by Jack Whyte
The farm manager had a bucket chain established within minutes, a string of sweating, cursing men battling to keep a supply of water flowing up from the still-raging stream. Bruce nodded to him grimly. He knew, though, that despite the tremendous rainfall that day, the tons of hay now feeding the fire had been warm and bone dry when they tumbled from the floor above, and that it was only a matter of time, perhaps mere moments, before the fire would erupt into an inferno.
He shrugged out of his heavy cloak and pulled off his shirt, crumpling it into a ball and then soaking it in the rushing water at his feet before wrapping it around his lower face against the thickening smoke. Scrambling to keep his balance on the treacherous stones that threatened to roll under his feet, he fought his way up to the top of the pile and stood looking down into the chaos of the interior. The fire was on his far right, a dense pall of yellow and black smoke that showed no hint of flame, though the fuel beneath the surface must have been burning like a charcoal burner’s kiln. Directly below where he stood, the well of the floor was a mass of bales, hay and straw, most of them intact. In one spot, though, loose hay heaved alarmingly, and he realized that there must be a horse beneath it, struggling to free itself. Beyond that a section of the collapsed floor of the hayloft hung loosely, sagging from one corner and forming a sloping wooden wall that concealed the rear of the stables on that side. He could hear the panicked screams of horses coming from behind the rough partition, and he swung around, looking for someone he could trust.
“Patrick!” Bruce shouted, and a young man looked up. “Up here, quick!” Patrick Dinwiddie was one of the Annandale men who had come south to England with Lord Robert years before. Behind him, Bruce saw Thomas Beg bent over with his hands on his knees, head hanging as he coughed and spluttered, trying to clear the foulness of smoke from his lungs. Dinwiddie scampered up the collapsed stones on all fours, and Bruce took him by the shoulder and pointed. “See those bales? Get a team of men and haul them out of there, quick as you can.” The young man turned away with a nod, but Bruce restrained him. “There’s a horse there, too, under the straw. Try and save it.” The young man dashed away, and Bruce looked back down the sloping scree of stones. “Tam! Come up here!”
Moments later Tam was there, still wheezing but no longer spluttering. Bruce pointed to the sagging upper floor. “There are horses back there. They’re still alive and they may even be uninjured, so we need to get them out. Are you fit enough?”
Tam drew a shuddering breath and nodded. “Aye,” he croaked. “I’ll manage. What d’ye want to do?”
“I can’t remember—is there a window back there?”
Tam squinted, then nodded. “Aye. Two o’ them, but they’re wee. Ye winna get a horse through.”
“No, but we could knock out the wall beneath them. We’ll need pickaxes or hammers big enough.”
Again the squint of concentration. “The smithy. I’ll get some. But we’re like to bring the whole place down about our ears. These walls are done.”
Bruce looked up at the remaining walls of the upper floors. The one to his right was almost completely gone, its fragile remnants tapering up to a point against the rear wall. The one opposite, on his left, was hanging drunkenly, wrenched out of true by the weight of the falling floors, and might come down at any moment. The rear wall looked stronger, but he knew that was only because he was looking at it full on and could see no evidence of it sagging in or out. He grimaced.
“It they fall, they fall. The horses are more important right now. We can’t afford to lose any more of them. Go and get something to breach the walls with and meet me at the back.” Tam grunted and turned away, passing Patrick Dinwiddie as he went at the head of a file of men armed with pitchforks and baling hooks.
“Good man, Patrick,” Bruce said as the Annandale man reached him. “See to the horse first. Then get as many of those bales out as you can. But be careful, and set someone to keep an eye on that wall up there. Any hint of it moving, anything at all, get your people out of there. Understand?”
“Aye, my lord.” They turned away together, Bruce down to the outside again while Dinwiddie led his men cautiously down to the mass of hay fronting the hanging floor.
Bruce ran round to the back of the stables, where he stood staring at the wall, trying to gauge its strength and its vulnerability. Four small windows were evenly spaced along its length, well above head height here at the back. He had already pulled himself up to peer in through the lowest one, but he had seen nothing but drifting smoke and a sullen glow of fire before he had to lower himself again. Now he was frustrated, for the sill of the rightmost window was a good foot beyond his reach, and there was nothing nearby he could use to stand on.
Thomas Beg came into view around the edge of the wall, closely followed by another man with an armful of tools.
“I need to get up there,” Bruce said over his shoulder to Tam. “Need to see what’s inside before we try to break in.”
“Stand on my shoulders, then.” Tam braced his back against the wall and cupped his huge hands to hold Bruce’s foot.
“Be careful,” the other man said in Gaelic, and Bruce whipped his head around in shock.
“Nicol!”
“Robert, you’re looking fine, lad. But get up there quick—the fire’s spreading and they won’t be able to hold it much longer. Go!”
Bruce launched himself upward until he was standing on Tam’s shoulders, then pulled the shutters open and leaned forward to peer through the open window. He could see nothing inside apart from the slowly pulsing yellow light of the fire on the far side of the fallen floor, but he clearly heard the sounds of the panicking animals in the darkness directly beneath him. He checked the thickness of the windowsill under his hands and then lowered himself to the ground.
“Three horses, perhaps four—none of them injured. The wall’s thick, but not too thick—probably about four feet at the base here but tapering to two as it rises. Mortared stones front and back, with rubble in the space between. I’ll start with a pickaxe.”
He stepped back to check the alignment of the window above him. “The mortar’s old and the stones are round. It shouldn’t be too difficult to break the seal and chop out the first stone. After that the rest will be easier. Stand back.”
He took aim at the plaster topping one stone at about the level of his eyes and swung the heavy pick in a short, sharp blow, shattering the ancient mortar easily and sending it flying in splinters. He hit again, below the stone this time and with the same result, and mere moments later he had pried the first stone free, leaving a gaping hole.
“Right,” he said. “There’s our start. We only need to bring it down to the floor, which should be about there.” He pointed straight forward at about the level of his waist. “We just have to keep the opening narrow—wide enough for a horse, but narrow enough to keep the wall from coming down on top of us. Once we’ve punched a hole through, I can crawl in and work from the other side.”
Nicol’s hand grasped him by the shoulder. “How big is yon window? Could you get through it?”
“Aye, easily.”
“Then do that. You can dig from inside while Thomas and I work out here. It’ll cut the time in half.”
It took only a short time to break the first hole open, and from that time on the work went more quickly, with Tam and Bruce pounding the stones free and Nicol MacDuncan shovelling the debris out and away as quickly as he could. Bruce found himself panting heavily, his mouth and nostrils stinging with the dust and smoke, and from time to time he could hear urgent voices behind him, on the far side of the hanging floor. He stopped and looked up at the wall ahead of him, then began to swing his pickaxe upward, smashing at the stones there and squinting narrowly against the flying chips until one mighty full-arm swing met no resistance and he overbalanced, falling to his knees. He regained his feet, checked the width of the opening they had made, then reached outside and pulled Tam and Nicol up until they stood beside him.
; “Careful,” he told them. “These beasts are terrified. They’d kick you to death without knowing it. Blindfold them if you can, and we’ll lead them out one at a time.”
There were five uninjured horses in the smoke-filled space beneath the sheltering floor, heaving in a frightened mass and pressed as close as they could come to the wall in their need to be as far away as possible from the noises and smells that threatened them. Bruce grappled with them one by one, covering their heads with clothes torn off and thrust at him by his companions, and calming them as best he could before passing each one along to one of the other two to lead outside. As he passed the fourth beast’s rope halter to Tam, the dull glare of yellow light beyond the hanging wall exploded in a rising ball of brilliant flames that sucked all the air and smoke out of the space in a whoosh.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE FRENCH PHYSICIAN
Bruce drew in his breath with a sharp hiss when his eyes would not open properly. His body stiffened instantly in protest, and the reaction made him aware of multiple centres
of pain throughout his upper body: on the left side of his chest; in his hip, also on the left; and in his right shoulder. His entire head felt as though it were on fire, and he had a flashing memory of exploding flames and a horse leaping past him, screaming, its tail a blazing torch.
He sensed rather than saw a blurred, dark shape leaning over him, and then a heavy hand pressed down on the centre of his chest, pinning him.
“Lie still, Robert. Don’t try to move.”
He recognized his father’s voice and the day came whirling back at him: the storm, the stables, the fire. And the roar of the conflagration that he had barely noticed at the time. He fought down an urge to resist and forced himself to remain still. His nostrils twitched, inhaling a sour odour of charred wood and bitter smoke.
“I can’t see,” he said.
“Your head’s bandaged. Covering your eyes. There’s nothing wrong with them. You fell and hit your head—landed on stones.”
… Bandaged. There’s nothing wrong with them … He felt a great relief welling up in him, and then his mind filled again with the image of the immense ball of fire that had filled the air around him. He had thought himself dead.
“Am I burnt?”
“No, just singed a bit … your hair. It will grow back.”
“Tam cut my hair,” he said softly, remembering being sheared that very morning.
“I know.” His father’s voice was gentle, filled with concern. “And a good thing, too. There was less to burn.”
“I can still smell the stink of it—the fire.”
“We all can, but it’s getting better. The smoke was everywhere. The whole house was full of it. How do you feel, though?”
A blink, feeling the roughness of cloth against his eyelids. “Sore,” he whispered. “Chest and side and shoulder. I can see, though? Are you sure, Father?”
In answer, a finger probed somewhere above his right eye, prying at the bindings there.
“There … Try again.”
He did, and his vision blurred as a great surge of gratitude swept up from deep inside him. He could see. He blinked rapidly, feeling again the lid of his left eyelid move against the roughness of its covering cloth, and what he was seeing came into focus. The room was night-dark, leaping with flickering light from fire and candles that brightened one half of his father’s face and left the rest in shadow. Beyond his father’s looming shape, closer to the fire’s brightness, he saw two other men looking down at him, their faces grave. One was his great-uncle Nicol; the other, much older and white-haired, with a deeply lined face, was a stranger. Bruce felt a cough well up in him and released it. A flare of pain exploded through his chest and cut off his breath. His father winced in sympathy.
“Aye, that’ll hurt, right enough. It’s your ribs. We thought at first you might have stove your rib cage, but Father Baldwin tested them and thinks there’s nothing broken. They’re badly bruised, he says, and you’ll be laid up for a week or so, but you’re as healthy as a horse in prime and you’ll recover quickly. That being,” he added, “by the grace of God and the power of prayer. The same goes for the rest o’ you. You’re hairless on one side and skinned raw on the other, but nothing’s broken.” A tiny smile tugged at his mouth. “Mind you, we’ll have to keep you out of Lady Isabella’s sight until your brows and your eyelashes start to grow again—and the hair on your head and face, of course.”
Bruce ignored the reference to his betrothed, his mind already busy with other things. “Who did we lose?”
His father looked up, his eyes on someone beyond Bruce’s sight. “Thomas,” he said. “You’re better informed than I am. Tell the earl what you know.”
Thomas Beg came into view, moving around from one side of the bed to the other. Bruce tried to twist his head to see him as he came, but the pain of his singed scalp flared again and he lay still, waiting until the huge man stood towering over him.
“There’s six folk missin’ frae the head count,” Tam began without preamble, “three o’ them stablemen. Five men was in the stables when it happened, we jalouse, and a woman.”
Bruce lay stony-faced as Thomas Beg continued. “Forbye, we think at least six horses, though there might hae been more. We just canna tell. Auld Sammy the stablemaster’s one o’ the missin’ folk and he’s the only one who would hae kent how many beasts was in there at the start.”
“Is the fire out now?”
Tam shook his head. “No, no’ yet, but close enough now. It’s rainin’ again—heavy—and that should soak what’s left.”
Bruce sighed. “God rest their souls,” he said. “The folk, I mean, though God knows the beasts are worthy of pity, too … I fear you’ll have to send men in there tomorrow, Tam, or as soon as the ashes cool … to find the bodies.”
Tam’s left eyebrow flared high. “What bodies, my lord? D’ye mind tellin’ me yon story about the Viking chiefs, when they died an’ wis burnt wi’ their boats?”
Bruce stared up at him, wondering what he was talking about, though he did have vague recollections of telling him one time about a Viking funeral.
“Well,” Tam said, “this was a worse fire than any Viking ever saw. We’ll no’ find any bodies in there, Earl Robert. I doubt we’ll even find the odd bone. And gin we do, the only thing that’ll mark them as horse or human will be the size o’ them. When that place finally went up it burnt like the fires o’ Hell—a furnace stoked wi’ straw an’ hay an’ wooden beams an’ joists an’ posts an’ floors an’ stalls, every bit o’ it dry, well-seasoned fuel—wi’ the walls actin’ like a chimney.”
The silence that followed was deep, every man there imagining what it must have been like.
Bruce drew a shallow, careful breath before asking his next question. “Is Dinwiddie safe?”
“Aye. He got out wi’ a’ his people just afore the fire exploded. He saved that horse you telt him to. There was three more under the straw, trapped there when the roof fell in on them. Two o’ them was dead an’ he had to kill the third. But him an’ his men got a’ thae bales safe out o’ there, and there was more o’ them than ye’d think. Mainly good hay feed, wi’ a scatterin’ o’ straw.”
“And no one else was killed, apart from the missing six you mentioned?”
“No’ a soul. There was a few bangs an’ bruises, that’s a’. It could hae been a lot worse.”
Bruce barely nodded, and Thomas Beg hovered for a moment, then turned to leave.
“Wait, Tam. Help me to sit up.”
“No!” The senior Bruce stepped forward quickly, waving Thomas Beg away. “No sitting for you, Robert. Not until we know there’s nothing broken inside you. Father Baldwin thinks you’re merely bruised, but he’s not certain of his own judgment and he’s sent for help—another physician, from Sir John Mowbray’s place a few miles from here. Until he comes, you are to stay flat on your back—tied down, if need be. We have no wish to see you die of a punctured lung from one of you
r own broken bones.” He glanced at Tam. “Thank you, Thomas. Away you go now.”
The big man nodded after a moment, cast a swift glance down at Bruce, and then left obediently, moving in silence for all his enormous size.
The silence lasted after his departure and grew long, broken only by the crackling of the fire in the grate. Bruce forced himself to breathe slowly and gently. The pain caused even by a too-deep breath was close to being unbearable. A snippet of memory flashed through his mind, a vague remembrance of a campfire comment made some long-past night, something about the degree of a wound’s agony being in relationship to its severity. He had no idea who had said it or where.
He became aware then of the silence and turned his head slightly to look up at his father, who was staring emptily back at him from a face that lacked any expression.
“What happens now, sir?”
His lordship blinked, his eyes visibly coming back to focus. “What? Oh … We have to get you up on your feet again, and hale, before we press on to Westminster and the King.” He almost smiled. “From the sounds of it, that ought not to take too long … ” His father’s face sobered again, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “You did well today, Robert. Your folk are speaking highly of you and they are more concerned for you than I ever remember mine being for me.” His voice sank lower. “And that’s as it should be. I’m proud of what you have achieved here in Writtle, my son.”
“Managing to let half the place burn down about our ears, you mean?” He grimaced, embarrassed by his father’s praise. “I knew that corner of the barn building was weak, Father. I saw it a year ago—the condition of the mortaring and the looseness of some of the bottom stones. I talked about it with Old Sammy and with Alan Bellow, but I did nothing about it, thinking it less urgent than other things. Old Sammy himself said that it had stood more than a hundred years and would keep until we had the time to mend it … He was wrong, and I was, too. But Sammy died because of it, and I’m still here.”