The Lion Rampant (The Kingdom Series)

by Robert Low

Berwick

  Octave of the Visitation, July 1314

  He was in there, the King of England. Jamie said it twice so that Hal would hear, though he was not sure if it had worked, for the man gave no sign. Just kept staring across the mirk of a sodden day at the faint grey streaks and worms of pallid light that marked Berwick.

  ‘Are we going for him then?’ demanded Yabbing Andra, and Horse Pyntle snotted rain and worse from his nose, which was expressive enough.

  ‘We are bliddy not,’ Sweetmilk replied vehemently, and turned uncertainly to the Black Sir James Douglas. ‘That’s the right of it, is it not, yer honour?’

  ‘That’s the right of it,’ agreed Jamie Douglas, clapping Sweetmilk on his rain-sodden shoulder, hard enough to spurt water. ‘We are not here for the glory of snatching the son of Longshanks at all.’

  He paused for effect and lowered his voice to a mockingly husked whisper.

  ‘We are here, lads, for … love.’

  We should not be here at all, Kirkpatrick told himself, on a mad-headed fool’s errand like this. But he kept it to himself, for there was no way of avoiding it and he owed the Herdmanston lord this much and more.

  He eyed the man who stared unflinchingly into the grey mirk; if the Devil was here to give him it, Kirkpatrick thought, Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston would sell his immortal soul for the power to drag Isabel MacDuff out of her cage and to his side with his eyes alone.

  He crossed himself for the thought and waited, sitting with the others in the dubious shelter of a copse of trees while the twilight drained the land of colour and the rain filled it with misery.

  It had been raining since the evening of the battle, Kirkpatrick thought, a downpour that drowned what was left of the fields and ruined the last chance of a harvest. Livestock plootered in mud, promising hoof rot and murrains – famine was coming with the winter and it would be hard.

  He muttered as much aloud, so that Jamie Douglas turned to him. Expecting the uncaring rasp of the Black’s hatred of all things English, Kirkpatrick was surprised.

  ‘Sair,’ agreed James Douglas. ‘The price of bread will be crippling. The poor always suffer worst.’

  Hal, face pebbled and eyes burning, turned at last from trying to see her through the miles and mist. Kirkpatrick nodded and smiled, aware – as he had been since he had hauled Hal to his feet beside the body of Badenoch – that he had been responsible for the Lothian knight’s crazed pursuit of that lord.

  He had it that I was killed and that it had been his fault, Kirkpatrick thought. I was not and cannot – will never – reveal that I had just given up and lay there, waiting for Badenoch to kill me like a done-up heifer. Now I have the guilt of having driven Sir Hal to slaughter Badenoch, the man he stopped me killing once before – Christ’s Blood, here’s a tangle of sin and redemption that even God would have trouble unravelling.

  It had been the last act of a bloody day, the stunning glory of it numbing yet. Such a victory, such a tumbling of great English lords to dust and ruin – aye, and death. The tallymen had been busy as fiddlers’ elbows noting the names: the Earl of Gloucester, slain. Sir Robert Clifford, slain. Sir William Marshal, slain. Sir Giles d’Argentan, slain. Tiptoft, Vescy, Deyncourt, Beauchamp, Comyn – great names whose holders were all slain, brothers and cousins and nephews all.

  Fifty of the great and good of England were no more than a nick in a hazel stick now, a notch the thickness of a palm for an earl, the breadth of a finger for a banneret, the width of a swollen barleycorn for a lesser knight.

  Hundreds of hazel sticks – and not one sliver for any of the great slather of corpses, blanching in the wet, stripped naked so that their wounds showed red and puckered as hag’s holes on the blue-white of their marbled skin. Thousands of them, Scots and English, Gascon, Hainaulter, Welsh, all left unrecorded so that, on the Scots side, folk could exult that only three had died: Sir William Airth, Sir William Vipond and, like justice from God, Sir Walter Ross, third son of the Earl of Ross.

  Others had been more fortunate and survived to be ransomed, the greatest of them being Robert d’Umfraville, the Earl of Angus, and Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, taken prisoner at Bothwell just when they thought themselves safe.

  The de Bohuns particularly, Kirkpatrick knew, had been so dragged in the dust of Bruce’s glory that you had to wonder how that family had so angered God: the Earl’s nephew, Henry, killed like a battle sacrifice by Bruce himself; the Earl and his kinsman, Gilbert, taken prisoner to be used as a ransom bargain for the return of all the imprisoned Bruce women – sister, wife and daughter.

  And Isabel MacDuff.

  All we have to do is wait, Kirkpatrick thought, in the safe and the dry while wee advocates arrange the business of it. By year’s end, Isabel could be back at Hal’s side and no risk in it at all. He had dared to argue that when he and Sir James and the King had considered the matter, with Hal waiting to be told whether he would be assisted to such a daring rescue.

  Hal had not said a word – but the look Kirkpatrick had from the King would have stripped the gilt from a stone saint, so that he had given in with a wave of the hand.

  ‘Sir Hal has waited long enough,’ the King had declared.

  ‘Isabel has waited long enough,’ Hal corrected tersely. Which was a truth Kirkpatrick had not considered at all, so that it fell on him like a dropped brick; seven years, he had realized, in a cage on a wall, waiting for rescue. Aye – overdue indeed.

  In the end, of course, Bruce had officially forbidden it. No one, especially Sir James Douglas, was to set as much as a toe on a Berwick wall. Truces had been arranged. There was his own sister and wife, the Queen, waiting to be released; matters were delicate and not to be plootered across with heavy feet.

  Kirkpatrick had agreed while shooting Hal warning glances to stay quiet; he knew the Lothian lord would go anyway. He was sure Bruce knew that, too.

  So, while Edward Bruce and Randolph stumbled down the muddy roads to Wark and out to Carlisle as the mailled fist, the King returned the bodies of Gloucester and Clifford – and the boiled bones of Humphrey de Bohun – with all due care and mercy, as the lambskin gauntlet. And turned a blind eye to Sir James Douglas, Kirkpatrick and Sir Hal of Herdmanston, riding off on their own towards Berwick with a knot of hard-eyed men.

  The day dripped on, and then a rider flogged a sodden garron through the grey and skidded to a halt in a shower of clots.

  ‘He is left,’ Dog Boy declared, wiping his streaming face while the steam came off him like haze. ‘Headed out to Bamburgh and then York with a great escort against capture.’

  Jamie’s face brightened with the possibilities at once, but caught sight of Hal’s own and shrugged, shamefaced, abandoning the glory that might have been.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Love it is then, though you can scarce blame me for thinking of scooping up such a prize as Edward of England.’

  ‘Less risk in that,’ Kirkpatrick growled morosely, but Dog Boy, shaking water from him, grinned into his damp-smoke mood.

  ‘Would ye not risk the same for your own wummin, then?’ he demanded. ‘For love?’

  Kirkpatrick gave him a jaundiced eye. He had a woman he would marry before too long and the bounty of that and the lands she brought was a glow in the core of him. He would risk much for that – but love? He had never considered love in the matter of getting wed and said so.

  Dog Boy, bright with the joy of Bet’s Meggy, little Bet and Hob, laughed at how the nobiles arranged such matters. Yet he had to agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the risk: he had watched the cavalcade quit Berwick, the hunched and smouldering King Edward in the centre of it, so there was a better chance of sneaking up the walls than if he had been there. A slight shift in risk, but welcome all the same and he said as much, to give heart to everyone.

  ‘King Edward has been given the advice the Holy Father gave to the beggar,’ Parcy Dodd answered and folk shifted expectantly, for a story was as warming as the fire they dared not light.


  ‘I am half afraid to enquire,’ Jamie Douglas said laconically and Parcy grinned his wide grin, the rain pearling on his nose.

  ‘The Pope is visiting town,’ he began, ‘and all the people are turned out and dressed up in their best cloots, all lining the way from the gate, hoping for a personal blessing from the Holy Father. One stout burgher, a man of stature and local note, has put on his best fur-trimmed cloak and gold chain for the moment, for he is sure that sight will pause the Pope and that the Holy Father will bless him.’

  ‘A bad plan,’ Horse Pyntle grunted, ‘for your clerical is a magpie for the shine and yon burgher will not, I suspect, own it long if he flaunts it at such a high heidyin.’

  ‘Ah,’ Parcy declared, as if he had been expecting that very point, ‘but he is standing next to a beggar, a man with more stain and rag than cote and who smells like a privy on a hot day. The stout burgher thinks to impress His Holiness by handing such a man a coin at the crucial moment. Certes, as the Holy Father comes walking by, the burgher ostentatiously offers the coin, the beggar takes it, bites it with the one black tooth he has left and vanishes it into his rags. The Pope leans out of his litter then – and speaks softly to the beggar. The burgher is stunned; the Holy Father ignores him and passes on, having spoken only to the beggar.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ muttered Yabbing Andra, uneasy at Parcy’s constant blasphemies, ‘the Holy Father is more interested in the poor and feeble ones.’

  ‘Just what the burgher thinks,’ Parcy declared cheerfully, ‘so he thrusts the rest of his bag of coin at the beggar and trades cloots with him. Then he sprints down the street – for certes, the crowd parts before a man who smells so badly – and flings himself almost into the path of the Pope’s processing litter. Sure enough, the litter stops, the ringed hand beckons and the burgher proudly walks up to get the blessing he has worked and paid so dearly for.’

  Parcy paused and grinned.

  ‘Then he hears, hissed in his now flea-bitten ear: “I thought I told you to get yourself to Hell away from my path, you beggarly misbegotten pile of shite.”’

  There were a few loud barks of laughter, a lot of headshaking and admiration for Parcy risking his soul with such a tale. But they were cheered by it, all the same, Jamie saw – and they would need such heart for what they intended.

  ‘When it is darker, then,’ Hal declared, capping the laughter like a candle snuffing flame.

  They went back to sitting, dripping in the rain, and the Dog Boy thought of what he had learned: Berwick had been put in the charge of Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The knight with stripes and little red birds, Dog Boy recalled, whom I almost tumbled off his fancy horse.

  He is like snot on your fingers, de Valence said to himself. You think you have got rid of it and then, the Lord alone knows how, it appears again, on the other hand. He looked at the Dominican and wished him as gone as the Italian abbot and the King, both ridden off to the safety of the south.

  Leaving me, he added bitterly to himself, with the ruin of it.

  And it was a ruin. What was left of the army straggled south by a dozen different routes, too fearful of what snarled at their heels even to find time for loot and rape, too sodden to burn anything. The lords who were left would be of no help in bringing them to order; those who were mounted had long since vanished and those unhorsed were either already dead or taken.

  The vellum rolls lay like white mourning candles on the table in front of him, a litany of lost lives and shattered hopes painstakingly scraped out by the clericals. Even now they were not complete; new revelations of the fate of the barons who had fought at Stirling were still being discovered.

  One at least was accounted for and de Valence was soured to his belly at what he would have to tell his sister, Joan. Your son, the young lord of Badenoch, is not coming home – slain by the same God-damned Scotch rebels who murdered your husband.

  Faced with that, the canting cadaver that was Jean de Beaune, piously name-changed to Brother Jacobus, was a misery de Valence could have done without, but the matter the Dominican had thrown at him would not be lightly dismissed. Yet de Valence vowed he would scourge the Cathar-hunting little prelate back to Carcassonne if he had to wield the whip himself.

  ‘The lady Isabel,’ he persisted, ‘is within the King’s Peace.’

  More so now than ever, he said to himself, for she could easily become a counter in the game of ransom.

  ‘She has been accused,’ Jacobus growled. ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live.’

  ‘The accuser is more of a Devil’s spawn than the lady in question,’ de Valence spat back. ‘Malise Bellejambe has been the creature of the Comyn for as long as I can remember, God forgive my kin for it. I know him well enough for he came to me only recently, hoping to slither his way into my patronage, and I sent him away as I would the serpent in Eden.’

  ‘God be praised,’ Brother Jacobus intoned at this last, crossing himself piously.

  ‘For ever and ever,’ de Valence answered by rote. ‘Now this Malise seeks your patronage – is there not a reward for exposing a witch? Apart from the love of Christ and Mother Church?’

  ‘You stand in the path of the Inquisition,’ the Dominican persisted.

  ‘I obey my king,’ de Valence replied savagely, weary of the whole business. He saw his clerks hovering, arms full of rolls that almost certainly continued the litany of ruin for his king’s cause.

  ‘She is a heretic.’

  ‘You have proof? Other than the word of a disenfranchised, dismayed worm like Bellejambe?’

  ‘I … that is …’

  ‘You mean no,’ de Valence interrupted roughly, and waved a hand so that the candles guttered in the wind of its passage. ‘Get you gone, Brother.’

  ‘I will investigate further …’

  De Valence glared at the Dominican.

  ‘You will not go against the King’s Peace. Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barleycorns – within that, Brother, Lady Isabel MacDuff is inviolate until the King himself decides her fate.’

  ‘Or God,’ Brother Jacobus persisted. ‘You may find that the good folk of this town consider the Lord’s Will takes precedence over suffering a witch to live in the King’s Peace.’

  De Valence’s ravaged hawk of a face made Jacobus recoil a little.

  ‘Should the good folk of this town voice this opinion,’ de Valence said, soft as a blade slice on skin, ‘I will know where to look for the cause. Fomenting discord and riot in a town under my command is treason, Dominican, and I have been given the writ of Law here.’

  He leaned forward a little, the candlelight turning his face to a twisted mask of shadows.

  ‘Break it, Brother, and you will discover that, for all there is no torture permitted in England, your Inquisition is a squalling baby compared with what I can inflict on those who thwart the King’s writ. Pleading a knowledge of Latin will not help you.’

  For a moment, they were locked in stares, and then Brother Jacobus turned on his heel and swung away. De Valence waited until he was almost at the door, the trailing wind of his fury making the sconces dance madly, before calling out.

  ‘Jacobus.’

  The Dominican whirled, his face a scowl.

  ‘You forget your station.’

  The prelate’s face flushed so that the veins stood out, proud as corded rope. Then he bowed.

  ‘My lord earl.’

  ‘You may leave.’

  The Dominican’s face was a beautiful thing and de Valence took some vicious comfort from it before he turned from the closed door into the bustle of the clerks. For all that, he knew that Isabel MacDuff was in danger. If the game of kings being played out above their heads did not include her as a vital piece, then she would fall to the flames.

  The clerks moved in with their blizzard of bad news in vellum and the room seemed suddenly stifling, every candle flame a sear. De Valence moved to the shuttered slit of window and pulled
them open, so that the night breeze, sodden with damp, snaked in to shiver the sconces.

  He stood for a moment, hearing the muffled noises of the castle settling for another night, saw the red eye of brazier coals flaring in the breeze and the figures moving past it, no more than shadows. A wall guard shifted into the lee of a merlon and left his dog to trot the walkway; de Valence felt a spasm of irritation at this slackness, just because the King had quit the place.

  Then, however, he heard the dog bark and was reassured: a good dog more than made up for a bad guard.

  Out in the cloaking dark, Jamie Douglas gave a muffled curse at the sound. No one needed reminding of the last time the Scots had attempted to stealth their way up the walls of Berwick’s fortress – foiled by a barking dog.

  ‘It will be the same one,’ Parcy Dodd muttered miserably. ‘Aulder by a bit and wiser than ever.’

  ‘Given Fair Days and petted,’ Dog Boy agreed softly, his grin white in the dark. ‘Fat with the finest for having saved an entire wee town.’

  ‘I dinna see any cheer in this revelation,’ muttered Sweetmilk.

  ‘Never fash,’ Dog Boy answered. ‘Just make sure you move gentle as spider silk and get Sim Craw’s marvel up under the wall without discovery. Leave the wee beastie to me – tonight I am more Dog Boy than Aleysandir.’

  Hal heard the mention of Sim Craw and watched Sweetmilk scuttle into the dark, half-crouched and hunchbacked under the rolled-up ladder. As much as the arbalest, that ladder was Sim’s legacy, he thought to himself, as the ache of loss settled in him again, bone-deep. He thought of Sim then, turning slowly in the bladderwrack and weed, his face wrapped in the wisps of his own white hair …

  The slap of a hand on his shoulder wrenched him from the sorrow into the face of Jamie Douglas, the expression on it a large, silent question. Hal shrugged it off and went ahead, following Kirkpatrick, Dog Boy and Sweetmilk; somewhere, Parcy Dodd and Horse Pyntle held the horses.

  ‘We were kine the last time we did this,’ Jamie muttered, ‘which let us get close to the walls.’

  Not now, Hal thought. A cow this close to Berwick and still uneaten would excite more interest than not, while stumbling people, seeming starved and shut out from safety by couvre-feu and caution, were all too common in these times.