down on them. She quelled the feeling, ruthless as those who hunted nuns and food and drink through the sacred shadows of Elcho. Here was a wee wummin who had taken money from her husband to hold her as prisoner in the name of God.
‘Brace yourself,’ she said viciously to the prioress. ‘ Victoria veritatis est caritas — the victory of truth is love.’
Outside, Sister Mary Margaret found a hand taloned on her shoulder and lifting her from the soaked ground. An eldritch face, scarred and gleaming wet, thrust itself at her, grinning, the broken nose dripping.
‘You will catch a chill, quine,’ Lang Jack declared and glanced at the open door of the byre. ‘We mun get you in the dry and oot of those wet clothes.’
Now Sister Mary Margaret screamed.
The Bruce House, London
The same night
The waxed paper windows turned the room to amber twilight even at midday and let in both the cold and the clamour from the Grass and Stocks markets; Hal could even hear the whine of the beggars on the steps of St Edmund’s Garcherche opposite and, naked to the waist, wished he could move closer to the brazier, a glowing comfort perched on a slate slab on the wooden floor.
The physician finished bandaging Hal’s ribs, dipping his fingers in a basin and drying them fastidiously on a clean linen square as he turned to Bruce.
‘Your man,’ he said, haughty and dismissive, ‘has re-opened an old wound. I have fastened it and will give him a salve and two mole’s feet, for protection against infection in the bone.’
He paused, then looked steadily at the Earl, ignoring Hal’s sullen scowl at the term ‘your man’.
‘In your own case, the tooth is healing nicely and your tongue is undamaged,’ he said. What was unsaid crouched between them like a rat on a corpse. Edward Bruce, oblivious to the exchange, laughed nastily and clapped his brother hard on the shoulder.
‘More than can be declared for your opponent,’ he growled. ‘I am told he gabbles like a bairn.’
The physician turned fish eyes on him. He was called James and came, he claimed, from Montaillou, which most thought simply a village in France. Those who knew, all the same, could tell you that Montaillou lay smack in the middle of that Langue D’Oc stronghold of the Cathar heresy which the Pope was scouring from the world.
James of Montaillou, Bruce mused to himself, was mostly a lie. He claimed to be a physician but had attended no university and was, at best, an inferior breed of skilled barber-surgeon. He claimed to be a Christian, but should, in truth, be wearing the compulsory yellow cross of a heretic Cathar.
‘I have it that Sir Robert Malenfaunt may never speak properly again,’ James commented, with more than a sting of mild rebuke in it. ‘His palate is pierced and his tongue slit longways into two halves.’
His audience winced. Bruce managed a wan smile, the square of linen held to his cheek in what was becoming an ingrained habit; the gleet from the purpling-red half healed cicatrice was clear, yet stained the square a foul yellow, tinged faintly with pink.
‘God preserve him,’ he said thickly, though there were few present who thought God had much to do with Sir Robert Malenfaunt, who had so clearly been abandoned by Him on that tourney day.
‘Deserves that at least,’ Edward Bruce growled, ‘and a mark of God’s Hand that he suffered it as a result of the battle and not afterwards, for losing in the sight of the Lord.’
But the worst injury done to him then is the one I fear myself, Bruce thought — the shunning by your peers.
James of Montaillou left and, after a blink or two of silent messaging to Edward, the rest of the mesnie clacked across the boards, leaving Bruce alone with Hal, Kirkpatrick and his brothers Edward and young Alexander.
‘So this Lamprecht is lost to us,’ Bruce declared bitterly. ‘And the Rood with him.’
‘We’ll spier this wee pardoner out,’ answered Edward determinedly, only to have his elder brother savage him with a glance like a lance-thrust.
‘You should not have been there yester,’ he declared, the words mushed by anger and pain. ‘Scampering around in pig shite like some callow boy.’
Edward’s smile was wide, but razor thin.
‘I thought to mak’ siccar it was done right,’ he declared and Kirkpatrick, hearing the phrase, spun round, glaring at him.
‘What mean you by that?’ he spat back, heedless of the protocols of rank. ‘D’you imply that it would not have been well done without ye?’
‘You needed our swords, certes, from what I saw,’ Edward snarled back, equally disregarding the differences in their station.
‘Who was it planned for such and summoned you?’
‘First time the dog has ever whistled up the master…’
‘Enough.’
Bruce’s voice was harshened by pain and a slap across both their faces, so that they subsided, glowering.
‘With or without you, brother,’ Bruce went on sternly, ‘the matter was not well done. And if you had been caught in it, all of us were ruined. Christ’s Bones — here you are arguing with a lesser rank like some drunken cottar and showing exactly the same disregard for station and dignity as you did in Sty Lane. It is not just yourself you risk nowadays, Edward — it is the Bruce name. My name and rank more than yours.’
Hal, fastening his belt back round his tunic, saw Kirkpatrick’s sullen scowl at being no better than ‘lesser rank’. He also saw Edward chew his bottom lip to keep silent; he knew why, too — the rumours of it were whispers within the mesnie that here was a man who wanted at least one of the titles his elder brother held and was not going to get it until that brother had the compensation of a crown. Only ambition outstripped Edward Bruce’s recklessness.
‘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
