The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas

by Glen Craney

  James spun on the bishop. “You planned this?”

  Lamberton shared a conspiratorial smile with the French knight as he dusted off James’s shirt. “Lord D’Argentin has agreed to take you into his training.”

  James rubbed his bruise. “I can do well enough on my own.”

  “Aye,” Lamberton said. “Well enough to get your head lopped off.”

  “Let’s see what you can do, shall we?” The instructor scanned his students and called out, “Rouen!”

  A helmeted student, shorter than the others, stepped forward.

  D’Argentin ordered up a helmet, padded gambeson vest, and broadsword for James. “There you are, Scottie. Alors, show us your dextérité with the blade.”

  James reluctantly put on the gear and tested the weapon; it was lighter and had more torque than those forged in Scotland. The student confronting him held his sword vertical to protect his torso. He accepted that he was shorter than most Parisian men his age, but he was a head taller than this opponent, and he was confident he’d have no problem thumping the pipsqueak.

  They circled each other, neither willing to make the first move.

  D’Argentin cried, “This hole will be my grave before you strike!”

  Fed up with the ridicule, James rushed at his opponent’s exposed leg, but the student whipsawed his blade and pinned his sword hand against his thigh.

  “Unclench!” the instructor shouted.

  Shoved away, James stumbled to the ground. He erupted to his feet again and lunged wildly, but was sent sprawling from his own momentum. He looked up to find his opponent offering his sword in surrender. He laughed at seeing the pampered Parisian already worn down. Typical Frank—all élan, no stamina. He dropped his weapon and swaggered up to accept the concession. When the extended handle was nearly in his reach, the student retracted the blade and buffeted him on the head with its knob.

  He came back to mindfulness convinced that he was suffering from a concussion hallucination: Above him hovered the vision of a comely female face, framed by short auburn hair cut like a man’s shocks. He heard d’Argentin’s distant voice echoing in his head. Are you still with us, Scottie? He managed to stand, only to be sent to his knees again—this time by confusion—as his opponent removed his helmet.

  Not a man, but a lass stared down at him with the same long-lashed eyes and pert red lips that he had just banished from his bollixed brain.

  Lamberton and the students cackled at his gawk of surprise.

  D’Argentin consoled him with a hand to his shoulder. “Head high, Scottie. She has bested most of them here.”

  The armoured maiden offered to assist him to his feet. “My name is Jeanne. You are not injured, I hope.”

  James repulsed her reach and, angrily yanking off his helmet, searched for cuts. Did the scheming wench deem herself immune from all rules of chivalry? He protested, “You presented your sword in surrender!”

  D’Argentin stole James’s sword by its cutting end and jabbed him with the hilt knob to demonstrate the famous Murder Stroke. “Count yourself fortunate that she did not separate your hollow skull from your shoulders, monsieur. A spoken confirmation must accompany a concession.”

  “Sharp practice!” James cried. “You Franks are full of deceit!”

  D’Argentin kept poking him. “And the charnel fields are fertilized with the rot of dupes like you. Tell us, what is the purpose of combat?”

  “To gain the field with honor.”

  “Cela est absurde! Do you think the Moors and Flemish care about our honor? Two hundred of our chevaliers drowned in their precious honor at Coutrai.” D’Argentin circled him, lecturing and prodding. “First maxim. Know your weapon. What is the most dangerous part of the broadsword?”

  “The blade,” James muttered. “Any idiot would know that.”

  D’Argentin wailed him with the knob and sent him curling into a ball. “The hilt, you Highland bouffon! The hilt! Why?”

  When James shrugged, clueless, Jeanne volunteered an answer for him, rubbing in his humiliation. “The forging is strongest at the grip.”

  After being dragged through the mud, James recovered to his feet and checked his scalp for blood. Glaring at the duplicitous Amazon, he retrieved his blade and retreated a step, watching for her next underhanded ploy.

  “Cross guard!” the instructor ordered.

  Jeanne raised her hands to her face and turned the blade’s point down. James saw an opening and attacked, but the lass rotated the blade and spun his sword from his grasp.

  D’Argentin flew into a prancing fit. “Keep low, Scottie! And spread your hands!” He pushed James aside and took the position confronting Jeanne. With a series of quick maneuvers, the instructor sent his female student backtracking. “Offense and defense at the same time! Every stroke sets up three thrusts hence! Advance with the foot on the same side as your sword hand! Four openings!” He punctuated each shout with a sharp blow. “Shoulder droite!” Thump! “Shoulder sinistral!” Thwack! “Leg droite!” Thump! “Leg sinistral!” The knight’s final smote alighted Jeanne on her backside.

  James thoroughly enjoyed that dénouement—until he found d’Argentin’s blade aimed at the space between his brows.

  “Does he show promise?”

  That sweet voice drove the French students and instructor to their knees.

  James escaped from the blade’s threat to find Princess Isabella standing on the bluff above the dueling field, a few steps away. How long had she been watching his embarrassing comeuppance at the hands of this sword-wielding girl? Accompanying her was the same retinue of ladies who had been at the palace during the dance. They batted their eyelashes at him and flapped their fans like geese wings.

  D’Argentin arose from bent knee and straightened his spine, trying to make his aging frame appear taller. “My lady, you honor us with your unexpected presence.”

  “I wished to take one last stroll along the river.”

  Lamberton came forward and, kissing her hand, led her down the bluff. “Surely you will have many more.”

  That expressed hope chased Isabella’s smile. “I leave for England on the morrow to meet my future husband.” She stole a furtive glance at James to emphasize that this encounter was no coincidence. “I know not when I shall return.”

  Lamberton searched for words of solace. “You will be dearly missed. We can only pray that France’s temporary loss will be England’s education.”

  Isabella came nearer to James and feigned an attempt at recognition. “Your scribe, if I recall, Bishop? Odd training for one meant for the monastery.”

  The students stifled smirks and chuckles—all but Jeanne, who held a nettled frown, as if detecting more than just a passing interest from the princess in that observation.

  James shot a lording glare at the jealous French girl who was gripping and regripping her sword, apparently pining for a rematch. Now she knew what it felt like to be on her heels. Prodded to courtesy by the bishop, he turned from his irked opponent and offered a kiss to Isabella’s wrist. While bent, he stole another brandish, sideways glance at Jeanne, but quickly lost his smirk, remembering that this might be his last opportunity to speak to Isabella, perhaps forever. He could never reveal their unlikely friendship. During their many secret but platonic trysts, the princess had made great strides in educating him in the ways of a gentleman, including giving him instruction in the French language and the lute.

  Isabella remained in his gaze too long for propriety. Daubing a tear, she looked to the sun to ascribe blame for the irritation and reluctantly broke off their silent exchange. She began walking toward the palace, but then turned back. “Lord d’Argentin, you did not answer me.”

  “My lady?”

  “Does our transplanted Scot here show promise?”

  D’Argentin regarded James with suspicion, questioning why the princess would take interest in a lowly foreign squire. “Too soon to know.”

  Isabella stole a last glance of regret at James,
her effort at flirtation dying with a sigh of resignation. Trying to mask the emotion in her voice, she gamely advised the instructing knight, one of her many admirers: “Then you must not divulge all of our secrets to him, no?”

  X

  BELLE FOLLOWED THE COMYN MEN up the puddled steps of Berwick Castle and looked down upon the rows and rows of new rooftops gabled in the London fashion. Married off two months ago to Tabhann, she had thought nothing could exceed that misery; but now, witnessing the tribulations of her fellow Scots here in the Borders, she felt her heart breaking again.

  Almost nothing remained of the port that she remembered from her first visit here as a child. The English had built thick curtain walls to the banks of the Tweed for protection against raids, and the adjacent burgh, transformed into a bastide with its own formidable ramparts, had been repopulated with Yorkshiremen whose forges now hummed with military preparations. Beyond the gate lay grassy mounds over the mass graves of those massacred here nine years ago, the only reminder left to bear witness to Longshanks’s brutality.

  The guards herded the Comyns and her into a waiting line of five hundred Scot nobles who had been summoned, under the penalty of treason, to appear and swear loyalty to the Plantagenet crown. Forced to stand in the rain for an hour, they were finally admitted into the shelter of the great hall. Near a raging hearth, Longshanks sat on a raised platform watching the arrivals as Robert Clifford roughly check them for weapons. Accompanying the king were his son, Edward Caernervon, and his Privy Council, which included the Earl of Gloucester, Hugh Cressingham, the Treasurer of the Realm, and William Ormsby, the English-appointed Chief Justiciar for Scotland.

  Belle scanned the hall and saw an unfamiliar face on the dais. At Caernervon’s side sat a slender, sable-haired knight who playfully nudged the prince while whispering jests at the expense of her forlorn countrymen. Raffishly coiffed with curls and trimmed beard glossed to a point, the brazen churl wore an outlandish tunic of crimson silk sewn lavishly with sparkling gemstones. Watching him preen without shame, she suspected the man, so untutored as he was in the virtue of Christian modesty, to be none other than the notorious Piers Gaveston, a Gascon dandy whose tongue was said to be as cutting as his sword. There was something so unnatural about his mincing presentment that she was at the same time repulsed and incapable of diverting her gaze.

  Caernervon’s future wife, Isabella, sitting on the prince’s left, also witnessed the Gascon’s risqué conduct. She turned toward Belle with a pointed glance of sickened anguish so shocking in its familiarity that Belle could not shake the absurd feeling that the princess somehow knew her intimately.

  Shoved toward the swearing stand, Red Comyn discovered the Bruces standing in the fore of the procession. Enraged by what he perceived as an end-run around his right to the throne, the chieftain attempted to elbow his way ahead of them. “The Comyns must be heard first!”

  Clifford buffeted Red’s yapping jaw with the back of his hand, sending the chieftain reeling. Laughing, the officer regaled the king, “They trample themselves to kiss your ring, my lord!”

  A groan of humiliation rose up from the Scots—from all, that is, but the Bruces, who nodded with satisfaction at seeing Red Comyn receive such a bruising welcome. Old Bruce the Competitor, tottering and disoriented, was supported at the elbows by five grandsons so varied in features and temperament that none would have guessed them to be kin. Wrapped in the black robe of a Cambridge scholar, Alexander Bruce was the shortest and fairest of the brood, with his soft, delicate lines and smooth skin protected by days spent in libraries. Edward Bruce, the second eldest, was stout, edgy, constantly in motion, pushing always, his sienna hair as wild and raging as his smoldering hazel eyes. Unlike their older siblings, twins Thomas and Nigel had inherited the optimistic nature of their Irish mother, and even in this hour of confrontation and discord, they traded broad, hail-thee-well grins with comrades.

  Yet it was Robert Bruce whose firm stance and determined brow made clear that he now governed the clan. Although an accomplished knight well into his twenties, he was rumored to prefer the comforts of the English court to the demands of his Scottish rank. His entrance had been met with icy glares from his fellow countrymen, for there was talk that he had tarried in bringing up his troops to aid Wallace at Falkirk. But that was just slander, Belle knew, spread by the Comyns to shunt responsibility for their own malfeasance.

  Longshanks ignored Red’s protests and offered his jewel-spangled hand to the lady accompanying the eldest Bruce brother. “Dearest Liz. I’ll never forgive Rob for stealing you from my court. I trust marriage is agreeable?”

  The former Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of one of Longshanks’s most valued allies, the Earl of Ulster, curtsied stiffly, allowing her strawberry blonde curls to fall over a green bodice that had been expertly tapered to announce her ample bosom. “It is all I dreamed of and more, Sire.”

  Belle found Robert’s choice for his second wife troubling. His first, the Scot daughter of the Earl of Mar, had died two years ago in childbirth, leaving him a weakly daughter, Marjorie. Robert had remarried into high nobility, true, but she would have preferred another Scot lady, and one a bit less arrogant. Elizabeth was tall, freckled, and big-boned; every inch of her impressive frame, which tended toward a meaty fleshiness, was cast in vibrant shades of red. She could have been one of those fire-haired warrior queens who once ruled from the sacred mound of Tara. And yet, there was none of that Irish acceptance of fate’s inevitable damnation in her temperament. Raised in the rarefied air of the London court, Elizabeth reportedly insisted on the finest of accommodations and was said to despise the brutish journeys across the Ulster moorlands to visit the Irish holdings of her father.

  Longshanks draped his vulture-winged arms across the shoulders of Robert and Edward Bruce. “Ah, lads, I had no doubt you’d rush to my side. Children, Rob! Has it not been a year? And still our lovely Liz has not bloomed? Delay much longer, and I’ll suspect you of being distracted from your husbandly duties.” He playfully slapped the back of Edward’s head, each tap more forceful. “And you, Eddie? Not a word since you took leave from my household?”

  Damned from birth with a face that never camouflaged a thought, Edward Bruce tried to protest, “That arrangement was not by my—”

  Robert silenced his impulsive brother with pinch to the nape of his neck in what only appeared to be sibling affection. As if to gain a distance from the taint of his fellow defeated Scots, Robert made it a point to speak the London dialect that he had learned as a boy in the Plantagenet court. “I have been occupied by troubles in our Galloway domains, my lord. Comyn and his outlaws harass me without cease. If you would recognize my right to the kingship—”

  “I pay your debts!” Longshanks screamed, suddenly turning apoplectic. “Do you now expect me to buy you a kingdom?”

  Robert was driven onto his heels by the swift alteration in the king’s mood. “My lord, I have been a loyal vassal—”

  “Loyal to my overly generous purse!” Longshanks shouted so shrilly that his hounds sprawled near the hearth erupted with howling. He contemptuously surveyed the slump-shouldered Scots. “He who rids himself of shit does good business.”

  A wave of muttering rippled through the scowling Scots.

  Seeing the Competitor baring his toothless gums in a half-snarl, the king settled into his chair and ordered old Bruce to the base of the dais. “I shall hear it from you first, Lord Annandale.”

  Robert tried to mitigate the king’s ire by stepping in front of his grandfather, but Clifford forced the Competitor to the fore. Shaking with the palsy, old Bruce shuffled pitifully to the dais, begrudged a difficult collapse to his knee, and mumbled the oath. Having swallowed his enforced dose of shame, he glared his grandsons to their prostrations.

  Robert was the last to descend.

  The English barons eased their martial stances, placated with this, the most significant of the many debasements that would follow that morning.

 
The Earl of Gloucester, cousin to the Bruces, assisted the Competitor back to his feet. Deprived of his dream to become king of Scotland, the Bruce patriarch could only offer him a browbeaten nod in gratitude for the kindness.

  Amused by their groveling prostrations, Longshanks turned next to Red Comyn. “You should be quite accomplished at this exercise, Comyn. God knows, you’ve practiced giving oath to me so many times, we’ve lost count.”

  The chieftain, still woozy from Clifford’s blow, stumbled to his knees. “My lord, as always, the Comyns shall keep true with you. May I present my son, the Lord of Badendoch, and my nephew, the Lord of Buchan.”

  While Tabhann and Cam mealy-mouthed their oaths, Longshanks squinted beyond their shoulders and found Belle still standing. Seeing her shove away Red’s hand when he tried to pull her down, the king mulled this rare demonstration of defiance. “Your men have barked, Comyn. It seems your women will not. I’m not surprised. My houndsmen tell me the orneriest bitches always mate with the puniest males. A law of nature.”

  Red labored under the delusion that Belle, not he, had been insulted. “You will remember her, my lord. At your behest, she is the wife of my nephew.”

  “Her father’s skull still hangs from Stirling Bridge,” Clifford reminded the king. “The son of MacDuff continues to prosecute his banditry in the Selkirk.”

  Longshanks did not receive the reaction that he had expected from the mention of Ian MacDuff’s death. Instead, he found Belle distracted by the block of limestone resting below his feet. “Do you recognize it, my lady?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Of course not. What was I thinking, asking such a question? Your crass traditions denied you the right to remain in its presence. I am your liberator. Gaze on it to your heart’s desire. I believe you call it your Stone of Destiny.”

  Belle stared dumbfounded at the crude lump. Iron rings had been driven into its sides so that it could be carried like a lump of rock salt. Could this disappointing chunk of common quarry truly be the Stone of Miracles? When it slowly dawned on her what base treatment it had suffered in captivity, she stumbled from faintness and nearly fell.