It helped him, she supposed, to talk about what had happened here five hundred years ago rather than twenty. But Lulu could just imagine them, those leather-jerkined desperados, peering out at the road from the cover of the trees.
‘It was known as The Debatable Lands in the 16th Century.’ Nick slowed the car as they rounded a bend in the road and a particularly beautiful scene was laid out before them: blowing verges of cow parsley, grey drystone walls, peaceful fields of grazing cattle and sheep. In the near distance was a stone cottage set in a colourful garden, the wooded slope behind it rising to a bleak hilltop. ‘A kind of no-man’s land. So lawless and dangerous that neither Scotland nor England wanted responsibility for it. There was even a decree, issued by the English but agreed on by the Scots, wiping their hands of the place. Pretty much the only time Scotland and England have agreed on anything. We had to learn it by heart at school. “All Englishmen and Scottishmen, after this proclamation made, are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every such persons, their bodies, buildings, goods and cattle as do remain or shall inhabit upon any part of the said Debatable Land without any redress to be made for the same.”’
Lulu felt a shiver on the bare skin of her arms. ‘Wow.’
Nick suddenly grimaced, and she knew he was reflecting, as she was, on what he believed Maggie had done here, five hundred years later, with similar impunity.
They turned off the road that ran alongside the River Esk and into the lane that led to Sunnyside. Nick was wearing sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes as he focused on the road, but she could see how tightly he was gripping the wheel.
She needed to think of something to puncture the tension.
At his temple, she could see the single strand of grey hair they called Tiberius. It had all started one day, just before they were married, when he’d sent her a text message:
!!EMERGENCY!! I just found my FIRST GREY HAIR!!! In desperate need of therapy!!
On the way home, Lulu had scoured the shops until she’d found the perfect card, with a grey fox on the front and the message To my favourite silver fox. They had spent a giggly five minutes trying to locate the hair on the back of Nick’s head. He’d been checking with two mirrors that he didn’t have a bald patch developing and had found, instead, the hair.
‘Aw, it’s lovely,’ Lulu had crooned when she’d located it. ‘I’ll take a photo. Hold still.’
Nick had pushed away the screen of Lulu’s phone with the image of the hair on it and pretended to collapse on the couch, traumatised. She had sat opposite him in therapist mode.
‘Okay, Nick, I do realise that it’s a big shock for you, but this is – how shall I put it – not really a valid reason for a trip to A&E?’
‘I need an operation to remove it!’
Her gaze fell on the cabinet of artefacts. ‘Would it help if we named it? How about Julius, after Julius Caesar?’
Nick had groaned. ‘Okay, I see where you’re going with this. The next one will be Augustus, I suppose. Then Tiberius.’
‘Ooh, yes!’ Lulu had gurgled.
‘Hmm. I’m not sure how loveable the Roman emperors were.’ He had grinned at her. ‘Caligula’s idea of entertainment was to have his minions construct elaborate structures in the arena onto which the condemned men would climb, thinking they’d be safe up there from the lions and bears – but the structures were designed to be unstable and collapse under their weight. Oh, how he laughed.’
‘Okay, we can skip Caligula.’
Now, Lulu reached up and caressed the hair at his temple: Tiberius and all the other nameless dark ones. ‘Ooh, I think I’ve just found . . . whoever comes after Nero.’
‘Galba,’ said Nick, deadpan. ‘God, really? We’ll probably be onto the Byzantine lot by the end of these two weeks.’ His mouth quirked in a smile. And then: ‘Here we are.’
He indicated right and eased the Audi up a steepish driveway between trees, a tunnel of green, the trees like two lines of silent giants performing some strange Scottish dance, leaning over to touch the tips of their branches together, forming an archway for Lulu and Nick to pass under.
‘Sunnyside.’ He said the name as if it were in inverted commas.
And oh God, it was an old-fashioned brute of a place – huge, high stone walls and a forest of chimneys. Very grand, she supposed, as Nick pulled up at the front door and they got out, stretching and breathing in the fresh air. No other houses in sight from here, just woods and fields and hillside.
The Debatable Lands.
She didn’t like to think about what it must have been like to live here in the 16th Century, in a place so anarchic that both Scotland and England had given up trying to impose the rule of law and had just let everyone get on with robbing and murdering each other. But what if you were an ordinary family just trying to get by? Knowing that you were completely at the mercy of bands of desperate men roaming the countryside? That robbery and murder were even officially sanctioned?
She linked her arm through Nick’s. ‘It’s a beautiful house.’
He took off his sunglasses and raised his eyebrows.
‘It’s only for two weeks,’ she added, and they both laughed.
She wanted to ask him how he was feeling. She wanted to know what was going on behind those narrowed blue eyes as he looked up at the house, but he would have to confront his memories head-on soon enough. For now, it was enough that he was here.
‘Home, sweet home,’ he said brightly, hauling their cases from the boot.