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His arrival back in Scotland had come as no surprise to folk, who thought he had just lain low for a while. Now he was snugged up in Riccarton’s chapel to Saint Mirin, having claimed ‘the knowledge of Latin’ to wriggle out from under Edward’s harsh law into the court of the Church, who had some sympathy towards ex-rebels.
There would be no church or God, though, which would keep him from the wrath of Longshanks if he ever discovered Jop was one of the thieves of the Crown’s treasure from the minster.
The fire sparked, little worm-embers snapping Hal from remembrance. That cloistered conversation had been a month ago and Lamprecht had grown no more easier to be with since. Neither him nor his tale, Hal thought.
‘Jop,’ he said and wanted to say more on this cousin of the Wallace, who had none of the man’s better qualities save height. He did not need to say more on it, all the same, for each man recognized the problem of Jop and, eventually, Sim voiced it.
‘This Jop,’ Sim said, breaking Hal’s reverie. ‘Is tight-fastened in a kirk. It will be as hard to crack open as Riccarton’s Keep, I am thinking.’
‘Less soldiery in the kirk,’ Kirkpatrick declared. ‘I hear the English have stuffed the keep wi’ English, to mak’ siccar The Ogre takes no rest there. They must be sleeping three to a cot in that wee place.’
‘Aye, weel, they will be dressed soon enough if a wee priest hurls up crying that mad drovers are beatin’ in his chapel door,’ growled Sim and Kirkpatrick’s laugh was low and mirthless.
‘Ye should get abroad more, Sim Craw,’ Kirkpatrick declared, his accent broadening, as it always did when he spoke with the likes of Sim. He could make it refined and French, too, when he chose and Hal realized this was part of the shifting shadow of the man.
‘Whit why?’ demanded Sim truculently.
‘Ye would learn things. Like the time there was an auld priest o’ Riccarton,’ Kirkpatrick answered. ‘Years since. Had the falling sickness, which laid him out as if he had died. He had such a fear o’ what would happen that even a week’s wake and a belled coffin was too little precaution for him – so he took steps to mak’ siccar he would never be buried alive.’
He had them all now, locked tight in the shackles of his eyes and words.
‘He had a lidless kist made and passage cut from the chapel crypt into the graveyard beyond,’ Kirkpatrick went on, ‘in case they tombed him up alive.’
‘Did he ever have use o’ it?’ demanded the round-eyed Dog Boy and Kirkpatrick shook his head.
‘Went on a pilgrimage to Rome, for relief o’ his condition and sins. Drowned at sea.’
‘Ah, bigod,’ sighed Sim, shaking a rueful head. ‘What is set on ye will no’ go past ye, certes.’
‘So the passage is there still?’ demanded Hal and Kirkpatrick nodded, his grin catching the firelight in the dark.
‘We will be in and out o’ Saint Mirin’s wee house, easy as beggary.’
He looked at where the sun was dying, seeping red into the horizon like blood from a flayed skin; insects hummed and wheeped in the iron-filing twilight.
‘When it gets dark,’ he said.
Sim grunted as he levered himself up. Tapping Dog Boy on the shoulder, he went out to check on the cattle and the dogs, followed by the boy. Dog Boy kept glancing behind them.
‘Are yer sins hagging ye?’ Sim demanded eventually and Dog Boy shook his head, then shrugged.
‘Lamprecht,’ he said and Sim nodded.
‘There is something not right,’ Dog Boy insisted.
‘God’s Hook, laddie, ye have said a true thing there – stop twitching in the dark and help me with these God-cursed stirks.’
Hal watched them go, hearing them mutter, while Lamprecht slithered off into a bower of leaves and branches, clutching his precious bundle to him and muttering morosely about the discomfort. Hal felt like telling him he was lucky it was summer still, for in winter the drovers made a bowl-shaped withy of sticks, then broke the ice on any stream or loch, dipped their cloaks and spread them out over the withy to freeze into a shelter.
‘Sim Craw must favour one o’ those cattle,’ Kirkpatrick said with a lopsided smile, ‘since he cares for them a deal, it seems.’
Hal did not reply; Sim Craw had bought bullocks and horse both from Stirk Davey in Biggar and had them cheap on the promise that Davey would buy them back if they were returned undamaged. It meant Sim and Hal would keep the money, which had come from Bruce for the purpose, and it would go into the trickle of silver that would, one day, become the pool to rebuild Herdmanston.
Instead, he wondered aloud his fears regarding Lamprecht and that it all might be a trap set by Longshanks himself to test Bruce loyalty.
‘It might,’ Kirkpatrick agreed laconically, ‘though such subtle work is not the mark of that king. If he suspects our earl to that extent, he would be hauling in folk likely to speak of it under the Question. Confessions would be enough without all this mummery.’
Which was true enough to silence Hal to brooding on Kirkpatrick himself, until he finally voiced what had been on his mind for long enough regarding the man.
‘Whit why do ye serve the Earl?’
The answering smile was bland, with some puzzle quirking the edge of it.
‘Same as yersel’,’ he replied and saw Hal’s laconic lip-curl, faint in the growing dim.
‘Ill luck and circumstance then.’
‘Circumstance, certes,’ Kirkpatrick answered, the slow, considered words of it forged in a steel that did not pass Hal by. ‘Ill luck? Hardly that for you, my lord. What have ye suffered?’
A lost wife and son to ague. A light of love to politics. A keep to fire and pillage, done by those he counted kin and friends.
‘There is more,’ he finished sarcastically and Kirkpatrick stirred a little, then poked the fire so that flames rose and embers flared away and died like little ruby hopes.
‘Your wife and boy are a decade gone,’ he replied sudden as a slap. ‘Others have suffered loss o’ dear yins, from ague, plague an’ worse. Your light o’ love is someone else’s and you have been apart from her for five years at least, so the brooding is of your own making. Your wee keep was slighted a bit – it is lacking the timber floors and is blackened, but the folk still huddle around it, you still collect rents an’ your kin in Roslin manage it and oversee the repairs. Yourself provides the siller, from the rents, the money the Earl pays you as retinue … and what you can skim.’
He stopped and turned his firelit blade of a face, challenging and grim, towards Hal.
‘Where is the suffering in this?’
‘You think you are worse?’ Hal bridled and Kirkpatrick sighed.
‘Ye have a dubbin’ as knight, the arms to prove it and lands,’ he answered, the wormwood of his voice a thickened gruel of bitterness, his face shrouded. ‘Yer da, blessed wee man that he was, had no learnin’ beyond weaponry and a wee bit tallying – but he made sure ye could read and write like a canting priest and provided other learning betimes.’
‘I am a Kirkpatrick o’ Closeburn, kin to the Bruces – my namesake holds the place from the Annandale Bruces, yet he has been more seen in the company o’ those who are King Edward’s men through an’ through. My namesake is the lord, and I am the poor relation, who has no way with letters or writin’, for who would bother hiring a wee dominie to teach the likes o’ me that?’
Hal shifted uncomfortably, remembering his own teacher and how he had fretted against him; here was a man who was bitter that he never had the same.
‘I speak the French, mind you,’ he went on – breaking into that tongue and speaking as much to the fire and his own thoughts as to Hal. ‘And some of the Gaelic learned from the Bruce. And a little Latin, for the responses. And the lingua franca yon little toad Lamprecht uses, learned while in France and … elsewhere.’
He stopped, paused, then continued in French, as if to prove his point.
‘I have never been touched by sword on shoulder, nor handed a set of gilded spurs. I can bear the arms of Closeburn, but so tainted with lowly markings for my station that it is less shameful to bear none at all. I can use the weapons of a knight, but I have never sat a warhorse in my life, nor expect it.’
He broke off, bringing his stare back to fall on Hal’s face. He shook off the French, like a dog coming from a stream.
‘Yet the Bruce esteems me for the talents I have, which are considerable. I ken the hearts o’ men and women both, ken when they lie and when they plot. I ken how to use a sword, my wee lord o’ Herdmanston, but I ken best how to wield a dirk in the night.’
There was a chill after this that the flames could not dispel. Hal cleared his throat.
‘You expect advantage from all this, from the Earl when he is king?’
‘Weesht on that,’ Kirkpatrick answered softly, then sighed.
‘I did so,’ he added flatly. ‘Now I see that what an earl wants an’ what a king requires are differing things.’
He was silent for a little while, leaving the fire to speak in pops and spits. Then he stirred.
‘When I was barely toddlin’,’ he said, ‘I got into the habit of makin’ watter wherever I stood.’
He broke off at Hal’s chuckle, his scowl softening, then vanishing entirely into a smile of his own.
‘Aye, a rare vision, I daresay, but I was a bairn, for all that. My ma warned me never to piss in her herb garden, which were vegetables and did not benefit from such a waterin’. Being an obedient boy, I never did so, preferring to keep it in until I could spray the chickens, which was better fun entire. Until the day the rooster turned and pecked me on the pizzle.’
Hal’s laugh was a sharp bark, quickly cut off lest he offend. Kirkpatrick’s chuckle was reassuring.
‘Jist so. A painful experience and it was so for a time. Peelin’ scab and stickiness was the least o’ it – but my mither soothed me with ministrations and good advice she thought a boy like me might remember. Chickens is vegetables, she says to me.’
He stirred the fire again so that sparks flew.
‘Since then,’ he added, ‘I have been aware that nothin’ is as it appears.’
‘Nothin’ is, certes,’ Hal agreed morosely. ‘I fought at the brig o’ Stirlin’ and at Callendar woods with Wallace – yet these last months I have been fighting against the same men whose shoulders I once rubbed.’
‘So?’
The challenge made Hal bristle.
‘So it is no way for a future king of Scots to behave, cleaving his own folk. They will not care for it, I am thinking.’
Kirkpatrick waved one hand, which had the added effect of scattering the midges.
‘Sma’ folk,’ he growled and jerked his shadowed head at where Sim and Dog Boy sat, shadows against the last of the bloodstained sky. ‘D’ye think they care who rules them? As long as they have their livelihood, the De’il could wear the crown. It is the nobiles of this kingdom Bruce will have to worry ower.’
Hal thought about it. He had seen the sma’ folk, barefoot, shit-legged, trembling, yet determinedly hanging on to their long spears and immovable from the shoulders of the men next to them. Not noble, some not even landed, unable in many cases to understand the very speech of the man next to them and with the men from north and south of The Mounth suspicious of one another, they came together for one reason. They had cared enough to be angered.
Though it had been slow and long in the growing, a realization was sprouting in Hal that there was a kingdom here that the commonality marked enough to defend – more to the point, it was one where the bare-footed shitlegs considered they had as much say in who ruled them as any earl. He said as much to Kirkpatrick.
‘Mayhap,’ Kirkpatrick growled at this, trying to shrug the matter off and failing, for he was no longer as sure as he once had been.
Chickens is vegetables, he thought.
CHAPTER THREE
Balmullo, Fife
The same night
They brought him in the dark on a litter, a milling crowd of riders and footmen strangely silent save for a grunt here, a hissed warning there. They hefted the litter up the steep stairs and across the span of wooden walkway to the door of the stout stone house.
There were lights from torches that let the curious, peeping from the wattle buildings clustered around Balmullo, see who it was who had arrived, but not who they carried in. The Earl of Buchan, visiting his wife, they saw; one or two of the women, swaddled in shawls, added ‘puir sowl’ to that, for it was hard enough for the Countess of Buchan to have to endure the presence of the Earl’s creature as her gaoler without The Man Himself descending on her for his rights.
The creature met the litter at the door, spider-black and hair-thin with a face somehow twisted out of true. The nose, speckled with the fade of old pox-marks, was bent and twisted and there was a permanent stain, like a birthmark or blood bruise, on one cheek where he had once been hit with an iron skillet. There was a chin on the man, but not much of one and it made the teeth stick out like a rat from between damp lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache, greying now.
He was preparing, Isabel saw, to be scraping and deferential to his master, the Earl of Buchan, in the hope of preferment away from his duties at Balmullo. No more than a mastiff, she thought, set to watch as much as guard and knowing he is hated.
Yet the mastiff that was Malise Belljambe had to stand aside when the grunting men sweated through the yett and into the main hall with their burden, who said nothing beyond a muffled curse when they set him down too hard.
Malise did not want to tangle with the carriers, who stank of sweat, woodsmoke and old blood; the leader lay in the litter like the Devil at rest, but a lesser imp, in his black carapace of boiled leather, spat curses at the careless handlers in a tongue Malise knew to be the Gaelic used by those strange caterans north of The Mounth.
Buchan followed, peeling off his gloves and shifting to remove his cloak from over his head without unpinning it, seeing Malise scuttle to help him. He nodded only a brief recognition – Malise was a mammet, no more, useful for the scut work that was necessary in these savage times. Then the light from the sconce flared in the night breeze and lit up his wife.
He took a breath, for he had not seen her in some months and had managed to forget how she could look, fresh from bed. Her hair was still richly coppered and, even when he knew there was artifice involved in that, the knowledge did not spoil matters. She was beautiful still, the body hinting at slender promise even wrapped in nightclothes and a fur-trimmed gown. Her eyes, lapis in the torchlight, were hard and cold as those gems and he felt the old slither of resentment and anger, quickly beaten down, for he had not come to quarrel.
She saw the cat and dog of that chase itself across a face heavier than before. He seemed weightier altogether, she thought, surprised at how six months could make such a difference. Then she saw that it was not fat – though there were colonies of that round his middle and chin – but a droop to the once-powerful shoulders, as if he carried too much across them.
His hair was pewter, his eyes glass and iron; for a moment Isabel wondered if he would wave imperiously to the bedchamber and follow her in, as he usually did – though less this last year than ever, she noted.
Buchan thought of it, then dismissed it. He had almost done with grunting and sweating on her for no result – even the pleasure of it was licked away by her dignified detachment as she left him at the end of it, he spent and ashamed at his grossness.
No offspring came from it and, for a long time, he had wondered whether this was natural or contrived by her – but he had had other women since and in numbers, too, as if to make up for the lack she offered, and none had conceived. Buchan was beginning, with a nag of fear he could not dismiss, to realize that the problem lay with himself.
‘Wife,’ he grunted at her in the end and she acknowledged matters with a cool, curt bow and then brought forward a servant and a tray with wine and food on it.
‘Malise,’ she declared, ‘see to the care of the others and the stabling of their horses. Find room for them all where you can – but be polite in the asking.’
Malise hovered malevolently for a moment, caught Buchan’s eye and bowed obsequiously.
‘My lord’s visit?’ Isabel asked and Buchan, goblet in hand, nodded to the litter, perched near the fire and surrounded by the grim-faced men.
‘Wallace,’ he growled. ‘He is sick from a wound, so I brought him here. You have some skill with the medical and can be trusted not to blabber.’
She tried hard not to blink, to stay as stone, but it was difficult. Wallace was outlawed and harbouring him was as good as a death sentence to Buchan, only just returned to the favour of King Edward. Her skill with ‘the medical’ was one more perversion of her sex and station and she had thought that, if her husband had considered it all, it was to add it to the black sin of her.
Isabel looked her husband full in his fleshy, pouch-eyed face and had back a cool, wordless stare; she realized, suddenly, what the stooping weight he bore was and that there was steel in the man – more so than even she had thought, with his dogged persistence in carrying on resistance to the English, whether openly or covert.
‘I will take to your chambers,’ he gruffed, ‘so that folk will spread the word that this was merely the Earl coming to take his rights of his wife. Happily for you, I need sleep more than your loins for the moment, so you need not fash over it.’
He did not wait, but barrelled off into the hall’s dim, smoke from the torches fluttering like dark insinuation in his wake.
The men round the litter parted deferentially when she came up and the figure on it, half propped up on his elbow, gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.
‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes – though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’
She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.
She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.
‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. Then came this.’
