by Robert Low
‘In the name of God, girl, shut up.’
Mary Bruce was stern as a stone Virgin, but her French was pitch perfect and precise; Marjorie was past all that, the fear rippling her body with weeping.
‘Auntie, they will kill us all,’ she wailed and Mary slapped her shoulder, then gathered her into her bosom in the next moment.
‘Swef, swef,’ she soothed. ‘They will not kill us – and speak French. You are the daughter of a king, girl, not some Lothians cottar.’
Isabel, who knew some fine Lothians cottars, thought of Sim Craw and Dog Boy and what they would do if imprisoned in the undercroft of Closeburn among the remains of old stores. Would think themselves well off, Isabel was sure, being warm and dry and finding old cheese rind and mildewed barley with which to make a meal.
Marjorie subsided to hiccups, for which Isabel was glad at least. Mark you, you could scarcely fault the girl, a child on the edge of womanhood, from being a gibber of fear after what had happened at Tain.
It had been a bad idea, as far as Isabel was concerned, to head north of Inverness and the chance of a boat to Orkney, where Norway held sway – and another Bruce sister was queen. That sanctuary led through Buchan and Ross lands, both those earls on the hunt for rebels; it came as no surprise to Isabel when wild-bearded men snarled out of the wet, foggy bracken of the hills and stampeded the column into flight.
They had reached St Duthac’s shrine, with its four weathered pillars marking the sanctuary of the garth and, by that time, four men had already been lost. The Duthac garth had been an illusion, for the Earl of Ross himself had curled a lip and strode into it, his men overwhelming the last resistance in a welter of blood; it was then Marjorie had started into screaming and sobbing and was only now subsiding.
Mary Bruce had drawn herself up to her full height, which was taller than the cateran who approached her, licking lascivious lips; she had stared down her nose at him, then dared him, in good Gaelic, to lay a finger on the sister of Scotland’s king.
Whether the cateran was impressed or not would remain a mystery, since the Earl of Ross had beaten his liegeman to a bloody pulp with a flute-headed mace and hanged the remains from a pillar at St Duthac’s shrine to remind the rest of his prowling wolves that he meant what he said when he told them to leave off the women.
The setting for this slaughter only emphasized that the Earl of Ross did not even consider God held power greater than himself.
‘Take a good look,’ Mary Bruce had said to Ross when the bloody remains were hauled up. ‘That is your fate for having violated this shrine and laid hands on a queen.’
The Earl of Ross had merely shrugged and smiled; his deference was all kept for the Queen herself, strangely aloof from all this and Isabel knew then that she would go one way and all the other women another – that the Queen would not be harmed because she was the daughter of Ulster.
Which was exactly what happened; without a backward glance, Elizabeth de Burgh had gone off, bundled up warmly and ridden away, while Mary, Marjorie, Isabel and the tirewomen had been huckled into carts to be transported south.
Isabel had seen Niall Bruce and Atholl, with chains at wrist and ankles, being dragged along in the wake of the carts, but only once, and when they arrived at a nunnery in the dark, the pair of them were gone. With grim irony, the nunnery was Elcho, though the prioress and all the nuns she had known had been replaced.
Now they were here in Closeburn and Isabel was no wiser as to their fate. South, probably – Carlisle or further still, away from any possible rescue.
She heard the familiar jingle, then the grate of a huge key in a fat lock: Dixon, their shuffling old gaoler, his great blued lips pursed.
‘Ye have a veesitor,’ he said, and nodded his fleshy head towards Isabel. ‘The Maister entertains him with wine and sends me to allow time to be presentable.’
Isabel snorted.
‘And how, pray, am I to achieve that?’ she demanded. ‘Empty this barley sack and wear it? Certainly that is more presentable than the dress I have on.’
‘Aye, aye, betimes,’ muttered Dixon, mournfully.
‘Suitable for this guest room, mark you,’ Isabel scathed.
‘Aye, aye,’ Dixon replied and turned one glaucous eye on her, the other shut as if considering.
‘The reason ye have this room is not because we cleared it out,’ he mourned, ‘but because it has been ate oot, rind an all, by the chiels we have crowding in. It will be a hard winter for us, ladies, when ye have passed on from here, since you and all those with ye have ruined us from hoose and hame.’
‘Then it seems clear I should hang on to the sack with the barley in it,’ Isabel replied tartly. ‘Bring on my “veesitor”, gaoler.’
‘Who could it be?’ Marjorie asked when the man was gone, and Isabel heard the hope of rescue or ransom in her voice; she looked at Mary Bruce and they shared the unspoken knowledge that it was unlikely to be either.
It was, as Isabel suspected, her husband.
He came in fur-wrapped against a chill that the women had grown used to but clearly bothered him and followed by the loathsome shadow of Malise Bellejambe. Her husband stood straight, Isabel saw, with a squared hint of the powerful shoulders left, his dirty grey grizzle of beard cocked haughtily.
Yet he was yellowed and gaunt, the hair on his head lank and the fur wrapping made him look like he had been caught in the embrace of a mangy, winter-woken bear and was struggling to break free.
She felt a leap of pity then, and an echo of feeling at his eyes, pouched and rheumed and unutterably weary – but it was an old statue, that feeling, the marble glory of it worn and weathered, clogged and smothered with the moss of neglect and anger.
Yet the death of Badenoch must have hit him hard, she thought, not to mention the forced alliance with the English he had always struggled against, because the Bruce stood on the other side.
Their endless feud was killing them both, she thought.
‘Ma Dame,’ he said icily. ‘You are fair caught. I am vindicated at last.’
She heard the cold in him and felt only sadness at it.
‘A great nation of vindicated corpses, that’s us,’ Mary Bruce answered and he turned his wet fish eyes to her, raking over the trembling Marjorie on the way.
‘Quiet you,’ he said with a stunning calm and a chilling dismissal of any deference to her rank. ‘You are bound for Roxburgh, lady, while the child is bound for a nunnery somewhere south. Count yourself fortunate to be alive – though you will not think it when you find the plan Longshanks has for you.’
Marjorie started to wail at the thought of being parted and Buchan grimaced with distaste, then turned his gaze back on Isabel.
‘You are bound for Berwick, where you will share the same fate, but on my own terms,’ he said, which was sinister but left Isabel none the wiser. He jerked his head and, obedient as a belly-fawning mastiff, Malise moved to her, his grin feral in the dark ruin of his face.
‘Malise will see to it. I commend you to his care, ma Dame. I commend you to God, for this is the last time you will see me. Never ask to do so, for it will be refused.’
He saw her, still lush and ripe – yet her face was haggard and there was snow in the autumn russet of her hair. She was, Buchan thought, a woman in the same way that a lion could be called a cat.
The memory hit him of the power he had had over her, the punishments he had inflicted for her transgressions, when he had gloried in her being stripped to ‘twa beads, yin o them sweat’. Her transgressions …
‘The last gift I shall give you will be the head of your lover when we find him, which you may care to look on before it is put on a spike.’
Which at least let her know that Hal was alive and free – and that she would live herself, though the triumphant sickle on Malise’s face made her wonder if that was preferable. When she turned to her husband again, there was only a hole in the air where he had been.
‘Come, lady.’
I
t was not a request and the hand Malise held out was not an invitation. With a chilling stone sinking in her belly, she looked into his too-bright eyes and realized she had been handed to her worst nightmare.
Closeburn Vill, Annandale
Vigil of St Athernaise of Fife, December, 1306
They came down to the English-dominated lands of the Bruce in a mourn of snow and sleet, stumbling from abbey to priory through brutal, metalled days of silvered frost and skies of iron and pewter. They were deferential and pious or garrulously merry when circumstances demanded it and no-one spared a single suspicious glance for two packmen, sweating south like snails with their lives on their backs.
Kirkpatrick had purchased the cheapjack wares from two delighted mongers paid more than they could earn in a year; one of them announced that he was quitting the travelling life for good and now Hal knew why, even as he applauded the disguise in it.
‘It is perfect,’ Kirkpatrick enthused, watching Hal eye up the hide packs, black with old grease against the weather. ‘We are travelling at the right time, coming up to the Christ’s Mass.’
He had that right, too, for they were in great demand for ribbons and silk thread and needles from folk who could ill afford the cost. It had become the fashion for burghers, cottars and serfs to give gifts to the manor ‘for the glory of Christ’s Mass’ and, though an acorn tied with bright ribbon, or a sacking purse sewed up with silk thread seemed nothing, it was a sacrifice to folk who had little to begin with. And was done, Hal saw, out of only the hope of future favour.
So they tramped, horseless, down the days towards Closeburn, where Kirkpatrick had said Isabel lay.
‘Three women,’ he had told Hal. ‘Taken to my kinsman’s holding, together with Niall Bruce and the Earl of Atholl.’
‘The women might be gone,’ Hal had answered morose and hopeful at the same time. The ‘or worse’ was left unsaid, for he could not be sure, in his sinking cold belly, that a vengeful King Edward could kill Niall and an earl of the realm and yet spare the women.
‘Aye, right enough,’ Kirkpatrick had declared, ‘but I am charged to seek out the King’s sister and wee daughter, so that is what I will do. Will you come?’
There was no refusing it and he had made what provision he could for those he left behind. He remembered the thrashing Sim Craw, soaking his pallet branches with sweat and steaming in the cold air, while Dog Boy and Chirnside Rowan looked on.
‘Take him to the King,’ he had said. ‘Neil Campbell will help. When that is done, go where ye will.’
Chirnside Rowan, who wanted home, nodded agreement, but Hal could hardly find the courage to look Dog Boy in the face and, when he did so, his heart creaked like a laden bridge.
‘I ken,’ he said softly, ‘that there is little left at Herdmanston, less at my kinsman’s Roslin. I may never return to it, even if this venture is a success, for I am outlaw and there is nothing for me there.’
Dog Boy felt stunned by it, could not move nor speak.
‘I took you from Douglas,’ Hal went on, speaking faster now, as if to rid himself of the words, ‘at the behest of Jamie’s stepma and never regretted it for an eyeblink. Now I release you. Find Jamie and tell him this – he will take you into his care and, Heaven willing, you will both be back at Douglas when God and all His Saints wake up in this kingdom.’
The youth’s face was with him now, as he stood in the snow-humped riggs of a backcourt, feeling the wet cold seep up through his ruined soles. Pale and stricken at the thought of never seeing Hal again, the Dog Boy had brimmed his tears over and they had clutched briefly; the ache of it now was sharper than the keening snow wind.
Kirkpatrick tapped on a door, then again, then stood away from the faint light that would be spilled when someone came to answer it. He was grinning to himself when he saw it was her, her hand raised with a smoking crusie in it, the other clutching the wrap of warm wool to her as she stood, peering uncertainly.
‘Who is it there?’
He stepped forward, into the falling faintness of the crusie’s glow.
‘Annie,’ he said. ‘Bigod, yer as lovely as ever ye were.’
Hal was astounded at the sharp yelp and the plunge of darkness as the crusie fell to sizzle in the snow. There was a pause and all their eyes adjusted.
‘You …’ she said and Kirkpatrick, still grinning, nodded. The blow took him by surprise, a calloused round-house slap that whipped his head sideways. Then Hal heard her burst into tears and Kirkpatrick felt the soft warmth of her, flung into his arms.
‘Annie,’ he said, working the jaw to see if any teeth had been loosened.
‘Ye cantrip, reeking dungheap,’ she replied and sprang from him, hands on hips and the wrap flowing free so that Hal saw the considerable matronly curves of her through a dress too thin for the biting wind. She will catch chill, he thought wildly, then looked right and left to see if any of the nearest of her neighbours had come to spy.
‘I will return, ye said,’ she accused. ‘And so ye have – a dozen years later.’
‘Fifteen,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and then wished he had not piled the truth on it.
‘I was a lad,’ he added weakly. ‘With scarce any chin-hair.’
Her voice lowered too, with a swift backward glance – o-ho, thought Hal, there is a husband in this mix.
‘And I scarce had quim fluff,’ Annie hissed, ‘neither of which stopped ye.’
‘Ye were not unwilling,’ Kirkpatrick replied desperately, for this was not entirely on the track he had planned. But he and Hal saw her face soften. It was plumped and blurred a little from the heart-stopper Kirkpatrick remembered, but still brought a stirring in him. First love, he thought with a sudden ache of loss and a leap of envy at what the hidden man in the house behind her had achieved over him.
‘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.’