The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (20 page)

He did not know that they had let him by as too small a prize when there was an inn to be plundered.

Bangtail Hob was not a happy man, as he kept telling everybody out of the sour scowl of his face. It did not help that it had rained on his ride from a warm, comfortable inn and that he had left his cloak behind.

‘When I find yon arse who swore he had come up this road and saw ye turn for Elderslie,' he growled for the umpteenth time, ‘I will hand him a lick such as to dunt his head from his neck.'

‘She was a rare piece, then, this quine ye climbed off?' demanded Will Elliott, who was licking his lips in anticipation of the delights of the inn Bangtail Hob had described.

‘She was,' Hob enthused, then blackened his face with a new scowl. ‘Now we will be lucky to get a whiff, when these lads reach it. Elderslie road – the serpent-tongued hoor-slip.'

‘Enow, ye midden,' Sim growled and nodded towards the palfrey, approaching at a posting trot, the Countess riding as easily as was possible on a sidesaddle. Hal and Sim Craw looked at each other, though there was only mild amusement in it for the entire affair was, as Sim put it when they'd set out, a guddle of nae good.

‘Master Hob,' the Countess called and Bangtail turned obediently, smiling his most winsome.

‘You are certain of the description of this man? That it was Malise Bellejambe?'

‘I am, Lady,' Bangtail replied firmly. ‘I kent his face, but he flustered me with his falsehoods and it was only when I reached here that I minded him. Malise, for sure. It is not a face I will forget again, mark me.'

‘He seeks me,' she said and Hal heard the catch in her voice.

‘You're safe with us,' he said firmly and she shook herself, as if a goose had walked over her grave.

‘I am in no danger from him,' she replied. ‘He would have the skin taken off his back by my husband if he as much as bruised me. That privilege belongs to Buchan.'

Hal blinked at the bleakness of the last words and Isabel came out of the dark place she had gone, blinked and forced a new smile.

‘But he is not … pleasant,' she said. ‘And he may do harm to others.'

‘I would worry about Tod's Wattie if I were he, lady,' piped a new voice and they looked at the Dog Boy, hovering round Isabel's stirrup. ‘Tod's Wattie loved they baists and yon man killed them with evil potions.'

Sim studied the Dog Boy, seeing the pinch of his face, the bruised eyes. Seeing what Hal saw, that wavering faint image of wee dead Johnnie. God alone knew what had gone through this lad's mind while he had been in the moatbridge pit but it had only been the grace of Our Lady that it had not been the moat weight itself. Yet the lad had had to listen to it crush Gib to bloody fragments and the Lord alone knew what that had done to him.

The Dog Boy felt the eyes on him and grinned at Sim before turning back into Isabel's fond stare. He was not sure what it was he felt for this high-born woman but he wanted, at one and the same time, to put his head on her breast and have his forehead stroked – and his hands on those same breasts. The combined raggle of these feelings frequently left him flustered, tight in chest and groin.

Hal caught Bangtail's eye and sent him off down the column. Twenty riders and four wagons had set off from Annick Water three days ago, following the arrival of Tod's Wattie just as peace broke out and everyone went their way. Hal and his small
mesnie
were headed north, first to Stirling, then on into Buchan lands. Delivering, Hal thought, like a mercantile carter.

Not all the men at Annick had traipsed homeward and the roads were shadowed with folk gone back to brigandry, either in the name of Wallace, or King John – or just themselves. Now there were at least a dozen carts and wagons, upwards of seventy folk, all trailing after for the protection of the armed men and despite Hal's protests, cajoling and even threats.

Travellers all, they were latched on for safety and with their own reasons for getting down this road; one even hirpled along on a crutch refusing all invites to be taken into a cart, since he had sworn to walk to the Priory of Scone, in penance and surety of a miraculous cure. Each day they left him behind, each evening, he hobbled painfully in to the nearest fire and Hal wondered if the Priory had recovered enough from the scouring of no more than a few weeks ago to offer him succour.

Then there was the Countess. Hal sighed. Bruce had been almost wheedling, but it was Sir William who had finally persuaded Hal to escort the Countess back to her husband.

‘It has to be done and it were best done by someone unlike to be seen grinning at the husband's cuckoldin',' the Auld Templar had said, then handed Hal a folded white square of fine linen with a thick black bar across the top.

‘That is a Templar
gonfanon,
he said. ‘Though you are not strictly a Poor Knight, ye are being asked to serve yin, namely masel', so such a banner will keep ye safe frae both sides. Naebody with sense will want to irritate the Templars, even an earl havin' his wayward wife returned by them.'

Hal could not find a good reason for refusing the man who had come to their rescue at the bridge and, besides, Hal had had another request that sent him in the same direction and the irony of where that had come from did not pass him by. It seemed Sir William knew something of it, too, since he asked, polite and innocent, about the fat wee man, Bisset, who had arrived looking for Henry Sientcler and no-one else.

‘A wee relic from Douglas, Sir William,' Hal declared, shrugging lightly. ‘Wallace promised to hunt the man – he was scrivener or somesuch to Ormsby at Scone and it was thought he might ken something about the murder of yon mason.'

Sir William stroked his grizzled chin and nodded, only half listening.

‘Oh aye? And does he?'

Hal shrugged.

‘Nothin' helpful,' he said and wondered then why he lied. Sir William grunted and patted Hal on the shoulder, a gesture that brought a memory of his father so sharp it nearly made Hal grunt. He wanted to get back to Herdmanston, to put the confusion of Bruce and Wallace and Buchan and Englishmen far away from him, and said as much.

‘Aye, well,' Sir William said thoughtfully. ‘Deliver the Coontess and yer done with Bruce – though I would seriously consider where yer future lies. Wallace is off to Dunkeld, I hear. Or to besiege Dundee. Or Stirling. Ye see the way of it – his rabble flit like wee midgies and clegs here and there and everywhere. He is not the man to tak' on the English in the field, no matter what Wishart thinks.'

He patted Hal again.

‘Anyhow – not your problem. Let that flea stick to the wall,' he said. ‘Tak' yon wayward wummin home and be done with matters until Bruce or myself send word. Send that wee scribbler Bisset away as well and forget about dead masons – Christ's Bones, Hal, there are corpses enow in every ditch from here to Berwick.'

It was sound advice and Hal was determined to follow it and praise God for having slid out from under the threat of Longshanks so easily. Yet the nag of the mystery stuck him like a stone in his shoe every now and then – when ‘yon wayward wummin' gave it a chance.

The Countess of Buchan, Hal thought miserably, was both an irritation and a delight. She was wearing her only dress, a fitted green affair whose sleeves flapped loose because she had no tirewoman to sew her into them. She wore the same battered riding boots Hal had seen at Douglas. Yet now she affected a barbette under her chin and a neat wee hat to go with it, a smile that never reached her eyes and a sidesaddle on a palfrey – handing Hal the bold Balius.

‘It is,' she had declared winsomely, ‘not seemly for me to be returned astraddle a warhorse, according to the Earl of Carrick and Sir William Sientcler and every other one of the community of the realm who passes and seems to have an opinion on it.'

She clicked her teeth closed, biting off more and widening the smile.

‘So, as a knight, you had better take the beast home to the Earl of Buchan's stables.'

Hal had stammered some platitude about treating the beast like silk and gold, but the truth was he felt a long way from the ground after Griff and felt the raw power of it in every step.

He should not even have been riding the beast at all – no sensible knight used a warhorse except for battle and, besides, it was not his. As Isabel winsomely pointed out, cheerful as a singing wren, she had probably already ruined the beast by using it like a common palfrey and, because it had been stalled at Balmullo, which was hers in her own right, she could give permission and did so.

Hal viewed this last with a jaundiced eye, but could not resist the chance of it.

For all her cheer, the lady herself seemed clenched as a curled fern, full of brittle laughter and too-bright eyes, which only softened when she laid them on the Dog Boy – and there was a fondness they shared.

More than ever he reminded Hal of his dead son – yet each time, the memory of it seemed less of an ache just because the Dog Boy was there. Hal marvelled at the change in the lad in so short a time and could only speculate on what had tempered the steel in him, down in that dark hole, listening to Gib's bones crunch. Hardly a friend, Gib, but even hearing a mortal enemy screaming his way out of the world would change you forever.

‘That and the dugs,' Tod's Wattie had said, in the grim firelit tale he had told the night he had arrived. ‘They died hard and sair, the dugs, and the only blessin' of the lad being in the pit was that he was dragged from it senseless an' so never saw them.'

Hal knew, from the unfocused eyes and the hard set of him, that Tod's Wattie had watched them die and that had altered him, too. The mere mention of Malise Bellejambe sent him coldly murderous and Hal saw him now, hunched aboard his garron, his face a dark brooding of furrow and brow.

It was a sorry cavalcade, he thought. He had sent Bangtail ahead, to secure the inn and warn them that a cavalcade was coming down the road, because Bangtail had some sense about him and could handle an encounter with suspicious English from the Bothwell garrison. Not that Hal thought many of them would venture out so far from the safety of the half-finished castle, but it was was better to be prudent; besides, Bangtail swore he spoke French, though Hal was sure it was just enough to order another ale or get his face slapped by any well-spoken woman.

Then there was Bisset. The man jounced on a cart like a half-filled sack of grain, since the insides of his thighs had been rubbed raw on the journey to Annick and he could no longer ride. He was going as far as Linlithgow and would then go south to Edinburgh, while Hal went north.

Fussy, precise and complaining, Bisset was also, Hal realised, brave and a man of his word. He had promised Wallace to deliver information and he did. He had promised to deliver Wallace's request to pursue the matter and he did that, too, though Hal wished he had laced his lip on that part.

‘The dead man was Gozelo de Grood,' Bisset had told Hal and Sim, quiet and head to head. ‘Almost certes. He disappeared from Scone in the summer of last year. Stabbed the once and a killing stroke, very expertly done. Not robbed.'

‘Apart from his name,' Sim growled, ‘we are no better informed.'

Bisset offered a sharp-toothed mouse of a smile.

‘Ah, but he had a close friend who is also missing,' he declared, and that raised eyebrows, much to the secretary's delight. He liked the possession of secrets, did Bartholomew – liked better revealing them to those who would marvel.

‘Manon de Faucigny,' Bisset declared, like a mountebank producing coloured squares from his sleeve. ‘A Savoyard and a stone carver. A good one, too, brought over by Gozelo to do the intricate work.'

‘Where is he?' demanded Hal and Bisset nodded, smiling.

‘Just what Master Wallace asked,' he declared and pouted. ‘He went either south or north, two weeks after Gozelo de Grood left Scone.'

‘Helpful,' Sim growled and Bisset, ignoring him, leaned into the tallow light.

‘It is my surmising,' he said softly, ‘that this Manon fled when it became apparent that Gozelo was not returning when he had said he would. Gozelo left, telling the Savoyard it was for a week and no more, then did not return because he was killed, we know. This Manon fled – I know this because he took only his easily portable tools and no craftsman would leave the others except under extreme duress. He told folk he was going to Edinburgh, to meet Gozelo, but it is my belief that this was mummery …'

‘And he was trying to send someone in the opposite direction from the one he travelled,' Hal finished. ‘Who?'

‘Wallace's second question,' Bisset declared delightedly. ‘He said your wits were sharp, Sir Hal. I give you the answer I gave him – I do not know. But Manon de Faucigny expected person or persons to be searching for him and expected also no good to come of it. So he fled. To Stirling, or Dundee. He will, I am sure, be thinking of hiding and trying not to do the obvious – run to the Flemish Red Hall in Berwick and be got away to safety.'

The Red Hall, Hal knew, was the Flemish guild hall in Berwick and he doubted it would be of any use, since the Flemings had defended it to the last man when the English sacked the town last year and around thirty had been burned alive in it. Now it was no more than charred timbers – though the Flemings were still in Berwick.

‘Why would person or persons want the man dead?' demanded Sim.

‘For the same reason they wanted the mason killed,' Bisset replied primly. ‘To stop his mouth. They both hold a secret, good sirs, but now only de Faucigny can tell it – and Master Wallace offers you this as promised. He said to say you would know what to do with it.'

Forget it. That was the sensible choice, but even as he turned the coin of that over in his mind, he knew it had never been a possibility. A pollard, he thought wryly. Just as refusing Bruce was a crockard. He had been summoned into the service of Bruce and, suddenly, had become part of the kingdom's cause. Now, just as suddenly, he was part of the forces dedicated to crushing that cause – and, he realised, bound now to oppose Wallace if he encountered him. Yet he had regard for Wallace, the man still fighting when everyone else had scrambled to bow the knee. Because he has nothing to lose, Hal thought, unlike myself and others.