The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (63 page)

‘We must find and deal with Lamprecht,' Bruce went on; Edward, still blunt as a hammer-blow, voiced what that really meant.

‘We have to kill him,' he growled, ‘before he can tell others what he knows.'

‘He can tell no-one, my lords' Hal replied carefully, ‘without giving away his own part in such affairs. Better to let him crawl away to a hole across the sea.'

‘He will tell all he knows if put to the Question,' Bruce pointed out, patiently because he valued the Herdmanston lord and did not want to slap him down, as Edward was about to do until a look from his brother clapped his lips shut.

‘The pardoner is clever,' Bruce went on, ‘but greedy. He will try and sell that reliquary treasure, or parts of it. Even the sight of one of those Christ-Blood rubies will trap him. Besides – there is the matter of the Rood itself. He has it. I want it.'

He looked from one to the other of them like a stern father.

‘Aye, weel, Your Grace,' Hal said sourly. ‘Whatever his business wi' us, it is concluded and it is my opinion that Lamprecht will consider himself safer abroad now he has failed to discomfort myself and Kirkpatrick – and Your Grace's honour. I dinna think his revenge runs so deep as will have him try again. I understand he was birthed in Cologne – mayhap he will return there wi' his prize.'

‘Comyn will not let him,' Bruce replied and the cutting blade of that was too sharp to answer. Bruce let the silence slide for a moment, the thoughts piling up behind his eyes as he removed, studied, then replaced the cheek pad.

‘Buchan has sent his animal Malise after Lamprecht, and Red John Comyn works hand in glove with his Comyn cousin, the Earl,' he said eventually. ‘If all they suspect is that the pardoner has information contrary to my comfort, it will be enough to keep them searching. If Red John suspects the presence of the Rood, he will want it for himself and his own plans for the throne of Scotland. He will not rest until he unearths it.'

Bruce removed the pad from his cheek, inspected it and put it back, his eyes bleak as a winter sea. For a moment, Hal saw the ugly wound and blanched at it, then the trailing
conroi
of his thoughts took him to Malenfaunt and the duel, incited by Buchan and Comyn.

For Buchan it had probably been in response to the business of Isabel, whom Bruce had ransomed from Malenfaunt while pretending to be Isabel's husband and using that man's own money. But Buchan had not had his countess back – Hal had got her, however briefly.

In turn, he thought bitterly, that act, for Bruce at least, was revenge for the time when Red Comyn had taken Bruce by the throat in public and threatened to knife him. Now it came to Hal, sudden as sin and just as thrillingly blasphemous, that perhaps English Edward was the best strong hand the unruly kingdom of Scots needed for, without it, the realm was already in a war with itself, played out in a mating-snake writhe of plot and counterplot, dark knifings and treachery.

‘Matters are not lost,' Kirkpatrick said into Hal's thoughts. ‘I can find Lamprecht – but not with Sir Hal in tow.'

He looked into Hal's outrage and shrugged.

‘Your idea of stealth and cunning in these matters is limited to not shouting who you are at the top of your voice,' he said, half apologetically and in French, which softened the bile of it. ‘Besides – you are hurt.'

Bruce looked from one to the other, removed the linen square and studied the stains, then replaced it.

‘Kirkpatrick,' he said, ‘shall stay in London and seek out this Lamprecht. Hal – go back north. The men you sent must have found some trace of Wallace by now. Find Wallace, and take care of your wound, for I have need of you yet.'

Hal nodded; he had had enough of London's stew of streets and alleys, while his ribs ached and burned in equal measure, so he leaped on Bruce's suggestion like a fox into a coop. He and Kirkpatrick headed for the door, pausing to offer passage to one another with exaggerated courtesy.

Bruce watched them go, shoulder to shoulder like two padding hounds who snarled and growled at each other, yet seemed capable of springing to each other's defence in an eyeblink.

He sent Edward off with some soothing words about his prowess and sighed when the door closed on his back, leaving him with Alexander. The youngest and yet the one he trusted most.

The Curse of Malachy, he thought bitterly, is to have all the attributes of greatness handed to you by God and have to accept recklessness with it. Thank Christ and all His angels that he was not as reckless as brother Edward, who had been slathered with most of that - but the sudden stab of pain from his missing tooth was a reminder of his own rash fight with Malenfaunt.

‘Does it hurt?' Alexander asked and Bruce felt a wash of panic and revulsion at the reality of the stained linen square and his cheek.

‘My tongue burns like the very De'il,' Bruce replied laconically. ‘At least the rough edge of that tooth is no longer a nag on it.'

The careful answer masked the truth. Alexander nodded, then flicked his fingers in an impatient gesture for his brother to remove the pad. He bent, inspected, then straightened with a sombre nod and face so at odds with his youth that Bruce almost grinned. Almost. A smile stretched the cicatrice into a gape; in all the weeks since the tourney, it had barely managed to close on itself and Bruce knew that Alexander and his physician feared infection.

‘The Curse of Malachy,' Bruce said suddenly, though he contrived to make it light and laughable. Alexander did not laugh and finally voiced the truth of matters.

‘The cheek does not hurt at all?'

Bruce shook his head, swallowed the rising panic. No pain when the knife had gone in. No pain when he had plucked it out. None at all when James of Montaillou had apologetically pulled his mouth aside to file down the pinked tooth, though the pain of that was a screamingly agonizing memory. Folk had marvelled at the stoic bravery of the Bruce, who felt no pain.

No pain in a cheek deadened. The irony, of course, was that it had saved his life, for Malenfaunt's blow should have reduced him to a blinding agony of tears and snot, leaving him at the mercy of a killing stroke.

‘Lepry,' Alexander said, a slapped blade on the table of Bruce's wild thoughts. Bruce said nothing, but the bleak truth of it was part of the Curse of Malachy.

‘Only you and I and James of Montaillou are party to that suspicion,' he answered at length. Alexander, the scholar, had worked it out almost as swiftly as Bruce and the physician; he nodded, his eyes welling with a sympathy Bruce did not care to see. Too much like the look you give a dog you have to put down, he thought.

‘No-one else must know,' he managed to rasp out and saw Alexander's eyebrow raise.

‘Not your wife, brother?'

Not her, with her coterie of tirewomen spying for her, and her wee personal priest sending back the doings of the Bruces to the Earl of Ulster. From there, Bruce was sure, it arrived in the hands of Edward Plantagenet in short enough order.

He felt a crushing sadness at the mire she and he were in, how their life had become polite in public and distant now in private; the excuse of his wounds kept them in separate bedchambers as much as Bruce's fear of the sickness he might have – a leper's very breath was poison.

Alexander knew all this and required only a sour glance from his brother.

‘Not Edward?' he persisted and now the glance was alarmed.

‘Especially not brother Edward.'

Especially him, the rash hothead who would ride through the fires of Hell to fetch Holy Water to heal his big brother – and turn every head to watch the glory of it as he did so.

Leprosy. Bruce pressed the linen to his cheek and stared blindly at the yellowed window, as if he could see through it to the street of the Grass and Stocks markets, the new, still-scaffolded houses of the Lombard goldsmiths and on up to Poultrey.

Where Buchan had his own house, lair of all Comyn activity in London; they would pay any amount, dare any dishonour, to discover that their arch-rival had even the suspicion of such an affliction.

Moffat, Annandale

Feast of Saint Kessog, March, 1305

Wallace was woken by the cow struggling to her feet. By the gleam of daylight smearing through the smoke-hole he saw Patie's woman kneel by the firepit to blow life back into the banked peat smoulder.

One of the brood of bairns wailed as he shrugged out of the door into a muggy morning where colour slid back to the land. For a moment he stood, listening, turning his head this way and that, but only the chooks moved, murmuring in their soft way.

Eventually, he unlaced his braies with one hand and, grunting with the pleasure of it, pissed on the dungheap; it was the first time this year, he noticed, that it did not steam.

The sound shut off his stream like a closing door and he half-turned, but it was Patie, coming up to join him and, for a moment of still peace, they both wet the dungheap.

‘Fine day comin',' Wallace growled and Patie nodded.

‘A seven-day o' this,' he answered thoughtfully, ‘an' I will sow peas in my own strip. Mayhap even oats. Pray to Goad there is no blight.'

Then he turned his big heavy face into the crag of Wallace's own.

‘There is gruel to break yer fast.'

Wallace nodded, then rubbed the greasy tangle of his chin ruefully.

‘I have no siller left to offer ye,' he said and Patie nodded sorrowfully, as if he had expected the news.

‘An' ye a dubbed knight, no less,' he answered, shaking his mournful head on the inequity of it. ‘Whit happened to yer siller, then? Wager or drink?'

Wallace laughed, remembering.

‘The most o' it went on a wummin,' he said and Patie sniffed. Hawked and spat.

‘Worth it, was she?'

‘She was,' Wallace agreed, the image of her sharp and blade-bright in his mind when he had come to the priory weeks before with his handful of scarred, filthy army.

‘A coontess, no less.'

It was the last shine of glory and tarnished even then and he had known it was all over even as he stood, hip-shot, while the nuns of Elcho squealed and ran. He had tossed the red robin's-egg ruby carelessly back to Isabel as she clasped her exhausted, trembling tirewoman, Ada, with her free hand.

‘I will take ye to Roslin,' he had told her. ‘Ye will have to make yer own way to Herdmanston – I am no' welcome there in these days.'

She had nodded, not knowing the why of it and too relieved to be free to do any asking. Wallace did not offer an explanation.

Patie's final grunt shook him back to the moment and the dungheap; he saw the man was looking at the scarred pewter sky with a calculated, expert squint.

‘A good crop, if there is little rain and less war.'

‘No war, Patie,' he answered and could hear the sorrowed loss of it in his voice, so that he was almost ashamed. No war, for his men were scattered and gone after taking Isabel, Countess of Buchan, to Roslin – Long Jack Short, Ralf Rae and the worst of them were briganding out of that old stronghold of outlaws, the Selkirk forests. Jinnet's Jean and others were probably hooring with the English in Carlisle and robbing them blind when they could.

And he was here. Once he had ruled the Kingdom as sole Guardian, now he sheltered in the mean holding of a sokeman of his sister's man, Tham Halliday, Laird of Corehead, because the castle itself was under watch. Soon, he knew, he would move to a house in Moffat, or another near Glasgow, those hiding him risking the penalty of harbouring, lying low until …

What? The thought racked him, as it had done from the moment he had woken to find most of the remaining men gone. Those left, he had realized, were starving and wasted, so he had given them what coin he had and watched the last of them melt away.

France, perhaps. The Red Rover, de Longueville, would get him away as he had done in the past and he and that old pirate had fought there before – but the French had given up as well and now no-one opposed the English; the idea of that burned him, but the old fire of it had little left of the great body to feed on save heart.

There was nothing in France for him – other than the relief of the Bruce; he almost managed a smile at that, but could not quite manage it, or the spit that went with it.

‘No war, Patie,' he repeated.

Patie fumbled himself shut, wiped his fingers on his tunic and nodded meaningfully.

‘I would lay that aside, then, while ye break yer fast,' he grunted. ‘Ye are scarin' the bairns.'

Wallace looked down, was almost astonished to see the hand-and-half sword clasped in his right fist, so much part of him for so long that he no longer recognized it as a presence. He had woken with it clenched there, walked out of the mean hut with it and stood pissing with it. He had learned to do so many things left-handed, because the right was always occupied by that weapon. Naked, notched and spotted with rust, it was as done up as he was himself – yet sharp and ready.

He remembered cutting men down at Scone with it, carving bloody skeins off the fine English knights at Stirling's bridge, slicing through the jawbone of the Templar Master, Brian de Jay, in the forest of Callendar.

His sword, so much part of him for so long, quenched in blood and wickedness, he thought. Now it was no more than a monstrous frightener of bairns.

Like myself.

Church of St Thomas of Acon, London

Thursday of Mysteries, April, 1305

He had risked it and was sure the dice had gone against him. When Lamprecht reached the herber's stall he looked round and was sure the cloaked man was the same one he had seen. He was sure, also, that it was Kirkpatrick; there was something sickly familiar in the oiled way the man moved, turning sideways, stepping careful as a fox and never bumping or being jostled.

Money, thought Lamprecht bitterly. Always the driven curse of a poor man, it had lured him to the Church of St Thomas of Acon on the day he knew alms were liberally handed out for the celebration of Christ's Last Supper on Earth. And here is me, he thought, with a ransom of rubies and so unable to make use of it that I am worth less than a beggar's cloak.