The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  ‘Kirkpatrick I know,’ John Duns said softly, looking steadily at Hal with his black gaze. ‘This one is a stranger to me.’

  ‘Hal – Sir Henry Sientcler,’ Bruce declared brusquely. ‘Of Herdmanston.’

  The black eyes flared a little and John Duns nodded.

  ‘Ah, yes – the one who cuckolded the Earl of Buchan. I understand his wife, Countess Isabel, is locked up like a prize heifer these days because of it. The pair of ye had little luck from that sin.’

  Hal looked at him for a moment, a grey stare that Bruce did not like, for he had seen it on a calm sea not long before a storm broke.

  ‘You will be John Duns, expelled from university in Paris,’ Hal replied eventually. ‘Hooring, I hear. Dying of the bad humours that has made in your body.’

  It was softly vicious and Duns mouth went pursed – like a cat’s arse, Bruce noted with some delight. Then Hal offered a bitter smile.

  ‘I am sure there is more to each of our haecceity than these singular events,’ he said and Duns blinked in surprise. His face lost the rising colour and the tight mouth slowly widened into a smile.

  ‘You know my doctrine, then?’ he demanded and Hal made an ambivalent gesture of one hand.

  ‘He is a singular wee lord,’ Bruce interrupted and clapped Hal on one shoulder, as if he was showing off one of his particularly clever dogs.

  ‘You will know it yourself, of course,’ Duns said wryly. ‘I ken your brother does.’

  Now Bruce’s stare was sea-cold; young Alexander Bruce was the scholar of the family and reputedly the best Cambridge had. Bruce himself had arranged and paid for the obligatory feast that celebrated Alexander’s acquisition of Master of Arts the year before – but the implication that the youth was the only educated one in the family rankled.

  ‘I know of your haecceity, the “thisness” that supposedly makes each of us singular,’ he replied, his voice a chill gimlet. ‘I am less convinced by your arguments for the immaculate conception of Mary. I consider it sophistry – but that is not why we are here.’

  ‘Ye have the right of it, my lord,’ Hal interrupted, making Bruce’s scowl deepen at the effrontery. ‘I know why each of us is here – myself an’ Kirkpatrick because the lord o’ Annandale commands, the bishops because their advice and support is necessary. I dinna ken why this Master Duns is here.’

  Kirkpatrick, his sharp hound’s head swivelling backwards and forwards as he followed their exchange, bridled at the presumption of the wee lord from Herdmanston and, almost in the same thought, admired the courage that spoke up. He was sullen at Duns for his ‘Kirkpatrick I know’, the sort of dismissive phrase that was like the fondle of fingers behind a hound’s ear. He was Bruce’s sleuthhound, sure enough, but did not care to be reminded of it so callously.

  He started his mouth working on the sharp retort it had taken him all this time to come up with – then caught Wishart’s eye. The bishop’s frown brought spider-leg brows down over his pouched eyes.

  ‘Master Duns,’ he said before Kirkpatrick could speak, his smiling rich voice soothing the ruffled waters, ‘has a shrewd mind, which we will need for the essential task of squaring a circle.’

  ‘Aye,’ Bruce replied laconically. ‘Trying to get the Comyn to agree to my claims without actually telling them what we plan.’

  ‘That is certainly one problem,’ Wishart replied. ‘There is another.’

  Lamberton sighed and waved one languid hand.

  ‘Let us not dance,’ he declared flatly. ‘We have to find a way to convince the Comyn that our cause is just and that the Earl of Annandale has claim to the crown. More than that, of course, we have to justify it to them and all the others.’

  ‘Justify?’

  Bruce’s chin was thrust out truculently, but the sullen petted-lip pout of old was long gone and now he looked stern, like a dominie about to chastise a pupil.

  ‘Ye are about to usurp a throne, my lord,’ Lamberton declared wryly. ‘It will take a cunning argument to convince Strathearn and Buchan and the Dunbar of March, among others, that you have the right to it.’

  ‘Usurp a throne?’ Bruce spat back and Wishart held up one hand, his voice steel.

  ‘King John Balliol,’ he declared and let the name perch there, a raven in the tree of their plans. Balliol, in whose name the rebellion had been raised and the reason Bruce had quit the rebels and sought his own peace with Edward two years ago.

  Hal knew that was when the rumours of Balliol returning – handed over by the Pope back to Scotland – had first been mooted by a Longshanks desperately fending off the French and Scots at either ends of his kingdom. The arrival of an old king into the ambitions of Bruce was not something the Earl of Carrick could suffer – so he had accepted Longshanks’ peace and rewards, in the hope of keeping his claims to kingship alive by persuading Edward that a Bruce was a better bet than a Balliol for a peaceful Kingdom.

  Yet, not long after that, in a bitter twist of events, had come the Battle of the Golden Spurs, when the Flemings had crushed the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai. Common folk in great squares of spears, Hal had heard, had tumbled so many French knights in the mud that their gilded spurs had made a considerable mound.

  It had forced the stunned French to make peace with Edward and freed Longshanks to descend on the north – the result sat outside the walls of Stirling, hurling balls of fire and holding victory tourneys that the newly pardoned Scots lords had to watch in grim, polite silence.

  It had also ended any plans to bring Balliol back to his old throne – yet the Kingdom had fought in his name until now. And failed; Bruce was determined to change this.

  ‘Balliol was stripped of his regalia,’ Bruce reminded everyone roughly, though his growl was muted. ‘By the same king who made him.’

  ‘The lords of this realm made him by common consent,’ Lamberton pointed out and had a dismissive wave of hand from Bruce.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Lamberton persisted softly. ‘Balliol is still king of this realm in the eyes of those who have consistently fought to preserve it. Wallace among them.’

  ‘The community of this realm are finished with fighting,’ Bruce snapped back angrily. ‘Unless it is to be first in the queue for Edward’s peace. Wallace is finished. No matter the harsh of it, that is the truth. This is no longer a Kingdom, my lords – in all the wee documents from Westminster it is writ as “land” and nothing more. Edward rules it now and his conditions for a return to his loving embrace include charging each lord of this “land” to seek out and capture Will Wallace. That man is not so well loved that such a command will go begging for long.’

  ‘The matter of Balliol is simple,’ John Duns said and all heads turned to him. His yellowed face was haughty, his fine fingers laced; Wishart felt a stab of annoyance at the infuriating arrogance of the man, tempered with respect for the intellect and steel will that went with it.

  Duns had not been expelled from Paris for whoring, as Hal had declared, but for defying the Pope. And he was dying of some slow wasting disease that Wishart prayed to God to make slower still, since the loss of Duns would be a tragedy. Yet he was hard to suffer, all the same …

  ‘We must remake the doctrine of the throne,’ Duns went on. ‘As a contract, between the King and community of the Kingdom, to the effect that the Kingdom itself reserves the right to remove an unfit king. Such an unfit king, of course, will be one who permits the freedom of this realm to be usurped by an invader, as John Balliol does, preferring gilded captivity to a struggle for freedom. Which, gentilhommes, is something no man gives up save with his life. As long as a hundred of us remain to defend it, we will do so.’

  They stared at him and he sat, head tilted and preening just a little, for he knew he had slit the Gordian of it – even Kirkpatrick, blinking with the effort of understanding it, could see the breathtaking genius.

  ‘That last is not my own,’ Duns added lightly, ‘but Bernard of Kilwinning’s.’

  Bruce cocked one warning
eyebrow.

  ‘That is the only part that is not mere elegant sophistry,’ he countered levelly. ‘Dangerous, too. The best defence for this kingdom has been the confusion and discord of England, thanks to Edward’s own nobiles and their attempts to foist Ordinances on his power. Think ye this realm needs such curb on royal power?’

  ‘There is only one ordinance in such a contract,’ Duns replied calmly, ‘and that is to defend the freedom of the Kingdom. Hardly a curb of royal power, to insist that a good king do that which he would anyway.’

  Bruce nodded, reluctantly. John Balliol had defended the Kingdom and suffered for it – since then, of course, he had haunted the French court and the papal skirts defending nothing at all, so Duns’ sophistry worked well enough.

  Yet Bruce was English enough to see that the crown of this kingdom was not the same as any other. Kings in Scotland, he had long since discovered, differed from those anywhere else because they had long admitted that God alone did not have the final say in who ruled. The reality for a King of Scots was that his right to rule had long since been removed from God and handed, via the noble community of the realm, to the Kingdom’s every burgher and minor landowner – aye, and even the cottars and drovers who lived there; it was a wise claimant who made his peace with that.

  Not King of Scotland, but King of Scots and there was a wealth of subtle meaning in the difference.

  Wishart saw Bruce acquiesce, slapped his meaty hands together and beamed. John Duns was clever, Hal thought, but his kenspeckled words were not enough to convince the Comyn Earl of Buchan, or the Comyn Lord of Badenoch, whose kin John Balliol was. The Lord of Badenoch had his own claim to the kingship and, even if everyone else allowed that John Balliol was too much empty cote to be endured, it was unlikely the Comyn would step aside for Bruce.

  Hal did not even have to voice it, for Lamberton did and the arguments swirled like the greasy, tainted smoke of the tallow until Bruce held up one hand and silenced them all.

  ‘Red John Comyn is a problem,’ he declared, ‘which we must address soon. Sooner still is the one called Wallace.’

  He looked round the room of shadowed faces.

  ‘He must be persuaded to quit the realm,’ Bruce said. ‘For his own safety and because nothing can proceed while he rants and ravages in the name of King John Balliol. That rebellion is ended, my lords, and will never be resurrected; the next time this kingdom wars against the invader will be under my banner. A royal one, lords – and against Edward the son, not the father.’

  ‘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 b
urr 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.