to it, even if this venture is a success, for I am outlaw and there is nothing for me there.’
Dog Boy felt stunned by it, could not move nor speak.
‘I took you from Douglas,’ Hal went on, speaking faster now, as if to rid himself of the words, ‘at the behest of Jamie’s stepma and never regretted it for an eyeblink. Now I release you. Find Jamie and tell him this — he will take you into his care and, Heaven willing, you will both be back at Douglas when God and all His Saints wake up in this kingdom.’
The youth’s face was with him now, as he stood in the snow-humped riggs of a backcourt, feeling the wet cold seep up through his ruined soles. Pale and stricken at the thought of never seeing Hal again, the Dog Boy had brimmed his tears over and they had clutched briefly; the ache of it now was sharper than the keening snow wind.
Kirkpatrick tapped on a door, then again, then stood away from the faint light that would be spilled when someone came to answer it. He was grinning to himself when he saw it was her, her hand raised with a smoking crusie in it, the other clutching the wrap of warm wool to her as she stood, peering uncertainly.
‘Who is it there?’
He stepped forward, into the falling faintness of the crusie’s glow.
‘Annie,’ he said. ‘Bigod, yer as lovely as ever ye were.’
Hal was astounded at the sharp yelp and the plunge of darkness as the crusie fell to sizzle in the snow. There was a pause and all their eyes adjusted.
‘You…’ she said and Kirkpatrick, still grinning, nodded. The blow took him by surprise, a calloused round- house slap that whipped his head sideways. Then Hal heard her burst into tears and Kirkpatrick felt the soft warmth of her, flung into his arms.
‘Annie,’ he said, working the jaw to see if any teeth had been loosened.
‘Ye cantrip, reeking dungheap,’ she replied and sprang from him, hands on hips and the wrap flowing free so that Hal saw the considerable matronly curves of her through a dress too thin for the biting wind. She will catch chill, he thought wildly, then looked right and left to see if any of the nearest of her neighbours had come to spy.
‘I will return, ye said,’ she accused. ‘And so ye have — a dozen years later.’
‘Fifteen,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and then wished he had not piled the truth on it.
‘I was a lad,’ he added weakly. ‘With scarce any chin-hair.’
Her voice lowered too, with a swift backward glance — o-ho, thought Hal, there is a husband in this mix.
‘And I scarce had quim fluff,’ Annie hissed, ‘neither of which stopped ye.’
‘Ye were not unwilling,’ Kirkpatrick replied desperately, for this was not entirely on the track he had planned. But he and Hal saw her face soften. It was plumped and blurred a little from the heart-stopper Kirkpatrick remembered, but still brought a stirring in him. First love, he thought with a sudden ache of loss and a leap of envy at what the hidden man in the house behind her had achieved over him.
‘Weesht on that,’ she said, with another quick, birdlike flick over one shoulder. ‘I have a man noo — a good man who makes a fair livin’ from shoemaking and merchanting in charcoal and I am Mistress Annie Toller. I dinnae want to present him with an auld love on his threshold.’
‘Then do not,’ Kirkpatrick declared with a rueful smile. ‘Present me as Rab o’ Shaws, a cheapjack in need of shelter. This is Hal o’ Herdmanston likewise. Tell him we will give fair pay in ribbons and geegaws for warmth and whatever food he can spare.’
She shivered and not entirely from the cold.
‘Black Roger,’ she said softly and Kirkpatrick jerked at the name while Hal cocked his head with interest; this name was new.
‘We hear of ye from time to time,’ Annie went on. ‘And that is the name that comes with it. If ye are back here on dark business, Roger, ye can go your way.’
‘Nothin’ o’ the kind,’ Kirkpatrick lied. ‘I need ye to find Duncan, all the same. I need his help on a matter.’
‘What matter?’
Kirkpatrick bridled.
‘Annie, it is freezin’ cold — yer turnin’ blue on the step here.’
‘What matter?’
Kirkpatrick turned and indicated for Hal to come forward.
‘This is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he said. ‘Sir Hal, no less. He and I are here after his light o’ love, the Coontess o’ Buchan.’
She had heard the tale of it, which raised eyebrows on Hal, for he had not realized. My love life is a bliddy geste, he thought savagely, for all to gawp at.
Kirkpatrick knew Annie would have sucked up the story of it and now she stared at the troubadour tale turned reality, standing with his soaked boots and mournful face on her doorstep. She bobbed a curtsey as one hand went to her mouth to keep her heart from surging out of it.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The poor man. The lady. Oh. Come away in. In, afore ye freeze.’
Hal glanced sideways at Kirkpatrick and caught the sly grin and wink as he ducked through the door.
Her husband, Nichol, was a bluff-faced barrel of a man, at once suspicious of two strangers within his house and eager for their news and the payment promised, which would sweeten his wife for weeks to come.
‘Ye can sleep in the coal shed,’ he declared and shot a sharp glance to silence the start of protest from his wife. ‘And eat separate an’ what ye are given.’
Yet, while he pressed them for news of the roads and whether carts laden with coal could go up and down from Glasgow, he took Hal’s boots and worked on them, almost as if his hands were separate from his nature.
In the end, of course, he gave more than he got in news and Hal marvelled at the subtle cunning of Kirkpatrick that unveiled the presence of too many English soldiery in Closeburn and that it had to do with the prisoners within.
‘The Maister o’ Closeburn is seldom seen,’ Nicholl informed them, stitching quietly and speaking with an awl in one corner of his mouth, ‘at table or elsewhere. He plays chess and has found himself a clever opponent he is reluctant to give up, it is said, even though the others who came there at the same time have moved on.’
‘A wummin?’ asked Hal before Kirkpatrick could stop him; Nichol glanced up, beetling his brows.
‘I never said so,’ he replied, then lost the frown and shrugged.
‘There were wummin arrived,’ he admitted. ‘The sister of King…’
He stopped, looked at them and carried on working needle through leather; Hal knew he was in a fury of worry about having started to mention Bruce and the word ‘king’ in the same breath among strangers who might report him. Kirkpatrick chuckled reassuringly.
‘Dinna fash,’ he soothed. ‘No tattle-tongues here. It is to be hoped the sister does not share the fate o’ her wee brother, God wrap him safe from further harm.’
There was a flurry of hands crossing on breasts, but Nichol grew taciturn from then on and, eventually, the conversation died; Hal and Kirkpatrick went off to the dubious comfort of the coal shed — which, Hal pointed out, was mercifully emptied, save for old dust.
‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick mused. ‘Poor commons, it seems. Too many to heat in Closeburn these days. To feed, too, for certes.’
‘Which means it is stappit full of folk we need avoid,’ Hal replied uneasily, knowing that the task they had set themselves was made harder.
‘It can be done,’ Kirkpatrick said out of the coal dark of the place. ‘We need Duncan.’
Hal had been told of Duncan of Torthorwald, another Kirkpatrick but one who had followed Wallace and now suffered for it; he was outlawed and Torthorwald held now by the Master of Closeburn.
‘He is prospering, is my namesake,’ Kirkpatrick had declared. ‘Closeburn and Auchencas and now Torthorwald, with Lochmaben handed to him to hold, on behalf of the Bohuns.’
And Hal had heard the bitterness there.
‘Will this Duncan help?’ Hal asked, wondering if a man who had fought in support of a Balliol king — and so a Comyn — would offer assistance to a Bruce. There was no reply and, eventually, Hal fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of rustle and grunt, a throaty sound bordered between shriek and hoarseness, so that
