The Complete Kingdom Trilogy

by Robert Low

  The self-inflicted pain of it, married to the pleasure, had been a game. You need suffer only as much as you need and the promise of something real a finger-length away was an awareness that grew less innocent the closer you approached to it. When it came to losing that innocence, she knew what to do with it and put away, she thought, the foolishness of love.

  Until Bruce. Until she dared hope for the distant promise of that garden.

  Even as she stepped into the sun of that smile, she felt the hope shred away, like a mist before a cold wind, and it made her sag against the length of him so that, for him, it felt like a flirting.

  Over her head, Bruce looked at Thweng’s long mourn of a face and knew now what the knight had meant – Isabel had to be returned, quietly and without fuss, to her husband.

  There had been a time when she helped salve the loss of his wife, Marjorie’s mother, and the thrill of bedding her and cuckolding his enemy had been heady. Now the first was palling and the second was, as Thweng had hinted, too much of a risk in awkward times.

  He nodded and Thweng returned it. Isabel felt his chin move on the top of her head and almost wept.

  ‘It was her right enow, eh?’ Sim growled, hunched up with a corner of cloak over his head and the drips sliding along it like bright pearls. Beside him, the exhausted Bartholomew Bisset snored and they could do nothing with him until he woke, that was clear.

  Hal and Sim now knew who he was, for he had managed to get that out, voice slurred with fatigue – Ormsby’s scrivener and notary, the one Wallace had sworn to find and the signature on the documents pertaining to the mason’s death.

  Hal had almost forgotten about the entire affair and the arrival of Bisset was an amazement in more than one way – he been sent on his way under a writ from Wallace that promised, in return for his life, that he put his tale at the disposal of Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston. When the said Sir Henry was satisfied and quit him of his obligation, Notary Bisset was free to go.

  ‘I am told to speak to you and no-one else, not even The Bruce,’ the fat little man had said, swaying with weariness and drenched to the bone. ‘I beg you – let me sleep before you put me to the question.’

  Sim had been astounded, but Hal had more than a touch of admiration, both for Wallace’s unshakeable trust in certain folk and the fact that the little scrivener, who could simply have run off, seemed to have more chivalric honour in his butter-barrel body than any of the nobles who had spent weeks here haggling like horse-copers.

  ‘It was her, for sure,’ Sim repeated, dragging Hal away from studying the sleeping Bisset.

  Hal said nothing. It had been her. Run away yet again and come straight to The Bruce. He felt a sharpness in him at that thought and quelled it viciously. Stupid, he thought, to go rutting after an earl’s leman. It was only what old Barnabus, the local priest, had said would happen – time had healed over the scars of his wife and woken his loins.

  Any lass with her clothes inside out, as the law demanded of whores, would do, he thought viciously, while the nag of Isabel, Countess of Buchan, fern-tendrilled hair dripping like wet autumn bracken, blue eyes weary, her smile still warm on his face, all made the dreich of this place even harder to bear.

  That and Bisset, who snored softly, each one a tearing nag at Hal’s heart, for he sounded like wee John when he slept. Well, his son slept now and made no sound at all. Slept forever …

  Christ, Hal thought savagely, can matters get worse?

  ‘Sir Hal. Sir Hal.’

  The voice brought their heads round and they stared in wonder at the pair, lurching out of the dark, propelled by the stiff, haughty Sir Gervaise.

  ‘More little barking dogs,’ the knight said and pulled the head of his mount round and away. Hal stared at Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy a shadowed skelf close behind, hugging himself against the rain.

  ‘Christ’s Bones,’ Tod’s Wattie bellowed, ‘am ah glad to see ye. Ye will nivver ken whit has happened.’

  Chapter Five

  Roxburgh Castle

  Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, August 1297

  A groan; the coverlet stirred. Ralph de Odingesseles waited warily with tunic, judging tenor and temper before stepping forward to the half-asleep figure who rolled over in a rustle of straw and feather mattress to sit upright, blinking, on the edge of the canopied box bed.

  Ralph moved to a covered pitcher of heated water, which he poured into a basin and brought forward. He discreetly handed his master a gilded pot and watched it vanish beneath his nightshirt; water splashed and Ralph stood patiently holding the basin, a towel and a clean tunic draped over either forearm; his master grunted, groaned and cocked one buttock to let out a squeaky fart.

  Yawning, Hugh Cressingham handed the chamberpot back to Ralph, dabbed water from the basin on his face and his close-cropped head, then dried his meaty jowls on the presented towel. Slowly, he woke up and blinked into a new day.

  Ralph de Odingesseles watched him, dispassionate but cautious – Cressingham was not tall, running to fat, had eyes that bulged like a fish and his cheeks were stubbled because a skin complaint made it painful to pumice off a beard and irritating to grow one. Nor did he keep his hair fashionably neck length and curled, as Ralph did – Cressingham paid lip service to his prebendery stipends by affecting the look of a monk, though untonsured, and that left him with a hairstyle like an upturned bird’s nest.

  He seemed, in his crumpled white nightserk, as bland as plain frumenty, but Ralph de Odingesseles knew the temper that smouldered in the man, stoked by pride and envy.

  By the time Cressingham was in tunic, hose and a cote embroidered with the – as yet unregistered – swans he claimed as his Arms, the whole sorry mess of life had descended on him afresh and Ralph de Odingesseles, coming forward with the gardecorps, was more cautious still. Experience had taught him that the storms forming on Cressingham’s brow usually resulted in a sore ear, which was the lot of a squire, he had discovered.

  Sufferance, on the other hand, was better than the alternative for the son of a poor noble. Ralph de Odingesseles’s only claim to fame was that he was related to an archdeacon and his grandfather had been a well-known knight on the Tourney circuit, who had once been beaten into dented metal by the then king’s French half-brother, Sir William de Valence.

  Eventually, Ralph would be made a knight and take no blows he would not return. The thought made him forget himself and smile.

  Cressingham looked sourly at the smirking squire holding the gardecorps. The garment was elegant and in the new shade of blue which was so admired by the French king that he had adopted it as his colour. Not diplomatic, Cressingham thought, and made a mental note never to wear it in the presence of Longshanks.

  He did not much want to wear it at all and, in truth, hated the garment, for the same reason he was forced to wear it – he was fat and it hid the truth of it. It was, he knew, not his own fault, for he was more of an administrator than a warrior, but you did not get knighted for tallying and accounts, he thought bitterly, for all the king’s admiration and love of folk who knew the business.

  As always, there was the moment of savage triumph at what he had become, despite not being one of those mindless thugs with spurs – Treasurer of Scotland, even though it was a Gods-cursed pisshole of a country, was not only a powerful position, but an extremely lucrative one.

  As ever, this exultant moment was followed by a leap of utter terror that the king should ever discover just how lucrative; Cressingham closed his eyes at the memory of the huge tower that was Edward Plantagenet, the drooping eyelid that gave him a sinister leer, the soft lisping voice and the great, long arms. He shuddered. Like the grotesque babery carved high up under cathedral eaves and just as unpredictably vicious as those real apes.

  He slapped Ralph de Odingesseles for it, for the smirk, for Edward’s drooping eye and this Pit-damned brigand Wallace and for having to wait in this pestilential place for the arrival of De Warenne, the Earl of Surrey.


  He slapped the other ear for the actual arrival of De Warenne, the hobbling old goat complaining of the cold and his aches and the fact that he had been trying to retire to his estates, being too old for campaigning now.

  Cressingham had no argument with this last and slapped Ralph again because De Warenne had not had the decency to die on his way north with the army, thus leaving Cressingham the best room in Roxburgh, with its fire and clerestory.

  Worst of all, of course, was the mess all this would leave – and the cost. Gods, the cost … Edward would balk at the figures, he knew, would want his own inky-fingered clerks poring over the rolls. There was no telling what they might unveil and the thought of what the king would do then almost made Cressingham’s bowels loosen.

  Ralph de Odingesseles, trying not to rub his ears, went to the kist in the corner and fetched out a belt with dagger, purse and Keys, the latter the mark of Cressingham’s position as Treasurer, designed to elicit instant respect.

  Like most such observances, the truth was veiled, like statues of the Lady on her Feast Days; everyone knew the Scots called Cressingham the ‘Tracherer’ and you did not need to know much of the barbaric tongue to know it meant ‘Treacherer’ and was a play on his title.

  Yet he was also the most powerful in Scotland, simply because he held the strings of the purse Ralph now handed him.

  He helped fasten on the belt, then adjusted his master’s arms in the sleeves of the long, loose gardecorps; Cressingham consoled himself with the fact that at least his gardecorps was refined. No riotous colours here, no gold dagging along the hem, or long slits up the sides, or three-foot tippets. Plain black, with russet vair round the sleeves and neck, as befitted someone of probity and dignity.

  ‘I will break fast now,’ Cressingham said and Ralph de Odingesseles nodded, took a step back and bowed.

  ‘The Seneschal is here. Brother Jacobus also.’

  Cressingham frowned and swallowed a curse – couldn’t they at least let him wake up and eat a little? He waved his page away to fetch food and told him to let the Seneschal in, then went to brood at the shuttered window, peering through the cracks rather than open it to the breeze – even in August it was cold. Outside, the river flowed, gleaming as quicksilver and he took comfort from the Teviot on one side and the Tweed on the other, so that the castle seemed to sail on a sea, a boat-shaped confection in stone.

  Roxburgh was a massive, thick-walled fortress with four towers and a church within the walls. Cressingham’s room was on a corner of the main Keep overlooking the Inner Bailey and, because of that, had a proper window of leaded glass rather than the shuttered arrow slits that faced the outside. The other sides of his room bordered on a corridor, so there were no windows at all, which made it dim and dark. Not for the first time, Cressingham thought of the light-flooded solar tower and its magnificent floor tiles, where De Warenne had installed himself.

  A polite cough turned him and the Seneschal, Frixco de Fiennes, stood, waiting patiently in his sober browns and greens.

  ‘Christ be praised,’ Frixco de Fiennes said and Cressingham grunted.

  ‘For ever and ever,’ he responded automatically. ‘What problems have surfaced this early in the day?’

  Frixco had been up for several hours and all the lesser folk of the castle hours before that. Half the day was gone as far as Frixco was concerned and he had already dealt with most of the castle’s problems – the cook needing the day’s salt and spices, the Bottler warning that immediate ale stocks were low and small beer lower still.

  The other problems he had no answer for were worse -supplies for the 10,000 men currently filtering through Berwick and heading this way, the timber to the workmen scaffolding the Teviot wall in order for minor repairs to be done, men to make spears and quarrels and bows. Where grain for bread was to come from, or fodder for animals, or bedding for horse and hound.

  ‘The world turns, Treasurer,’ he replied. He should properly have addressed Cressingham as Lord but that was a step too far for the fine-bred Frixco de Fiennes, who was brother to the Warden here. Frixco, however, was not brave, or clever. He should have gone to the Church but liked women too much even to suffer the slight restriction priesthood would place on his whoring – the thought of the splendid Mattie down at the Murdoch’s Tavern in the town tightened his groin so much he almost bent over, convinced it could be seen.

  Seneschal here was perfect, for it let him use his skills in tallying and reading and writing in English, French and Latin while leaving him free to plough whatever furrows he could find.

  He laid out the problems as Ralph de Odingesseles returned with bread and dishes of mutton, pork and fish. The squire poured watered wine and Frixco stood while Cressingham chewed and swallowed, toying absently with the bread as he walked to the shuttered window and, finally, opened it to the day. Behind him, sly as a mouse, Ralph filched slices of meat and fish, popping it in his mouth at once and ignoring the frowning Frixco.

  There was Stirling, one of the main fortresses still held by England. Frixco meticulously listed the castle stores there – 400 barrels of beer, four of honey, 300 of fat, 200 sides of beef, pork and tongue, a single barrel of butter, 10 each of pickled meat and herring, seven of cod, 24 strings of sausages, two barrels of salt and 4,000 cheeses.

  ‘Enough for six to eight months,’ Frixco de Fiennes ended, ‘given that the garrison is not large. I have assumed that the townsfolk will seek sanctuary within.’

  ‘If we do not succour the town?’ Cressingham asked and the Seneschal looked astonished at the very idea of not taking in Stirling’s desperate. That was the purpose of the castle, one of the three such purposes fortresses were designed for. One was as a base for the destruction of enemies, the second was the succour of guests and pilgrims and people in their charge and the third was to stamp the authority of the king on the area.

  Frixco de Fiennes said nothing, all the same, for he knew that Stirling should have had stores for two years, but complacency and greed had corroded that. In the end, Cressingham gave up expecting a reply.

  ‘The townspeople of Stirling must work if they wish the protection of the fortress,’ Cressingham declared. ‘Make it clear to them that rations will be given to those who volunteer for service.’

  Frixco duly made a note, tongue between his teeth, juggling parchment and quill and the ink pot hung round his neck, though he knew Cressingham only did this because the commander at Stirling was Fitzwarin, a relative of the Earl of Surrey.

  Frixco had already delivered lists to Cressingham regarding Roxburgh itself, which should have made it clear to the man how unlikely it was that any castle in Scotland could fully equip enough townspeople – Roxburgh had 100 iron helmets, 17 maille tunics cut for riding, seven pairs of metal gauntlets, two sets of vambrace and a single cuisse. What use a solitary thigh guard? Frixco wondered. And if one was found – what use a one-legged knight?

  ‘My lord.’

  Ralph was back, announcing that the Earl of Surrey and Sir Mamaduke Thweng were in the main hall, awaiting Cressingham’s pleasure. Brother Jacobus had joined them.

  The scathe of it lashed Cressingham, so that he scowled. My pleasure, indeed. He was tempted to let them wait – two tottering old warhorses, he thought viciously, though he had to temper that in Sir Marmaduke’s case, since he was younger than De Warenne by a decade or more and still held a formidable reputation as a chivalric knight. Muttering, he swept from his room.

  The three sat at the high table benches in the huge hall, misted with faint blue smoke from badly lit fires and empty but for De Warenne, Sir Marmaduke and Brother Jacobus, Cressingham’s chaplain from the Ordo Praedicatorum.

  Before Cressingham had even slippered his way across the flagged floor, Frixco scuttling behind him, he could hear De Warenne’s complaints, saw that Thweng stared ahead, forearms on the table, and with the air of a man shouldering through a snowstorm while Brother Jacobus, piously telling his rosary, listened without seeming to list
en.

  ‘Plaguey country,’ the Earl of Surrey was saying, then broke off and looked up at Cressingham with watery, violet-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Here you are at last, Treasurer,’ he snapped. ‘Did you plan to sleep all day?’

  ‘I have been busy,’ Cressingham fired back, stung by his tone. ‘Trying to sort out the feeding and equipping of this rabble you have brought, claiming it to be an army.’

  ‘Rabble, sirra? Rabble …’

  De Warenne bristled. His trimmed white beard was shaped into a curve and pointed; with his round arming cap he looked like some old Saracen, Cressingham thought.

  ‘Good nobiles, chided Brother Jacobus and the soft voice stilled everything. De Warenne muttered, Sir Marmaduke went back to staring at nothing and Cressingham almost smiled, though he resisted the triumph of it, for fear the priest would notice. Domini canes – God’s Dogs – folk called the Order of Preachers, but not to their face, since they had been given the papal permission to preach the Word and root out heresy, a wide and sinister writ.

  Now this bland-faced little man sat in his frosting of habit and jet cappa, the over-robe that gave them yet another name, Black Friars. He let the polished rosewood beads slip, sibilant as whispers, through his fingers.

  Shaven and washed so clean his face seemed to shine like a white rose, Jacobus was, Cressingham knew, using the rosary as a pointed reminder to everyone that this was the Thursday of the Transfiguration of Christ, one of the days of Luminous Mystery. He also knew those beads were just as easily used to tally and list in the service of the Treasurer; if Jacobus was a hound of God, Cressingham thought, then he is kennelled at my command – though it would be prudent to check his chain now and then.

  The beads, click-clicking through the friar’s smooth fingers, brought tallying surging back to Cressingham.

  ‘Gascons,’ he declared viciously, startling De Warenne out of a slump so suddenly he could not form a response; the air hissed out of the Earl and he gobbled like a chicken.