Kirkpatrick braced, knew he would never resist the pain of it, that he was about to take a long, hard fall into Hell itself… looked up into the leering face for one final curse on the ugly little shit…
The face changed in an instant, to one of absolute bemusement, staring down at the length of bloody steel which had just sprung out of his belly. It disappeared with a sucking sound that seemed to cut some hidden string inside Lamprecht and the little pardoner slumped sideways, mewling.
Kirkpatrick, blinded by sweat and pain, saw a black-gloved hand grasp his wrist, then a tremendous strength hauled him up and on to the platform, where his legs refused to carry him; he sat, shaking, looking at the twitching remains of Lamprecht.
The man who had killed him was all brown and black, wiping the length of sword clean on Lamprecht’s tunic, so that Kirkpatrick saw the pommel of it, the Templar cross clear. The man’s black spade beard split in a grin as he tore free what was around the dying pardoner’s throat, already slick with his own bloody vomit.
‘Rossal de Bissot,’ he announced in French, then jerked his head back the way he had come. ‘You should have realized how a fat painter would get to his workplace and saved yourself a climb. Now we must hurry and use the same counterweight lift — this place is carnage, no?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Herdmanston Tower, Lothian
Six days to Midsummer Eve, June, 1305
Hal and the Dog Boy came up on Herdmanston under a low sky like a bruise, the weather hot and heavy and the garrons moving as if underwater. Thunder growled behind the hills.
Hal came, pale as milk from the fever which had forced him off the road from York to Whitby and into the care of the Augustinians at Kirkham. It was there that the questing Dog Boy found him and brought the news of how Wallace had red-murdered Bangtail Hob.
Now the pair of them rode down into the huddle of buildings clustered round Herdmanston, where children left off making a fat straw man for the midsummer bonfire to run up and gawp. I am a stranger, Hal realized, looking at a fat-legged toddler with a finger stuck up one nostril. There are bairns here too young to have ever laid eyes on me in the flesh.
Herdmanston bustled, all the same, was scattered with sawdust fine as querned flour and smelled of new wood and pitch; men waved to the lord of Herdmanston from the roof where they were making the trapdoor watertight.
Some matters were the same; Alehouse Maggie, all bosom and folded arms, gave him a wide grin and then swaddled him as if he was a bairn and not her fealtied lord; men in sweat-darkened serks jeered and chaffered, as much glad for the excuse to stop work as the sight of the bold knight of Herdmanston gasping for breath and demanding Maggie leave off and watch his ribs, which were tender yet.
Sim Craw arrived, his iron-grey curls and beard frosted with wood shavings, his own grin wide and his wrist- grip iron hard; Hal, for the first time in a long run of days, felt a glow of peace descend on him.
Yet not all was the same. Bet The Bread was gone, taken by the bloody flux — now her daughter, as willow-wand slim as Bet had probably been in her own youth, bobbed nervously at Hal, announced herself as ‘Bet’s Meggy’ and went away beaming and strutting when she was confirmed as Herdmanston’s cook and baker, the place her mother had once occupied.
‘There are some other matters,’ Sim said, when they were in the cool of the big hall and left alone with bread, cheese and leather mugs. ‘Yon Malenfaunt has had to end his legalling ower his writ, for one.’
Hal nodded; it had hardly been a surprise. Longshanks had confiscated Herdmanston years before from the rebel Hal and handed its care to Malenfaunt, though the ownership was a parchment gift only. Malenfaunt, in all the years since, had never been capable of claiming it — but, since peace had broken out he had agitated through wee canting lawyers for the exercise of his rights.
It had been a nagging stone in Herdmanston’s shoe — but defeat at the hands of Bruce had stripped Malenfaunt of honour, dignity and support and now he had quit the case. At least some good came of that ill-fated joust, Hal thought, remembering the sickening sight of Bruce’s cheek.
‘Earl Patrick has refused the use of his mill — happily, Sir Henry is letting us mill at Roslin,’ Sim went on, spraying bread as he spoke.
Hal was not surprised at Patrick of Dunbar’s decision — the Herdmanston Sientclers were supposedly fealtied to Patrick, Earl of March, but had defied the determinedly English-supporting lord at every turn. The Earl had had to grit his teeth and welcome Hal back at every turn, too, as part of the peace terms with Longshanks, so any petty slight he could visit was grist to his mill, as Sim declared, proud of his cleverness.
‘Dog Boy needs confirming as a cottar,’ Sim continued when Hal seemed not to have recognized his word skill, ‘now that ye have manumitted him from bondage. He would not ken ploughshare from auld heuch, so I have kept him working with the dugs for money payment — Sir Henry sent a brace o’ braw wee deerhound pups which have grown leggy since an’ Dog Boy loves yon animals.’
Hal, feeling at ease from pain and care, sitting in his own rebuilt hall, could only smile at it all, the comforting balm of the familiar, of Herdmanston at work and far removed from the maelstrom it stood in — yet the next words drove the old chill back in him.
‘Kirkpatrick came,’ Sim said, frowning over his mug. ‘There was a stushie in Lunnon, it appears, where yon wee pardoner was killed dead an’ that hallirakus likkie-spinnie Bellejambe seems as good as. I would surmise so, since Kirkpatrick looked like a week-auld corpse himself and he the victor of the tourney atween them.’
So the pardoner was dead. Hal felt relief that it had happened, more that it had not been him who’d had to do the deed — and guilt at feeling both.
‘Christ be praised,’ he said.
‘For ever and ever,’ Sim replied, then cleared his throat.
‘Kirkpatrick is now away to Sir Henry at Roslin,’ he went on, ‘charged with pursuing “the other matter” — I jalouse this is the same matter Bangtail died for.’
Hal met his eye with one of his own, as hard as glass so that Sim’s eyebrows seemed suddenly to shoot up to avoid colliding into a frown. Curved as Saracen scimitars they stayed that way for a long moment, then he nodded.
‘Aye, weel,’ he growled. ‘I have had men out, making discreets and riskin’ nothing. Every spoor says that Wallace has gone to ground and his men scattered. He has not been seen since he arrived at Roslin a while back. Mayhap this is the end of him.’
‘Wallace is never ended,’ Hal replied tersely, then forced a smile.
‘Wallace came to Roslin?’ he asked and shook his head. ‘So even Sir Henry keeps secrets from me — is there any good news in this dish of grue?’
He paused apologetically, then waved a hand which encompassed Herdmanston and everything done to it.
‘Apart from all this, which is sweetening indeed — more power to you for it, Sim Craw.’
Sim, muttering pleased, waved a dismissive hand, then laid his leather mug down, slow and careful, a gesture Hal did not miss.
‘There is a last matter,’ Sim said, ‘but I leave it to yourself as to the good or bad news in it.’
Hal paused, then forced a smile.
‘Weel, I am sittin’, so the shock will no’ throw me on my back. Speak on.’
‘Sir Henry kept the news of it until now, when he thought you better suited to the receipt of it. Wallace brought the Coontess to Roslin and, if ye send word, she is almost certes headed here.’
Herdmanston Tower, Lothian
Midsummer Eve, June, 1305
He sent word, would have dragged Hermes from Olympus to deliver it faster if he could. Then he waited, limping up and down and fretting, leashed only by the certainty that, if he stormed over to Roslin, he would shatter something delicate as a glass web.
