Beside him somewhere would be young Jamie Douglas, a powerful nobile of Scotland in his own right, yet no richer now than Lauder of the Bass because the English sat in his castle and took rent from his lands.
Hal thought of Herdmanston under a blue sky, blue as the paint they used on the Virgin’s mantle on a church wall, with the good brown earth rolling beneath it and himself between. He put himself in the tower that was his own, with a great feeling that threatened to burst his chest. But for all he tried, squeezing his eyelids tight shut, he could not rid himself of the last rotten-tooth black vision of its stones and the crow-feather smoke staining the sky like a thundercloud.
Gone and gone, like the wee house of Lauder of the Bass by now. All gone, save for the great feeling in his chest and the reason for that lay in the gathered dark, tending to a queen. He got up then, urgent with the need to see her, hold her.
He found her spreading bracken in a bower of bent hawthorn at the back of the proud tents and she straightened from the task as he approached; he saw the weariness in her.
‘How is Her Grace?’ he asked and had a Look for it, even as he drew her into the cage of his arms.
‘Stoic,’ Isabel told him, muffled against his chest, then surfaced for breath.
‘Behold, a wee love nest.’
‘Brawlie,’ he admired, trying to keep the smirk from his face and failing. She struck him lightly on the chest.
‘Less to do with your voracious appetite than not wanting to spend another minute in that wee cloister o’ weemin,’ she informed him and he nodded, sinking on to the soft bracken and feeling her stretch out the length of him.
‘Bad is it?’
‘Enough to make me consider passing time in the company of any of the men round a fire,’ she snorted and he laughed.
‘Best not, love,’ he advised. ‘I would then spend the evening fighting them all, one by one.’
‘Ah, gallant knight,’ she replied in a strained falsetto. ‘Hold me not so tight, you are crushing the rose blossom of me.’
‘There will be a few round those fires who would desire to nip your rosy buds,’ Hal answered wryly. ‘Little they know of the thorns they risk.’
‘I need all my thorns for the Queen and her women, so it is hard to put them away easily at the end of day.’
‘You need them still?’
Isabel made a ‘tsschk’ of annoyance.
‘The Queen is stoic, as I say. Like some auld beldame faced with fire, flood and famine, for all she is a girl yet. She does not care for it much, but she will dutifully follow her man, to Hell if that is where he is headed. I am sure she believes it lies beyond the next hill.’
‘The King’s sister is not so bad — Lady Mary is of an age not to have her head turned by events. It is the others,’ she went on sourly. ‘Good dames o’ the court whom I have to remind that I am a countess, even if they sneer at the title these days. An’ Marjorie…’
She broke off to shake a sorrowful head.
‘She is a recent elevation to princess, yet still enough of a bairn to pout about the lack of ermine and pearls, or warm hall being feted by all the young men.’
‘Which she would be,’ Hal noted, knowing the attraction rank added to a woman, ‘for all her chin.’
They grinned at each other, sharing the sly spite on the chin of Bruce’s daughter, a heavy inheritance for such a flower. ‘You have an interest there?’ Isabel demanded archly. ‘If you can suffer the chin you will have a princely reward.’
‘And leave you to pine in some hawthorn arbour?’ he countered. ‘Alone and weeping?’
‘I am told that has attractions for some.’
‘Ach weel — pray for luck that kills me then. Men love to comfort a mourning lover.’
The game ended with her sudden, fierce clutch.
‘Weesht on that,’ she said, her eyes big and round. ‘I am not so stoic a matron that I can listen to that sort of talk.’
‘Swef, swef,’ he soothed. ‘Lamb. Shall I comfort you with the poetry of the Court of Love? Demand you turn the moon of your countenance on the misery of my night?’
‘God forbid,’ she answered and lay back, suddenly loose and lush. ‘I would concentrate on unlacing instead.’
He began, then paused.
‘The King will send his queen away in the morn, for safety,’ he said into the moonlit pools glowing in her face. ‘This may be the last time we see each other for some time.’
‘I know it,’ she said and buried her face in the curve of his neck and shoulder — then dropped back on to the bracken.
‘Are you having trouble with the knots?’ she demanded. ‘I have dirk if ye need to cut them.’
Afterwards, lying in the strewn bracken bed, he listened to the soft laughter and the sudden chords as Humfy Johnnie struck up a harp tune, his crooked back as bent as his gaping grin.
There was still the wild, strange feeling in Hal as he listened to her breathe softly beside him and, when he fell asleep, he dreamed that the blue sky and the brown earth were tilting him away from her altogether.
He woke in the dark, afraid.
Methven
Translation of the Relics of St Margaret, June, 1306
In the lush of morning, the summer lay on the ground, delicate and soft as a cat’s paw. The sun drifted lazily in a sky like deep water, soaking the spread of fields round Methven so that it seemed to Hal that the land lost the pinched skin of itself, softening and rolling under the hooves of the horses. Larks sang, hovering.
They were coming round in a wide sweep, out north and west from the raggle of poverty that was Methven vill, swinging round in a forage that had found nothing but horse fodder and beans.
Half the army, Hal knew, was trying to glean something from the empty basket of this place. He was glad that the household was to be packed up and sent north with two of the Bruce brothers, for it meant Isabel might get a decent meal. He would miss the music of her, all the same.
Sore Davey, scouting ahead, came back at a fast lick, flinging one hand back behind him as he gasped up.
‘Men,’ he said and, by the time Hal had established where, how many and whether they were on foot or horsed, the rest of the riders had tightened their straps and loosened their weapons.
A column of foot, three wide and deep enough to contain a good hundred, even allowing for Sore Davey’s poor tallying and seeing double, was moving at a steady pace up over the fields, having come out of a copse at one side.
Such a column moving without straggling or stravaigin’ was certainly not Scots, for none of them were this far out on foot and none were as disciplined on a march. They were no foragers either, who would be in handfuls like thrown gravel, just strong enough to overcome a few peasants and steal their livelihood.
‘English,’ savoured Chirnside, ‘plootering aboot the countryside spierin’ out chickens.’
In threes, neat as a hem? Hal voiced the doubt aloud and those with heads agreed, nodding soberly. Still — there was nothing to be done with his twenty riders but take a look, so they rode forward, steady and careful, to where the column scarred across the green grain, cutting a careless swathe through it. Some snatched ears, even though it was unripe and had been left unburned because of it.
Lightly armoured, Hal saw, in leather and bits of maille with hardly a helmet between them and those no more than light leather caps. The one who led them, stepping out and pausing now and then to watch his men go past, was dark-haired and had a studded leather jack; all of them seemed to have short spears for throwing or stabbing and were bundled about with scrip and cloak and pack.
Then, sudden as a shock of iced water, Hal saw the black columns behind, first two, then four, then five, all footmen, moving in loose blocks. A swift tally gave him three, perhaps four hundred.
