The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  ‘Weesht on that,’ she said, with another quick, birdlike flick over one shoulder. ‘I have a man noo – a good man who makes a fair livin’ from shoemaking and merchanting in charcoal and I am Mistress Annie Toller. I dinnae want to present him with an auld love on his threshold.’

  ‘Then do not,’ Kirkpatrick declared with a rueful smile. ‘Present me as Rab o’ Shaws, a cheapjack in need of shelter. This is Hal o’ Herdmanston likewise. Tell him we will give fair pay in ribbons and geegaws for warmth and whatever food he can spare.’

  She shivered and not entirely from the cold.

  ‘Black Roger,’ she said softly and Kirkpatrick jerked at the name while Hal cocked his head with interest; this name was new.

  ‘We hear of ye from time to time,’ Annie went on. ‘And that is the name that comes with it. If ye are back here on dark business, Roger, ye can go your way.’

  ‘Nothin’ o’ the kind,’ Kirkpatrick lied. ‘I need ye to find Duncan, all the same. I need his help on a matter.’

  ‘What matter?’

  Kirkpatrick bridled.

  ‘Annie, it is freezin’ cold – yer turnin’ blue on the step here.’

  ‘What matter?’

  Kirkpatrick turned and indicated for Hal to come forward.

  ‘This is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he said. ‘Sir Hal, no less. He and I are here after his light o’ love, the Coontess o’ Buchan.’

  She had heard the tale of it, which raised eyebrows on Hal, for he had not realized. My love life is a bliddy geste, he thought savagely, for all to gawp at.

  Kirkpatrick knew Annie would have sucked up the story of it and now she stared at the troubadour tale turned reality, standing with his soaked boots and mournful face on her doorstep. She bobbed a curtsey as one hand went to her mouth to keep her heart from surging out of it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The poor man. The lady. Oh. Come away in. In, afore ye freeze.’

  Hal glanced sideways at Kirkpatrick and caught the sly grin and wink as he ducked through the door.

  Her husband, Nichol, was a bluff-faced barrel of a man, at once suspicious of two strangers within his house and eager for their news and the payment promised, which would sweeten his wife for weeks to come.

  ‘Ye can sleep in the coal shed,’ he declared and shot a sharp glance to silence the start of protest from his wife. ‘And eat separate an’ what ye are given.’

  Yet, while he pressed them for news of the roads and whether carts laden with coal could go up and down from Glasgow, he took Hal’s boots and worked on them, almost as if his hands were separate from his nature.

  In the end, of course, he gave more than he got in news and Hal marvelled at the subtle cunning of Kirkpatrick that unveiled the presence of too many English soldiery in Closeburn and that it had to do with the prisoners within.

  ‘The Maister o’ Closeburn is seldom seen,’ Nicholl informed them, stitching quietly and speaking with an awl in one corner of his mouth, ‘at table or elsewhere. He plays chess and has found himself a clever opponent he is reluctant to give up, it is said, even though the others who came there at the same time have moved on.’

  ‘A wummin?’ asked Hal before Kirkpatrick could stop him; Nichol glanced up, beetling his brows.

  ‘I never said so,’ he replied, then lost the frown and shrugged.

  ‘There were wummin arrived,’ he admitted. ‘The sister of King …’

  He stopped, looked at them and carried on working needle through leather; Hal knew he was in a fury of worry about having started to mention Bruce and the word ‘king’ in the same breath among strangers who might report him. Kirkpatrick chuckled reassuringly.

  ‘Dinna fash,’ he soothed. ‘No tattle-tongues here. It is to be hoped the sister does not share the fate o’ her wee brother, God wrap him safe from further harm.’

  There was a flurry of hands crossing on breasts, but Nichol grew taciturn from then on and, eventually, the conversation died; Hal and Kirkpatrick went off to the dubious comfort of the coal shed – which, Hal pointed out, was mercifully emptied, save for old dust.

  ‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick mused. ‘Poor commons, it seems. Too many to heat in Closeburn these days. To feed, too, for certes.’

  ‘Which means it is stappit full of folk we need avoid,’ Hal replied uneasily, knowing that the task they had set themselves was made harder.

  ‘It can be done,’ Kirkpatrick said out of the coal dark of the place. ‘We need Duncan.’

  Hal had been told of Duncan of Torthorwald, another Kirkpatrick but one who had followed Wallace and now suffered for it; he was outlawed and Torthorwald held now by the Master of Closeburn.

  ‘He is prospering, is my namesake,’ Kirkpatrick had declared. ‘Closeburn and Auchencas and now Torthorwald, with Lochmaben handed to him to hold, on behalf of the Bohuns.’

  And Hal had heard the bitterness there.

  ‘Will this Duncan help?’ Hal asked, wondering if a man who had fought in support of a Balliol king – and so a Comyn – would offer assistance to a Bruce. There was no reply and, eventually, Hal fell asleep.

  He woke to the sound of rustle and grunt, a throaty sound bordered between shriek and hoarseness, so that he lay quiet in the velvet dark, unlatching the dirk from inside his tunic. The rhythm of it ended in the rasp of mutual breathing and then a faint, whispered voice.

  ‘Did we wake him?’

  ‘Naw. He dreams of his lost love and what he will do when he gets her back.’

  Kirkpatrick slid out of the warm depth of Annie and silently blessed Hal and his countess for it had been that honeyed tale, as much as his hand at her fork, which had persuaded her to part with her old charms while they waited at the coal-shed door for Duncan.

  He did not know of her desperate need to find a little of what had been lost between then and now, in the compromise of poverty and the grief of bairns lost in birthing, but he felt a little of it touch him, a tendril of something sharp and sweet.

  It brought the knowledge, complete and out of the casket, of what he had given up all those years ago, sacrificed to the lure of the wider world and all its possibilities. His hand idled back to her wetness and she slapped his arm.

  ‘Enough,’ she hissed. ‘We have been fortunate that my man sleeps like an auld log. I will risk no more. Never again, Roger – that was for sweet memory and auld times.’

  Yet the fierce kiss she gave revealed the lie in it and choked his throat with all he wanted to say. The sudden arrival of a shadowed figure relieved him of the moment.

  ‘Mistress,’ said the shape, nodding to Annie.

  ‘Duncan,’ Kirkpatrick said.

  ‘Black Roger,’ the shadow acknowledged.

  ‘Good,’ said Hal, emerging from the black of the coal shed into the clear night, brilliant with stars and moon. ‘I am Hal of Herdmanston, knight. Now we’re all introduced, perjink and proper.’

  Duncan nodded at Hal, stepping forward so that he was silvered by moonlight, a ghost in the dark. He was tall and broad, with a great bush of black beard grown against the cold and a cloak wrapped round him – as much to hide the weapons, Hal thought, as for heat.

  ‘Ye had best go back, Mistress,’ he said to Annie. ‘Lest yer man miss ye.’

  She bobbed a curtsey and half-paused as if to say something to Kirkpatrick, then ducked away; Hal could feel the heat of her emotions as her face disappeared into the dark.

  ‘Ye are a muckhoond,’ Duncan said, soft enough so that only Hal and Kirkpatrick could hear it; Kirkpatrick wondered how long Duncan had been waiting in the cold shadows, listening to him and Annie and said as much, adding, viciously, that he was sorry if he had strayed on to Torthorwald territory.

  Duncan was suddenly close enough for Kirkpatrick to have the warm smoke of his breath on his face.

  ‘Nichol Toller is a good man and, until ye arrived, Annie was a well-conducted wife,’ he said. ‘They dinna deserve the likes of you.’

  ‘You will back off a step,’ Hal said gently, though hi
s voice held a rasp and Duncan felt the nudge in his ribs and looked down at the moon-silvered wink of steel.

  ‘We are off to a bad start,’ he declared and Hal nodded.

  ‘Let us begin again, then,’ he said. ‘I am Sir Hal of Herdmanston. You address me as “my lord” an’ you ask what you can do to assist us both and His Grace, the King.’

  ‘What king is that, then?’ Duncan demanded with a sneer.

  ‘The one ye will wish as a friend in the future,’ Kirkpatrick answered, recovering himself. ‘The one who is not in France with his empty cote and no wish to return to these shores, having been pit aside by the nobiles o’ this kingdom. Nor is it the covetous English one, whose death heralds the freedom of our realm – if ye believe the prophecies of Merlin. Have ye tallied it up yet, Duncan?’

  ‘Whit why are ye here?’

  Kirkpatrick smiled and laid out the meat of it and what he needed – good horses and supplies enough for five, for they hoped to have three women in tow when they came out of the castle of Closeburn. Duncan was no fool; he had heard of the prisoners and said so, rubbing his beard with the idea of such a blow being struck.

  ‘That was weeks since. They may not be there still,’ he added warningly. ‘There has been a deal of skirrivaigin’ by folk since then and a deal of it in secret, to foil such attempts.’

  ‘Yet the Master of Closeburn plays chess with a prisoner,’ Hal pointed out and Duncan’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Ye have good intelligencing,’ he answered, nodding. ‘He is the man for that game, right enough, and complains of havin’ no good players here. Until recently.’

  ‘Isabel plays chess,’ Hal answered, fixing Duncan with a grapple of eyes. ‘So does Lady Mary Bruce.’

  Duncan stroked his beard, frosting with his own breath in the night chill. Then he nodded.

  ‘Five horses. Garrons only, nothin’ fancy – those days are long gone,’ he said, the last added with a grue of bitter ice.

  ‘How will ye get in?’

  Kirkpatrick smiled and winked.

  Berwick Castle

  At the same time

  Isabel tallied up the number of years a body spent in growing, then in dying. Then she thought how long a person spent in bed, asleep or awake, sick or well, fevered with lust or bad dreams. In her real world, only sickness or love justified daylight hours in a bed – yet this was not the real world and she knew that.

  Snow-white sheets, a sable-fur covering, a red-velvet waterfall of privacy hangings, her head on down and linen – she dreamed of Balmullo and lay on filthy straw as if nailed. She had the imperative to move, knew she could not make her limbs work and felt like a laired toad, a salamander caught by the tail.

  The room was hazily outlined and she knew people came and went, but she could not speak or even move her eyes and the panic this had first created in her – oh, what a lurch of heart, of shrieking terror that had been – was gone, replaced only by the calm slant of faint light on the stinking floor.

  She could hear the sound of hammering. The cage. Malise had taken delight in telling her of it all the long journey across from Closeburn and she was not surprised, that first night they had stopped at Devorguilla’s abbey in Dumfries, when he had come to her.

  Sweetheart Abbey, they called it and the irony was not lost on her. She had fought and he had beaten her almost senseless, then forced his way into her. It had been mercifully short that first time, but he had done it since and more than once in the same night; she knew it was as much to do with the power he had now as with the act itself.

  Malise would have been surprised at this, for he thought he was secret with his thoughts. The first time – Lord, that first time; after all the fervid dreams he’d had, he thought he would die of pleasure, especially when she fought and he had her, as he had always imagined it, naked and helpless and trembling at his feet.

  She would have been surprised, too, that the foulness he spilled on her, thought and deed, was not from vicious hate but the opposite – Malise had found his love at last. She was his and his alone. At last, he could share all his thoughts and dreams with her, for she was not shared with anyone, saw no-one else.

  So she had it all from him, all the things he could not tell anyone else, the cruel and obscene things he had kept to himself and now emptied on her like spilled seed.

  Tortures of men and women, killings of them and children, too, in the name of her husband and for the greater furtherance of the Comyn and Badenoch and Balliol – and for his own pleasure and interest.

  He knew bodies as well as any Bologna surgeon, she realized in that part of her mind which was turning as feverish as her body. He spoke of nerves laid bare, muscles racked or slashed, breasts torn off, the monstrosity of forced couplings.

  Once, musing on whether he would fare better than his master and get her with child, he revealed how such a creature did not amount to very much.

  ‘If you have it in your belly,’ he marvelled, ‘everyone lauds you for it, but the truth is that it is hardly anything of interest. I cut such a lady open once and it was such a frog of a thing with a big head, all curled and sticky. I threw it to the dugs.’

  By the time they were crossing the Tweed into Berwick, she was littered up and barely conscious; the castellan, Robert de Blakebourne, took one look at her and savaged Malise away, cursing him.

  Malise, concerned that he had gone too far, took to gnawing his nails and making his mind to be more circumspect while the castellan, a good man, tried to prise the lady loose from him entirely – and failed, with orders from an earl and King Edward himself.

  A girl, Agnes, fed Isabel bread soaked in watered wine and she had been grateful for that because of the thirst – then watched the girl steal her last jewel, a locket with his hair; she hoped Malise did not catch the quine, for there would be blood.

  She wondered where Malise was. There had been too much blood already and she knew now that what had happened to her was the punishment of God for all her sins. She tried to call out her own name, but could not speak and all that came into her head was ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena’ and then ‘panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie’.

  She lay in the tower room while they took away the shutters and made the window into a door leading to the cage they were fixing on the wall. When she was better – and the weather warmer, the castellan had insisted – she would be forced into the cage, in full view for most of the day, though she could retire ‘for purpose of her privies’ by asking her gaoler, Malise.

  Blakebourne had also, for mercy, insisted that the cage be on the inside wall of the Hog Tower, so only the castle would see and not all the gawpers who chose to come up from the town itself.

  Apart from the workmen, no-one came. When they had gone for the night, leaving her in the chill dark with the cold swooping talons through the open door-window, she breathed softly, easily, regularly. Started to count them – one, two. Out, in. Measuring her life.

  She knew the dark was closing in. She liked the dark. In the dark she could dream up the sun of Hal and bask in it.

  Closeburn Vill, Annandale

  The day after …

  They walked the market on a day of blue and gold and cheesecloth clouds, where breath still smoked and people bundled themselves up and stamped their feet. Closeburn was too small for a decent market and seemed to consist mainly of deals being done for the staples, the fleece skins of sheep slaughtered at Martinmas. Hal, who knew the business well, reckoned the clip would fetch a good price when it, in turn, was sold in the spring.

  Kirkpatrick, chaffering and huckstering, dispensed good cheer and sold well, while Hal scowled and tried to keep his new-soled boots out of the worst of the mud. He felt guilty that Nichol had waterproofed them with pig fat while Kirkpatrick had been swiving his wife.

  By the middle of the afternoon the glory of the day was gone back to iron and pewter, the dark closing in – but the deed, as Kirkpatrick said with satisfaction, was done; two cheapjacks had been seen plyin
g their trade in the market and would now, unremarked, seek the hospitality of the castle, in the name of Christ and for a consideration to the Steward.

  The Steward was a fat, harassed wobble and looked them up and down with some distaste. They had smeared fat on their faces against the cold and the charcoal dust had blackened it, while the rags wrapped round their hands against the freeze were grimy, the nails half moons of black.

  ‘For God’s Grace I cannot turn ye away,’ he grumbled, ‘but ye will eat at the end of the table and will share each other’s platters – I cannot see another wanting yer mucky fingers in his gruel.’

  Hal knew that it was more the gift of silver than God’s Grace that had landed them at the Master of Closeburn’s table, while Kirkpatrick hoped the reference to gruel was a jest and not a reality in this place of poor commons.

  The hall was well lit and Kirkpatrick slid in, mouse quiet and head down, keeping his pack close to him when he sat and taking it all in. Hal dumped his in a corner and joined Kirkpatrick at a bench, where they exchanged wordless information on what they saw.

  The top table was dominated by empty high seats – the Master of Closeburn was absent again and Hal drew attention to it with a sharp nudge in Kirkpatrick’s ribs.

  ‘Chess,’ he whispered.

  Kirkpatrick was scanning faces, relieved to see a few he knew slightly and who would know him only when he was not dressed so badly, or blackened of face. He had been more worried about the Closeburn women, but had suspected – correctly – that Closeburn’s fortalice was too dominated by soldiery for their taste; they would be in Auchencas, peaceful and unmolested.

  Most of those at the low table, above and below the salt, were soldiery of some sort, or travellers like themselves. There were a peck of wool dealers from the Italies, a friar and a deal of rough-faced men that Kirkpatrick thought to be garrisoned here rather than passing through.

  The top table held three only, one of them a knight of St John, dark and sinister in his black surcote with its white cross. Kirkpatrick did not know any of them and nudged Hal in turn.