Excerpt from Fair Helen by Andrew Greig, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Plus ça change, I murmur to none, and huddle deeper within coarse blankets. This stern house is silent. It is hours till chapel service, which I attend for the sake of dinner if not my soul. No choice but to sit here and feel again, like a dirk slipped between the ribs, dismay as he cut me dead.

The sleekit laddie—Watt his name, and I regret his end—hesitated. Judging me hairmless, he turned and padded down the tower stair. I heard him slap slap slap on the worn sandstone, hesitate at the trip-step, then gone.

Stott stott stott of the tennis ball into the drunken hand of my bedraggled lost friend. I could smell stale wine across the distance between us. Still, he never fumbled the bouncing ball, even when he looked out absently over the valley, the Kirtle burn, the woods and braes of his small corner of the Borderlands.

He flicked the ball between his legs, caught it as it rebounded off the castellation, then hurled it far into the walled garden. He turned to me and his grey-green eyes were now bright, perhaps too bright.

"Harry," he said quietly, and we embraced. "Thank God you are here," he murmured, breath hot in my ear. Hot, but not vinous. Only his stained shirt stank of claret. "I need your help and counsel, old friend."

Once he had said those words I could not have ridden back to the city, the courts, the college where we had once disputed fine points with words and argument, not the finer point of dagger and short sword. In any case, I was not quite the free man my friend imagined.

"So," I said. "You seek advice from the daft, or a loan from the penniless?"

"Still poor and honest, then?"

"Poor, at least," I said.

He smiled, though I had spoken but careful truth. From the courtyard below a lassie's song rose. An axe thudded in the stables, kye moaned from Between the Waters. Doos flew in and out of the storey below, all grey flutter and reproach. The pale sun lit on our faces, the Kirtle water glittered, and for a moment the Borderlands lay at peace. He slung his arm across my shoulder, the way he would when we were students, no more than boys, slipping into the Embra night, bound for mischief, or heading into the examination hall of the Town's College.

"I am in love," he announced. "And they mean to kill me."

I addressed the less implausible first. "Who is she?"

"Helen." He turned his gaze away from the circling pigeons. "Helen Irvine, of course."

"Ah," I said, trying to sound surprised. "Fair Helen."

And who else would he have set himself on but my childhood confidante, Cousin Helen? Even in the city I had heard the new flower of Annandale lit soul, heart, loins. And she was Irvine of Bonshaw's daughter, and the families were long at feud.

"So Will Irvine plots to kill you for fancying his daughter? Even by Borders standards that is high-handed."

I was trying to calm his fervour, and my own.

Adam shrugged. "Feud is like fire in a peat-bank. It smoulders, it burns, it sleeps again. Irvine could perhaps be persuaded to the match—despite my mother's remarriage, I am still heir to these small lands—were there not another asking for Helen."

"Who?"

"Rob Bell."

"Ah."

In student days I had passed Robert Bell of Blackett House, striding down the crowded High Street past St. Giles, sword set high in his belt, Flemish pistolet on a sling, swerving not a jot for anyone but Jamie Saxt. Upon his father's death amid a storm of daggers in a wynd in Gala, he had lately become the Bell heidsman. Folk said young Robert Bell had a future, though most hoped it short.

"Bell's not half the swordsman he thinks he is." Adam grinned, looked carefree for a moment. "He swings that long pistol like it was his cock, and we are meant to be impressed."

From Fair Helen, by Andrew Greig. Copyright © 2015 by David Starkey. Reprinted by permission of Quercus, a Hachette company.