The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (38 page)

‘He says he came across with someone named Guastamondo and has beaten the news of it by a week,' Kirkpatrick declared and would have said more, save that Bruce forestalled him.

‘
Guastomondo
,' said Bruce softly. ‘My father told me that was the name he had in Outremer. The Breaker of Worlds.'

Even the bells paused as he stopped and looked round them all, his face serious as plague.

‘Edward is back in England.'

No-one spoke for a moment, then Sir Henry cleared his throat and touched Hal's arm.

‘We had best stir ourselves. This will put a heart we do not need into the garrison.'

Hal did not reply. He was staring at the medallion swinging in Kirkpatrick's fist and reached out to grasp it. Then he fixed his stone gaze on the pardoner.

‘This,' he said, holding the amulet up to dangle like a dead snake. ‘Tell me of this.'

The pounding at the door was a great, dull bell that slammed Isabel from sleep, spilling her upright. The nun who had been assigned to sleep at her feet – latest in an endless rotation of watch-women – came awake as suddenly, whimpering and afraid.

Clothilde her name was. She was from France, part related to the kin of the Malenfaunts there and dispatched all the way from the warm dream of vineyards to the cold stone and damp of Berwick by a family who wanted rid of an unwanted child. What happened to her mother Isabel did not know, but Clothilde had been here almost all her life, as an Oblate. Isabel, who had been here for almost half a year, shivered at the thought of such a time trapped in this eggshell of stone and corruption.

‘Men are coming,' Clothilde said in a small voice. Isabel knew the child – she could hardly see her, even at fifteen, as a woman – feared the arrival of men and the reason for their coming. Malenfaunt, Isabel knew, took money and favours for allowing a select few to plunder the delights of a nunnery and, though some of the women were willing and depraved enough, some were not and Clothilde was one.

‘Come closer to me,' Isabel said and the little Oblate scurried to her. I am her prisoner, Isabel thought with a wry twist of smile, yet she cowers behind my nightdress. She saw the scarred forearms of the little nun, knew that the girl sat and crooned hymns and psalms to herself when she thought no-one could see, slicing her flesh for the glory of God and an offering to the Virgin to rescue her.

The door slammed open so suddenly that Clothilde shrieked. The Prioress stood like a black crow with a candle, the sputtering tallow pooling her in eldritch shadows.

‘You are to come,' she said to Isabel, then frowned at Clothilde. ‘Get away from there, girl.'

‘Come where?' Isabel answered. The Prioress turned the scowl on her, but it was a pallid affair by the time it rested on Isabel's face; long weeks of realising that this Countess could not be cowed by words and was not to be beaten by sticks had sucked the surety from the Prioress.

‘You are to be released.'

The words spurred Isabel into dressing swiftly, her heart and mind whirling. Freed.

She followed the Prioress through the dark corridors to the Refectory, which seemed to be full of men – her heart thundered at the sight of the tall, saturnine Malenfaunt, leaning languidly on the table and studying a document. He raised his head and was smiling when she came in.

‘My lord earl – your wife, safely delivered.'

Bewildered, Isabel stared at Bruce, who stared back and offered a stiff little bow.

‘Good wife,' he said blandly. Then Isabel saw Hal and her heart threatened to leap out of her throat, so that she flung one hand up to it, as if to trap it at the neck. She saw the warning in his narrowed eyes, saw the huge bearded face of Sim behind him and heard, like the tolling of a bell, the word ‘rescue' clanging in her head.

‘Husband,' she managed.

‘So it is, then,' Malenfaunt declared in French, smiling with triumphant pleasure. ‘We part amicably, so to speak.' Bruce turned a cold face on him.

‘For now,' he answered, then held out one hand. Isabel, half numb and stumbling slightly, took it in one of her own and was led out. Behind her, Hal draped a warm cloak on her shoulders and pulled the hood up against the cold benediction of rain.

In the darkness of the nunnery garth were horses and more riders. Isabel felt a hand haul her long skirts up above her knees, then Sim was lifting her up, with a muttered apology.

‘No fancy sidesaddle, Coontess. Ye ride like ye usually do.'

His grin seemed like a bright light – then Hal was beside her and Bruce was leading the cavalcade away into the cobbles and ruts and stinking rubbish of the street, with the sea wind blowing clean and exhilerating through the bewilderment of her.

‘Isabel,' Hal said and she leaned forward then, met his face in a fumble of salt and rainwashed lips, sucking as greedily as he until the horses parted them.

‘Aye,' said Bruce wryly in French, ‘do not mind my part in this, mark you, for such chivalry and bravery is old clothes and pease brose to the likes of the Bruces.'

Isabel, starting to laugh with the bubbling realisation of it all, turned to answer him and heard a voice from the dark, slight shape on a big horse nearby.

‘Ye should nivver violet a lady.'

‘Dog Boy,' she said and saw the great smile of him loom out of the dark. Then, sudden as a blow, she thought of Clothilde, trapped like a little bird and knew, for all she ached to free the girl, she could not persuade these men to risk it – nor should she.

She was crying so hard, the tears and snot mingling with the rain as Hal tried to get his horse close enough to comfort her, that she missed Kirkpatrick's bitter growl – though Hal didn't.

‘There will be the De'il to pay when Buchan finds his wife has been lifted like a rieved coo and his siller spent for no return.'

Neither of them missed the rain-pebbled exultation that was Bruce, grinning as he turned to them.

‘God's Wounds, I only wish I could see his face when he is told of it.'

His laugh drowned out the mad tolling of the bell. Breaker of worlds, Hal thought wildly.

Herdmanston Tower

Feast of St Theneva, Mother of Kentigern, July 1298

She woke to the sound of birds and the soft scent of broom from the fresh rushes, wafted from the tall window where the shutters were open against the stifle of the night. It had rained, though, so the heat had gone and insects buzzed in and out. The harsh wickedness of woodsmoke scattered the brief heaven of the moment.

Her leg was over his, the coverlet thrown back and he woke, slowly, as she watched the pulse in his neck, the trough of a slight pox scar dragging her eyes down to the muscled shoulder and another scar, a deeper, pale cicatrice. Lance wound from a tiltyard tourney, a mercifully glancing blow which, if it had struck full would have ripped the entire arm off.

Isabel's flesh crept and tightened at the thought. Even in such a short time, she knew this man's body almost as well as her own, each mole and scar of it – there were a lot of scars, she saw, and had mocked him for being careless.

‘None on my face, lass,' Hal had answered, almost half-sorrowful. ‘Every man who is thought of as a great knight has a face like a creased linen sheet as far as I can tell.'

He stirred awake to her playful fingers, finally grunting as she clasped the rise of him.

‘Christ's Bones woman – are there not Church laws that govern this?' he growled throatily as she moved over him. ‘If so, we are condemned.'

‘Feast days, fast days and menses,' she murmured. ‘Gravid, weaning and forty days after birthing.'

She stopped mouthing him and looked up.

‘I know them all, since it enabled me to avoid my marital duties more than once a week by canon law and more than that by contrivance.'

‘Condemned already,' Hal muttered weakly, ‘so it would be a sin to stop now.'

‘Sheldrakes,' she mumbled and Hal fought with his senses, eventually reaching the answer.

‘A dopping,' he gasped and countered at once, before he lost it.

‘Harlots.'

Isabel stopped then and ignored Hal's plaintive yelp of loss.

‘Under the circumstances,' she declared primly, ‘you might have chosen better.'

‘You do not ken it,' he accused and she frowned, started idly back to what she had been doing, though he could tell it was half-hearted and that she was concentrating on the puzzle.

‘A byre,' she said eventually and then screamed when Hal whirled her round and on to her back.

‘No,' he said, adjusting the curve of his hips until she gave a little gasp. ‘I win. It is a haras of harlots.'

A stud farm for stallions – apt, she thought, gasping as he began ploughing the long, deep furrow of her, and then her mind turned into white light for a long time. In the dreaming aftermath, the sweat cooling deliciously on her, there was a stamping and throat-clearing from below.

The lord's room at Herdmanston was the top of the square tower block and the only thing higher than it was the narrow, crenellated walkway reached by a ladder. The lord's room had no door and was reached by a stone wind of stair from below, coming up to a solid fretwork of balustrade.

It had its own privy hole, a strong oak four-post bed with heavy, faded hangings – blue, with gold owls, she saw – a table, a chair, a bench and two large kists but, best of all for Isabel, it had one window as tall as a man, inset with seats where someone could perch and sew in the light and sun.

A woman had wanted that and she had it confirmed from Hal.

‘My mother,' he said. ‘She died when I was young, but even by then I knew my father could refuse her nothing – even the folly of such a window making a hole in a good stout wall.'

A fair hole it was, too, with cushions of velvet, faded from the original crimson to a dusted pink. It was also armed with stout shutters for those days – more often than not – when the rain lashed the Lothians.

Below, at the foot of the top landing, the Dog Boy slept like a guarding hound and, if he heard their frantic gasps and her squeals it scarcely mattered, for this, to Isabel, was more privacy than she had known and more, she thought, than she deserved.

Beneath that was the main hall and the main entrance, fortified with a steel yett and a thick door, twenty feet up the thick wall, reached by a cobbled walkway and, at the last, across a removable wooden platform.

Deeper yet were the under-levels, two deep floors of cool, dark storage and, surrounding the thick square of it was a barmkin wall four feet high, enclosing stables, a brewhouse and the bakehouse and kitchens among others. Nearby was the stone chapel, isolated save for the tall cross beside it.

The throat-clearing got louder.

‘Come up, ye gowk,' Hal growled, already into tunic and hose and casting a warning glance at Isabel, who pouted at him and drew the sheet up just as Sim's great tousled black head rose above floor level.

‘Ready, Lord Hal? Ye wanted an early start, ye told me,' he said, then nodded and grinned companiably to Isabel.

‘Coontess,' he added with a nod. ‘I see why he is laggardly.'

‘Cannot send my man off to war half-cocked, like a badly latched bow,' she replied as lightly as she could manage and had the gratification of a Sim laugh, a bell of sound from his flung-back throat.

‘Weel said, Coontess,' Sim declared and dropped out of sight again.

She watched Hal drape all the panoply round him, from maille to jupon – freshly sewn by the two main women of the place, Alehouse Maggie and Bet the Bread – and finally turn to her, awkward and tongue-tied.

‘Ye need to break your fast,' she chided and he nodded like a child.

‘If trouble comes,' he began and she placed a finger on his bearded lip.

‘I am safe here,' she said, ‘whether it be the English or the Scots of my husband. Ye have left me Will Elliott, who is a fine man – not to mention the Dog Boy.'

They both paused at the name. The Dog Boy looked the same, yet both Hal and Isabel knew he was not, that the killing of the man in the lazar had snapped something of the boy away and the man replacing it was not yet comfortable with the slaying. They had heard him yelping in his sleep like a troubled pup; it had been the main reason Hal had decided to leave him behind.

To his surprise, he found he had not thought of John for a long time, nor his wife for longer than that; the knowledge flushed him with shame. Yet he had more on his mind these days, he said to himself by way of excuse. He was Lord of Herdmanston now, summoned to war by Bruce to serve in the host commanded by Wallace.

Longshanks was here, rolling north like a storm, and Hal had delayed, selfish as any callow youth, because of Isabel. He had missed joining the Roslin men under Sir Henry, released back into the love of wife and weans only to go off yet again, as a rebel.

Now Henry was with Bruce in Annandale, cut off from the main host under Wallace – and the Sientclers of Herdmanston would ride north to find the host, near Falkirk, before the English arrived in a tide that would cut Hal off from everyone.

The first lappings of that tide were already here – English under Bishop Bek, sent like the first blast of Longshanks' wrath, were rampaging through Lothian, set on taking the rebel-held castles of Dirleton and Tantallon. Roslin was too strong for them and Herdmanston too little a bother so far; Will, Dog Boy and old Wull the Yett were enough to keep the tower safe.

But it was not Bek and
herschip
raiders Hal feared. Buchan was leashed by the fact that Herdmanston was on the same side as himself, but that was a thin cord – if he snapped it and came for his vengeance, there would be no half-hearted exchange of bolts and arrows and taunts. Buchan would bring the deep hate of the robbed and cuckolded, the unrelenting vengeance that had made him send Malise after Isabel in the first place.

Hal heard the Auld Sire's voice, as if he was at his elbow – he will come at you sideways, like a cock fighting on a dungheap. Even from the dark …

And he might not be here to defend her. The thought embered up into his eyes and she saw it and balmed it with smiles and calm.

‘Besides,' she added lightly, ‘who would dare take on Maggie and Bet and hope for life?'

Hal smiled, remembering how she had taken them on herself. Alehouse Maggie ran the brewhouse, with arms muscled as hams from stirring her vats, an arse like the quarters of a
destrier
and breasts, as Sim had mentioned, that you could see Traprain Law from if you reached the top. Once she blew the froth off her moustache, he added, she was a rare rattle on a cold night.

Bet the Bread ran the bakehouse and did the cooking for all in the Keep. Chap-cheeked, breasted like a pouter-pigeon, she had hair so long covered by a tight headsquare than no-one could swear to the colour of it – not even Sim since, as he had once confessed, it was the only thing she never took off.

They had sniffed a little, like bitches round a strange animal, when Isabel had first arrived, then given it a day or two before testing the steel of her. Alehouse Maggie had begun it, when Hal and Isabel had gone to the stone cross, ostensibly for him to pay his respects to the Auld Sire and, she knew, in some weird way, present her to the other occupants that lay beneath.

Isabel had stood beside him in the shadow of the great stone column with its coffin bell and chains – disconnected, she knew, after a violent storm had set the heavy bell ringing in the night and brought everyone to trembling wakefulness – and hoped to feel something from the mound.

There was nothing but wind and the wheep of birds, no word of greeting or condemnation from the dead, not even from the newest, the Auld Sire himself, who had winked and leered at her that day in the makeshift chapel on Abbey Craig.

Then Alehouse Maggie had lumbered up with a brown, glazed jug in one hand and, to Isabel's questioning eyebrow, lowered two of her own.

‘First of a new brew,' she rumbled, ‘goes to the Auld Sire.'

She was intrigued and shocked when Isabel reached out, took the jug and gently but firmly plucked it from her hands, then handed it to Hal.

‘First of a new brew,' she said as Hal, taking his cue, drank and handed it back to her, ‘goes to the lord of Herdmanston. After that, you can water what graves you choose.'

Hal smiled at the memory of it, then uncurled one fist and held up an amulet on a leather thong; Isabel arched a quizzical, mocking eyebrow.

‘Did that wee pardoner promise redemption, or just the Hand of God?' she demanded and he looped it over the tousle of her hair, then kissed her soft on the lips.

‘We are all in the Hand of God,' he said and she clutched him. The Kingdom was a guttering candle in the high wind of Edward Plantagenet and Hal knew that the next few days and weeks would make or break it. I would not leave here for anything less than this, he said to himself, but he did not need to say it to her.

Yet, even now, he knew that Buchan would be scheming harder on how to bring down one wee Lothian lord than all the Plantagenets in Christendom; he threw the thought from him with a flick on the medallion.

‘That holds the secret of making a king,' he said to her, smiling. ‘Keep it safe. Give it to The Bruce if … matters turn out badly. Serve him right to have to uncouple the puzzle of it, as I did.'

She did not know what he meant, but clutched the lead medallion in one hand as he turned away, clumping and clattering carefully down the worn stone steps in his hobnailed shoes. She heard the shouts and neighs and armour clatter, finally dragged the coverlet tight round her for modesty and went to the great window.

Below, Hal and Sim were mounted and surrounded by a score of riders, all local men come to join him. I have to go, Hal said to himself, feeling the heat of her eyes on his back even after the curve of land hid the tower from view. There is no other Sientcler to do it.

With luck, he thought to himself, there will be no battle and the English, half-starved and thirsting, will be forced to abandon their campaigning for another year. Wallace was no fool and was not about to give Longshanks the battle he craved – particularly as the English king had finally reached Scotland with the largest army anyone had ever seen, with hundreds of heavy horse and a great mass of foot, almost all of them Welsh, or Gascons – even some Germans.

Isabel watched the Lothian men cavalcade away, the younger ones on their first such great endeavour, whooping for the joy of it. She felt the lead settle in her heart for the life that might be ripped away from them all.

And afterwards … the chill of that sleekit a way in to her, unwanted and unloved, so that she could not ignore it.

Afterwards, there would be sunshine and a gentle life with a man I have come to hold dear, as much a surprise to me as it is to him.

Even as she warmed herself at the idea of it, she knew it was a lie. Afterwards, win or lose, would come the reckoning – and she was not sure she wanted to visit on Herdmanston such a hatred as Buchan would wreak.

Yet, for now, there was the hope of something else, forlorn and ragged though it was.

‘Aye,' said a voice, ‘it is a hard matter to watch yer man ride away to war, Lady.'

She turned to see Alehouse Maggie and Bet the Bread at the top of the stairs, the former holding a limp swatch of cloth.

‘You'll be missing Sim,' she managed and saw the pair of them smile and look at each other.

‘Pleased to see the back of him,' Maggie declared. ‘He has wore us both out, the muckhoond.'

They did not look worn to Isabel and she did not want another game of tests with them. To her surprise, Maggie held out her arms, full of the limp cloth which Isabel saw was a dress.

‘We made ye this,' she said awkwardly, ‘seeing as how ye came with no furbishments and have, we heard, refused to wear the mistress's auld cloots.'

Isabel's gaze flicked to the chest that held the clothes. It had not been hard to refuse the offer: she did not want to parade in his dead wife's leavings.