by Robert Low
He’d then thrown himself into a curule chair, draping one leg over the arm.
‘Yet we care about our womenfolk, Lord Hal. I would not be so free and easy with the King as regards these matters. He is not the man you knew, being fresh to the kingship then.’
He’d stared moodily, glassily, into the wine and had spoken almost to himself.
‘Now he is fixed on securing matters, on ensuring that everyone kens he is king. Nothing else matters but that and you step soft round him these days.’
‘I have read the Declaration of the Clergy,’ Hal had told him and had back a surprised look.
‘Have you indeed? They were solicitous of your welfare in the end, to fit you with a copy of that in your cell. Shame we had to poke out Sir William’s best eye, then, for it seems he did not deserve it – what did you think of that document?’
Hal remembered what that question had raised in him. Aggie, the girl who had served him meals, had brought it and she had plucked it from the kirk door, one of the many expensive and laboriously made copies nailed there. She had wanted to know what was in it but could not read, nor dared take it to anyone in Roxburgh who might.
What was in it? At first, the joyous honey of a candle, the first Hal had seen up close in an age and even the blur of tears it brought to his squinting eyes was a joy. The second was the smell: the musk of the parchment, the sharpness of the oak-gall ink – the breath of Outside. That, in the end, was worth more than the Declaration of the Clergy itself, a pompous piece of huff and puff to make Robert Bruce seem the very figure of a king and his sitting on the throne far removed from any hint of murderous usurping.
‘Smoke and shiny watter,’ Hal had told Edward eventually. ‘Bigod, though, they almost convinced me that the Bruce is descended from Aeneas o’ Troy himself. A Joshua and white as new milk on a lamb’s lip.’
Edward had laughed then, sharp and harsh, spilling wine on his knuckles and sucking it off. It came to Hal that the Earl of Carrick was mightily drunk and that it was no strange thing for him.
‘Ah, Christ’s Wounds, we have missed you, Lord Hal – but it is as well you were safe locked up, for plain speaking is not the mood of now, certes. I would not share your view of the bishops’ fine work with my brother. If you even get to see him.’
He’d paused moodily.
‘I mind you were close to him, mark you. You and Kirkpatrick. Like a brace of clever wee dugs working sheep for their master.’
There was old envy and bitterness there, which Hal had decided was best to ignore.
‘How is Kirkpatrick?’ he’d asked, suddenly ashamed that he had not thought of the man since he had been released.
‘Auld,’ Edward had replied shortly. ‘You may not see the King at all,’ he then said. ‘And if you do, it will not be a straight march in to where the Great Man sits, taking your ease in the next seat. Naw, naw. There are steps, neat as a jig: walk forward and stop. Kneel. Never look at him. Never speak to him unless invited.’
This kingdom is not large enough for the pair, Hal had thought, hearing the savage bile in his voice. Then Edward had recovered himself and smiled, drained the goblet and risen.
‘Well, good journey to you. I am away to kick the stones out of Roxburgh. Pity – it is a pretty place.’
Prettier than here, Hal thought now, looking up at the rotting-tooth rock of Edinburgh Castle, while they wound a way through the siege lines.
They passed tents, a black Benedictine who was crouched like a dog to hear confessions, a sway-hipped gaud of shrill, laughing women who stared brazen invites at the newly arrived heroes of Roxburgh. Somewhere behind them a pair coupled noisily while the camp dogs circled, looking to steal anything vaguely edible.
Hal felt the heat of forges, tasted the sweat and stale stink of a thousand unwashed, the savour of cook and smith fire as they picked their way through the tangle and snarl of a siege camp. He was fretted and ruffled by the place even as it seemed to him that he moved in a dream, too slowly and somehow detached from it all.
Too much, too quick after seven years of being a prison hermit, he thought, yet the sights and sounds flared his nostrils with old memories.
The world passed him like a tapestry in a long room: a ragged priest singing psalms; squires rolling a barrel of sand through the mud to flay the maille in it of rust; a hodden-clad haughty with his lord’s hawk on one wrist; two men, armoured head to toe but without barrel-helms, running light sticks at each other in practice tourney, pausing to raise greeting hands to Jamie. Only their eyes could be seen in the face-veiled coifs of maille.
Out beyond them, close under the great rock and walls, was a line of hurdles, pavise protection for the crossbows and archers. Beyond that, close under the looming hunch of Edinburgh’s rock, a cloak of murderous crows picked mournfully through the faint stench of rot and the festering corpses of men who were too far under the enemy bows to be recovered for decent burial.
Men moved in blocks, drilling under the bawls of vintenars; Hal saw that some had only long sticks, as if the spearheads had been removed from their shafts, and that too many were unarmoured, with not even as much as an iron hat.
‘Thrust – thrust. Push.’
The sweating men clustered in a block, hardly knowing right from left, half of them unable to speak the other half’s tongue and none of them having met before; they staggered and stumbled and cursed.
The ones who had done this before, the better-armed burghers and armoured nobiles of the realm, moved smoothly through the drills, but they did not laugh at the rabble; they would all depend on each other when push came to thrust.
Hal moved through this misty, half-remembered world of noise and stink and death, made more grotesque by the shattering bright of banners and tents and surcotes dotting it like blooms.
Brightest of all was the Earl of Moray’s flag, big as a bedsheet, fluttering in the dank breeze. It did not show the arms Hal remembered, but the old lessons dinned into him by his father surfaced like leaping salmon: or, three cushions within a double tressure flory counterflory gules. It was the arms of Randolph, right enough, but new-wrapped in the red and gold royal trappings of Scotland.
He saw Jamie Douglas jerk at his reins, black-browed, but then order his own banner dipped; Sim Craw, knee to knee with Hal, gave a quiet coughing bark of laughter and touched Hal’s arm as the entrance of the rich yellow panoply parted to reveal Randolph himself.
‘The paint is scarce dry on his new earl’s arms,’ Sim whispered hoarsely. ‘Jamie resents having to hand Randolph his due as Earl o’ Moray, him being a mere lord of Douglas. Resents, too, the royal mark in that shield that reminds folk Randolph claims the King’s kinship.’
‘Good Sir James,’ Randolph called in French, sweet as milk so that the grue in it was almost masked. ‘I hear you have triumphed at Roxburgh. Bigod, you are a byword for trickery, certes.’
Hal expected wildness and ranting, but Jamie lost his black brow almost at once and threw back his head; the mock of laughter he flung out was more stinging than any curse.
‘Bigod, Thomas, are you still sittin’ here?’ he lisped back. ‘Would you like some ideas on taking fortresses?’
Flushing, Randolph managed a twist of smile.
‘His Grace the King, of course, demands to see the Good Sir James – and the rescued Sir Henry of Herdmanston. Welcome, my lord. Seven years gone from us and now plucked forth like a plum from a pie.’
Hal, taken aback by the sudden focus on himself, managed only a weak nod, but Randolph had never been part of the circle round Bruce seven years ago, so neither man knew the other save by repute – and Hal’s had moss on it.
The moment was broken by a distant thud and all the heads swivelled and craned skywards.
‘There.’
Hal saw the shaped stone arc downwards, scurf up a huge wad of mud and bounce harmlessly almost to the foot of the hurdles; a protesting smoke of crows rose up off their old feasts.
‘They are trying li
ghter stones out of the fortress,’ Sim muttered. ‘You will note what is absent on our side of the siege.’
Engines. Not a trebuchet nor a mangonel – not so much as a springald. No towers or rams. Nothing.
Jamie Douglas inclined his head in a curt, mocking bow to Randolph.
‘You have sat here since last winter, my lord earl,’ he noted with mock sadness. ‘Shame there does not seem to be a balk of timber that can be laid one on the other, or any trickery to supplant it. Still, I have it that you will persevere, certes, though it is my fervent hope that your lordship manages it before a big stone rolls over your curly pow. It is no good look for an earl, that. God be praised, my lord.’
He went off, laughing and chattering either side to the adoring, trailing everyone after him and leaving the thundercloud of Randolph in his wake. They quit the dripping sour of the camp, cavalcading down from under the black rock along the sullen mile of cramped houses and wynds that led to the peace and dry of Holyrood Abbey, where the King demanded to see the darling captor of Roxburgh.
The way of matters, Sim explained on the way, is not as it was. Randolph and Douglas and the last brother, Edward Bruce, were mighty captains, seasoned in the wars with the Buchan and Comyn which had finally exterminated all Bruce’s enemies.
‘A sore slaughter that,’ Sim declared, grimed with the memory of it and shaking his head in sorrow. ‘The Comyn are harrowed and ploughed under; the Earl of Buchan himself fled south and turned his face to the wall years since, poor auld man that he was – killed of a broken heart, they say.’
He looked sideways at Hal, but saw only a blank stone stare back at him, though Hal had his own thoughts on the poor auld man who had died of a broken heart. If the Earl of Buchan ever had one, Hal wanted to say, you could not have smashed it with hammer and anvil – but he did not have to voice it and was aware that Sim was still able to read him even after seven years.
Buchan, Isabel’s husband and the nemesis of their loving for a decade and more, was gone like smoke. As if he had never been. Hal wondered if Isabel knew. It was as likely that someone would tell her for spite as they would keep her from the comfort of knowing, in marriage at least, she was free at last.
There was more, spilled out from Sim while Jamie Douglas climbed into his finery in order to come formally into the presence of the court. Hal, it seemed, had been forgotten already, though that suited him well enough, as did the corner of canvas and stick that Sim shared as part of the Douglas retinue. Sim, of course, was more outraged than Hal.
‘You are the lord o’ Herdmanston,’ he fumed. ‘Christ betimes, we rescued wee Jamie from the grip of the English when he was a snot-nose, carted him to safety and his da.’
‘Aye. You cuffed his ears if I remembrance it right,’ Hal said with a twist of grin. ‘Has he forgave you yet?’
Sim glowered.
‘He barely had fluff on his balls then, but I should cuff his lug again for this, which is no little insult to a lord of Sientclers. Ignored by the King ye served fine well and stuck in a corner of the Douglas panoply like lumber? It is not proper. And where is your kin of Roslin in this, eh?’
‘That was then, Sim Craw. This is now. Now I am lord of nothing at all, for Herdmanston is still a ruin, you tell me. Roslin’s Sientclers have done enough in keeping the wardship of the place alive at all. Besides, even a corner of this is better and lighter than the stone room I have lived in until recently.’
Sim had no answer to that. He sat with his head bowed, bleared by the memory of the last time he had seen Herdmanston, still black with the seven-year-old stain of fires, the floors fallen in and the weeds sprouting from the rotting-tooth of it. All the Herdmanston folk had gone to Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin, yet their own field strips were at Herdmanston and too valuable to let lie, so some were back at the plough and the harvest, living in cruck houses under the ruins of the old tower.
‘It would not take much to return it,’ he added after telling Hal this, but then fell silent. None of the old riders remained, the ones who had once followed Hal, sure of that lord’s ability to pluck gold out of a cesspit; they had died at Stirling’s brig and Callendar’s woods and on every herschip since. Those who had survived had long since grown too old for the business after – Christ’s Wounds – fifteen years of fighting.
‘Nearer twenty,’ Hal corrected when Sim hoiked this up and Sim grew even more morosely silent at the truth of it. Out of all that time, Hal thought bleakly, Isabel and I have had no more than a year and a day in total together, tallied in months here, a week there.
Yet he would give as much for the same again.
‘The new lord of Badenoch keeps her fastened,’ Sim said suddenly, as if reading Hal’s mind. Hal looked up and saw the grim gimlet of Sim’s eyes, pouched and rheumy, but hard enough still.
The new lord, Hal thought, and almost laughed aloud. The youth Kirkpatrick had almost killed in Greyfriars, until Hal had prevented it, thinking enough blood had been spilled on a holy altar with the death of the father, the Red Comyn.
‘Aye,’ Sim agreed, seeing that chase itself across Hal’s face. ‘The stripling is grown to man and come into his lordship of Badenoch and all the attainments thereof. Mind you, the most of it he can actually lay his hands on without an army at his back consists of Malise Bellejambe and Badenoch has confirmed that man in the duty once given him by the Earl of Buchan: keep her in her cage.’
Bellejambe. Sim saw Hal’s eyes turn to haar on grey water.
‘I had hoped Malise Bellejambe was gone down the brae,’ Hal said flatly. ‘Then hoped the opposite, for I want to end his life myself.’
‘He lives yet,’ Sim said, and then laughed dryly. ‘Greyer, as we all are these days, but his heart is as black as ever, I hear.’
Bellejambe, who was guilty of murder by knife and poison, who had snaked his way after Isabel on behalf of her husband until, finally, he had coiled round his capture. Hal did not want to think of what he had done to her, was almost rushed off the bench he sat on with the mad, frantic urge to charge down to Berwick.
It washed over him like fire, sank and ebbed, leaving him trembling and bitter with the reality. Seven years detached from swordplay or even wearing maille or riding a horse. Nothing left of his Herdmanston lands but the title. No men at his back and no future at his front. Some gallant rescuing knight, he thought, who has even been forgotten by the King I helped put on the throne.
But not by Isabel. He was sure of that and it nagged him like a knife in the ribs, the knowledge that she had squatted in her cage for seven years, willing him to her rescue. It was a scorching force that, every now and then, drove him to his feet as if to rush there alone and beat the walls down. The effort of staying shook him like ague and it had been this way for all of the seven years; the old weals on his knuckles told of the blood he had spilled hammering uselessly on stone and door.
An hour later, the world changed again when a squire came up and declared that the King requested Sir Hal of Herdmanston’s presence in his chambers. The boy said it politely enough, for he was court-skilled enough to realize that there might be more to this old man than poor clothes and a bad haircut, since the King was not only seeing him in private, but had requested it.
‘Come as you are,’ the servant added, seeing Hal hesitate and look down at his tunic. Sim laid a hand on Hal’s wrist as he started to move after the servant.
‘Dinna fash when you see him,’ he hissed, his Lenten fish-breath close to Hal’s ear.
Which was not a comfort to a man anxious about meeting a king he had not seen for so long. Eight years ago, the Bruce had been freshly crowned, awkward under it and hag-haunted by what he had done to the Red Comyn in Greyfriars.
Even behind Roxburgh’s walls, Hal had heard the argument, the monks of Bishops Wishart and Lamberton piercing the stones with their shouted debates, that it had not been red murder because there was no ‘forethocht’ in it. Rather, according to the carefully primed monks, it was a chaude-
melle, a ‘suddenty of temper’ brought on by the lord of Badenoch’s provocations. Besides, Hal thought as he clacked into the great nave on his thick-soled shoes, the new Joshua of Scotland could not be so base as to have deliberately sought the murder of a rival.
But he remembered the stricken Bruce, seemingly struck numb and appalled at his act of temper. Seemingly. Even now, Hal was hagged by the possibility of mummery, for the speed of Bruce’s recovery, the smoothness with which Kirkpatrick and himself had been sent to make sure the Red Comyn was indeed dead, all left an iced sliver of doubt.
The bloody altar and the high, metal stink rolled out of Hal’s old thoughts, so that he paused and stood, mired in memory. The way Badenoch’s heels, those vain, inch-lifted heels on his fancy boots, had rattled like a mad drummer as he kicked his way out of the world, splashing his own puddled gore up even as Kirkpatrick made sure …
‘Sir Henry.’
The familiar voice wrenched him back and he stood in front of a clean altar under the great bloom of stone and glass that formed the nave window of the abbey. A figure, silhouetted against the stain of light, walked forward and the servant boy stepped back, bowing.
‘Hal. God be praised.’
‘For ever and ever,’ Hal repeated by rote and then, remembering too late, bobbed his head and added: ‘Your Grace.’
He was aware of figures and the servant, dismissed with a wave, sliding off into the shadows, then he looked up from the floor, blinking, as Bruce swung round into plain view.
The height and the body were the same, tall and hardened, unthickened by age – he must be in his fortieth year, Hal thought wildly, yet his hair is still mostly dark.
But the face. Hail Mary, the face …
It had coarsened, the lines of age in it deepened to grooves, the skin lesioned and greyish, so that he looked older than his years – Christ’s Wounds, Hal thought, he looks older than Sim. The right cheek – that old wound, Hal remembered, given to him by Malenfaunt in a tourney à l’outrance – was a thick weal of cicatrice. As if in balance there was the slash taken in the fighting round Methven, a gully of old scar tissue that began above the left brow, broke over the eye and continued down the inside of his cheek almost to the edge of his mouth.Two such dire wounds would have been bad enough, but there was more in that face than hard usage, Hal realized with a sudden shock. There was now clear reason for the whispers of sickness – or even the famed Curse of Malachy.