Insurrection (52 page)

The old man had so often said this. Robert had pledged fealty to King Edward and sworn an oath to Humphrey de Bohun and the Knights of the Dragon to defend the king’s cause. Despite the conflict warring inside him since the theft of the stone, he couldn’t refute this. A true knight, a man of honour, would not break his word. More than anything his grandfather had taught him that. But what if a man had taken oaths that contradicted one another? What then should he do?

The moon was high and small now, its glow weakened by advancing daylight. The loch was glassy, disturbed only by the shadows of birds flitting over the surface. Across the water, the castle keep loomed above the trees. Robert could see plumes of smoke rising from the bailey. The servants would be awake now, preparing the morning meal, stoking the hearths, feeding the animals. Behind him, from the still of the woods, six crows cast into the sky.

Robert closed his eyes and breathed in the hush when the birds had gone. It was then that he heard it: a crackle of twigs and the rustle of undergrowth. He went for his sword and drew it as he turned, eyes scanning the gloom. His gaze alighted on a stooped figure in a hooded brown cloak, heading towards him. As he saw the large black dog loping at the figure’s side he realised he had seen them outside the castle gates. He had taken the hunched figure for a beggar. As the figure passed out of the shadows of the trees he saw whoever it might be was leaning on a stick, their gait awkward. Long ashen hair fell in twisted hanks from beneath the low-pulled cowl. Robert caught a glimpse of a wrinkled throat, a sagging jaw and a down-turned mouth. ‘Who are you?’

The figure pushed back the cloak’s hood.

Robert stared at the hard face, creased with age. It was many years since he had seen her, but he knew her instantly. ‘Affraig?’ he murmured, lowering his sword.

‘I followed you from the castle.’ Her voice was rasping. ‘I knew it must be you by your clothes.’

Robert glanced at his cloak, decorated with the arms of Carrick.

‘I would not have known you otherwise.’ Affraig’s abrasive voice softened with wonder. ‘The boy I knew is gone. A man stands before me.’

Her Gaelic was like a long forgotten song. Since the death of his mother, Robert had mostly spoken French or Scots. He shook his head, stunned by the sight of her. ‘When did you come here?’ He thought of the journey from Carrick, a few days on foot, perhaps longer for a woman of her years. ‘Why did you?’

‘Brigid came to me. Her husband heard it on the road from Edinburgh that you were here. He said the Earl of Carrick was raising the men of Annandale.’

‘Brigid?’ A memory of a whip-thin girl with ratty hair came into Robert’s mind.

‘Is it Carrick you are raising your father’s men for?’ There was hope in the question, but flint in her tone.

‘Carrick?’ Robert frowned. Did the old woman know something his vassals had not told him? ‘There is no fight in Carrick.’

‘Fight, no. But struggle, yes. Great struggle.’ As she limped towards him, the black dog followed.

Robert saw that the animal had white, blind eyes. He wondered if it was one of the dogs she’d had when he had known her – that had bitten his brother, Alexander.

‘It has been hard for us, caught between Ayr and Galloway.’ Her haggard face was grim. ‘Soldiers of the Englishman, the one they call Percy, have pressed in on us from both sides. Disputes against them are silenced before they can be raised, by bribes or by violence. It is worse beyond our borders. Brigid brings me tidings from Ayrshire and many others come, begging for my aid to ease their suffering. Much suffering there is, in the towns filled with English soldiers and in the villages, where taxes have taken the food from children’s mouths. I have heard of men hanged without trial or judgement, houses looted, women—’ She halted. When she continued, her voice was low. ‘It is worse since the rising of William Wallace, but at least he brings hope to his people. I came, Sir Robert, to see if our hope may lie in you. Our lord.’

For a long moment, Robert didn’t know what to say. More than anything he felt angry: at her for bringing tidings it was the responsibility of Andrew Boyd and his other vassals to tell him and for assuming it was her place to, and at himself for not knowing his own people were suffering. ‘I am here on my father’s orders,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘But I intend to return to Carrick as soon as my task here is done. I know Sir Henry Percy. I will talk to him personally.’

‘
Talk
to him?’ The lines on Affraig’s face deepened. ‘When I learned of your alliance with the English and their king at the start of the war, I did not at first believe it. Your father, yes. But you? Your grandfather would weep for these days, had he lived to see them.’

Robert’s eyes narrowed, anger struggling to break free. ‘You forget my grandfather served both Edward and Henry. I am not the first Bruce to serve an English king.’

‘Served them he may have, but not at the expense of his kingdom. He never would have done so if it meant harm to his own people!’ Her bony finger shot out. ‘You and your father have left your lands to wither! For more than three years the people of Carrick have been without a lord.’

The dog, hearing the words spitting through her teeth, began to growl.

Robert stood his ground, towering over Affraig, his nose clogging with the smell of mouldering earth that came off her. Her cloak was caked with mud. ‘You dare speak to me in this manner? You know nothing of my life!’

She didn’t flinch at his tone, or the sword that had risen in his grasp. ‘I know you were passed a solemn inheritance that you have turned your back on. That I know.’

He went to speak, then moved past her, not wanting to hear more of her sour invective.

‘What of the throne of our people, carted to a foreign court?’ she called behind him, her voice as harsh as a crow’s caw. ‘What of the hill that stands empty?’

He turned, fear and shame leaping in him, thinking she must somehow know of his part in the theft.

‘For centuries Scotland’s kings were made at Scone. Will there not be another to stand upon the Moot Hill and hear the names of his forefathers recited from the pages of history? Our kingdom has lost its soul, Robert.’

He could see no accusation in her face any more, only sorrow. She couldn’t know what he had done. If she did, she would curse him where he stood. Some part of him wished she would.

‘Your family held a claim to the throne for over half a century. I do not understand why you do not fight for it, as was your grandfather’s wish. Or why you would serve the man who has taken your right from you?’

Something flashed in Robert’s mind. He remembered the day his grandfather told him he was to be dubbed, the day his father was forced to resign the earldom of Carrick. He had seen Affraig in Lochmaben talking with the old man. She had touched his face with strange affection. How could he have forgotten? ‘It was you? You told my grandfather to pass the claim to me?’

Her lips flattened in a thin line. ‘Fool that I was. I should have seen then that it was your father’s mould you had been made in.’

Robert’s face flushed. ‘Leave. You have no business with me or my family. Not any more.’

As he strode through the trees, cuffing aside branches, her voice echoed at his back.

‘Leave, I shall. There is no hope here.’

47

The boy grasped the mossy stones of the parapet wall and pulled himself up, breathing hard from the climb. Behind him his father’s banner snapped in the breeze. His pale blue eyes narrowed as he squinted over the battlements into the sunlight that was reflected in the surface of the small loch that lay beyond the castle walls. From out of the green depths of the forest that encircled the stronghold an army was slowly emerging, men and horses forming up beyond the dazzling water, helms and lances glinting. The boy’s eyes settled on a standard at the head of the company. A red chevron on white.

‘
Bastards
,’ he murmured. Dropping down, the boy turned to his father’s banner, three white stars on billowing blue. The sight of the flag fuelled him with defiance. ‘Let them come,’ he breathed, ducking through the door at the tower’s top and sprinting down the steps inside.

As he reached the floor below, he saw the door to his parents’ chamber was ajar. The gap was filled with firelight and conversation came from within. The boy halted, stifling his breaths so as not to be heard. His mother’s voice sounded, soft and troubled.

‘I shall speak to them. They will parley with me, surely?’

‘The Earl of Carrick leads them, my lady. The young Bruce is a puppet for the English king, so it is said.’

The boy moved closer. That was Dunegall, the captain his father had left to command the garrison. The man was stalwart, but as old as the hills and afflicted with the gout.

‘I will address them from the gate, my lady, and demand to know why they are trespassing on Lord Douglas’s lands.’

‘I think it is clear why they have come, Dunegall. With my husband in the company of William Wallace they have come for James and me. They mean to punish him through us. I have no doubt of it.’

The boy stepped back with a frown at his name and the threat in her words.

‘Do not fear, my lady, these walls are stout.’

‘After all the Treacherer has taken our stores are almost empty. We cannot stay here indefinitely. The Bruce and his men will starve us out, if they do not break down the gates and force their way in. No, I will go to them.’

Lady Douglas seemed to falter. But when she spoke again, her voice was flat. James recognised the resolve in her tone. He’d been confronted with it many a time when he’d misbehaved.

‘I will tell them James is not here. Perhaps, if I give myself to them, they will be content. Whatever happens to me, Dunegall, you must promise to deliver James safe to his father.’

James stumbled back from the door. Without waiting to hear any more, he raced on, down through the tower. If his father were here he would ride out on his charger with a roar that would shake the foundations of the keep and smash through them all with the fury of hell, not stopping until the ground was drenched in their blood or his own. Either way, he would not let his wife face an army. Well, James could not ride out – his father’s men had taken all their horses, except his mother’s hobby and a few nags – but weapons he did have. He kept his sword, the one he had trained with for the past year, in the room where he slept, but the guardroom was closer. Anyhow, he wanted a man’s weapon.

On the other side of the loch, Robert formed up with the men of Annandale, as the foot soldiers continued to tramp out of the trees behind. To either side of him were Nes and Walter, a knight from Carrick, who had served him well in Carlisle and whom he’d appointed as his banner-bearer. Walter held aloft his standard, the chevron a bold red arrow pointing to the sky. The hooves of their horses sank in the boggy ground around the loch, the grassy banks of which were alive with waterfowl. Robert glimpsed flickers of bronze and silver, the sunlight catching under the birds’ wings as they darted through the reeds, disturbed by the gathering men. Beyond the body of water, the castle of Lord Douglas rose from a grassy mound. It looked much like Lochmaben: a stone keep atop a motte reinforced with clay and timber, and a bailey surrounded by a palisade. The only real difference was the terrain, which was more thickly wooded.

Robert had led his company through these deepening woods for miles, following the River Annan north through his father’s domain, before heading west into the rising hills. The land had marched up into lofty, green tors, cloaked with beech and oak, where rivers snaked along the valleys and waterfalls tracked silent silver lines down the steeper slopes. In the distance the blue shadows of higher peaks could be seen, the first markers of the mountains that barred the way to the north and west. Douglas, nestled in a valley in the heart of the woods, was a peaceful setting, the smell of wild herbs filling the air.

Sitting astride Hunter on the edge of the trees, the sun warm on his face, Robert stared at the hushed landscape before him. There should be peasants out working, farmers driving cattle to summer pastures, girls traipsing down to the waterside with laundry, lords and their sons out with bows, hunting the first deer. Instead, the place was deserted, the castle gates shut and barred. Only the smoke coming from the buildings and the noises of panicked animals beyond the palisade gave any sign of life. He could see Douglas’s banner, flying from the keep. Robert had never met Sir William Douglas or his family, but he knew the man’s wife was a sister of his grandfather’s old ally, James Stewart. Douglas’s son and heir had been named after the high steward, his uncle and godfather.

‘Do we make camp?’

Robert looked round at the blunt question to see a flint-eyed knight staring at him. Gillepatric was one of his father’s staunchest vassals, a tough, canny man who had aided in the defence of Carlisle. Robert had often wondered how his father inspired such loyalty in men like this, who had kept faith and fought for him even while their homesteads were being burned by the Comyns. He supposed his father’s decision to support King Edward had been proven right in the end, for the men of Annandale were some of the few in Scotland to retain their lord and their lands, many others now subject to the rule of English barons such as Warenne and Percy. Still, his father inspired so little devotion in him by comparison. It now struck Robert that these men weren’t a threat to his father’s ambitions. They were followers, loyal because they had to be, for their own sakes as much as their lord’s. He was the one waiting in the shadows to take his father’s place, his fortune. His father had already been passed over, his earldom removed. However much Robert admired his grandfather he couldn’t deny that the old man’s disappointment in his son and affection for him had been the main cause of the division between them. For the first time, he thought he understood something of his father’s resentment. He was a mirror in which the man had watched his own life pass.