by Robert Low
‘Wallace fled to France,’ Bruce added, frowning at the bowl in front of him, ‘because he could not be sure that he would not be betrayed by his own. There will be no peace for Wallace. Edward will have his head on a gate-spike.’
Hal regarded the Earl of Carrick with a new interest, seeing the sullen face of two years ago resolved into something more stern and considered. There was steel here – though whether it would bend and not break alongside the Red Comyn was another matter.
Bruce stirred and looked up at Sir Henry, then pointedly at Hal, who nodded and levered himself wearily up from the table.
‘It is time.’
Sir Henry stood up and a flutter of servants brought torches. They left Elizabeth and the servants behind, moving into the shifting shadows and the cold dark of the undercroft, descending until the stairwind spilled them out into the great vaulted barrel that was Roslin’s cellars. Their breath smoked; barrels and flitches gleamed icily.
‘This has been finished a little, since I was last home,’ Henry Sientcler mused, holding up the smoking torch.
‘As well your Keep is now stone,’ Hal said. ‘I would do the rest, and swift, my lord of Roslin, now that your ransom money is freed up – if Edward comes back, Roslin’s wooden walls will not stand and that Templar protection we Sientclers once enjoyed is no longer as sure as before.’
Henry nodded mournfully while Bruce, his shadow looming long and eldritch, waved a hand as if dismissing an irrelevant fly.
‘Castles in stone are all very fine – but only one stone matters now,’ he said, then turned to Hal. ‘Well, Sir – ye claim to have the saving of us. Do you ken where Jacob’s Pillow lies?’
Hal fished out the medallion and handed it to the frowning earl, who turned it over and over in his gloved hand.
‘A medal of protection,’ he sniffed. ‘Sold by pardoners everywhere. Like the one we took from yon Lamprecht fellow.’
Hal watched while Kirkpatrick and Sim, suitably primed, moved down the length of the vaulted hall, shifting bundles and barrels, peering at the floor and tallying on sticks. Bruce and Sir Henry watched, bemused.
‘It is the very one,’ Hal said, watching the two torches bobbing across the flagged floor. ‘It was the pardoner explained the significance of the marks.’
Bruce turned it over and over, then passed it to Sir Henry, who peered myopically at it.
‘A fish?’ he hazarded and Hal fumbled out the ring corded round his neck.
‘The same one is on this,’ he declared, ‘which the Auld Templar bequeathed me on his deathbed. An auld sin he called it.’
Bruce looked steadily at Hal and he was struck, again, by the absence of the sullen pout, replaced by a firm, tight-lipped resolve and an admitting nod. Sim appeared and shook his head; Hal felt his stomach turn.
‘Reverse it,’ he said and Sim nodded. The torches started to bob again, the tallying began anew.
‘A mason’s ring,’ Hal went on. ‘Belonging to Gozelo, who worked here before he became involved in your … scheming, my lord. And died for it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Bruce muttered as he frowned, muttering half to himself. ‘If he had not run … a sad necesssity for the safety of the Kingdom. The ring went to the Auld Templar and then to you. It is the Christian fish symbol from ancient times -what has this to do with locating the Stone?’
Henry, who had only recently been told of all this, blinked a bit and shook his head with the sheer, bewildering stun of it all. Plots were nothing new in this Kingdom, nor the killing that invariably went with them, but, even so, the careless way the Earl of Carrick dismissed a murder was disturbing.
The torches bobbed to a sudden stop and Sim and Kirkpatrick both cried out.
Hal moved swiftly, the others following, drawing into a breathless ring round a single broad flagstone, the faint chiselled mark gleaming in the torchlight.
‘A fish,’ Hal said pointedly and Bruce agreed, then pointed to his left.
‘There is another. And one over there. Every flagstone is marked – there are scores of them.’
‘Just so,’ Hal said. ‘Gozelo’s mark, which all masons leave behind – if it seems he was excessive fond of making it here, he had reason, my lords.’
Sim and Kirkpatrick, their breath mingling as they struggled, shoved pry bars into the grooves of the flagstone as Hal spoke.
‘Not an original mason’s mark,’ Hal said, speaking in rapid French, spitting the words out as if they burned him. ‘Gozelo was not that imaginative and thought to find a good Christian symbol of this land, to suit the tastes of his customers. He took the fish mark from the same place the makers of wee holy medals took it and for the same reason – to impress and because it is simple to make.’
He held up the medallion.
‘Taken from the Chalice Well in Glastonbury,’ he said as they peered at it. ‘See – the circumference of one circle goes through the centre of the other, identical circle. The bit in the middle is called the vesica piscis, which is the name of the mark.’
‘Bladder of the fish,’ Bruce translated thoughtfully. ‘Of course – I had forgotten the Chalice Well had it.’
There was a grating sound and the flagstone shifted, the two men sweating and panting to slide it with a long grinding slither, leaving a dark hole. The dank of it seemed to leach chill into Hal’s breath of relief.
‘The Holy fish symbol of Christians from the times of the Romans,’ Hal explained. ‘Lamprecht knows his business and told me the Holy nature of it – and it became clear why masons fancy the symbol. I am no tallyer, nor was he – but he knows his relic business well enough and the holy fish measures a ratio of width to height which is the square root of three – 265:153. The number 153 is the amount of fish Our Lord caused to be caught in a miracle, so there is the work of Heaven in it.’
‘Gospel of St John,’ Kirkpatrick breathed, astounding everyone with that knowledge, so that he blinked and bridled under the stares.
‘Two hundred and sixty-five fish-marked stones one way, a hundred and fifty-three the other and you have this,’ Hal said and held the torch over the hole, allowing the light to fall, golden as honey on the ancient sandstone snugged inside.
‘The Auld Templar’s secret place,’ Hal said, then glanced at Henry’s open-mouthed stare. ‘I hazard there are deeds and titles and Roslin secrets you will want from there, Henry -but first you will have to lift a heavy cover.’
‘The Stone,’ Bruce declared and gave a sharp bark of delight.
‘Not easily moved by two men – but done all the same,’ Kirkpatrick added and there was a pause as they saw how the Auld Templar and Roslin’s Steward, John Fenton, had struggled the Stone into the undercroft and hidden it.
‘Yon Gozelo was a clever man,’ Sim offered and glanced into the scowl of Kirkpatrick. ‘Just not very fast on his feet when it came to the bit.’
‘Aye, well,’ Bruce said and straightened. ‘Once you have taken what you need, Sir Henry, cover it up anew.’
He glanced round at the faces, all blood-dyed in the light, their breath like honeyed smoke.
‘Here we all are, then, party to the future of the Kingdom,’ he said. ‘In the absence of Bishop Wishart, I call upon us all to kneel and pray for the strength to hold to our resolve, to keep this secret until the time is right.’
This piety took even Kirkpatrick by surprise, but he dutifully sank to his knees. Bruce and Hal were the last to descend to the chill stones and looked at each other for a moment over the heads of the penitents. When the time is right, Hal echoed silently. The time for Bruce to make his move.
‘Welcome to your Kingdom,’ Hal said to him, savage and morose. ‘A bloodier place these days, my lord earl.’
The sun of Bruce’s smile was a bright uncaring knife that cut through Hal’s bitter grief and the Kingdom’s turmoil of pain.
‘Hectora quis nosset, si felix Troia fuisset? he answered, leonine with new dreams, and then added, in perfect English:
‘Who woul
d know Hector if Troy had been happy?’
Author’s Note
In light of the collective nouns used in this book, I should add another which is particularly apt – a roguery of historians.
Unlike the earlier Dark Ages, there is no paucity of sources for the Scottish Wars of Independence, or the lives of Wallace and Bruce – what there is instead is a contradiction of times, dates, places and people, sometimes accidental, more often deliberate, from those being paid to enhance the reputation of their subjects.
That, coupled with the general attempts to revise history in favour of the various protagonists, has polished the personae of Edward I, Wallace and Bruce almost beyond recognition, while creating the impression that the war which culminated in the battle of Bannockburn was one of the freedom-loving Scots against the tyranny of England.
Ask any Scot in a pub and they will tell you chapter and verse on Bruce and on Wallace – they may even pour scorn on Mel Gibson and Braveheart, while admitting that they thoroughly enjoyed the movie, even the pseudo-kilts, face-painting (now almost de rigueur at any Scottish event) and waggling of bare arses at opponents.
The truth is harsher and more misted. Braveheart is a dubious interpretation of already dubious history, while relative sizes and composition and exact location of the armies at Stirling Brig and Falkirk is supposition and best-guess, depending on whom you read.
There is no doubt that the major protagonists were genuine heroic figures to a large body of opinion, in their own lifetimes and since. Equally, they were regarded as the blackest of terrorists to much of the rest of the population of both Scotland and England.
The legend had made Bruce into the hero king, liberator of Scotland, and any grey areas of his life have been airbrushed. Wallace, of course, is painted in easy black and white, as the giant with an anachronistic two-handed claymore, fighting to the very end and never giving in.
The truth – or what can be seen of it now – is different, but open to interpretation. This period was Scotland’s civil war more than anything, with the powerful Comyn, Buchans and Balliols against the determined Bruces for the possession of the Kingdom of Scots. Edward, the opportunist, tried to muscle in and soon realised his expensive mistake, for both sides used him unashamedly to further their own ends.
Nor is he the out-and-out villain, the ‘proud Edward sent hame to think again’ about trying his tyranny on the Scots; to the English he was one of the best kings they ever had and they feared – rightly – his passing, knowing the son was not the father.
I have tried to give Bruce and Wallace and Edward I back their original lives, after a fashion, to show them against the backdrop of the times while also unveiling some of the people, great and small, fictional and historical, who struggled to live in that emerging Scotland.
There are those I have maligned, or used for my own ends. Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, for one. All that is known, for certain, is that she existed, was married to the Earl of Buchan and, at one crucial moment in history, deserted marriage and party to side with her husband’s enemies, by becoming the hereditary MacDuff, Crowner of Scottish kings, and helping to legitimise Bruce.
She suffered for it, being subsequently captured and imprisoned in a cage on the walls of Berwick. Her later life is debatable, the best theory being that she was huckled off to a nunnery, her husband, the earl, having died.
The rest is my intepretation and invention – even her age is a confusion of accounts; her marital status is based on the evidence of her turning her back on her husband in favour of the Bruce faction. That and her lack of children told me much about her personal relationship with Buchan. Her supposed love affair with Bruce is mentioned as a rumour in some sources, probably scurriously anti-Bruce propaganda; her love affair with Hal of Herdmanston is pure invention.
Kirkpatrick is another invention and, though I have based him on the real Sir Roger Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, I have deliberately made him a fictional figure, since the real one crops up, irritatingly, on the English side far too often to be the firm Bruce henchman I needed for the story. Until, that is, he appeared on the scene to complete the murder of the Red Comyn in Greyfriars Church. That killing persuaded me of his darkly murderous character, though he is invention, as is his counterpart, the vicious Malise Bellejambe. Another villain, Malenfaunt, is a legitimate family name, but the saturnine and dubious Sir Robert does not exist.
Hal of Herdmanston, of course, is also fiction – though the Sientclers (or St Clairs, St Clares, Sinclairs or any other variant spelling you care to dream up) are not. They and Roslin became renowned, not least for Rosslyn Chapel – but Herdmanston, though it existed, is now no more than a rickle of unmarked stones in a field in Lothian. The other Sientclers are real enough, save for the Auld Templar, who rode into my head at the start of this tale and was just too magnificent to wave on.
Why the Sientclers at all? Because I needed a powerful Lothian family who could be opposed to the dominant force in the area, Patrick of Dunbar, who, with his son, was a committed supporter of the English right up until the aftermath of Bannockburn. Why Lothian? Because that was the battleground of the Wars of Independence, more so than any other part of Scotland.
There are other lights, lesser or greater, who may or may not be fictional – I hope I have written this well enough to leave the reader guessing most of the time.
Lastly – Edward I was never known as Hammer of the Scots in his lifetime. That name was given to him in the sixteenth century when it was carved on the unsubtle square slab of his tomb. Yet I prefer to believe that it did not spring, full-formed at the time, but came from all the whispers that had gone before.
The start of this is purportedly written by an unknown monk in February of 1329, three months before Robert the Bruce is finally acknowledged as king of Scots by the Pope – and four months before his death.
Think of this as stumbling across a cache of such hidden monkish scribblings which, when read by a flickering tallow candle, reveal fragments of lives lost both in time and legend.
If any interpretations or omissions jar – blow out the light and accept my apologies.
List of Characters
ADDAF the Welshman
Typical soldier of the period, raised from the lands only recently conquered by Edward I. The Welsh prowess with the bow and spear was already noted, but the true power of the former, the Crecy and Agincourt massed ranks, was a strategy still forming during the early Scottish Wars. Like all of the Welsh, Addaf’s loyalty to the English is tenuous.
BADENOCH, Lord of
Any one of two, father and son. Both called Sir John and both members of a powerful branch of the Comyn, they were favoured because, after John Balliol, they had a legitimate right to claim Scotland’s throne as good if not better than the Bruce one. The Badenochs were known as Red Comyn, because they adopted the same wheatsheaf heraldy as the Buchan Comyns, but on a red shield instead of blue. Sir John, second Lord of Badenoch, was also referred to as the Black Comyn because of his grim demeanour – a former Guardian of Scotland, he died in 1302, leaving the title to his son who was known as the Red Comyn. Despite being married to Joan de Valence, sister to Aymer De Valence, Earl of Pembroke, John the Red Comyn was a driving force in early resistance to Edward I – and truer to the Scots cause than Bruce at the time. He was murdered by Bruce and his men in Greyfriars Church, Dumfries in February 1306.
BALLIOL, King John
A member of one of the more powerful families of Scotland and backed by an equally powerful one, the Comyn, John Balliol was elected to the vacant throne of Scotland by a conclave of Scotland’s nobility and prelates, a conclave chaired by King Edward I of England. By the time the Scots discovered they had been duped by Edward, it was too late and subsequent attempts to exert their independence resulted in invasion, defeat and the stripping of the regalia of the kingdom – the Stone of Scone, the Black Rood and the Seal – and also the public humiliation of King John Balliol. His royal coat of arms was
torn from his tunic, leaving him with the name that still resonates down through history – Toom Tabard, or Empty Coat. The Balliol and Comyn were arch-rivals of the Bruces.
BANGTAIL HOB
Fictional character. One of Hal of Herdmanston’s retainers, a typical Scots retinue fighter of the period. Mounted on garrons – small, shaggy ponies – they are armed with Jeddart staffs, a combination spear, pike and hook, and are not cavalry, but mounted infantry. The English counterparts are called ‘hobilars’ because they are mounted on small ponies known as ‘hobbies’ (hence the term hobby-horse). Bangtail and the likes of Tod’s Wattie, Ill Made Jock, Will Elliott and others are the common men of Lothian and the Border regions – the March – who formed the bulk and backbone of the armies on both sides.
BEK, Anthony, Bishop of Durham
Commander of one of the four knightly ‘hosts’ at Falkirk, he led some 400-plus heavy horse.
BELLEJAMBE, Malise
Fictional character, the Earl of Buchan’s sinister henchman and arch-rival of Kirkpatrick.
BISSET, Bartholomew
Fictional character. Notary clerk to Ormsby, Edward’s appointed justiciar of Scotland. His information leads Hal and others on the trail of the mysterious murderers of a master mason found near Douglas.
BRUCE, Robert
Any one of three. Robert, Earl of Carrick, later became King Robert I and is now known as Robert the Bruce. His father, also Robert, was Earl of Annandale (he renounced the titles of Carrick to his son when they fell to him because, under a technicality, he would have had to have sworn fealty to the Comyn for them and would not do that). Finally, there is Bruce’s grandfather, Robert, known as The Competitor from the way he assiduously pursued the Bruce rights to the throne of Scotland, passing the torch on to his grandson.
BUCHAN, Countess of
Isabel MacDuff, one of the powerful, though fragmented, ruling house of Fife. She acted as the official ‘crowner’ of Robert Bruce in 1306, a role always undertaken by a MacDuff of Fife – but the only other one was her younger brother, held captive in England. In performing this, she not only defied her husband but the entire Comyn and Balliol families. Captured later, she was imprisoned, with the agreement of her husband, in a cage hung on the walls of Berwick Castle.