Isabel’s glance at the King was fouler still as she collected the bowl.
‘Yon Cathar never fed me anything so sour,’ Bruce persisted, smacking his mouth in a grimace of disgust.
‘He never fed you anything worthwhile,’ Isabel answered tartly, ‘and has run off besides. A wee proscribed French Cathar Perfect, heart-afraid for his life now that he has shackled himself to a usurping king declared red murderer and about to be cast loose from Holy Mother Church. Now you have only me.’
‘Aye, speak plain why don’t you? Never bother sweetening it, woman.’
‘You are a king and supposed to be stronger than others. Besides, I sweetened the brew I gave you with honey and spices and it seems to have made little difference to the taste.’
‘What was in it?’ he asked suddenly, his voice quiet; she heard the fear threnody in it.
‘Rue, valerian, fox’s clote, lady’s bedstraw and laurel among others. This is an ointment of radish — do not swallow it, rub it on.’
‘Will it work?’
She looked at him and smiled.
‘It is not a cure for lepry,’ she said, ‘if that is indeed what you have. For that, any blessed water will be as good.’
‘Then why am I poisoning myself with it?’ he demanded, truculent as a babe.
‘Because it will help with the skin complaint you do have, which is common enough and nothing to do with the lepry,’ she answered. ‘At worst the lady’s bedstraw might dye your beard yellow, while the radish ointment, if you spread it on Lady Day, will keep you in funds all year if Hildegard of Bingen is to be believed.’
He heard her tone and lost his irritation in an instant. She had always dabbled in herbs and potions, he knew, but he thought it was merely a mild woman’s interest, like they had in wool thread or good needles. He said as much, while managing to marvel at her expertise enough to rob the patronising sting of it.
‘Better still,’ she answered, ‘is that you can trust me with the secret. That scar is a worry, certes, but there is nothing here that makes me believe in lepry, Robert.’
‘The signs are slow,’ Bruce replied and it was clear he had found out all he could. ‘They take years to manifest.’
That was true, but Isabel refrained from pointing out that the usual first signs were when the appendages started to rot — the end of the nose and fingers. And the prick.
‘I would stop hiding it,’ she said. ‘Once the skin clears, you can let the air and sun to that scar, which will do more than your hodden hoods. Besides — the mark of a great tourney knight is to have at least one scar on the face, to make women swoon and men cower.’
‘Christ, Izz,’ Bruce said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘I should have married you.’
‘Instead, you cast me back to my husband and married an earl’s daughter. That will learn you.’
‘I am a king now,’ he growled, eyeing her sideways. ‘You are not supposed to speak so.’
‘You are a great bairn,’ she answered lightly, ‘who cannot sup a wee grue without making a face. Besides — we have both made our respected beds and now must lie in them.’
Bruce relaxed, tried not to pick skin from his cheeks.
‘Aye — how is the master of Herdmanston?’
‘More bitter these days than the brew you swallowed,’ she replied brutally. ‘His lands are scorched, his castle slighted, his folk scattered — and that done by those he has sworn fealty to. God help him when his enemies get to work.’
‘I hope he knows the necessity of it,’ Bruce answered suspiciously, then sighed wearily. ‘I do not need to lose more good men. There are few enough as it is.’
Faintly through the thick walls, they both heard the sound of the few good men, drilling frantically in pike squares while their women stitched and sewed thick gambeson coats, the quilted flutes stuffed with straw.
‘He will stick,’ she said firmly, then gathered up her jars and packets. ‘Now I must attend your wife in the role you gave me — lady to a queen.’
‘An honour well earned,’ he answered and she smiled wryly.
The last time she had seen the Queen she had been riding a palfrey using a sambue, a sidesaddle so elegant and so useless that the horse had to be led because the rider had no control of it. She and her new coterie were discussing the chansons of Guilhem and pointedly fell silent when Isabel approached; it annoyed Isabel, but only because all the other women were local wives and daughters who should know better — but the court, she knew, had a way of corrupting.
‘An honour that does not sit well with Her Grace,’ she answered, ‘which you might have known. Bad enough I placed the crown on her head without constantly attending her as a reminder of how I was once her husband’s hoor.’
‘God in Heaven, Izzie — moderate yer tongue.’
He rose and paced for a moment, then rounded on her.
‘Is she aggrieved?’
Her look was enough and he shook his head.
‘I do not know what…’ he began, then stopped and let his hands drop to his side.
‘Start mending that fence,’ she answered. ‘Dine with her. Spend time with her. Else you will find the chasm too broad to leap.’
He straightened, breathed deeply, then nodded and turned to her with a smile.
‘Good advice and good treatment. God keep you, Isabel — and your Herdmanston lord.’
‘I trust he is safe,’ she said and felt the deep, welling panic that he was not.
When she was gone, he went to a scrip on the table and pulled out the small, stoppered bottle, opened it and put a finger in. It came out bloody and he sniffed it suspiciously. Was that rot?
He sighed. Probably. He should have known better, even if the bottle was gilded and the cap jewelled, to have bought it from his confessed heretic Cathar physicker, even if it came wrapped in vellum and sealed with the Order’s double-mounted knights as provenance. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, would probably have sold me the same, he thought wryly.
He glanced at the crumpled parchment, knowing the Latin on it by heart — Hoc quicumque stolam sanguine proluit, absergit maculas; et roseum decus, quo fiat similis protinus Angelis.
Whomsoever bathes in the divine blood cleanses his sins and acquires the beauty of angels.
He looked at the beautiful little bottle which had done nothing at all for him. What had he expected? That the blood which flowed from His Hands and Feet had been collected in this, then translated across the centuries, miraculously, to arrive at Bruce’s moment of need?
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it really was His Divine Blood and not the escape fund of a cunning, desperate physician. He felt a chill at the idea — better it was chicken or pig, for if even the Blood of Christ Himself had failed, where did that leave King Robert Bruce?
Yet, he thought, can Christ still save the world? All the signs are against it, Lord, and there are so few righteous left in a kingdom ravaged by endless strife, where Your flock is reduced to individuals and petty tribes suffering and killing one another.
But there was a Plan. If I am not here then barbarism and madness become law, the weak have their throats cut or become slaves and the future is a terrible nightmare of cruelty and bloodletting.
I am the leash, he thought. The leash and the lash and even tormented by the Curse of Malachy I will never give in. He thought of Wallace, saw the twist of his bloody face on the day they gralloched him like a caught stag. He thought of his part in it.
I think, he said aloud, that the wee Cathar was right — this world is, in fact, Hell.
And there is no other.
Near Cupar, Fife
That same moment…
Hell vomited over the ridge. Malise saw it, falling like some huge wave of horses that seemed to snarl, ridden by open-mouthed men desperate with fear and an anger that was as good as courage.
He had been watching Kirkpatrick, stumbling along behind Malenfaunt’s horse, falling now and then to be dragged when Malenfaunt, vicious and laughing, spurred it a little to make it too fast for Kirkpatrick to keep up.
‘Walk faster,’ he would yell, ‘else you will be dragged to Carlisle.’
