‘Not bad, Creishie Marthe. Neat as a hem.’
‘A wish my ma were here to see,’ the woman answered with a shrill cackle. ‘She swore at my stitchin’ betimes — now it is part o’ a king’s face forever.’
‘Aye, weel — now there are two things ye are good at,’ someone said and the woman huffed indignantly at this affront to her honour.
Edward grinned cheerfully at Bruce and nodded.
‘Rest. We must be away from here, brother, and swiftly.’
‘What happened to me?’ Bruce managed to ask, coherent at least. Edward dismissed it with a casual wave.
‘Lost a wee tourney fight with the English,’ he answered, ‘and took a dunt. Your eye is fine, mark you — the cut is above and below it. It will leave a fine scar — you have a naming face now, brother.’
A naming face. Bruce heard the others laugh, daringly suggest names their king would be remembered by — Robert the Scarred, Dinged Rob, King Hob the Screed… the voices faded and Edward, frowning, patted his shoulder.
‘We left your fancy war hat behind, mark you,’ he said. ‘The crown is lost.’
The crown is lost. Bruce struggled and Edward looked alarmed as his brother sat up.
‘I have not lost the crown,’ he shouted, before pain wrenched his face and sank his swimming head down on the pallet again.
I have not lost, he thought through the swirling agony. By God, I have not.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lanercost Priory
Ferial day following the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September, 1306
It was white-knuckle cold in the Priory, a place of high, shadowed walls, chill fluted stone and wide floors of glacial flags. The room held a meagre fire which only accentuated the damp and the only decoration was a bleak- eyed statue of Mary Magdalene, staring from a niche with one hand raised.
Asking, no doubt, for another log on the fire, Edward thought to himself as he approached the man seated at the table, his back to the King. A priory servant, hunkered by the flicker of flame in the huge fireplace, leaped to his feet and bowed, so that the seated man immediately knew who was behind him.
He stood, scraping back the bench and turned, bowing.
‘Your Grace,’ he said, then wiped gravy from his moustaches.
‘Sit, sit,’ growled Edward, flapping one hand and shuffling up to perch opposite, his back to the fire. He hunched himself a little, then rounded on the servant.
‘Fetch some logs and build that blaze, damn your eyes.’
Marmaduke Thweng thought the King and a two-day old corpse had much in common, but the rouge and prinking made Edward look worse.
‘Eat, eat,’ Edward declared expansively. ‘You have come a long way to deliver your charges, Sir Marmaduke, and deserve a decent pie, by God. Tell me everything.’
Thweng looked with sadness at the half-eaten bacon and beef pie, which was delicious, aware that he could not follow both commands at the same time.
‘The women follow on slowly, Your Grace, in carts as befits their station. Your son decided to send the Earl and the Bruce brother ahead with me, on horseback. He knew you would wish to see them at your soonest convenience.’
‘No doubt to ingratiate himself. Bastard boy,’ Edward scowled, eyeing the pie and feeling his belly gripe. No more food like that for me if the physickers are to be followed, he thought to himself bitterly. Crowfoot powder for the belly gripe and fare that loosens the bowels, so the act of losing a turd did not bring excruciating agony — damned black biled humours of the arse would not even allow him to sit in comfort.
His malady was well known and Thweng thought back to the moment the King had quit Scotland after stripping Balliol, the moment he had sneered that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of such a turd’. Like the ones he strained to pass now, that one, too, had been painful and costly.
Thweng knew better than to speak on that, or about why the King scowled over his son; Sir Giles D’Argentan and a whole slew of knights, who were supposed to be scouring the north in the host commanded by the prince, had all decided to go to France. For an Important Tourney. The prince, of course, had permitted them and it was only a Holy Miracle that he had seen sense enough not to go himself.
The memory of it clearly rankled stilll. Twenty-two arrest warrants had been spewed out from the King’s wrath — even for his son-in-law, the elegant fop Humphrey de Bohun. The others were all the gilded youth, the new breed Edward had so painstakingly fastened to his son at the Feast of Swans.
Even that he contrives to subvert and ruin, Edward thought. Even that…
Thweng watched him reach out and scoop up the meat of the pie and stuff it in his mouth, gravy dripping down his curled beard and off his fingers.
‘Have they found Bruce?’
Thweng shook his head.
‘Not at Kildrummy, nor Dunaverty,’ he answered and the king hunched and brooded, sucking the delicious gravy over his teeth. Gone, like the mists of those damnable hills, he thought. Vanished. Dunaverty and Kildrummy — bloody barbaric names they had there — were the last strongholds where the usurper could possibly have lurked.
It meant he was hiding in the woods and hills, with places that translated to ‘loch of the ambush’, ‘wolf’s burn’ and ‘murder hole’.
‘You could find him,’ Edward declared, sucking his fingers. ‘You are a thief-taker in your own Yorkshire lands, are you not? For the bounty?’
Thweng’s eyes narrowed, for he did not like the thrust of this; he would not be thief-taking at all if he did not need the money it brought, for decades of service to the King had been less than lucrative.
‘Trailbaston and outlaws, Your Grace,’ he replied flatly. ‘In a country I know with my eyes closed and one which seeks to help me. A different matter to hunt down one man in a strange land whose folk offer every resistance.’
‘He must be found,’ the King persisted, helping himself to more of the pie. Thweng nodded, trying not to show the inward weary sigh he felt. It would, he thought, be best if Bruce were found and dealt with if only to stop the welter of dragon-banner blood that had already claimed so many. There were a score or more and the gutters had stank with blood for two days, according to the reports. Thweng had known most of the noble dead.
‘Will you speak with the Earl of Atholl, my lord?’ he asked.
‘I will not,’ the King declared savagely. ‘He will try to plead his case, no doubt, tell me he is a kinsman of mine through his mother, who is some king’s bastard. He is for the axe, by God.’
Now Thweng was alarmed; no earl had been executed in England for two hundred years and more and he said as much. The King regarded him sourly, the drooping eye flickering with a tic, gravy sliding down his fingers.
‘The Bruce brother — Niall, is it? Yes, him. I will axe him, certes and send his head to Berwick for spiking. Atholl must also suffer, earl or no. He can hang instead. If he is higher in rank than any of the others, then we can add thirty feet to his gallows drop, for benefit of his station.’
He smiled greasily. ‘As for the Bruce women — well, I have an Italies punishment for them.’
He saw Thweng’s bewilderment.
‘After Fossalta — you recall the battle? The Bolognese imprisoned Henry of Sardinia in an iron cage. It took him twenty-two years to die.’
‘In the name of Christ’s Mercy,’ Thweng blurted before he could stop himself and saw the storm gather on the royal brow, reined round and came up on another attack.
‘You can scarcely do that to his wife, Your Grace. A De Burgh of Ulster? And the Bruce daughter, Marjorie, is
