Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [252]
The air seemed colder. It came to Nicholas that there was a conversation with John le Grant which he had been postponing, and which he thought John would prefer to take place without Julius. Tonight, after a ride such as this, they would all fall into bed. But tomorrow, perhaps.
BERWICK-UPON-TWEED had passed through many changes in the four years since Nicholas de Fleury’s first arrival in the house of Tom Yare, and that other, miraculous arrival, of Robin.
In his many subsequent visits, Nicholas had noted them all, and had been responsible for some of them. Latterly, it had been men like Bonar and Cochrane and their craftsmen who had been concerned with strengthening the walls of town and of castle, and repairing gates, and fortifying the buildings and mounting the artillery in the castle precincts. Through all this, Nicholas had formed a good working partnership with Rob Lauder of the Bass, the castle’s Keeper, and with Patrick Hepburn the sheriff, whose wife, hard of hearing but merry, was another of Princess Joanna’s daughters. Aside from these, he got on well enough with the crown representatives, and with the Abbots of the various monastic houses. His other friendships, of the less formal kind, were with the merchants, the skippers, the fishermen of the untidy Tweedside town, with its lumpy waste ground and battered buildings.
Two decades before, a Lancastrian King had handed Berwick to Scotland in return for support against York. And now a Yorkist King wanted it back. It was what Nicholas wished to talk about with John le Grant, who was the only experienced soldier he could trust to help him draw up a profile of what happened when a frontier town was in danger of changing hands. Among other things.
You could see some of the precautionary changes already, walking these hilly streets. The official houses were empty. The Clerk Register, the former Archdeacon had withdrawn their furniture, their arras, their silver, loaded their coffers and paid off their servants, for no ceremonial meetings of the March Wardens would be held this year, or perhaps even next. The hammerers had long gone, as had the coiners with their punches and dies from the castle.
The church possessions in the Ness and elsewhere had also emptied. In the great houses of Melrose, there remained a small group of Cistercians, with their servants, to serve the community while they could. The rest had withdrawn to the mother house, as the monks of Newbattle had retired north.
On the river, the ferries had disappeared, and the King’s boats, leaving everyone to splash over by ford. The merchant ships had also departed: most abroad on their trading, but others to ports further north. The merchant-burgesses of Edinburgh and St Johnstoun of Perth and Dundee—the Colquhouns from Dumbarton, the Prestons, the Bartons, the Sinclairs—had largely returned home as well, emptying their warehouses. The officers and the Keeper of the castle had closed their lodgings in town and retired to the castle. Those who were left were powerful or obstinate enough, like Bertram or Yare, to wait until the last moment, and still be sure of escaping with what they had left.
Others had in mind, perhaps, waiting beyond the last moment. Some were foreigners, although there was nothing here now like the great Cologne and Flemish factories of a century and a half ago, when Berwick was another Alexandria: rich and populous, and earning a quarter of the customs return for the whole of England, it was said. Those who lingered in Berwick now were more likely to be cottars and fishers and herdsmen of no clear nationality who crept back unnoticed after pompous changes of master, and whose skills were in demand. Only a local man knew the whereabouts of the shoals and the fish-pools, or the clay for the pottery, or where the best fowling was. There was always building to be done. Whatever orders were given, those small burghers who had to depart