The Scottish Boy

by Alex de Campi

The fields and hedgerows were lush with midsummer’s rude vigour as Harry dashed down the lanes towards home. Every corner of the Devon landscape burst forth with life. Every corner but one. The apples bowed the gnarled branches of their trees, yet his mother could not eat. Honeysuckle lay heavy on the vine, its perfume almost stifling in the hot July air, and yet his mother could not smell.

Harry thinks back to the woman’s dress, finer than any his mother had ever owned. Of drops of blood on turquoise velvet. Of holes where cloth-of-gold embroidery and jewels might once have been. ‘Who were they?’ he asks. ‘They’re what happens when power moves on and leaves you behind, m’boy,’ Montagu says. ‘Never forget that.’

Harry lies there and tries to glimpse the divine reason for Sir Simon’s death. For his mother’s. Because the alternative thought – that God doesn’t have a plan, that all this random pain and cruelty is merely the purposeless lurching of the human animal as it comes howling into the world and then goes screaming out of it – is unbearable.

Harry feels completely lost. Everything around him is this cavalcade of cruelty, and no matter what he does he can’t seem to stop it. He tries to act with chivalry and honour and it doesn’t matter a damn bit.

‘So is that why your French is so good?’ ‘No,’ he says, poking Harry in the ribs. ‘It’s because in Scotland we believe in education, you great Sassenach idiot.’ Harry barks out a surprised laugh. ‘I missed you,’ he says, and the words are out of his mouth before he can think about them. Iain hums, and snuggles his face into Harry’s neck. ‘I’m sorry I’m so much trouble.’

Harry realises that at some point he’s started rubbing little circles with his thumb against the silky, firm skin of Iain’s hip, and the other boy exhales and leans into him, shutting his eyes as their foreheads touch. They stay like that for one beautiful, suspended moment, breathing in sync, one with each other and the idyll around them, until a fat trout splashes out of the water and Iain startles, then giggles.

‘I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what this is. I prayed so hard, throughout my time away from here, that I could … be your friend. W-without sin. I thought I had succeeded. And I come back, and with one look from you I am ablaze again.’

‘Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.’

The rational part of him knows it’s paranoia. That nobody has ever seen him and Iain together like that. But he feels like the whole world can read in his face what he wants from Iain, if they just look. It’s so overwhelming, he can’t believe it doesn’t shine out of him like some terrible beacon of sin.

At this point he’s not sure how he isn’t leaking light out of every pore, so enraptured is he with existing at this moment, with this person.

Harry can only stare after him, the fear of being discovered replaced by terror at what he has broken.

Where he and Iain will live in a small tent together, sharing a travelling pallet at night, for a whole week. Harry shuts his eyes and prays to Agnes, patron saint of chastity.

He knows now the word for the soaring feeling he gets in his chest every time he looks at his squire. He knows now the name of the song his body sings when he touches his friend. It is love. And it is impossible.

He is dizzy with grief, lost in the vast, empty wasteland inside himself he never realised was there until Iain left.

He loses an indeterminate amount of time staring at the tear-blurred shapes of dead leaves as they flutter down from the ghostly, skeletal birch trees onto the grey surface of the pond. The worst part is knowing he has to continue. That he’ll be expected to be happy at Christmas, and glad for the spring. But this is his season, the dead end of autumn, when the life fades from all things. The season when he began to love, and when he said farewell to it a year later.

Harry thinks back to Halidon Hill often, to the naïve boy who rode to war like it was another game, with stewards and rules and clear winners. Now he knows it’s just a tangled, horrid mess with no law except that of the winners. He wonders if he, now, would have wetted his sword at Loch Doon.

Unfortunately the written word is stronger than memory, so the myth of glorious knighthood lingers onwards in the minds of boys and patient wives. Otherwise no mother would let her child ride to war.

‘Fret not. I only kneel for one man, and it is neither of you, my cousins.’