‘You are assured of the bishoprics of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld and Scone,’ Wishart declared with some pride and looked pointedly at Lamberton, who stroked his hairless chin and smiled.
‘Moray, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Brechin more certainly. I have yet to sound out the abbot of Inchcolm, but I understand he esteems you well, my lord earl.’
‘You may have the Abbot of Arbroath,’ John Duns declared, ‘provided he is my clerk, Bernard of Kilwinning. A good man, who knows all my thoughts and deserves such an appointment — Longshanks threw him out of Kilwinning Abbey for his loyalty to the Kingdom’s cause.’
‘You cannot crown pawns in this game,’ Lamberton rebuked sternly. ‘Only kings.’
Duns shrugged.
‘No game of chess here, my lords. A horse fair, perhaps, though Bernard is scarcely equine, albeit he works as hard as one — and has the same appetite, that I can attest. He is, reluctant though I am to admit it, too fine to be my clerk and be taken off to Paris when I return.’
It was hard to take in, Hal thought. With the English king not a handful of miles away throwing stones at Stirling, last defended fortress of a failed rebellion, this wee room in the campanile of Cambuskenneth birled with fetid plans and trading in favours to make another, with Robert Bruce a defiant king.
Yet it was not enough, Hal thought. Two earls, a wheen of bishops and a rickle of wee lords was not enough when a man planned to make himself king. He did not even realize he had said as much until the silence and the still cold of the stares jerked his head up.
‘Kirkpatrick I know,’ John Duns said softly, looking steadily at Hal with his black gaze. ‘This one is a stranger to me.’
‘Hal — Sir Henry Sientcler,’ Bruce declared brusquely. ‘Of Herdmanston.’
The black eyes flared a little and John Duns nodded.
‘Ah, yes — the one who cuckolded the Earl of Buchan. I understand his wife, Countess Isabel, is locked up like a prize heifer these days because of it. The pair of ye had little luck from that sin.’
Hal looked at him for a moment, a grey stare that Bruce did not like, for he had seen it on a calm sea not long before a storm broke.
‘You will be John Duns, expelled from university in Paris,’ Hal replied eventually. ‘Hooring, I hear. Dying of the bad humours that has made in your body.’
It was softly vicious and Duns mouth went pursed — like a cat’s arse, Bruce noted with some delight. Then Hal offered a bitter smile.
‘I am sure there is more to each of our haecceity than these singular events,’ he said and Duns blinked in surprise. His face lost the rising colour and the tight mouth slowly widened into a smile.
‘You know my doctrine, then?’ he demanded and Hal made an ambivalent gesture of one hand.
‘He is a singular wee lord,’ Bruce interrupted and clapped Hal on one shoulder, as if he was showing off one of his particularly clever dogs.
‘You will know it yourself, of course,’ Duns said wryly. ‘I ken your brother does.’
Now Bruce’s stare was sea-cold; young Alexander Bruce was the scholar of the family and reputedly the best Cambridge had. Bruce himself had arranged and paid for the obligatory feast that celebrated Alexander’s acquisition of Master of Arts the year before — but the implication that the youth was the only educated one in the family rankled.
‘I know of your haecceity, the “thisness” that supposedly makes each of us singular,’ he replied, his voice a chill gimlet. ‘I am less convinced by your arguments for the immaculate conception of Mary. I consider it sophistry — but that is not why we are here.’
‘Ye have the right of it, my lord,’ Hal interrupted, making Bruce’s scowl deepen at the effrontery. ‘I know why each of us is here — myself an’ Kirkpatrick because the lord o’ Annandale commands, the bishops because their advice and support is necessary. I dinna ken why this Master Duns is here.’
Kirkpatrick, his sharp hound’s head swivelling backwards and forwards as he followed their exchange, bridled at the presumption of the wee lord from Herdmanston and, almost in the same thought, admired the courage that spoke up. He was sullen at Duns for his ‘Kirkpatrick I know’, the sort of dismissive phrase that was like the fondle of fingers behind a hound’s ear. He was Bruce’s sleuthhound, sure enough, but did not care to be reminded of it so callously.
He started his mouth working on the sharp retort it had taken him all this time to come up with — then caught Wishart’s eye. The bishop’s frown brought spider-leg brows down over his pouched eyes.
‘Master Duns,’ he said before Kirkpatrick could speak, his smiling rich voice soothing the ruffled waters, ‘has a shrewd mind, which we will need for the essential task of squaring a circle.’
‘Aye,’ Bruce replied laconically. ‘Trying to get the Comyn to agree to my claims without actually telling them what we plan.’
‘That is certainly one problem,’ Wishart replied. ‘There is another.’
Lamberton sighed and waved one languid hand.
‘Let us not dance,’ he declared flatly. ‘We have to find a way to convince the Comyn that our cause is just and that the Earl of Annandale has claim to the crown. More than that, of course, we have to justify it to them and all the others.’
‘Justify?’
Bruce’s chin was thrust out truculently, but the sullen petted-lip pout of old was long gone and now he looked stern, like a dominie about to chastise a pupil.
‘Ye are about to usurp a throne, my lord,’ Lamberton declared wryly. ‘It will take a cunning argument to convince Strathearn and Buchan and the Dunbar of March, among others, that you have the right to it.’
‘Usurp a throne?’ Bruce spat back and Wishart held up one hand, his voice steel.
‘King John Balliol,’ he declared and let the name perch there, a raven in the tree of their plans. Balliol, in whose name the rebellion had been raised and the reason Bruce had quit the rebels and sought his own peace with Edward two years ago.
Hal knew that was when the rumours of Balliol returning — handed over by the Pope back to Scotland — had first been mooted by a Longshanks desperately fending off the French and Scots at either ends of his kingdom. The arrival of an old king into the ambitions of Bruce was not something the Earl of Carrick could suffer — so he had accepted Longshanks’ peace and rewards, in the hope of keeping his claims to kingship alive by persuading Edward that a Bruce was a better bet than a Balliol for a peaceful Kingdom.
Yet, not long after that, in a bitter twist of events, had come the Battle of the Golden Spurs, when the Flemings had crushed the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai. Common folk in great squares of spears, Hal had heard, had tumbled so many French knights in the mud that their gilded spurs had made a considerable mound.
It had forced the stunned French to make peace with Edward and freed Longshanks to descend on the north — the result sat outside the walls of Stirling, hurling balls of fire and holding victory tourneys that the newly pardoned Scots lords had to watch in grim, polite silence.
It had also ended any plans to bring Balliol back to his old throne — yet the Kingdom had fought in his name until now. And failed; Bruce was determined to change this.
‘Balliol was stripped of his regalia,’ Bruce reminded everyone roughly, though his growl was muted. ‘By the same king who made him.’
‘The lords of this realm made him by common consent,’ Lamberton pointed out and had a dismissive wave of hand from Bruce.
‘Nevertheless,’ Lamberton persisted softly. ‘Balliol is still king of this realm in the eyes of those who have consistently fought to preserve it. Wallace among them.’
‘The community of this realm are finished with fighting,’ Bruce snapped back angrily. ‘Unless it is to be first in the queue for Edward’s peace. Wallace is finished. No matter the harsh of it, that is the truth. This is no longer a Kingdom, my lords — in all the wee documents from Westminster it is writ as “land” and nothing more. Edward rules it now and his conditions for a return to his loving embrace include charging each lord of this “land” to seek out and capture Will Wallace. That man is not so well loved that such a command will go begging for long.’
‘The matter of Balliol is simple,’ John Duns said and all heads turned to him. His yellowed face was haughty, his fine fingers laced; Wishart felt a stab of annoyance at the infuriating arrogance of the man, tempered with respect for the intellect and steel will that went with it.
