sword, though he probably does not use it well. Not knighted, with no lands of his own – yet cunning and smart. An intelligencer for The Bruce, then, a wee ferret of secrets – and a man Bruce could send to red murder a rival.
‘So – you and Buchan, plootering about in the woods like bairns, tryin’ to red murder yin another?’ Wishart scathed. ‘Hardly politic. Scarcely gentilhommes of the community of the realm, let alone belted earls. Then there is this ither matter – ye never saw the body, then?’
Bruce rounded on him like a savaging dog, popping the French out like a badly sparking fire.
‘Body? Never mind that – what in God’s name are you up to now, Wishart? The man’s a bloody-handed outlaw. Barely noble – community of the realm, my arse.’
Wishart sipped from a blue-glass goblet, a strangely delicate gesture from such a sausage-fingered man, Hal thought. The bishop stared up into Bruce’s thrusting lip and sighed.
‘Wallace,’ he said heavily. ‘The man’s a noble, but barely as you say. The man’s an outlaw, no argument there.’
‘And this is your new choice for Scotland’s king, is it?’ Bruce demanded sneeringly. ‘It is certainly an answer to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol, but not one, I think, that your “community of the realm” will welcome. A lesser son, a family barely raised above the level? Christ’s Bones, was he not bound to be a canting priest, the last refuge of poor nobiles?
‘Aye, weel – some become bishops,’ Wishart answered mildly, dabbing his lips with a napkin, though the stains down the front of his serk bore witness to previous carelessness and Bruce had the grace to flush and begin to protest about present company. Wishart waved him silent.
‘Wallace is no priest,’ he answered. ‘No red spurs nor dubbing neither, but his father owns a rickle of land and his mother is a Crawfurd, dochter of a Sheriff of Ayr – so he is no chiel with hurdies flappin’ out the back of his breeks. Besides, he is a bonnie fighter – as bonnie as any I have ever seen. As a solution to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol it takes preference over murder plots on a chasse, my lord.’
‘Is that all it takes, then?’ Bruce demanded thickly. ‘You would throw over the Bruce claim for a “bonnie fighter”?’
‘The Bruce claim is safe enough,’ Wishart said, suddenly steely. ‘Wallace is no candidate for a throne – besides, we have a king. John Balliol is king and Wallace is fighting in his name.’
‘Balliol abdicated,’ Bruce roared and Kirkpatrick laid a hand on his arm, which the earl shook off angrily, though he lowered his voice to a hoarse hiss, spraying Wishart’s face.
‘He abdicated. Christ and All His Saints – Edward stripped the regalia off him, so that he is Toom Tabard, Empty Cote, from now until Hell freezes over. There is no king in Scotland.’
‘That,’ replied Wishart, slowly wiping Bruce off his face and staring steadily back at the pop-eyed earl, ‘is never what we admit. Ever. The kingdom must have a king, clear and indivisible from the English, and Balliol is the name we fight in. That name and the Wallace one gains us fighting men – enough, so far, to slay the sheriff of Lanark and burn his place round his ears. Now the south is in rebellion as well as the north and east.’
‘Foolish,’ Bruce ranted, pacing and waving. ‘They are outlaws, cut-throats and raiders, not trained fighting men -they won’t stand in the field and certainly not led by the likes of Wallace. Your desperation for a clear and indivisible king blinds you.’
He leaned forward and his voice grew softer, more menacing while the shadows did things to his eyes that Hal did not like.
‘Only the nobiles can lead men to fight Edward,’ he declared. ‘Not small folk like Wallace. In the end, the gentilhommes – your precious “community of the realm” – is what will keep your Church free of interference from Edward, which is really what you finaigle for. Answerable only to the Pope, is that not it, Bishop?’
‘Sir Andrew Moray is noble,’ Wishart pointed out, bland as a nun’s smile, and that made Bruce pause. Aha, Hal thought, the bold Bruce does not like the idea of Moray. Moray and Wallace as Guardians of the Realm would go a long way to appeasing nobles appalled at the idea of a Wallace alone.
Bruce would not then be at the centre of things – he had not been party to any of it so far, nor would he have been if he had not turned up on his own, dangling The Hardy’s family as security of his intentions and looking for the approbation of the other finely born in Wishart’s enterprise. Hal, dragged along in the Auld Templar’s wake, had wondered, every step of the way, what had prompted Bruce to suddenly become so hot for rebellion and Sim had remarked that Bruce’s da would not care for it much.
Bruce the son had not got much out of it. The Hardy had been grudgingly polite, the Stewart brothers and Sir Alexander Lindsay had been cool at best while Wallace himself, amiable, giant and seemingly bland, had looked the Earl of Carrick up and down shrewdly and wondered aloud why ‘Bruce the Englishman’ had decided to jump the fence. Now they were all glowering on the other side of the door, still wondering the same.
It was exactly what Wishart now asked.
‘If you have set your face against this enterprise and my choice of captain,’ Wishart grunted, slopping wine on his knuckles, ‘why are you here when your da is in Carlisle, no doubt setting out his explanations to Percy and Clifford of why his son has gone over to Edward’s enemies? I would have thought, my lord, that you would be bending your efforts against Buchan – and a body found in the woods.’
Hal leaned forward, for this was something he wanted to know as keenly – Bruce was young, his father’s son in every way until now, and his family had been expelled from their Scottish lands by the dozen previous Guardians, only just returned to them by Edward’s power. Why here? Why now?
Hal was sure the uncovered corpse had something to do with it, surer still that Wishart and Bruce shared the secret of it. He was also more certain than ever that he should not be here, mired in the midden of it all – how in the name of God and all His Saints had he become a rebel, sudden and easy as putting on a cloak?
He became aware of eyes, turned into the black, considered gaze of Kirkpatrick and held it for a long while before breaking away.
Bruce frowned, the lip pouted and the chin thrust out, so that the shadows turned his broad-chinned face to a brief, flickering devil’s mask – then he moved and the illusion shattered; he smiled.
‘I am a Scot, when all said and done. And a gentilhomme of your community of the realm, bishop,’ he answered smoothly, then plucked the prelate’s glass from his fat, beringed fingers and drained it, a lopsided grin on his face.
‘Besides – you have your fighting bear,’ he answered. ‘You need, perhaps, someone to point him in the right direction. To point you all in the right direction.’
Wishart closed one speculative eye, reached out and took the glass back from Bruce with an irritated gesture.
‘And where would that be, young Carrick?’
‘Scone,’ Bruce declared. ‘Kick England’s Justiciar, Ormsby, up the arse, the same way we did Heselrig.’
Hal heard the ‘we’ and saw that Wishart had as well, but the bishop did not even try to correct Bruce. Instead he smiled and Hal was sure some subtle message passed between the pair.
‘Aye,’ Wishart said speculatively. ‘Not a bad choice. To make sure of… matters. I will put it to the Wallace.’
He lifted the empty glass in a toast to Bruce, who acknowledged it with a nod, then smiled a shark-show of teeth at Hal.
Chapter Three
Scone Priory
Feast of Saints Castus and Aemilius, martyrs – May, 1297
Dusk was hurrying on and dark clipping its heels, so that the heads and shoulders were stained black against the flames. Hal could hear the guttural snarls and spits of them, as fired as the sparks that flew; it had been a long time since he had heard such a large crowd of men all speaking Lowland and it brought back ugly memories of last year, when he and others had padded, cat-cautious and sick to their stomachs, in the fester that was Berwick after the English had gone.
The cooked-meat smells didn’t help, for Hal knew the sweet, rich smell had nothing to do with food.
They came up through the huddle of wattle and daub that clustered round the priory like shellfish on a rock,
