man, but not much of one and it made the teeth stick out like a rat from between damp lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache, greying now.
He was preparing, Isabel saw, to be scraping and deferential to his master, the Earl of Buchan, in the hope of preferment away from his duties at Balmullo. No more than a mastiff, she thought, set to watch as much as guard and knowing he is hated.
Yet the mastiff that was Malise Belljambe had to stand aside when the grunting men sweated through the yett and into the main hall with their burden, who said nothing beyond a muffled curse when they set him down too hard.
Malise did not want to tangle with the carriers, who stank of sweat, woodsmoke and old blood; the leader lay in the litter like the Devil at rest, but a lesser imp, in his black carapace of boiled leather, spat curses at the careless handlers in a tongue Malise knew to be the Gaelic used by those strange caterans north of The Mounth.
Buchan followed, peeling off his gloves and shifting to remove his cloak from over his head without unpinning it, seeing Malise scuttle to help him. He nodded only a brief recognition — Malise was a mammet, no more, useful for the scut work that was necessary in these savage times. Then the light from the sconce flared in the night breeze and lit up his wife.
He took a breath, for he had not seen her in some months and had managed to forget how she could look, fresh from bed. Her hair was still richly coppered and, even when he knew there was artifice involved in that, the knowledge did not spoil matters. She was beautiful still, the body hinting at slender promise even wrapped in nightclothes and a fur-trimmed gown. Her eyes, lapis in the torchlight, were hard and cold as those gems and he felt the old slither of resentment and anger, quickly beaten down, for he had not come to quarrel.
She saw the cat and dog of that chase itself across a face heavier than before. He seemed weightier altogether, she thought, surprised at how six months could make such a difference. Then she saw that it was not fat — though there were colonies of that round his middle and chin — but a droop to the once-powerful shoulders, as if he carried too much across them.
His hair was pewter, his eyes glass and iron; for a moment Isabel wondered if he would wave imperiously to the bedchamber and follow her in, as he usually did — though less this last year than ever, she noted.
Buchan thought of it, then dismissed it. He had almost done with grunting and sweating on her for no result — even the pleasure of it was licked away by her dignified detachment as she left him at the end of it, he spent and ashamed at his grossness.
No offspring came from it and, for a long time, he had wondered whether this was natural or contrived by her — but he had had other women since and in numbers, too, as if to make up for the lack she offered, and none had conceived. Buchan was beginning, with a nag of fear he could not dismiss, to realize that the problem lay with himself.
‘Wife,’ he grunted at her in the end and she acknowledged matters with a cool, curt bow and then brought forward a servant and a tray with wine and food on it.
‘Malise,’ she declared, ‘see to the care of the others and the stabling of their horses. Find room for them all where you can — but be polite in the asking.’
Malise hovered malevolently for a moment, caught Buchan’s eye and bowed obsequiously.
‘My lord’s visit?’ Isabel asked and Buchan, goblet in hand, nodded to the litter, perched near the fire and surrounded by the grim-faced men.
‘Wallace,’ he growled. ‘He is sick from a wound, so I brought him here. You have some skill with the medical and can be trusted not to blabber.’
She tried hard not to blink, to stay as stone, but it was difficult. Wallace was outlawed and harbouring him was as good as a death sentence to Buchan, only just returned to the favour of King Edward. Her skill with ‘the medical’ was one more perversion of her sex and station and she had thought that, if her husband had considered it all, it was to add it to the black sin of her.
Isabel looked her husband full in his fleshy, pouch-eyed face and had back a cool, wordless stare; she realized, suddenly, what the stooping weight he bore was and that there was steel in the man — more so than even she had thought, with his dogged persistence in carrying on resistance to the English, whether openly or covert.
‘I will take to your chambers,’ he gruffed, ‘so that folk will spread the word that this was merely the Earl coming to take his rights of his wife. Happily for you, I need sleep more than your loins for the moment, so you need not fash over it.’
He did not wait, but barrelled off into the hall’s dim, smoke from the torches fluttering like dark insinuation in his wake.
The men round the litter parted deferentially when she came up and the figure on it, half propped up on his elbow, gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.
‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes — though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’
She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.
She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.
‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. Then came this.’
‘There is rot in it,’ Isabel said flatly and Wallace chuckled harshly.
‘I ken that, lady,’ he replied. ‘Pain, too — if ye as much as blaw on it, it hurts as bad as if ye had struck me.’
‘We will needs do more than blow on it,’ Isabel answered and Wallace’s throat apple bobbed twice, then he nodded. The smile was gone.
‘Ah spier ye, lady — fit’s gan wrang?’
The voice was thick, the accent strange from the black-carapaced Fergus the Beetle. Isabel explained as best as she thought the man would understand and he nodded, blued bottom teeth sucking his top lip, brows lowered in a frown and eyes peering from the tangle of hair and beard, his face dark from sun and dirt, sheened with grease as protection against wind and rain.
‘Ah howkit oot a daud o’ muck frae it,’ he told her. ‘Black as the De’il’s erse, beggin’ the blissin’ o’ ye, lady. Wull he gan live yet?’
‘Away with ye, Fergus,’ Wallace said gently, hearing this. ‘Leave the good wummin to her skill.’
She had water heated and brought, with cloths and a keen, sharp skewer; Wallace followed it with his eyes, then met hers. Isabel felt clammy at what she had to do to a wound that hurt with a breeze on it, but he swallowed once, then nodded.
‘Hold him,’ she ordered and his men went to shoulders and feet. She hovered the skewer over it and saw him brace — then she struck.
He howled, thrashed, vomited and fainted. The skewer went flying from her hand and skittered across the rushed flags; even as it did she knew she had failed.
It took ten minutes for him to recover. Slick with new sweat, he managed a wan grin from the whey of his face.
‘I have the idea o’ it, now, lady,’ he said and held out his hand for the skewer. ‘Ye have the strength o’ purpose but no arm for the deed.’
She handed it to him and he wrapped all but the last fingerjoint length of it in a cloth while she watched, fascinated and appalled. Could she do this if it were her suffering?
He placed the tip of the skewer gently, just where she indicated and the blue-black mass seemed to Isabel to be pulsing now. Then he nodded to Fergus and the others, who came up and placed their hands on him in readiness.
‘Bigod,’ he said, lifted one great fist and hammered it down on the handle of the skewer.
When he came to his senses for the second time she had placed both fists on either side of the punctured wound and squeezed a festering, stinking mass of green-black pus until the blood flowed cleanly. Then she washed
