The Honor Due a King (The Bruce Trilogy)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  “Eight years, my good James.” I straightened and clapped a hand on James’ arm so fiercely he reeled sideways. “Eight. Long. Years!”

  In minutes, I had donned my musty clothes and followed him from the abbot’s house, through the transept door and back into the nave. A flood of light rushed in from the main door, reflecting dully off the tiled floor to obscure the figures who now made their way toward the altar where we stood waiting. They were nearly to us before I recognized my nephew, Thomas Randolph, his fair hair darkened by rain and his heavy wool cloak hanging lank and sodden from his shoulders.

  “Make way. Make way!” Randolph pushed the palms of his hands wide to clear a pathway down the middle of the nave. Groggy soldiers yawned and rolled aside. Those closest to the middle staggered to their feet and scampered back to avoid being stepped on.

  “We made it as far as Dryburgh yesterday,” Randolph said as he approached, the dark crescents beneath his pale blue eyes making him look more tired than any of the rest of us, “but we could go no further. I begged her to let me send for you, but she would not waste the time waiting.” He sighed, his shoulders sagging, and moved aside. “I fear the queen is gravely ill.”

  Behind him, Gil de la Haye carried my Elizabeth in his arms. The joy that should have been in my heart fled when I saw her like that – her limbs as limp as wet cloth, all color gone from her face, her eyes lackluster and barely open. I took her from Gil’s arms and clutched her to my breast as I sank to the floor.

  “Elizabeth,” I whispered into her cold ear. “My love, is it really you? What ails you? Oh, please, for love of life, say something so I may hear your voice again and know it is you I am holding and not your ghost.”

  She stirred, weak as a fledgling fallen from its nest. Her eyelids fluttered as she turned her head toward me, but when she parted her lips to speak and drew a shallow breath, a fierce cough wracked her chest. I stroked the wisps of hair from her feverish face until it subsided.

  “Robert?” she whispered.

  “Aye, my love. ’Tis me. Dear, sweet Elizabeth, you really are home.” I pressed my whiskered chin to the top of her head and swallowed back bittersweet tears. Her heartbeat was weak. Every breath came as a struggle. She coughed again and curled tighter in my arms. I glanced at Walter. “Broth, please. A blanket. Something.”

  Walter backed away, but his eyes were set on someone. I looked beyond Randolph to see the rest of the party. A young woman, slight and fair-haired and beautiful smiled at me with an aching familiarity. She came to me, knelt and placed a cool hand on my tear-moistened cheek.

  “Father? I have so missed you.”

  “Marjorie?”

  She nodded. I turned my head and kissed her palm. Marjorie embraced me lightly, touching her head to my shoulder. There was so much I wanted to say to my daughter, so grown and comely now I found it hard to believe she was the curious little girl who I had last seen at Dalry, believing I had sent her on to safety, only to have her whisked away by my enemies when the Earl of Ross took them all at St. Duthac’s and handed them over to the English. Then, another voice from years past greeted my ears.

  “Robert?”

  I laid bleary eyes on my sister, Christina. She appeared older, worn from her ascetic and secluded life, but alive and well.

  “By the time we reached Richmond,” Christina began, “she had begun with a cold in her chest. It worsened quickly. The fever comes and goes, but she weakens daily from the cough. She has barely eaten the past four days, but for some boiled cabbage and beans. When we woke at cockcrow, she insisted on riding with your man Gil. She wanted to see you. Gil had to hold her all the way.”

  Christina, once the striking beauty that had drawn many a man’s eyes, had her dark hair hidden beneath a stiff, white widow’s wimple that covered her chin. Her kirtle was the gloom of slate and she wore no other adornment than a silver crucifix on a coarse, tarnished chain about her neck. The nuns at Sixhills, where she had spent her captivity in England, had imprinted her deeply. On her left arm, leaned the old, nearly blind Bishop Wishart. He tilted his head and squinted, as if trying to make out faces close by or recognize voices. His hands trembled and every hair was gone from his head, except for a few white strands at the back of his mottled skull.

  Christina cast a look over her shoulder toward the door where a young man hid in the shadows. In the middle of the nave, my brother-in-law Neil Campbell started forward, tentative. Finally, Christina inclined her head toward the young man. “Colin was released from the custody of Sir Henry Beaumont and permitted to come home with us. He’s been eager to greet his father.”

  Neil walked across the nave toward Colin, who hung back timidly. Neil touched his son’s cheek. “You have your mother’s eyes, lad.”

  “I ... I ... don’t ...” Colin stammered and tugged at his own fingers. “I don’t remember much of you. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s time enough now.” Neil put his arms around his son, a young man now and nearly as tall as his father. Stiff at first, Colin relaxed and then returned the embrace. Neil had taken the news of his wife’s death hard and if not for his son coming home to him, he would still have been grieving.

  As much as my sister Mary’s loss pained me, it also made Elizabeth’s homecoming that much sweeter. I bent my head and pressed my cheek to Elizabeth’s as she moaned in discomfort. She was home ... home. And I was holding her in my arms. But oh, so ill, so weak ... her life so tenuous.

  The abbot shooed away those who were crowding around and, stooping, offered a small, wooden bowl half-full of warm beef broth. I raised Elizabeth’s shoulders up and encouraged her to take some. When the abbot pressed the bowl to her lips, she sipped a small amount, then closed her mouth and turned her face from me as a cough ripped from her chest.

  With bone-thin fingers, the abbot touched her forehead. “A warm bed is the best place for her. Fortunately, she will sleep through most of this.”

  “Will she be well soon?” I asked, both needing and not wanting to know the answer.

  His brow wrinkled. “There’s no knowing about that. It may pass within a few days. It may linger. We can only say our prayers and leave it to God’s will.”

  But holy men are ill liars. I could see it in his face and hear it in his words that he feared for her. As did I.

  “A Mass every day until she’s well again, Abbot William. If you can win His grace in this, then I’ll see to it that this abbey and every one in Scotland knows favor as long as I live.”

  The abbot nodded. “I doubt any abbey will turn away a king’s generosity, my lord. But if it’s thanks to God you wish to give, He prefers souls over coins.”

  Near the main doorway, Neil Campbell was still crushing his Colin with such ferocity that my heart pained me.

  Somewhere in Carrick, I had a son, too. A son Elizabeth knew nothing of ...

  ***

  For a fortnight, Elizabeth rolled in and out of a burning fever while she lay in the abbot’s own bed swaddled beneath deep piles of blankets. Her fever subsided several times, only to fire up again and snatch the fight from her. Her countenance paled to the color of ashes. Her breath was but a whispered reminder that her heart yet beat. The woman that they had brought to me – my beloved wife and queen – faded before my eyes like the very sunset that signaled the end of each passing day. And as winter encroached upon the earth, those days were growing shorter and so, it seemed, was her life.

  Even though she seldom woke and spoke not at all, I set aside all thoughts and preoccupations of state and warfare to be by her side. But too often I was herded away and told to let her rest by her hovering lady servant, Gruoch.

  On those too rare occasions when I could snatch time alone with my wife, I spoke of our days at Lochmaben riding at morning dew, of Christmases at Turnberry where we played games and danced giddy with laughter until our stomachs hurt, and of summers spent at Kildrummy roaming the paths above the Don by the old stone quarry where the wild roses bloomed, her hand fitted pe
rfectly in mine. Those times had been few, for so often I had been abroad on Longshanks’ business, but they were golden times. Times that I had lived for. Times that I did not know if I would ever see again.

  When not by Elizabeth’s side, I was in the barley fields beyond the abbey, one eye straining to focus on the broken barrel that served as my butt, the taut string of my bow cutting into my fingers and the fledging of an arrow tickling my cheek before I let it sing across the distance. But my arrows too often missed their mark, their points plowing into soft dirt. James attempted to join me one morning, retrieving the arrows scattered about the fallow field from the previous evening, but he soon sensed I was not in need of company and left me alone with my silence.

  Cold whispered against my neck and I looked around to see the first snowflakes of the season falling. I tucked the last arrow back in my belt and dragged the corner of my cloak across a runny nose. All around, the world blended in shades of gray, transmuted between the faint light of a cloud-choked day and the heaviness of descending night. The faint silhouette of the abbey’s narrow belfry against a silver sky beckoned and I started back. At once, I stepped upon a frozen puddle, too lazy or lacking in care to go around it. The ice cracked and broke under my weight. Mud splattered over my leggings and frigid water seeped into my boots. Toes numb, I trudged across the snowy ground, up mossy stone steps and down the narrow corridor that led to Elizabeth’s room.

  It was well past vespers when I nudged open the door. Instantly, I was assaulted with the caustic scent of lye mingled with a faint fumitory of pennyroyal. I put a hand over my nose until my senses grew accustomed to the odors. On a long, narrow table near the door sat an empty laver, a ewer full of water and a stack of folded, clean cloths. Wisps of smoke curled from the small piercings in the bell lid of a bronze incense brazier which was topped with a small, leaning cross, tingeing the air with the sweetness of rosemary and cloves.

  On the far side of the room, a small hearth contained the flames of a well-fed fire. The stones around it bore little trace of soot, indicating that the abbot must not have used it often, probably thinking the luxury too much of an indulgence when wood could be used to cook food or warm the sick.

  The abbot had afforded himself one comfort and that was a large four-postered bed, its mattress plump with feathers and encased in undyed canvas. Cocooned beneath layers of linen sheets and woolen blankets lay my Elizabeth, her head propped against a dark blue bolster.

  If not for Gruoch’s snoring, I might not have seen her lying in the shadows on her pallet between the door and the bed. I crept toward Elizabeth’s sleeping form and stood at the side of her bed. Barely, slowly, her chest rose and fell. A ragged tendril of hair, damp with sweat, lay crookedly from her hairline to the corner of her mouth. I pushed it away, the backs of my fingers lingering at her jawline.

  Dear God in Heaven, don’t ... please don’t take her from me. Not after bringing her back. Not after so long without her.

  I wanted to kneel beside her and lay my hand over hers, but instead I turned back toward the door. An indrawn breath, ragged but deep, stalled me.

  “Will you go ...” came a hoarse voice, “without a kiss?”

  When I first turned to look, her eyes were closed. Surely I had dreamed the words? But then her lashes fluttered and parted.

  “Turnberry,” she said meekly, curling her fingers over the edge of her blanket. “Will you take me there?”

  I returned to her and sought her hand. “Aye. In time.”

  Elizabeth turned her face away, but when she looked back at me, I could see the heartache of eight long years behind those once vibrant green eyes. “When?”

  “Soon, my love. Soon.” The coolness of her cheek as I kissed it reassured me that the fever had at last left her. “The sea air is brisk this time of year, but perhaps it will refresh you.”

  “It has been so long, Robert. So long.” Her mouth trembled. “I hardly know what to make of everything that has happened. What to say ... Where to begin, even.”

  Begin? Why not now, today ... this very moment?

  In truth, though, I knew it would not be so easy. We were strangers, she and I, in ways as yet unknown to us both. God knows I had changed – and not so certainly for the better.

  I knelt at her bedside and cupped her hands between mine. “We have many years still ahead of us, sweet Elizabeth. Many, many years.”

  Ch. 3

  James Douglas – Melrose Abbey, 1314

  Grunting from deep in his belly like a rutting boar, Robert Boyd heaved the wooden post into a half-frozen mud puddle at my feet. Muck splattered over my shins. Behind me, sheep bleated at the disturbance and ran to the far side of the pen where a small sheep cote had already been erected. Wary of going inside, they crowded at the opening, shoulder to shoulder.

  I rested my axe against the gate. “What was that for, Boyd?”

  “You asked me to bring you another.”

  “You could’ve just laid it on that pile there with the rest.”

  His broad shoulders lifted in an insolent shrug. “Perhaps, James Douglas, I don’t like being ordered about by some coddled underling half my age.”

  “That old now, are you?” I thumped Boyd hard in the middle of his broad chest with my fist. “The king says we’re to make ourselves useful while we’re loitering about here. The orders come from him, not me.”

  We had spent the day working in a stretch of pasture to the east of Melrose Abbey where pens were being repaired. The English soldiers, on their way through after Bannockburn, had scattered what sheep they had not stolen. The abbey’s flock numbered in the thousands and it had been no small task for its shepherds to comb the hills and return them to the lowland winter pastures. The abbot took great pride in standing only his best rams to his ewes and so after every harvest the ewes were gathered up for breeding. But this year the monks and lay brothers had been too busy rebuilding. Lambing next spring would be later than usual.

  The stone fences normally in use had been knocked over in many places and while the lay brothers were carefully setting the stones one by one, Robert had tasked his soldiers to repair the winter holding pens – as much to keep us from mischief as to lodge us in the abbot’s favor.

  While it was not my place as one of the king’s commanders to ply my trade at menial tasks, there was only so much a man could do whilst confined at an abbey. So I took up tools beside my muttering men and the toiling lay brothers and did my share. It only seemed a fair exchange for all the times I had looted the stores of many a holy place to keep my men fed and alive.

  It soon became evident that I was not born with a shepherd’s crook in my hand. More than once that day, a frantic ewe had knocked me off my feet. One, spooked when I tossed a stone aside, bolted in fright, nostrils wide in panic, and slammed her head into a stone wall. She fell over, legs twitching, her neck flopped oddly backward. I slit her throat to relieve her of her misery. Tomorrow we would fill our bellies on a pot of mutton stew.

  A weak winter sun peeked between scudding clouds of iron gray. I rubbed my hands together to warm them. Motioning for Boyd to join me, I grabbed the axe and hoisted it onto my shoulder as I strode past him. “Come along. We’ve done enough for today.”

  He hesitated, then caught up with me in three thunderous strides. We walked up the well-beaten sheep path toward the eastern gate of the precinct wall, through which one could see the great eastern window of the abbey. The church had been built a hundred and fifty years ago in the time of King David. The sandstone blocks of which it was constructed were quarried from the slopes of the Eildon Hills. A magnificent structure, two transepts stretched north and south like the arms of a crucifix. Westward ran the long nave, braced by airy buttresses on the outside and lined inside with an arcade of stout columns. On the north side were the monks’ cloisters.

  We passed through the eastern gate, its recent repairs evidenced by freshly hewn timbers. A cemetery with mossy stones so old and weathered their carvings could
no longer be read filled the open ground on the southern side of the abbey. Many of the grave markers had been toppled by the retreating English. It was there, beneath the twisted limbs of an ancient yew tree, two women stood in the growing darkness, their mirthful laughter a stark contrast to the solemnity of their surroundings.

  “When the queen is well enough,” Boyd asked, “we’ll move on, aye?”

  “Why so eager? Need to get back to Lanark to your new woman?”

  “Aye, that. My woman has a rump as round as a sow’s. Good for clinging to at the right moment ... But you wouldn’t understand such things. Chaste as a monk, you are. My daughter would make a fitting mate for you.”

  “You’ve made the offer before. I said ‘no’, as I recall.”

  “Not that one. She’s already wed. Her growing belly was ... ah, getting a little hard to hide. Seems the Boyd women are tantalizing to any man with a heartbeat. This is a different daughter. Younger. Sturdier. More comely, even. And only fifteen. Tucked away in a nunnery, for now – although I fear some passing merchant or nearby crofter’s son will sniff her out all too soon. You’d have to marry her, of course. Won’t have any bastard grandchildren, not even by the likes of you ...” – he gave me a sidelong glance – “pretty as you are.”

  “You flatter me with your jealous remarks, Boyd.”

  He snorted and punched me in the arm so hard I staggered sideways.

  The old goat liked to nettle me. Not that he was as old as he said. He just liked to complain. And drink. And talk about his ‘woman’, although sometimes I doubted her existence.

  As we neared the graveyard, I could tell by the golden veil of curls that one of the women was undoubtedly the king’s daughter, Marjorie Bruce. She never wore a coif or wimple and dressed in the least ornate of gowns. Even from this distance and in the gloaming, I perceived a smile gracing her lips. But that was wee Marjorie as I remembered her in my heart from her girlhood days: as gay as a wren on the first day of spring. The spirit was still the same, but in beauty she had blossomed, just as the bud unfurls to reveal the glory that had always been there.