Ch. 21
Robert the Bruce – Lochmaben, 1305
Turnberry, where I had wiled away much of my youth, was always closest to my heart; but it was Lochmaben, a more stately place for a rising earl and his lovely countess with its herb gardens, mews and wine cellar, that became home to Elizabeth and me. From there it was a swift ride to Carlisle, where I was often summoned – sometimes whimsically it seemed, as if to test my obedience.
Ever since the tidings of Wallace’s heinous death, I had felt a dark, vaporous cloud hovering over my soul. It is a burden to grieve and be unable to reveal it. Elizabeth was my consolation. Into her open ears I poured every dream and doubt, every hope and fear. She received it all and gave back to me nothing but love and comfort. There were nights when I awoke from nightmares, sweating with fury, when I might have clutched up my sword and ridden alone to London to murder the heartless Longshanks on his throne before a hall full of councilors, but Elizabeth would say my name over and over, pull me back to bed and return me to the moment. There were days when I stood on the turrets and gazed out over the brown and dying countryside. Brisk autumn wind tore at my cloak and rain soaked into my bones as I lamented on the hopelessness of it all. Elizabeth would retrieve me to our chamber. She peeled away my wet clothes and set a peat brazier next to my chair to return the warmth to my flesh. She stroked my whiskers, and then settled into my lap. As I looked at her, nothing existed but the bewitching green of her eyes and the shining red-gold of her hair. A touch from those soft fingers and all was forgotten.
And then came a few, brief, cherished days when we believed Elizabeth was with child. She hummed and smiled like a young lass in love for the first time. I took her to bed often – morning, evening and afternoon. Afterwards, we smiled and stared long at one another. We talked of the child: whom it would look like and all that it meant to us and how many more we would have. Then I would kiss her belly and lay my head there and imagine a heartbeat, strong and full of the force and wonder of life.
One morning, I arose and, upon seeing her soundly asleep, slipped from our bed, dressed and crept to the door. I went to the stables to look in on Elizabeth’s favorite mare, which was close to foaling. She paused in her feeding only long enough to investigate whose hand was running along her protruding flank. Two more weeks, I surmised. As I left the stable groom in charge of the horses, a gray mare for Elizabeth and a black for me, a messenger galloped into the courtyard, dropped from his steaming mount and placed a letter into my hands.
A summons from mighty King Edward to shatter the sunlight of my bliss into a thousand shards.
I found Elizabeth alone in her solar, curled up in a corner in her crumpled nightclothes, knees tight to her chest and tears flooding over her cheeks. Perplexed, I pulled the door shut and went to crouch beside her.
“I truly thought... I’m sorry, Robert. So sorry. There is no child.” She buried her face in her hands.
I wrapped my arms around her and kissed the top of her head, her hair still messed and knotted from sleep. “Another time, love. You are young and strong. There is no hurry.”
She wept long and hard while I stroked her hair. Outside, the rising sun poured strongly through the single glazed window, as if to say the world had not ceased to go on because of our tiny sorrow for a child that never even was.
“Shhh, shhh.” The cloth on the shoulder of my tunic was soaked through with her grief. All I could do was hold her. “Elizabeth, do not think I love you less. Come with me to Christmas court at Windsor. We shall bury our sorrow along the road and feast on puddings and wine and dance till our knees give out. Come with me, love.”
She pressed her tear-wet palms against my cheeks and shook her head. “Robert, no, no. You cannot go. Stay, oh, please stay. I need you. And I fear for your safety.”
“Fear? What cause have you to fear? Besides, I have been commanded. To refuse to attend Christmas court, well, I would need a very good reason and I believe I have run dry of excuses, used up every last one over these past few years to frolic with you. Well worth the insult I may have caused him, but just the same... this time, I...”
Those lips that had urged such waves of passion within me trembled faintly.
“Then tell him I am ill... and you cannot leave me,” she pled. “You have too much to lose if... if Comyn –”
I pressed a finger to her lips. She may as well have plucked at my heart with her very fingers. “I promised him more than Longshanks will ever even hint at. The man has no loyalty but to his purse. So I must go this once, my love. The time for me to make myself known is not yet upon us. Soon, though. Very soon. I wish to see for myself how the king fares. This court that he has conjured up is a façade, meant merely to reassure his subjects that he yet breathes.”
“Stay.”
“Elizabeth, you know I cannot. I must go.”
“Then you shall go without me. I have no wish to sit among those hooded crows and feign joy. Oh, I will be sick at heart until you’re safe at home again.”
She turned her face toward the winter sunlight that marched boldly in through the window. The dry tears that now streaked her face with salt left marks like the beginnings of tiny cracks in shining enamel. She had taken Marjorie in and loved her like her own, wanting her own flock of bairns with a fierceness that until then I had not been aware of – mayhap in the same tenacious, foolishly impatient way that I wanted to give life to my grandfather’s dream and hold it as my own. And she, who had been a pillar of stone for me, was now a fragile lamb, quivering in my arms.
I smoothed down the errant wisps of her hair, and then traced a finger down her neck, shoulder and arm until I clasped one of her hands. I brought it to my mouth and kissed her fingertips, one by one. With woeful tenderness, I turned her hand over and laid a kiss within her palm. “Ah, Elizabeth, sweet... My heart aches as well for want of a child, not only for us... but for an heir to a kingdom yet without a king.”
Still gazing into the light, she said, “For you, I suppose, a man, it is about heirs and kingdoms. For me, it is all I have to give in this life. All I am.”
I cupped her chin and turned her face to me. “Say that and you say a lie. You will always be the reason I will fight to live another day, Elizabeth, children or no.”
I crushed her delicate frame to me, as if the ardor of my embrace might impress upon her the depth of my love for her.
Ch. 22
Robert the Bruce – Windsor, 1306
Due west of London, Windsor had all the splendor and convenience a king could fancy, without the stench and stir of the city. Fertile pastures patched with woodland surrounded the royal residence in rustic tranquility. Within the mortared walls, however, the scandal of court life teemed. I endured Christmas court in the company of the two Edwards and sundry barons of blessed England, although I would much rather have been enjoying the intimacy of my gentle Elizabeth at humble Turnberry. I was miserable without her. Even Gerald, for all his stale attempts, could not humor me. But somehow, I managed to wear my mask well and discoursed with a gaggle of English bishops with their upturned noses and glittering ringed fingers of gold. They sniffed at King Philip for quarreling with the pope, while in the next breath they intimated the pope’s own iniquities in dabbling in Edward’s affairs. Christmas came and went, anything but merry, and all the judgmental prelates drifted off to their parishes.
Although I yearned to return quickly home with Gerald at my side prattling away the hours, I took the road northeast to Essex, the area my father had favored, to look over the vast stretches of family farmland: rich, loamy soil deep and frozen beneath stubbled stalks of grain. All was serene and every penny accounted for. If nothing else, my father had kept a tight fist on his coffers, hiring only the shrewdest and most parsimonious of constables and stewards. There was nothing more to do, but go home to my Elizabeth. On the way, I would stop for a day, two at most, at Huntingdon and take a quick tally of affairs there.
We had not gotten as far as Cambrid
ge, when a messenger caught up with us. Another damnable summons from Longshanks. And so, instead of a swift journey home, hearts alight with anticipation, we pressed back toward Windsor. Dread sucked at my insides. We skirted Epping Forest, hardly aware of the tall, smooth-trunked beeches around us, which stood in silent array like ladies in gowns of pale, green silk.
The business might have gone quickly, but for the king’s frequent absences. Each day that I arose, I thought, hoped, prayed perhaps that would be the day Gerald would come to me with the news that Longshanks had received his final rites. Yet, it never came to pass. The king would drag himself to the council chamber, a countenance as gray as ash and eyes drooping to his jowls for lack of sleep, his cheeks hollow, a cough rattling every breath, his limbs obviously compromised for strength as he leaned upon his page to rise from his chair at the premature end of every day’s session. All the while, his unavailing heir scrutinized me as if I was an orphaned lamb abandoned in an open field and he was a lion in need of a meal.
In mid-January, the king’s health took a turn, sadly, for the better.
He was in such lofty spirits he called a feast. In my chamber, I laid out three of my best shirts on the bed, studied them for awhile and finally picked up the red one with the dagged edge bottom and pleated shoulders and pulled it over my head.
Gerald’s mouth twisted in disapproval. “Not that one.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not fit for such a grand occasion. You have better.” He readjusted his growing paunch beneath his embroidered tunic, fastened at the neck with two ivory buttons. When at court, Gerald was fastidious about his dress, if nothing else. It was a trait that had given him fits when we were hiding in the forests only a couple of years ago, with rarely a change of clothing, let alone any lye and tallow soap to wash with or a chamber pot to shit in. I chuckled to think of those days: Gerald mumbling every time he caught wind of his own bodily odors or distressed over a rip in his cloak.
“Better?” I remarked. “This is the shirt I married Elizabeth in.”
“And how many times have you worn it since?” His forehead shrank between those expressive eyebrows and peaked hairline.
I snapped the shirt off and tossed it onto the bed. “Who needs a wife when I have you? Now, your advice?”
He tugged at his shaggy beard with a thumb and forefinger. “Hmmm, I’d wager on the green. Fine cut. Rich cloth. Aye, that’s the one.”
As I reached for the green silk tunic and began to pull it on, there was a knock at the door. Gerald went to open it.
“Robert!” Ralph de Monthermer held his arms wide. A warm, pleasant smile graced his lips beneath a dark moustache streaked with gray. Ralph and his kin had been close friends of my grandfather’s. The bond, strained as it might have been by Anglo-Scottish relations, had never dissolved.
We embraced in the doorway. “Ralph, you look well, thin perhaps, but –”
“Been down with a fever.Nothing serious. I am well enough now.”
“And things in Gloucester?”
“Ever the same.”
“I have seen your stepson about – Gilbert de Clare, a handsome lad, indeed. And a fine soldier in the making, I hear. When Edward needs to call on him one day, he’ll be a worthy opponent on the battlefield.” And as close to the Prince of Wales as a mole on his backside.
Suddenly, Ralph’s brow clouded. He leaned out into the corridor, glanced both ways, then dove back into my chamber and pulled the door shut behind him.
“A moment to speak with you.” His fingers ran back and forth over the fur trim at the neck of his shirt. “Your grandfather, rest his soul, was a fine man. I was a stripling at Lewes when he saved me from one of Montfort’s men. I shall never forget that.”
I nodded. “That was a long time ago, Ralph.”
“And I am still alive, thanks be to him and Our Father.” He paced over the loose planks. Every time he turned they groaned with a secret, begging him to let it out. At last, he stopped, looked at me in a probing manner and took a deep breath. “You are not safe here.”
“What do you mean, Ralph? What have you heard?”
“Rumors, whispers… that when they took Wallace, letters were found on his person, letters that, that –”
“Out, man! What letters?” My veins clogged with ice. There should not have been any letters yet in Wallace’s possession that carried my name when the traitors took him. He had delivered them to Philip and Boniface… and come back by then. Might he have had one from them addressed to me that never found its way to me? But how? My heart fluttered. Ralph de Monthermer was indebted to my grandfather, but in these ever-shifting times how could I know enough of the man’s character to trust that he, too, would not betray me? I gripped his arms tightly, as if to force the truth from him. “In honor of my grandfather, your friend, if there is danger to me here, say it. If you never had the chance to repay him – at least save me.”
His countenance went soft, as if a tide of memories had washed over him in that moment. Ralph preferred music and philosophy to politics and war, that much I knew of him from the times he had thrown open his doors in hospitality to me. His stepson Gilbert was of a different vein. Shoulders sagging, his jaw slack, Ralph pressed his hands together, as if in a prayer for guidance.
“It bodes ill, Robert. Letters from various nobles of Scotland, suggesting your name over and over as king.”
Shrugging, I relaxed my grip. “But how does that put me in danger? Because others say that? It is what Longshanks himself swore to me.”
“Far from the worst of it, Robert. When I arrived here, Gilbert received me. He had a secret and could not keep it to himself. Recently, Prince Edward received a correspondence from John Comyn of Badenoch, promising to deliver proof of your treachery. The prince then told the king of it and it is that proof the king awaits now… and why he called you back from Huntingdon.”
I spun on my heel, threw open the chest at the foot of the bed and began to cram my belongings into it. Then, consumed with urgency, I dropped my things and rummaged for my purse of coin, figuring I could make it home with that alone and the clothes on my back. “Gerald, our horses, we’ve no time.”
“No, not yet,” Ralph begged. His hands fluttered in the air as he continued to pace in tight circles. “It is yet daylight. I could have been seen coming here. And if anyone sees you leave in haste… they will talk. They will know. Every tongue from here to London will be wagging. The king does not yet have the letters in his possession. There is still time. I beg you – attend the feast. Excuse yourself early. Say your head aches or your stomach disagrees with something. I will linger. If there is any hint of danger, I shall send a signal of some sort through the keeper of my wardrobe, Waldhar. He is an old and feeble soul and none will think anything of him ambling about the corridors.”
My heart hammered so loudly I could barely hear Ralph. What if his appearance here was a trap, meant to coax me to self-incrimination? And yet, it was all too close to the truth to be a lie.
I stopped his motion with a steel hand on his frail shoulder. “Spurs for haste.”
Ralph nodded and returned, “And a shilling then, if the honor of your name has been bought and sold.”
Oh, it had indeed. And I had Edward of Caernarvon and Red Comyn to thank for it. How could I have been so terribly naïve? So trusting of a selfish pig? How now to preserve myself and fly home? But first, to endure a hall thronged with lords and ladies, some of whom undoubtedly had caught wind of this all and who would gaze upon me haughtily, whispering of the false Scot who had nuzzled up to the king and been treated as his own favored son, heaped with offices and holdings and housed under the king’s own roof.
Lord, Holy Spirit… Blessed Virgin and Savior Above… bring me safely through the night. See me home. Spare me. For the sake of beloved Scotland, spare me. Let me see my Elizabeth again.
In all my life, I had never seen such gluttony and excess. The king himself drank from a gilded chalice studde
d with pearls, while those at the head table were given hippocras, a sweetened, spiced wine, in rose-colored goblets of glass. Servants ceremoniously brought forth the Great Salt in a silver saltcellar fashioned in the shape of a sleeping unicorn. Then they brought out spit-roasted lamb; herbed capon stuffed with suet, bread crumbs and saffron; fried almonds over a pudding of white rice; and a purée of apples in almond milk laced with ginger. Afterward, there were congealed sweetmeats heady to the tongue, spiced and garnished with coriander, orange peel, anise and cloves. The aromas alone overwhelmed the senses. I nibbled here and there at the offerings before me, but the impulse to flee continued to charge through my veins, distracting me at every moment.
Seated close at my right, for the hall was stuffed to the vaulted rafters with guests, was Aymer de Valence, the Earl of Pembroke and Longshanks’ favored general in the field. He poked a knife at the barely touched food on my overflowing trencher. “Indulge yourself, Lord Robert. One never knows how long a time will pass before such luxuries come our way again.”
His words raised an alarm for me. How much did Pembroke know of Comyn’s divulgence? If the prince had told Gilbert de Clare, and de Clare in turn told Ralph de Monthermer, then how many more knew of my impending doom? Prince Edward had left his place in between courses and was dangling above the shoulder of his favorite, Piers de Gaveston, an opportunist loathed by the king from all accounts and adored and lavished upon by the prince. The prince, a perpetual sneer on those thin, pale lips of his, whispered into Gaveston’s receptive ear. I thought I noticed a glance from both of them and my whole chest tightened with panic.
The Crown in the Heather (The Bruce Trilogy) Page 18