Now Hal sat in the abbey hall at Scone with the feast flowing round him and the music of shawm and sithole, harp and fiddle circling and swooping. Douce Dame Debonaire, the troubadour sang, while the monks, daring as swooping swallows in the risk of their souls, peeked from hiding and tried not to let their toes tap.
Their betters — five bishops, three abbots and a slew of other clergy — were clearly safe from God’s wrath and could beat the tables in roaring time.
And yet, while the troubadour detailed the exchange between the horse Fauvel and Dame Fortune, Hal could only see the weeping women and the bairns being kissed farewell by their menfolk, while the black feathers of smoke spilled out of Herdmanston’s shattered doorway. Roslin men, grim with what they were doing, methodically fired Herdmanston to a ruin the Earl of Buchan would have exulted over.
‘I am benisoned, it seems, to be burned out by kin,’ Hal had remarked bitterly and Henry of Roslin, sick with the shame and sadness of it, could not speak at all.
From the top table, resplendent in finery that was not even his, Bruce surveyed the joy and would have been surprised to find another at the feast whose mood was as bitter as his own.
He was king. He had been crowned by the right person, in the right place with all the correct procedure and regalia, so that all the years of careful plans had come to final fruit — yet he sat in Balliol’s coronation robes, felt the strange weight of Toom Tabard’s gold circlet on his head, all hidden away by Wishart for this very moment.
Borrowed finery was bad enough — but because of it, he had to forsake the hiding hood and now his face, with the livid cheek scar weeping still, was there for all to see and wonder at.
Beside him sat the Queen and the bitter gruel of that flavoured all the meat and drink that found a way to his mouth. It was bad enough that they had been so estranged — he could not go to her with what he suspected he had, with his very breath the kiss of death — but now she was smouldering resentment, with all the fire of her seventeen years, at what he had done to her household.
It had been necessary for an age and Bruce had put it off — until the coronation loomed. He had gone to her then, been welcomed stiffly by a girl bewildered why her husband seemed to have taken a dislike to her. Wondering why he hid his face from her, all but his eyes, behind a veil like some Saracen.
He had told her that the entire ceremony would be repeated, this time with the Stone of Scone and the hereditary Crowner, the Countess of Buchan; that name brought her head up and flared her cheeks, for she had heard the rumours of the old love and did not care for it.
But it was the Lady Bridget, that older, pinched twist of scorn who had been Elizabeth’s nurse when she had been a babe, who set the seal on matters with her snort.
‘Bad enough my lady is made queen to your king of summer,’ she had spat, ‘without having to go through such mummery again, this time with yer old hoor.’
The silence had stretched an endless age, while Elizabeth’s eyes went wide with horror and all the entourage, down to the huddled little priest at the back, waited to see what would happen.
When it did, the sudden crack of it made them all jump; one or two squealed — all of them shoaled away from the fallen Lady Bridget, who struggled like a beetle and sat up, bewildered, astonished and afraid. She touched her lip, saw the blood on it and moaned.
Bruce, his knuckles stinging from the backhand slap, looked at his queen, feeling sick at what he had done — had to do, he reminded himself. Yet another stain…
‘I have been tolerant, lady,’ he said to Elizabeth, ignoring the whey-face sprawl of Lady Bridget, ‘and you have mistaken this for weakness. Say your farewells to all of these, for they return to your father in Ireland after the coronation. You will have new tirewomen from among my Scots subjects — and, if you need the comfort of God, there is the dean of the royal chapel.’
He raked them all with his eyes.
‘What I put up with as an earl was one matter,’ he added. ‘Now I am a king and at war, so I cannot have all my doings sent back to Ireland and on to Plantagenet.’
Yet the frightened, bloody face of Bridget, braided hate though it had been, left him feeling that stain yet and the sight of the one called Dog Boy brought it back in a rush. He remembered the boy, all those years ago round a campfire. Nivver violet a wummin, he had intoned as one of the vows a knight should follow and, even allowing for the mis-speaking of it, the memory of the strength in the lad’s voice made Bruce ashamed.
‘ Hare, hare, hye,’ they were singing, furious, red-faced, beating tempo on the tables until the trenchers jumped. ‘ Goudalier ont fet ouan d’Arras Escoterie. Saint Andrie — hare hare, goudeman et hare druerie.’
Hark, hear it now, Jamie translated for the Dog Boy, who marvelled at how his friend and new-dubbed knight had learned French in the years he had been in that country with Bishop Lamberton. Those ale brewers are turning Arras into Scotland. By St Andrew hear it — good men and good times…
Across the table from them sat Kirkpatrick, solitary in the crowd and counting the heads. The bishops of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld, Moray and Brechin. The abbot of Scone and another from Inchcolm. Three earls — John of Atholl, Malcolm of Lennox, Alan of Menteith, spilling alkanet-coloured gravy down their fine wool tunics.
And that was it, apart from a slew of lesser lights, some of them dubious — Randolph for one, Kirkpatrick thought, would bear watching. Not a single Comyn, nor a Balliol — it was hardly a rich vote of confidence in the new king of Scots.
They were bringing in brawn with mustard and starting in to toast the ‘good men and good times’, while Jamie was telling Dog Boy of how some woman called Agnes they had known as boys in Douglas had run off with Fergus the cook and they now had a pie shop in Perth. And how a falconer called Gutterbluid was still there, serving the Clifford folk who ruled now and how, one day, Jamie would scorch all of them out of Douglas Castle.
He said it loudly and often, flushed as much at having been made a knight by a king as the wine and there was no lisp in the boy when he did it; Kirkpatrick wondered if Edward, the Covetous King, knew what hatred he had created in the north out of the generation of Jamie Douglases.
He wondered if Edward knew what had happened here in Scone — though he already knew what Longshanks would do about it and could feel the sullen, embered wrath of the English king through the dark and the miles.
This was the last feast — what followed would be a famine of good men and good times.
The Painted Chamber, Westminster, London
Pentecost, May, 1306
Seraphs, prophets and the fulminating Judas Maccabeus all glared painted disapproval down at the huddle round the table, whose black echoes were stretched and monstrous on the walls; a wind flickered the sconces and the shadows danced like mad imps in Hell.
I have never been warm in that bed, Edward thought moodily, as the hangings of the gilded, green-postered bed swung like banners. For all that, he looked at it longingly, perched invitingly on a dais at the far end of his private chambers; it had been a long, long day weighted with fur and cloth of gold, crown and jewels, touching stumbling youths on the shoulders, youths who knelt as tyros and rose as knights.
Three hundred, at least, Edward thought wearily and all of them equally exhausted from their night of chapel vigil, the Templar courtyard choked with their tents and the press so great on the day that he’d had to clear a passage in the abbey with armoured knights on horseback.
It had been worth it, though, for the ceremony, the timing — Whitsun, when Arthur himself had held his fabled plenary court at Caerleon — and the binding of so many young knights to this one day and to his son.
He glanced at the boy, seeing his whey face and violet-ringed eyes. He had stood up well to the ritual of spending all night alone in the palace chapel. At dawn, he had knighted the boy and then the pair of them crossed to the abbey and, together, dubbed all the others.
After that was the feast of it, complete with the masterstroke of gilded swans on which Edward himself had sworn vengeance on Bruce, promising that, once he had vanquished his enemy, he would proceed to the Holy Land.
It was pure Arthur and only a few doubted that the King would do it, for he was magnificently prinked and preened, coloured and oiled. Not to be outdone, the prince had risen, resplendent in the heraldry of Gascony, to which he had also been newly raised, and swore loudly not to rest two nights in the same place until the Scotch had been defeated.
