Edward did not seem to notice them or the smell, but his next words gave the lie to it.
‘Cask him up. Lead line it — strip the church roof here if you have to. We will take him south for burial.’
Norbert blinked.
‘My lord,’ he began. ‘The King’s command…’
‘Is that you tomb up the dead man in the room,’ Edward declared in a grim voice. ‘And do something about the stink. Am I understood?’
He did not wait for a reply, but walked off, while Monthermer closed the door on Edward the First and turned to Norbert.
‘You have annoyed your king, notary,’ he said with a sharp smile. ‘I would start running and catch up with events if I were you. That and look for a new position.’
Norbert swallowed hard and then looked at the lists clutched to wrinkled ruin in his sweaty fists, all the prisoners awaiting the King’s pleasure in castles scattered all over the north. The most dangerous, those who had assisted in crowning the rebel king or colluded in the murder of the lord of Badenoch, had been granted the King’s peace until he decided on their fate.
Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barley-corns, he thought, the mystical radius of the verge of the King’s peace. Within it, no man was to come to harm. But the world had ended and that king was dead — did his peace still exist, in law or under God?
It was clear that the insouciant new king — Norbert still could not accept it completely — was in no mood to consider the matter. So let the captives languish, he thought, with a sudden, sharp rebellion of his own, until this new king is remembered of them and comes to me. Or someone like me, he added, recalling Monthermer’s parting words.
Out in the air, folk breathed easier, benisoned by the persistent cold drizzle of rain which had suddenly relieved the oppressive heat in a thunderstorm the night before.
‘What of the army?’ asked Marmaduke Thweng. ‘Do you join it, my lord? Or go south with your father?’
Edward sighed. The army waited under de Valence to lumber north on a pointless exercise that would add to the crippling debt that was his inheritance. Debt and boiled bones my father left, he thought bitterly, yet no loving final words for me.
He wanted to be in Langley, swimming. Digging a ditch. It came to him, in a sudden heady rush, that he could do that without worry now.
He looked round at the assembled lords, more suspicious of them than he was of the Scots; Monthermer arrived, smiling blandly and bowing and Edward bowed back. A mummery, he thought savagely — his sister, Joan, had just died and she had been Monthermer’s wife, so that the lowborn former household knight had enjoyed the titles of Earl of Hartford and Gloucester, and added Earl of Atholl to them after Strathbogie had been hanged.
Now, of course, he had nothing — Joan’s young son Gilbert had the first two titles restored to him on his mother’s death and young David Strathbogie had been given his Atholl lands back, so that Monthermer had a pile of gold in lieu.
Half of it from the royal coffer, Edward realized with bitter anger, yet another debt my father left. From having three earldoms Monthermer now had no title at all — and Edward did not trust him; Gaveston had been sure the man had been too friendly with Bruce years before.
Gaveston. The ache for him was intolerable…
‘Bruce is gathering strength, Your Grace,’ added a voice, deep as a bear’s. ‘Since he kicked de Valence’s arse at Loudon Hill, he and the raggle he commands have been strutting. Folk believe more and more in him and that cursed lie being preached by hedge-priests, that the death of your father is a prophecy from Merlin heralding liberty for Scots and Welsh, in concert against us.’
It was delivered firmly by Sir John Segrave, all grim in black and silver, and had obviously been rehearsed — though Edward knew the truth of it well enough already. Bruce, curse him.
‘We must let them know differently,’ Segrave added and Edward closed his eyes briefly against the beat of it.
The truth was that the army his father had so expensively and painstakingly gathered would never meet a Scots army stupid enough to face it. It would march up and down in a pointless chevauchee and then retreat south again, before it melted away. Everyone knew it, but the ritual dance of it would have to be followed one more time.
After, Edward thought viciously — the crown is on MY head…
‘First, I will have to at least escort my father some of the way south,’ Edward pointed out and no-one could argue with that. ‘To York seems fitting enough. Then I will need to be crowned king, my lords, before I lead any army.’
In my name, he thought triumphantly. Not my father’s, nor led by his bloody boiled bones. His time is done — an exultant thought struck him like a thunderbolt.
‘Send to France,’ he ordered to anyone who was listening. ‘Fetch my loving brother Lord Gaveston and the others who languish there. If we are to have a coronation and a war, we will need all the lords of the realm.’
Segrave looked darkly at Thweng, who merely drooped his moustache a little more and cocked a jaundiced eye at the rain. St Swithun’s Day, he noted — there will be forty more days like this if the prophecy of the saint holds true.
Hopefully, by the time the King is ready for the army, neither it nor its commanders will be too damp or hungry to appreciate it. He looked at Segrave and saw the scowl that gave lie to hope.
Thweng hunched his shoulders, against the weather and the bad cess of the moment. Once more, he thought, we will scour the north and bring fire and sword to everyone in it, making a place where wolves survive while sheep go under. And all the fighting men of that land have wolves as godfathers; one day those beasts will bite us back…
Cold rain and Black John, he thought bleakly. Not the recipe for a happy war.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The era portrayed here is one which defined both the Kingdom of Scotland and its people, large and small. The initial heady rush of rebellion, the successes — and disasters — of Wallace’s tenure as Scotland’s leader are long gone and only the iron will of the man himself remains, unbending and resolute.
It is easy to hold Wallace and Bruce up against one another and see the black and white of the former and the many shades of grey in the latter — but, as always, the world is more complex than that.
Wallace’s adherence to the kingship of John Balliol is never fully explained in any account. It seems obsessive and stubborn to me, which is the stamp of the man in general. In the end it was also pointless and Bruce, who had realized this long before, could not fight for the return of a Comyn-backed king who not only represented the end of Bruce hopes for the throne, but a man who did not even want the crown.
Kept alive by Comyn desires, until it was clear there was no hope, exiled John Balliol had only one function left — to pass on the legacy to his son and so keep alive the claims and hopes of the Dispossessed, those Scots lords who had lost their lands in supporting King Edward.
By the opening of this book, the small battle at Happrew — in Scotland most battles were between no more than a few hundred men a side — throws the whole of Scotland’s grief into stark relief.
On this bleak moorland in the Borders, Bruce fought for the English and Wallace for the last dying echoes of the rebellion crushed at Falkirk years before. Whether they met in personal combat on that field is unknown, but given the small size of the forces, the delicious what-if of it is too good to pass up.
Wallace, last hold-out of a war-weary Scotland, is not only increasingly isolated but vilified by the commonality; the darling freedom-fighter of earlier years is now simply standing in the way of everyone else’s peace to raise crops and family.
Did Bruce betray him? Probably not, but he was capable of it — and some Scot did, for the point of King Edward’s cunning exercise was not only to capture this rebel figurehead, but have his own former supporters do it.
The Apostle rubies, of course, are fiction — though the Holy Rood of Scotland is not. Taken south with other
