The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (50 page)

The auld reprobate had been his grandfather, who had dinned into him the Bruce claims to kingship and pointedly scorned, as he did so, his own son's inadequacy in that regard. With some justice, Bruce thought to himself – grandda worked tirelessly to the end to further the kingship cause of the Bruces – God blind me, was he not called The Competitor for it – and my father, apart from one timid plea to Longshanks, did little.

Yet when he heard there was a last breathed message from his father, brought by Kirkpatrick, for a moment Bruce's heart leaped at the promise of a final affection, for all the marring of their relationship by mutual stubbornness and temper. Then hope faltered, stumbled and fell for the last time.

Not before Longshanks is dead.

Simple and stark, his final advice, with all the love in it the elder Bruce was capable of bestowing. That was the legacy of the Bruces; that and the Curse of Malachy, Bruce added silently, as his fingertips brushed against the hairless cheek.

Hal saw the unconscious gesture and knew at once what Bruce was thinking.

So did Kirkpatrick and he and Hal exchanged a brief glance while the candles flickered, each man knowing just enough of the tale – something about a previous Annandale Bruce thwarting Malachy the holy man by promising to release a condemned felon and then hanging him in secret. The said priest was angered and cursed the Bruces, a curse made more powerful still when Malachy eventually became a saint.

It had hagged Bruce's father, who had dedicated a deal of Annandale rents to endowing the saint's last resting place at Clairveaux with perpetual candles and masses in an attempt to ease the burden of it.

Bruce fought against the fear of it more often than he would allow – Kirkpatrick knew it well enough never to admit that the man who had breathed his last fetid breath on to this Bruce's cheek years before had been named Malachy.

Kirkpatrick. Bland as gruel, with a face that could settle to any shape save pretty and was more than servant, less than friend to the Bruce. A dagger of a man and a ferret for Bruce, sent down the darkest holes to rout out the truths hidden there – especially about the stone-carver. Everyone else here thought he had been called Manon, a dying man Bruce was sure knew a secret and was taking it to the grave, so that he had bent close to him in the hope of hearing his last words. The carver had vomited out blood – and the last administered Host, a white wafer floating like a boat in a flood into the Bruce face.

Afterwards, Bruce's right cheek had flared with red pustules, but soon they had faded to dots of white – and now no beard would grow on it; Bruce already thought this little flaw a part of the curse – to know the full of it, Kirkpatrick thought, might cause no end of turmoil in the man's mind.

As if he had heard, Bruce's eyes flickered and he dropped his hand, dragged back to the dark room and the eldritch dancing shadows.

‘I can count on your lordships' support,' he said, cutting into Wishart's final amen. ‘I am sure of Atholl and Lennox and a great part of the lesser lords – Hay of Borthwick, Neil Campbell of Lochawe for some of the names.'

‘You are assured of the bishoprics of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld and Scone,' Wishart declared with some pride and looked pointedly at Lamberton, who stroked his hairless chin and smiled.

‘Moray, perhaps,' he said. ‘Brechin more certainly. I have yet to sound out the abbot of Inchcolm, but I understand he esteems you well, my lord earl.'

‘You may have the Abbot of Arbroath,' John Duns declared, ‘provided he is my clerk, Bernard of Kilwinning. A good man, who knows all my thoughts and deserves such an appointment – Longshanks threw him out of Kilwinning Abbey for his loyalty to the Kingdom's cause.'

‘You cannot crown pawns in this game,' Lamberton rebuked sternly. ‘Only kings.'

Duns shrugged.

‘No game of chess here, my lords. A horse fair, perhaps, though Bernard is scarcely equine, albeit he works as hard as one – and has the same appetite, that I can attest. He is, reluctant though I am to admit it, too fine to be my clerk and be taken off to Paris when I return.'

It was hard to take in, Hal thought. With the English king not a handful of miles away throwing stones at Stirling, last defended fortress of a failed rebellion, this wee room in the
campanile
of Cambuskenneth birled with fetid plans and trading in favours to make another, with Robert Bruce a defiant king.

Yet it was not enough, Hal thought. Two earls, a wheen of bishops and a rickle of wee lords was not enough when a man planned to make himself king. He did not even realize he had said as much until the silence and the still cold of the stares jerked his head up.

‘Kirkpatrick I know,' John Duns said softly, looking steadily at Hal with his black gaze. ‘This one is a stranger to me.'

‘Hal – Sir Henry Sientcler,' Bruce declared brusquely. ‘Of Herdmanston.'

The black eyes flared a little and John Duns nodded.

‘Ah, yes – the one who cuckolded the Earl of Buchan. I understand his wife, Countess Isabel, is locked up like a prize heifer these days because of it. The pair of ye had little luck from that sin.'

Hal looked at him for a moment, a grey stare that Bruce did not like, for he had seen it on a calm sea not long before a storm broke.

‘You will be John Duns, expelled from university in Paris,' Hal replied eventually. ‘Hooring, I hear. Dying of the bad humours that has made in your body.'

It was softly vicious and Duns mouth went pursed – like a cat's arse, Bruce noted with some delight. Then Hal offered a bitter smile.

‘I am sure there is more to each of our
haecceity
than these singular events,' he said and Duns blinked in surprise. His face lost the rising colour and the tight mouth slowly widened into a smile.

‘You know my doctrine, then?' he demanded and Hal made an ambivalent gesture of one hand.

‘He is a singular wee lord,' Bruce interrupted and clapped Hal on one shoulder, as if he was showing off one of his particularly clever dogs.

‘You will know it yourself, of course,' Duns said wryly. ‘I ken your brother does.'

Now Bruce's stare was sea-cold; young Alexander Bruce was the scholar of the family and reputedly the best Cambridge had. Bruce himself had arranged and paid for the obligatory feast that celebrated Alexander's acquisition of Master of Arts the year before – but the implication that the youth was the only educated one in the family rankled.

‘I know of your
haecceity
, the “thisness” that supposedly makes each of us singular,' he replied, his voice a chill gimlet. ‘I am less convinced by your arguments for the immaculate conception of Mary. I consider it sophistry – but that is not why we are here.'

‘Ye have the right of it, my lord,' Hal interrupted, making Bruce's scowl deepen at the effrontery. ‘I know why each of us is here – myself an' Kirkpatrick because the lord o' Annandale commands, the bishops because their advice and support is necessary. I dinna ken why this Master Duns is here.'

Kirkpatrick, his sharp hound's head swivelling backwards and forwards as he followed their exchange, bridled at the presumption of the wee lord from Herdmanston and, almost in the same thought, admired the courage that spoke up. He was sullen at Duns for his ‘Kirkpatrick I know', the sort of dismissive phrase that was like the fondle of fingers behind a hound's ear. He was Bruce's sleuthhound, sure enough, but did not care to be reminded of it so callously.

He started his mouth working on the sharp retort it had taken him all this time to come up with – then caught Wishart's eye. The bishop's frown brought spider-leg brows down over his pouched eyes.

‘Master Duns,' he said before Kirkpatrick could speak, his smiling rich voice soothing the ruffled waters, ‘has a shrewd mind, which we will need for the essential task of squaring a circle.'

‘Aye,' Bruce replied laconically. ‘Trying to get the Comyn to agree to my claims without actually telling them what we plan.'

‘That is certainly one problem,' Wishart replied. ‘There is another.'

Lamberton sighed and waved one languid hand.

‘Let us not dance,' he declared flatly. ‘We have to find a way to convince the Comyn that our cause is just and that the Earl of Annandale has claim to the crown. More than that, of course, we have to justify it to them and all the others.'

‘Justify?'

Bruce's chin was thrust out truculently, but the sullen petted-lip pout of old was long gone and now he looked stern, like a
dominie
about to chastise a pupil.

‘Ye are about to usurp a throne, my lord,' Lamberton declared wryly. ‘It will take a cunning argument to convince Strathearn and Buchan and the Dunbar of March, among others, that you have the right to it.'

‘Usurp a throne?' Bruce spat back and Wishart held up one hand, his voice steel.

‘King John Balliol,' he declared and let the name perch there, a raven in the tree of their plans. Balliol, in whose name the rebellion had been raised and the reason Bruce had quit the rebels and sought his own peace with Edward two years ago.

Hal knew that was when the rumours of Balliol returning – handed over by the Pope back to Scotland – had first been mooted by a Longshanks desperately fending off the French and Scots at either ends of his kingdom. The arrival of an old king into the ambitions of Bruce was not something the Earl of Carrick could suffer – so he had accepted Longshanks' peace and rewards, in the hope of keeping his claims to kingship alive by persuading Edward that a Bruce was a better bet than a Balliol for a peaceful Kingdom.

Yet, not long after that, in a bitter twist of events, had come the Battle of the Golden Spurs, when the Flemings had crushed the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai. Common folk in great squares of spears, Hal had heard, had tumbled so many French knights in the mud that their gilded spurs had made a considerable mound.

It had forced the stunned French to make peace with Edward and freed Longshanks to descend on the north – the result sat outside the walls of Stirling, hurling balls of fire and holding victory tourneys that the newly pardoned Scots lords had to watch in grim, polite silence.

It had also ended any plans to bring Balliol back to his old throne – yet the Kingdom had fought in his name until now. And failed; Bruce was determined to change this.

‘Balliol was stripped of his regalia,' Bruce reminded everyone roughly, though his growl was muted. ‘By the same king who made him.'

‘The lords of this realm made him by common consent,' Lamberton pointed out and had a dismissive wave of hand from Bruce.

‘Nevertheless,' Lamberton persisted softly. ‘Balliol is still king of this realm in the eyes of those who have consistently fought to preserve it. Wallace among them.'

‘The community of this realm are finished with fighting,' Bruce snapped back angrily. ‘Unless it is to be first in the queue for Edward's peace. Wallace is finished. No matter the harsh of it, that is the truth. This is no longer a Kingdom, my lords – in all the wee documents from Westminster it is writ as “land” and nothing more. Edward rules it now and his conditions for a return to his loving embrace include charging each lord of this “land” to seek out and capture Will Wallace. That man is not so well loved that such a command will go begging for long.'

‘The matter of Balliol is simple,' John Duns said and all heads turned to him. His yellowed face was haughty, his fine fingers laced; Wishart felt a stab of annoyance at the infuriating arrogance of the man, tempered with respect for the intellect and steel will that went with it.

Duns had not been expelled from Paris for whoring, as Hal had declared, but for defying the Pope. And he was dying of some slow wasting disease that Wishart prayed to God to make slower still, since the loss of Duns would be a tragedy. Yet he was hard to suffer, all the same …

‘We must remake the doctrine of the throne,' Duns went on. ‘As a contract, between the King and community of the Kingdom, to the effect that the Kingdom itself reserves the right to remove an unfit king. Such an unfit king, of course, will be one who permits the freedom of this realm to be usurped by an invader, as John Balliol does, preferring gilded captivity to a struggle for freedom. Which,
gentilhommes
, is something no man gives up save with his life. As long as a hundred of us remain to defend it, we will do so.'

They stared at him and he sat, head tilted and preening just a little, for he knew he had slit the Gordian of it – even Kirkpatrick, blinking with the effort of understanding it, could see the breathtaking genius.

‘That last is not my own,' Duns added lightly, ‘but Bernard of Kilwinning's.'

Bruce cocked one warning eyebrow.

‘That is the only part that is not mere elegant sophistry,' he countered levelly. ‘Dangerous, too. The best defence for this kingdom has been the confusion and discord of England, thanks to Edward's own
nobiles
and their attempts to foist Ordinances on his power. Think ye this realm needs such curb on royal power?'

‘There is only one ordinance in such a contract,' Duns replied calmly, ‘and that is to defend the freedom of the Kingdom. Hardly a curb of royal power, to insist that a good king do that which he would anyway.'

Bruce nodded, reluctantly. John Balliol had defended the Kingdom and suffered for it – since then, of course, he had haunted the French court and the papal skirts defending nothing at all, so Duns' sophistry worked well enough.

Yet Bruce was English enough to see that the crown of this kingdom was not the same as any other. Kings in Scotland, he had long since discovered, differed from those anywhere else because they had long admitted that God alone did not have the final say in who ruled. The reality for a King of Scots was that his right to rule had long since been removed from God and handed, via the noble community of the realm, to the Kingdom's every burgher and minor landowner – aye, and even the cottars and drovers who lived there; it was a wise claimant who made his peace with that.