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.’
