him drifting steadily, mercilessly northward like a pall. Longshanks, Bruce thought, will not be pleased at having this Scots boil erupt on his kingdom’s neck and still remain unlanced. His interests are in France – further still, if truth be told, in the Holy Land.
Yet he was old and such temper was not good for an old man…
‘How is the English Justinian these days? Choleric as ever?’
Sir Marmaduke smiled at the new name given to King Edward, only half in scathing jest, as he rampaged through the laws of the land creating and remaking them to suit himself as he went. It was not, Thweng was sure, anything approaching the legendary codifying of the Roman emperor.
‘Liverish,’ he replied diplomatically. ‘The wool business has caused him problems as you might imagine, while he will not debase the sterling coinage against all the crockards and pollards from abroad. That decision, at least, is a good one.’
Bruce stroked his beard – in need of trim, Thweng noted – and pouted, thinking. The wool business – seizing the entire country’s output on the promise to pay for it later -had caused most of the dissent in Scotland, mainly because it was Cressingham as Treasurer who had ordered the Scots to conform to it and no-one believed his promises of future payment, never mind Edward’s. The profit from it had been eaten by armies for all the wars King Edward seemed to embroil England in and his own barons were growing tired of it. Wishart’s timing had not been out by much, Bruce realised.
‘The Jew money will have run out,’ he mused and Thweng nodded. The Jews of England had been summarily thrown out of the country not long since and all their assets taken for the Crown – again, eaten by armies.
‘At least you are returned to the loving grace of the English Justinian,’ Thweng declared, ‘so proving that you are not so reckless as the youth I traded lances with at Lille.’
‘Just so,’ Bruce replied and Kirkpatrick saw his eyes narrow a little, for he could sense a chill wind blowing from Sir Marmaduke. When it came, it was pure frost.
‘I also came bringing a visitor,’ Thweng went on, savouring the wine. ‘One who asked for you particularly. Before I deliver your guest, let me once again congratulate you on maturing into a man and leaving the furious, reckless boy behind.’
Now the hairs on Kirkpatrick’s arms were bristled and you could stand a cup on the thrust of Bruce’s bottom lip.
‘You will do right by this guest,’ Thweng declared, leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘The sensible course. You will know what it is.’
He rose, idly tossed the empty cup to a frantically scrabbling squire, then stuck his head out of the tent flap. When he drew back, Isabel entered.
Bruce saw her, the hood of her cloak drawn back to reveal the copper tangle of her hair, the damp twisting it tighter still, the eyes bright and round, blue as sky and feverish – he thought – with longing.
He was, as ever, wrong. The wet had soaked her to the bone and the long ride on Balius had made her weary to the marrow, yet none of that had dented the hope she felt, the hope that blazed from her eyes.
His face shattered it.
She saw him blink and, in the instant before he spread a great, welcoming smile on it, saw the flickers of annoyance and irritation chase each other like hawk and heron across it. It had been forlorn hope, of course and she had known it in the core of her. Love was not anything deep between them but she had hoped for a better affection than what she saw. He would not take her into the safety of his arms, his castle and away from Buchan, and the weight of that descended on her.
She had taken her chance on the road back to Buchan, knowing that her refuge at Balmullo was probably gone from her, that she would be cloistered in some lonely Keep until such time as arrangement were made to cloister her somewhere more holy and uncomfortable. The aching memory of the bruises and angry lust Buchan had inflicted added urgency to her escape; getting away from the oiled skin-crawl of Malise only sauced the affair.
Yet it was all for nothing – Bruce would not help. Even as it crushed her, she cursed herself for having given in to the foolishness of it. There had been similar in her life – an older knight and, after him, the ostler boy, neither of whose names she could remember. All she recalled was the delicious anguish, the laborious subterfuge to be in that part of the world at the same time as they were. The smile to be treasured, the fingertip touch that thrilled, the sticky paste in a pot that was valued simply because his fingers had touched it.
She had, she remembered, thought such tender secrets were her own, hugged them to herself because of that fact alone – with a murdered father and all her other kin seemingly uncaring, it was a slim path picked through thorns to the vague promise of a distant garden.
Only her old nurse had noted it all and the truth of it came out later – too late, when Trottie lay, dying slowly and gasping out her last secrets. Then there was shared laughter over the wonder and worry of a nurse confused by her charge’s seemingly bad fetlocks that needed such a pot of evil-smelling ointment.
The self-inflicted pain of it, married to the pleasure, had been a game. You need suffer only as much as you need and the promise of something real a finger-length away was an awareness that grew less innocent the closer you approached to it. When it came to losing that innocence, she knew what to do with it and put away, she thought, the foolishness of love.
Until Bruce. Until she dared hope for the distant promise of that garden.
Even as she stepped into the sun of that smile, she felt the hope shred away, like a mist before a cold wind, and it made her sag against the length of him so that, for him, it felt like a flirting.
Over her head, Bruce looked at Thweng’s long mourn of a face and knew now what the knight had meant – Isabel had to be returned, quietly and without fuss, to her husband.
There had been a time when she helped salve the loss of his wife, Marjorie’s mother, and the thrill of bedding her and cuckolding his enemy had been heady. Now the first was palling and the second was, as Thweng had hinted, too much of a risk in awkward times.
He nodded and Thweng returned it. Isabel felt his chin move on the top of her head and almost wept.
‘It was her right enow, eh?’ Sim growled, hunched up with a corner of cloak over his head and the drips sliding along it like bright pearls. Beside him, the exhausted Bartholomew Bisset snored and they could do nothing with him until he woke, that was clear.
Hal and Sim now knew who he was, for he had managed to get that out, voice slurred with fatigue – Ormsby’s scrivener and notary, the one Wallace had sworn to find and the signature on the documents pertaining to the mason’s death.
Hal had almost forgotten about the entire affair and the arrival of Bisset was an amazement in more than one way – he been sent on his way under a writ from Wallace that promised, in return for his life, that he put his tale at the disposal of Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston. When the said Sir Henry was satisfied and quit him of his obligation, Notary Bisset was free to go.
‘I am told to speak to you and no-one else, not even The Bruce,’ the fat little man had said, swaying with weariness and drenched to the bone. ‘I beg you – let me sleep before you put me to the question.’
Sim had been astounded, but Hal had more than a touch of admiration, both for Wallace’s unshakeable trust in certain folk and the fact that the little scrivener, who could simply have run off, seemed to have more chivalric honour in his butter-barrel body than any of the nobles who had spent weeks here haggling like horse-copers.
‘It was her, for sure,’ Sim repeated, dragging Hal away from studying the sleeping Bisset.
Hal said nothing. It had been her. Run away yet again and come straight to The Bruce. He felt a sharpness in him at that thought and quelled it viciously. Stupid, he thought, to go rutting after an earl’s leman. It was only what old Barnabus, the local priest, had said would happen – time had healed over the scars of his wife and woken his loins.
Any lass with her clothes inside out, as the law demanded of whores, would do, he thought viciously, while the nag of Isabel, Countess of Buchan, fern-tendrilled hair dripping like wet autumn bracken, blue eyes weary, her smile still warm on his face, all made the dreich of this place even harder to bear.
That and Bisset, who snored softly, each one a tearing nag at Hal’s heart, for he sounded like wee John when he slept. Well, his son slept now and made no sound at all. Slept forever…
Christ, Hal thought savagely, can matters get worse?
‘Sir Hal. Sir Hal.’
The voice brought their heads round and they stared in wonder at the pair, lurching out of the dark, propelled by the stiff, haughty Sir Gervaise.
