is a killed man and ye had better buckle to the bit if it is yourself has to do it. Else it will be us killed. As well that Jop is cold — as yon wee Riccarton priest should be betimes.’
‘Yon priest kens nothin’,’ Hal muttered bitterly, ‘though Jop might have explained what Lamprecht intended, had he been allowed to live a wee while longer.’
‘Aye weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled, aware that he had been hasty with the knife — but Christ’s Bones, the man was coming at him. The wee priest, on the other hand, was neither here nor there. For certes, Kirkpatrick said to himself with grim humour, he will, by now, wish he is no longer here — and explained to Hal, patient as a mother, why it would have been better if he had died.
‘The wee priest kens folk were spyin’ Jop out. He kens the name Lamprecht, which was spoke out for all to hear,’ he whispered, flat and cold. ‘That name has already reached Comyn ears, which is why Malise is sent out. It will, for certes, be whispered in Longshanks’ own by now.’
Hal said nothing, for the truth of it was a cold burn, like the wound along his ribs. Jop was better dead, if only for his own sake; the King’s questioners would not have stinted on their store of agony — for all Edward Longshanks proudly pontificated about there being no torture in his realm — and the priest would be telling all he knew to anyone who would listen.
The more Hal thought on it, the more he wondered about what might have been inadvertently revealed that night. His dreams were cold-sweated with what the priest might be saying, but Hal knew he would have been hard put to kill the man for it. Nor was he sure he could kill Lamprecht as coldly.
Yet the nagging why of it was a skelf in the finger. Why had Lamprecht come back to the north in the first place, after all that had happened to him? Just to risk himself for the chance of revenge on those who had wronged him, as he saw it? It was possible, as Kirkpatrick put it, that he nursed a flame of hate. And Buchan would be interested because a Bruce was involved in it.
‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick said in answer to the last, a short chuckle saucing his bitter growl, ‘as to that last, you underestimate the sour charm you exert on that earl — he might be spying the chance of vengeance on you himself. The bright shine on this is that Buchan, who can never resist the charms of seeing Bruce or yourself discomfited has sent Malise Bellejambe after Lamprecht and so he is let loose from being the chain-dog o’ your light of love.’
‘A perfect chance for me to rescue her,’ Hal replied laconically, ‘save that I am here.’
And five years lie between us like a moat, he added to himself; she may not even welcome a gallant knight’s rescue, never mind a worn lover with blood on his hands.
‘Besides,’ he added, bitter with the memory, ‘Buchan has already had vengeance on me. Why would he suddenly want more?’
Kirkpatrick, shuffling himself comfortable in the middle of a snoring, growling pack of other pilgrims, did not say what he thought — that perhaps, even now, the Earl’s bold countess had mentioned Hal’s hated name aloud. Worse yet, cried it out when her husband broke into her, as Kirkpatrick heard he was wont to do, like a drover earmarking a prize heifer.
It would be enough, he thought, to drive the Earl to visit some final judgement on the man who so cuckolded him. Christ’s Bones, if it were mine I would be so driven.
Yet it was not only the lord of Herdmanston that Buchan pursued, but Bruce. The wee Lothian knight was simply a hurdle in the way of that, for the Comyn would do all they could to bring down a Bruce. And the same reversed.
Somewhere, the monks began a chanting singsong litany and a bell rang.
‘No rest for any this night,’ he muttered in French.
‘It is the Christ Mass,’ Hal answered him, with a chide in the tone of it.
‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled back, ‘like most weans, He benefited from the peace o’ silence in the cradle. A good observance for these times, I am thinking.’
‘Yer a black sinner,’ Hal replied, with a twist of smile robbing the poison of it.
‘Ye are a dogged besom o’ righteousness, Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘but ye are mainly for sense, save ower that wummin.’
‘Christ,’ Hal growled back at him, ‘enough hagging me with that. If you had a wummin you cared an ounce for yourself, man, you would know the sense in what I feel for Isabel of Mar.’
Kirkpatrick laughed, though there was little warmth in it.
‘You once asked me as to what I wanted from serving the Bruce,’ he said suddenly. ‘So I ask you in return, Hal of Herdmanston — what is it keeps you here, if you carp at the work Bruce has for us? Siller? Your fortalice restored? Yon wee coontess?’
I miss Herdmanston, thought Hal. And Bangtail and Dog Boy, sent out to chase after Wallace and neither of them up to the task of it. And Sim, who oversees Herdmanston’s rebuilding. And women to talk to rather than swive in a sweaty, meaningless rattle. And bairns laughing, with sticky faces. And men building rather than tearing apart. And an end of folk the likes of Malise — aye, and Kirkpatrick himself.
Above all, there was her and the music of laughing she had returned to his life, a music that had ended when his wife and son slipped out of the world. A music that, for five years, he had lived without, with no prospect of it in the black void that was today, would be tomorrow and would be still the next God-damned year. That’s what he wanted back, what he hoped Bruce would somehow help him achieve.
‘Music,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and left the man arrowing frowns on his face.
Music?
In the end, sleep stole Kirkpatrick away from making sense of it.
Lincoln
The same night
Music flared loud as light, half-drowned by talk in the Great Hall, where banners wafted like sails and the sconces jigged in the rising haze. Sweating servants scurried in the sea of people, bright finery and roaring chatter while the musicians strummed and blew and rapped out Douce Dame Jolie as if Machaut himself were there to hear played what he had written.
Sir Aymer de Valence, limping and lush with glee, told the tale — yet again — of his daring escape from the clutches of Bruce by the mad expedient of hurling himself from his own horse into the middle of the melee. All the gilded coterie, the King’s close friends and those who wanted to be, applauded, laughing — all save Malenfaunt, bruised and furious that the sacrifice he had made for de Valence was no part of the tale.
‘Turned the German Method back on you,’ de Valence yelled across and Bruce raised his goblet in smiling acknowledgement of the feat, all the while studying the ones around the bright-faced young heir to the earldom of Pembroke.
Had de Valence paid Malenfaunt’s hefty ransom? Bruce pondered it; though his mother held the Pembroke lands, de Valence had the family holdings in France and so could well afford it.
If not him, then who? It was certes Malenfaunt himself did not have such coin, nor any call on someone rich enough, for all he was part of the mesnie of de Valence. Yet he had ransomed himself and his horse and his harness, which had not been cheap.
The music shrilled; dancers, circling in a sweaty estampie, bobbed and weaved and laughed. The slow drumbeat thump-thump, insistent as nagging, finally silenced the players; one by one the last of the half-drunk dancers stopped stamping, blearily ashamed. Heads turned to where the Lincoln steward stood with his iron-tipped staff rapping a steady beat and, behind him, the King.
He looked every inch regal, too, Bruce thought. He stood with one mottled hand on a dagger hilt of narwhal ivory and jacinth, coiffed and silvered, prinked and rouged, brilliant in murreyed Samite and orphrey bands, but draped in a fine blue-wool cloak — no Provence perse here, of course, but good English wool; even in dress, Edward was politic.
He had good reason to look pleased with himself, too and the lavish Swan Feast was simply the statement of it, fit for the monarch of two realms. With the French king humbled to peace and with his Gascony lands secured, Edward straddled a sovereignty over the island nation that none before him had ever enjoyed.
He was sixty-six years old — less than half a year would take him past the point of being the longest-lived king England had known. Nor, Bruce added moodily to himself, was he showing any signs of ailing anytime soon — it was clear to everyone that his young queen was pregnant again.
The Plantagenet voice was equally firm and ringing loud when he spoke, of discordance made harmony, of
