The Lion at Bay

‘If what you say is true,’ Lamberton with a wry, fox smile, ‘that might see you with grey hairs of your own. Is Longshanks not in the finest of health, with a new young queen and two wee bairns tumbling like cubs?’

‘Besides,’ Wishart added mournfully, ‘Wallace is unlikely to be moved by the argument that he stands in the way of your advancement, my lord Robert. Nor has he been much concerned over his own safety in the past.’

‘Leave Wallace and Red John Comyn to me,’ Bruce declared grimly and then shot a twisted smile at John Duns. ‘God and time will take care of King Edward.’

‘Affectio Commodi,’ he added and John Duns acknowledged it with a tilt of his head.

Affectio Commodi, the Duns doctrine of morality, where happiness is assigned to ‘affection for the advantage’ and true morality to affectio iustito, an affection to justice.

Hal remembered the times the wee dominie his father had hired ‘to pit poalish on the boy’ had lectured on that, hands behind his back and eyes shut. Hal had struggled with it then and was more than relieved when the wee priest had given up and gone off to find more fertile pastures.

Justice or advantage. Hal did not need to look at Bruce to see the choice made and had it confirmed later, when he and Kirkpatrick, obedient to the summons, went to the Bruce’s quarters.

In contrast to the roomful of plots, this blazed with light from fat beeswax candles and sconces, the flagged floor liberal with fresh rushes. Herbal posies were stuffed into wall crevices and looped round the crucifix which glared malevolently from the rough wall at the men who lolled carelessly beneath it.

They were young men, faces full of impudence and freckles, half-dressed in fine linen shirts, rich-dyed tunics and coloured hose, lounging in a welter of discarded jerkins and cloaks, baldrics, sheaths and ox-blood boots of Cordovan leather with fashionable high heels. A couple of gazehounds nosed the rushes, searching between jug and goblet for the remains of roast meats and chewed fruit.

One of these languid men was Edward Bruce, a warped portrait of his brother, big shouldered, large chested and with the same face, only as if it had been squeezed from forehead and chin. It made his eyes slitted and his grin wider – unlike his brother, he grinned all the time.

Hal saw Kirkpatrick stiffen a little and felt a slight, sudden stab of justified satisfaction; for years Kirkpatrick had been the only retainer Bruce had closeted with him, a shadowy ferreter of secrets – aye, and worse – at Bruce’s beck and call. This was the reward for it – supplanted by those Bruce needed more.

Let him taste the bitter fruit of it, as I have, Hal thought savagely. My father dead, my home burned by my own kin after the battle at Roslin Glen, good friends dead in the mud of Stirling and Falkirk. Little reward for the middling folk who had ended up in the Bruce camp.

And Isabel. Her loss burned most of all. Gone back to the Earl of Buchan on the promise that her lover and his home would not be harmed. For six years Hal and she had kept to the bargain, though there was not a day he did not think of her and wondered if she still thought of him.

And for what? Buchan had found a way to burn Herdmanston to ruin anyway and would, Hal knew, seek a way to kill him. He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap – his father’s bleak warning echoed down the years.

Now all that was left was shackled to the fortunes of Bruce. Kirkpatrick shared the chains of it, Hal saw, though he had not considered the man an unwilling supplicant until recently, when this fresh mesnie had grown around the new Lord of Annandale and Carrick.

Not great lords, either, but an earl’s bachelor knights, fashionable, preened and coiffed. They stared at Hal and Kirkpatrick as if two aged wolves had stepped into the room, a mixture of sneer at what they considered to be old men out of touch with the new reality, the coming man that was Bruce, and envy that their lord and master treated so closely with such a pair.

Bruce showed the truth of it when he did not bother to announce Hal or Kirkpatrick and indicated that they should draw apart. Into the shadows, Hal saw with a sharp, bitter smile, where we belong.

‘Wallace,’ Bruce said in a voice so low it was more crouched than a sniffing rat. Neither Hal nor Kirkpatrick replied and Bruce, his eyes baleful in the dim, raked both their faces with an unsmiling gaze.

‘Find him. Tell him he has my love – but he must quit Scotland before it is too late for him. If nothing else, he will end up making the name of his captors odious in Scotland, for they will be Scots men, mark me. That is part of Edward’s scheme.’

Kirkpatrick, his eyes like faint lights in the cave of his face, nodded briefly and Hal jerked his head at the distant murmur and laughter at someone’s poor attempts to play and sing in the Langue D’Oc of a troubadour.

‘Finding him will be hard,’ he said, more harshly than he had intended. ‘He is a hunted man and unlikely to caw the craic, cheek for jowl, with any as declares they are friends.’

Bruce smiled. There had been a time when this would have been as incoherent as a dog’s bark, but time and exposure had improved his ear.

‘You speak their way,’ he said to Hal in elegant French, ‘and understand a decent tongue besides, so you can walk in both camps easily enough. Better yet – you have dealt with Wallace before this and the man knows you. Trusts you even. In case he does not, Kirkpatrick knows what to do when men come at you from the shadows.’

‘A comforting thought,’ Kirkpatrick answered in equally good French, though his burr added a vicious twist to the wry delivery. He jerked his head backwards at the coterie of quietly murmuring knights.

‘Why not ask Crawford there? Is he not kin to Wallace?’

Bruce merely looked at him until Kirkpatrick dropped his eyes. Only the auld dugs would do for this, he thought. At least it means he trusts us, as he does no others.

Hal cleared his throat, a sign the other men knew meant he had something difficult to hoik up on the way. They waited.

‘Wallace kens what is hid in Roslin,’ Hal said flatly. Bruce said nothing, though the problem had nagged him. He had arranged for the Stone of Scone to be supplanted by a cuckoo and the real one carried off to Roslin. Murder had been involved in it and, in the end, Wallace had found out. He had done nothing then – Falkirk fixed that – and said nothing since; Bruce now wrestled with the problem of whether he would keep his silence.

The Earl eventually shrugged, as if it no longer mattered.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and then turned away.

Later, in the cool breeze of a summer’s night, Hal stood with Kirkpatrick and watched the flaring fire from Stirling, heard the sometime thump as the wind veered.

‘Edward will be getting a lashin’ from his young queen,’ Kirkpatrick noted wryly, ‘for keeping the royal bairns up wi’ such racket.’

‘He is not short of pith for an auld man,’ Hal answered. ‘I fear our earl will have to be doucelike patient if he waits for Longshanks to get kisted up afore he makes his move.’

‘If Wallace remains it will be longer than that,’ Kirkpatrick answered. ‘So we had better be on the trail of it.’

‘What did he mean,’ Hal said, ‘by his parting words?’

‘Mak’ siccar?’ Kirkpatrick smiled sharply. ‘Make sure. Make sure Wallace is found and given the message, of course. That he stands in the way.’

Hal watched Kirkpatrick slide into the shadows and wondered.

Stirling Castle

Vigil of Saint James the Apostle, July, 1304.

He knelt in the leprous sweat of full panoply, hearing the coughs and grunts of all the other penitents suffering in the heat – yet ahead of him, Bruce saw the straight back and brilliant white head of the King, rising up from the humble bow to look to where the prisoners knelt, humbler still; he could imagine the smile on Edward’s face.

Oliphant’s face was a grey mask, not all of it from the ashes dumped on his head; together with the hemp noose round his neck, it marked his contrition and the final humiliation of surrender. Behind him, as suitable a backdrop as a cross for Jesus, the great rearing throwing arms of the Berefray, the parson, Segrave and the notorious Warwolf leered triumphantly at the pocked and blackened walls of Stirling.

‘O gracious God, we remember before thee this day thy servant and apostle James, first among the Twelve to suffer martyrdom for the Name of Jesus Christ …’

The Bishop of Ross was a pawky wee man with a matching voice, Hal thought, and then offered apology to God for the impiety, true though it was.

Still, he was also a prelate trusted by the English, more so than the ones he and Kirkpatrick and Bruce had quit only weeks before at Cambuskenneth. Better still, being full of his own self-importance, he had handled the entire affair of the surrender of Stirling fortress with suitable gravitas.

Just as well, for a single snigger would have undone the wonderful mummery of it – the stern, implacable Edward, ordering the gralloching of Oliphant and the other supplicants staggering out of Stirling with their hempen collars, draped in white serks and ashes. The lisping French of the beautiful young Queen, begging her imperious husband to relent and spare them, for the grace of God and on this day of days, the Vigil of St James the Martyr.

Three times she and her women, Bruce’s Irish countess among them, had pleaded and twice Edward had loftily refused, perfectly coiffured silver head and rouged cheeks tilted defiantly skywards, while everyone watched and tried to remain suitably dignified.

And then, when the weeping and wailing had worked its inevitable magic and the rebels were spared, the collective sigh exhaled by everyone watching all but rippled the trampled grass.

‘God be praised,’ finished the bishop.

‘For ever and ever.’

The reply from a host of murmured lips was like a covey of birds taking flight and the rest of the Augustinians went off into chant and slow march, swinging their censers; the acrid thread of incense caught Bruce by the throat and Hal heard the subtle little catch of breath next to him.

Head bowed, draped so that Bruce could only see the half-moon of eyelash on cheek, his wife was young and beautiful. Creamed flesh and black hair, a true Irish princess was Elizabeth and Bruce tried to think of her and not her powerful father, the de Burgh Earl of Ulster.

She was polite and deferential in public, a delight in private, so that love with Elizabeth de Burgh was no sweating work of grossness. He did what he wanted, feeling her writhe and knowing that she took pleasure in it, so that there was for him, too.

Yet, afterwards, there was always the memory of his first wife, Belle, his hand on her small, heaving bosom, feeling her life drain away, seeing the baby she left. Poor Marjorie, he thought with a sharp pang of guilt and regret, I have not done well by that child.

And before, with Belle, there had been times when he felt he could believe in the power of sheean magic, in that lazy hour of lying together when outlines hazed and a sunbeam slant, danced with golden motes.

In the day Elizabeth de Burgh was dutiful. In the night, she was wanton and that was workable – in the night, he thought, I lose my ability to see. But Belle was slim as a wand, with breasts like nuts. Elizabeth is as lush as the lands she brings to me, Bruce thought, so that even the dark cannot turn back time. The Curse of Malachy, he thought, to have the world and taste only ashes – would it be like this even when he was king?

Elizabeth rose, smoothing her dress, adjusting her wimple, smiling at him gently, making an expression of winsome regret as she began to move to the side of the equally young Queen, who smiled with bland eyes below a pale forehead and brows almost blonde. For all her youth, three faint lines already touched that brow, as if the age of her husband was leaching her youth.

Ashes. The taste drifted to his mouth, palpable, so that he turned in time to see a brown-hooded figure signing the cross at a man in white, neck-roped and clouded with flying ashes where he had shaken himself free of them. The ceremony over, Oliphant was smiling at the chance to wash and get back into decent clothes.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ intoned the monk. ‘Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae …’

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Not that Oliphant faced death now or anything near it, Bruce thought. He had won himself a deal of fame by holding out so long and even managed to avoid serious injury or penance; Bruce nodded acknowledgement to the man and had back a grin that bordered on sneer from the grey-smeared face.

Bruce felt movement at his elbow and turned into the curious stare of Hal, felt unnerved as he often did when he found the man looking at him. He did it more and more these days, as if silently accusing, though Bruce did not know for what – unless the Countess Buchan, of course, the poor wee man’s lost light of love, who had been Bruce’s initiation into the serious arts of the bedchamber once.

Hardly that, for he has known of that since the beginning and made his peace with it. Herdmanston, then? Burned out, it needed rebuilding and I promised him aid in it, but God’s Blood, the man was on wages for himself and thirty riders which took the rents of a couple of good manors. Surely he realized that rebuilding his wee rickle of stones in Lothian was no great priority when a throne was a stake?

Yet he smiled, at him and Kirkpatrick both; they were useful, though not the pillars to support a man who would be king. Still, he needed their questing-dog purpose even if, so far, it had come to nothing; he knew they smarted over their failure to find Wallace, knew also that they would not give up if only because of their rivalry in it. Bruce’s smile widened; divide and conquer, the first rule of kings.

The monk and Bruce watched the prisoners stumble off, then the monk turned and Bruce gave a start, for he knew the face. So did Hal, coming up on his elbow and seeing the smeared smile of the little man, whom he remembered as one less than holy.

‘Benda ti istran plegrin: benda, marqueta, maidin. Benda, benda stringa da da agugeta colorada,’ the monk intoned with a grin as brown as his robe.

‘Kirkpatrick,’ Bruce called and the shadow was beside him instantly, scowling; Hal became aware of the rest of Bruce’s mesnie, suspicious and sullen, closing in.

‘Lamprecht,’ Kirkpatrick said, as if the name was soiled fruit in his mouth. The man admitted his name with a bow and a quick flick of his head left and right, to see who was within earshot; he did not like the presence of so many armed men and said so, then repeated the phrase he had used before.

‘Andara, andara, o ti bastonara,’ Kirkpatrick growled in response, and Hal saw the looks that passed between Bruce’s noblemen – but none asked what they all wanted to know, namely what tongue the man used.

Hal knew, from the last time he had met the little pardoner; it was lingua franca, the old crusader language, a patois of every tongue spoken along the Middle Sea, with more than a dash of heathen in it. Pilgrims used it and the last time Hal had seen this Lamprecht – at least six years ago – he had been claiming himself to be one, with shell badge in a wide-brimmed hat and a collection of relics and indulgences. The meeting had not been profitable for him, nor the ones he had been involved with and Kirkpatrick had, Hal recalled, threatened him with a knife. What had brought the skulking wee pardoner back here, of all places?

‘What is he saying?’ Bruce demanded and Kirkpatrick, who was the only one who spoke the tongue, revealed that the little man, his pouched face shrouded in rough brown wool, was begging alms. Kirkpatrick had told him to go or be beaten.

‘Peregrin taybo cristian, si querer andar Jordan, pilla per tis jornis pan que no trobar pan ne vin.’

‘Good Christian pilgrim, if you want to journey to the Jordan, take bread with you, for you will find no bread or wine,’ Kirkpatrick translated it and someone laughed as the priest held out one grimy hand with half a chewed loaf in it.

‘Is he trying to sell you bread?’ demanded Edward Bruce, his voice rising with incredulity. ‘Be off, priest,’ he added though he did it politely, for there was no telling what powers a pilgrim friar had – or what such a one might become after death. The Curse of Malachy, Bruce thought wryly, seeing his brother’s scowling fear.

Hal saw the gleam in Lamprecht’s eyes, like animals in the dark of the cowl. He glanced at Bruce and saw he had seen the same. There was a moment – then Bruce reached out, took the bread and turned to Kirkpatrick.

‘Give him a coin.’

Pilgrim Lamprecht, with obvious delight, took the coin from under Kirkpatrick’s scowl, frowned at how small it was, then made it disappear.

‘Cambuskenneth,’ he said, clear as new water, then he was gone, leaving bemused men looking at his scuttling back. Edward Bruce looked at the bread, then smiled his broad, slit-eyed grin, his cheeks knobbed as late apples.

‘I would not eat that if I were you, brother.’

He went off, hooting, while the others trailed after him. Bruce looked at the half-loaf, rough maslin with a grey dough interior, indented as if someone had poked a finger in it. He scooped, found something hard and pulled it out; Kirkpatrick whistled, then looked right and left while Bruce closed his fist on the object and moved on, nodding and smiling as if it was the everyday thing for the powerful lord of Carrick and Annadale to be holding one half of a poor loaf.

But all of them had seen the red gleam of a ruby, big and round as a robin’s egg and that itself would have been marvel enough. Bruce knew more, had known that ruby and its eleven cousins when they had been snugged up next to each other along the length and breadth of a reliquary cross last seen tucked under the arm of an English knight heading south to Westminster.

Inside the jewelled and gilded crucifix-casket, Bruce knew, had lain the Holy Black Rood of Scotland, the holiest relic of the Kingdom and, together with the Stone of Scone, as much the mark of a coronation as the crown itself.

CHAPTER TWO

Riccarton, Ayrshire

Transfiguration of Christ, August, 1304

Mattie Broon first caught sight of them as he plodded through the drizzle, his idiot son lumbering awkwardly at his side and jumping in puddles. Late in a wet August afternoon for Mattie to be heading out to his sheep, folk said later. Too long in Creishie Jean’s alehouse, the knowing said. Too slow and indulgent with that daftie boy said those who knew better.

Mattie saw the cattle first, small black shapes with long, curved horns. Being a sheepman he did not care for cattle much and was surprised to see them, for this was no drover’s road. The dogs came next, rough-coated slinkers moving the score or so stirks along the road.

First came long shadows, eldritch as Faerie, from men walking determinedly on foot, four of them – no five. One a priest, or a pilgrim lay brother – Mattie had never known such a thing before. His original thought, that they had stolen the beasts, was now thrown into confusion, for surely no priest would be party to cattle-lifting?

The cattle lumbered over the low ground, a seemingly disorganized mob of shaggy bodies and wickedly curving horns. The topsman – Mattie presumed – lifted one hand in greeting and to show it was empty, that they meant no harm.

No harm, Mattie snorted to himself. It was clear they were circling the beasts, planning to make camp and he shifted away from them, ignoring the plaintive repeat of questions from his son. He moved off a little way and hunkered, hearing their rough laughter, the lowing of cattle and sharp barks of the dogs clamouring to be fed.

When the breeze brought the smell of onions and oatmeal with the whisper of grass Mattie rose up, chivvied his son from digging in the mud and moved off. His sheep would be untended, but he knew that this would have to be told to Heidsman. He would know what to do.

The drovers watched him go from under the loops of rough wool drawn up over their heads, eating stolidly from horn spoon and wooden bowl, save for the young, dark one who was making a fuss of the fawning hounds.

‘Is he away?’ asked Hal, who had his back to the man. Kirkpatrick flicked his eyes up and toed a loose brand back towards the fire.

‘Heading away, fast,’ he growled. ‘Herding the boy like a coo. No right in the head, that boy.’

‘Away to fetch the maister,’ Sim Craw said and looked over at the Dog Boy. ‘Leave the dugs, man. Sit and eat – nivver miss a meal, for ye dinna ken when the next will appear.’

Dog Boy gave a last friendly cuff to the fawning beasts and then went to the fire, taking his bowl and spoon from Sim and offering a wide grin in payment. Hal smiled with him – the Dog Boy was enjoying himself, even if it was only a couple of sleekit cattle dogs he worked with and the price for it was spending the last weeks looking at the shitty arses of a dozen scrubby kine. He was the only one with any joy of the affair.

‘I said,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘that this idea of pretending to be drovers was bad. We are nowheres close to a drove road, so any who spy us will think we stole the baists.’

‘Which is for why we brought our own wee priest,’ Sim replied, bowing his neck to Lamprecht and having back a brown sneer for it. ‘No stolen kine here, wi’ a wee friar in tow.’

It was one reason they had brought Lamprecht from Stirling weeks since and not the most important, Kirkpatrick thought. He caught himself staring at Sim, taking in the slab of a face, the span of shoulder, the grizzled beard. More iron than black in that beard, he thought and that monster crossbow he used to span constantly with a heave of those shoulders is now latched back with the belly hook and belt more and more these days. We are all getting old, he thought moodily.

Sim Craw felt the eyes on him and spared Kirkpatrick a brief flick of glance, which took in the sharp, long-nosed mummer’s mask of a face, little knife points of dagged hair, wintered here and there, plastered wetly to hollowed cheeks. Bigod the wee man was ugly.

The only one uglier, Sim Craw agreed with himself, was yon murderous Malise Bellejambe, the Earl o’ Buchan’s man just as Kirkpatrick was Bruce’s murderous wee man. It seemed to Sim that every highborn in the land needed a murderous wee man like a shadow and he was ruffled as a wet cat at the idea that he and Hal were somehow included in that mesnie.

‘Farthing for that thought,’ Hal offered, seeing Sim’s familiar glazed scowl. The man blinked and grinned loosely.

‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he answered and saw the cloud darken Hal’s face. He wished he had not answered so truthfully now, for Malise was dark and unfinished business, a man who, for sure, had killed Tod’s Wattie and two prime deerhounds as well as a yielded English lord waiting for ransom. There were other killings that could be laid at his feet, though none of them could be proved – but the worst about Malise Bellejambe was that he was Isabel’s keeper, the Earl of Buchan’s snarling guard dog on his wife and one reason why Hal had kept away from her these past years.

Hal was spared the brooding of it by the arrival of the Heidsman, with a bustle of curious and concerned locals at his back, one of them the local priest. In his pretend role of topsman of the drovers, Hal stood up and moved to greet him, being polite but not fawning.

‘Christ be praised,’ the priest announced.

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal responded and there was a slight ease of the tension now that it was established that the strange drovers were neither Faerie nor imps of Satan, who could never get such words past their lips. He saw the idiot boy laughing with the fawning dogs and Dog Boy grinning with him, the shared delight in hounds an instant bond.