of price wherewith to deck her slim hands and snowy bazoom, and you have a picture of feminine perfection that would take the paper off the wall. Rumour had it that she had been Master Spenser’s original model for the Faerie Queene before wiser counsels led him to ascribe his inspiration to Her Majesty’s person, and that Shakespeare himself had her in mind when he penned that immortal line in Much Ado which begins “Here’s a dishe …”

In short, Lady Godiva Dacre was the ultimate Elizabethan knockout, and if among the sonnets, songs, wolf-whistles and cries of “Gaw!” with which courtiers paid tribute to her peerless oomph, there were occasional murmurs of “Haughty piece”, “Stuck-up icicle”, and “Payne i’ the butte”, this was no matter for wonder.

For, as our description and the foregoing snatch of small talk suggest, our leading lady’s temper was wilful, headstrong, passionate, and proud to busting. Spoiled from infancy by a doting grandsire and squads of devoted nurses, grooms, and hangers-on, our orphaned heiress had realised at the age of about three that beauty, money, and blue blood had placed in her tiny hand the throttle of a steamroller on Life’s highway, and she had been winding it on ever since. Sent to court as a child, she had modelled herself on the Queen’s Grace, to whom she had been maid-in-waiting for several years; hence those outbursts of tantrum when any inconvenience (like having to sit in a coach moving at one mile an hour through a snowstorm) came to disturb the rose-strewn progress of her existence. We see her now aged twenty-two, journeying north to visit the distant estate of her late grandfather, old Lord Waldo Dacre, recently succumbed to a surfeit of reivers. She wouldn’t have come – too far, too rude, and oh, sweet coz, the people! – had she not been commanded away by the Queen who, it was rumoured, had been itching for an excuse to get shot of an attendant who gave herself impossible airs and whose naturally flame-coloured coiffure was a maddening reproach to Her Majesty’s weekly gallon of henna.

So there’s Lady Godiva … sorry? Lovers, you ask? Well, none of your business, really. Yes, granted, a lady with her equipment and ardent spirit, when aroused by Cupid, might well make the Maneaters of the Kumaon look like stuffed mice … and, indeed, there has been talk, but that’s the court for you. Suffice to say that while she has had legions of open admirers with whom she has dallied coolly before giving them the old-sock treatment, we are not prepared to speculate about anything steamier. Don’t worry, her passionate nature will take off before we’re finished … but mum.

Now, if you can tear your eyes away from our heroine, we turn to little Kylie, her attendant, a perfect complement to Lady G. Kylie is petite, blonde, pert, and chocolate-box pretty, with those generous contours common among saucy milkmaids and well described by the modern expression “stacked”. Inseparable since they won the two-woman bob-sleigh title at their Swiss finishing school, they spar almost continuously, for Kylie couldn’t care less about her imperious employer’s outbursts, and needles her freely, a familiarity which Lady Godiva secretly enjoys because she feels such tolerance becomes her aristocracy. Just let anyone but Kylie try it.

Having brimmed her companion’s goblet with the electric soup, Kylie remarked that it would keep out the cold, and got her head in her hands for her pains.

“Cold, quotha!” withered haughty Godiva. “What shouldst thou know of cold, overweight and padded wi’ blubber as thou art! Nay, had I thy surplus tissue I might sit me starkers on an ice floe and be warm as toast, I’ll warrant!”

“Pleasingly plump and eight stone in my pantyhose, I,” murmured Kylie, no whit abashed. “And who tipped the scale at nine stone two last Twelfth Night? Do I hear the name Dacre?”

“But then I’m not a midget, am I?” riposted Godiva with acid sweetness. “I don’t roll for miles when I fall over, like some butter-balls I could mention. Sure, nine-two is nought to one o’ my stately inches; ’tis but sweet proportion. Oh, come on, top me up again, and if it makes me car-sick, what the hell, it’s better than freezing.”

“Aye, let’s get loaded,” sighed Kylie, dispensing joy-juice. “’Twill make our present plight seem the less woeful, and banish fond regrets that we might ha’ been snug at Greenwich, simpering at Her Grace, dancing corantos, and sizing up the Yeoman Warders … if only someone had had the sense to wear a black wig …”

Lady Godiva’s lovely eyes glinted like dangerous sapphires. “If you’re trying to wind me up, dear heart,” she purred, “you’re getting perilously warm. Well ye know that I am up to here, repining this unlooked for voyage to my Cumbrian estate – but what could I do, with Her Grace insistent and Grandpops handing in his bucket untimely?” Moodily she plucked seed pearls from her ruff and flicked them at the decanter, her bosom quivering in a sigh that would have had strip-club patrons clambering over the seats. “Aye, me, I suppose someone’s got to mind the store, and who but the old goat’s heiress? ’Tis the penalty of uncountable riches and social status that they bring Care and Duty in their wake. Ah, sweet Kylie, sometimes I wish I had been born a poor beggar maid, with no cares but ducks and manure. Or whatever,” she added vaguely.

“’Tis hell in the trenches,” sniffed cynical Kylie. “But when her ancestors collar the monosodium glutamate monopoly from Henry the Seventh, what can a girl do but wallow lamenting in the dividends? Heart-breaking, I call it.”

“It keeps you in tights and Chanel,” flashed Godiva, “so knock it not. Skip off the gravy train an ye list, but remember, baby, it’s cold outside. Aye,” she resumed in pensive mood, “this same wild wind will be sighing its plaintive dirge through the battlements of Thrashbatter Tower, where I was born, ’neath the grim shadow of the lonely fells. We’ll be seeing it shortly, assuming these layabouts get us moving before Easter – a stark and lonely hold, gentle Kylie, fronting the grim border. And yet …” Godiva’s marble beauty seemed to soften in creamy-dreamy reminiscence “… and yet ’twas there I played, as tender little child, by rippling beck and oozing bog, and harkened me to the murmuring of butterflies and badgers in the greenwood, all carpeted with daisies … And what the hell do you want, clodpole?” she concluded as the coach window flew open to admit a rush of freezing air and the empurpled face of Coachman Samkin under a thin sheet of ice.

“’Tis of no avail, my lady!” he quavered through chattering teeth. “My big end’s gone!”

A dozen crisp rejoinders jostled for priority on the red lips of quick-witted Kylie, but Lady Godiva ignored the opportunity, so great was her fury.

“Have ye not tried kick-starting, fool?” she railed.

“Aye, mistress, but ’tis vain! Boot their buttocks as I may, they stagger like men stoned! The wheels slip, wi’out purchase, and us wi’ no chains nor grit –”

“Then find something else!” stormed her ladyship. “Where are your wits, looby? Lay two o’ the smaller lackeys ’neath the wheels, so shall ye find purchase enough! Stay, dolt – cover them with blankets lest their liveries be soiled. Jesu, must I think of everything! And close the dam’ window!”

“Oh, kindly mistress! Oh, sweet consideration!” grovelled Samkin. “’Tis done in a moment, wi’ all despatch! I go, see how I … aaargh!”

His fawning protestations ended in a sudden yowl as tender Kylie closed the window on his fingers, and while he is bathing them in snow and calling for volunteers to prostrate themselves beneath the wheels, we pan and zoom dramatically to the night skyline far above the road. You know the shot – usually it reveals Comanches or Riffs gazing down on the unsuspecting wagon train or Legion column, but this is something more sinister by far: a dozen steel-capped border riders sitting their hobblers like black phantoms in the swirling snow, motionless save for the play of their cloaks in the wind and the fidgeting of the man on the end whose chilblains are killing him. A fearsome sight, and worse when you get close and see the gaunt profiles of the long horse-like faces – and the riders are nothing to write home about either, grim and bony villains with wolfish expressions and hungry sunken eyes, for these are Charltons and Milburns of Tynedale, the hardest of hard men on the English side. Plagued by a power cut in their valley, they have been raiding their own countrymen (nothing unusual on the frontier, believe us) for firelighters and primus stoves; now, on their homeward road, heavy with plundered matches and kindling and a-reek with paraffin, they have spotted the stranded coach, and are arguing not about the practicality but – would you believe? – the morality of attacking it.

You see, if we haven’t already mentioned it, the border reivers had eccentric notions of what was fair game. Livestock of any kind, and the contents (what they called the “insight”, a definition probably unknown to C. P. Snow) of farms, crofts, churches, and other people’s peel towers, were legitimate loot, and murder, arson, kidnapping, extortion, and terrorism were simply part of their business – and none of these things did they consider criminal. But there was a line which no respectable reiver would cross, if he could help it: mugging, pocket-picking, fraud, embezzlement, highway robbery, or oath-breaking – these things were out, as the State Papers testify, and if you think the borderers were crazy, well, that was their code. The line got a bit blurred sometimes, admittedly – which was why the Charltons and Milburns were getting all het up as they eyed the great gilded coach with hungry doubt and their extremities froze. They were talking, or rather growling, in Northumbrian, a form of English incomprehensible to outsiders, chiefly because it features a deep guttural noise as of a motor starting up, in place of the consonant “r”. In translation: