and, besides, it was not his. As Isabel winsomely pointed out, cheerful as a singing wren, she had probably already ruined the beast by using it like a common palfrey and, because it had been stalled at Balmullo, which was hers in her own right, she could give permission and did so.
Hal viewed this last with a jaundiced eye, but could not resist the chance of it.
For all her cheer, the lady herself seemed clenched as a curled fern, full of brittle laughter and too-bright eyes, which only softened when she laid them on the Dog Boy – and there was a fondness they shared.
More than ever he reminded Hal of his dead son – yet each time, the memory of it seemed less of an ache just because the Dog Boy was there. Hal marvelled at the change in the lad in so short a time and could only speculate on what had tempered the steel in him, down in that dark hole, listening to Gib’s bones crunch. Hardly a friend, Gib, but even hearing a mortal enemy screaming his way out of the world would change you forever.
‘That and the dugs,’ Tod’s Wattie had said, in the grim firelit tale he had told the night he had arrived. ‘They died hard and sair, the dugs, and the only blessin’ of the lad being in the pit was that he was dragged from it senseless an’ so never saw them.’
Hal knew, from the unfocused eyes and the hard set of him, that Tod’s Wattie had watched them die and that had altered him, too. The mere mention of Malise Bellejambe sent him coldly murderous and Hal saw him now, hunched aboard his garron, his face a dark brooding of furrow and brow.
It was a sorry cavalcade, he thought. He had sent Bangtail ahead, to secure the inn and warn them that a cavalcade was coming down the road, because Bangtail had some sense about him and could handle an encounter with suspicious English from the Bothwell garrison. Not that Hal thought many of them would venture out so far from the safety of the half-finished castle, but it was was better to be prudent; besides, Bangtail swore he spoke French, though Hal was sure it was just enough to order another ale or get his face slapped by any well-spoken woman.
Then there was Bisset. The man jounced on a cart like a half-filled sack of grain, since the insides of his thighs had been rubbed raw on the journey to Annick and he could no longer ride. He was going as far as Linlithgow and would then go south to Edinburgh, while Hal went north.
Fussy, precise and complaining, Bisset was also, Hal realised, brave and a man of his word. He had promised Wallace to deliver information and he did. He had promised to deliver Wallace’s request to pursue the matter and he did that, too, though Hal wished he had laced his lip on that part.
‘The dead man was Gozelo de Grood,’ Bisset had told Hal and Sim, quiet and head to head. ‘Almost certes. He disappeared from Scone in the summer of last year. Stabbed the once and a killing stroke, very expertly done. Not robbed.’
‘Apart from his name,’ Sim growled, ‘we are no better informed.’
Bisset offered a sharp-toothed mouse of a smile.
‘Ah, but he had a close friend who is also missing,’ he declared, and that raised eyebrows, much to the secretary’s delight. He liked the possession of secrets, did Bartholomew – liked better revealing them to those who would marvel.
‘Manon de Faucigny,’ Bisset declared, like a mountebank producing coloured squares from his sleeve. ‘A Savoyard and a stone carver. A good one, too, brought over by Gozelo to do the intricate work.’
‘Where is he?’ demanded Hal and Bisset nodded, smiling.
‘Just what Master Wallace asked,’ he declared and pouted. ‘He went either south or north, two weeks after Gozelo de Grood left Scone.’
‘Helpful,’ Sim growled and Bisset, ignoring him, leaned into the tallow light.
‘It is my surmising,’ he said softly, ‘that this Manon fled when it became apparent that Gozelo was not returning when he had said he would. Gozelo left, telling the Savoyard it was for a week and no more, then did not return because he was killed, we know. This Manon fled – I know this because he took only his easily portable tools and no craftsman would leave the others except under extreme duress. He told folk he was going to Edinburgh, to meet Gozelo, but it is my belief that this was mummery…’
‘And he was trying to send someone in the opposite direction from the one he travelled,’ Hal finished. ‘Who?’
‘Wallace’s second question,’ Bisset declared delightedly. ‘He said your wits were sharp, Sir Hal. I give you the answer I gave him – I do not know. But Manon de Faucigny expected person or persons to be searching for him and expected also no good to come of it. So he fled. To Stirling, or Dundee. He will, I am sure, be thinking of hiding and trying not to do the obvious – run to the Flemish Red Hall in Berwick and be got away to safety.’
The Red Hall, Hal knew, was the Flemish guild hall in Berwick and he doubted it would be of any use, since the Flemings had defended it to the last man when the English sacked the town last year and around thirty had been burned alive in it. Now it was no more than charred timbers – though the Flemings were still in Berwick.
‘Why would person or persons want the man dead?’ demanded Sim.
‘For the same reason they wanted the mason killed,’ Bisset replied primly. ‘To stop his mouth. They both hold a secret, good sirs, but now only de Faucigny can tell it – and Master Wallace offers you this as promised. He said to say you would know what to do with it.’
Forget it. That was the sensible choice, but even as he turned the coin of that over in his mind, he knew it had never been a possibility. A pollard, he thought wryly. Just as refusing Bruce was a crockard. He had been summoned into the service of Bruce and, suddenly, had become part of the kingdom’s cause. Now, just as suddenly, he was part of the forces dedicated to crushing that cause – and, he realised, bound now to oppose Wallace if he encountered him. Yet he had regard for Wallace, the man still fighting when everyone else had scrambled to bow the knee. Because he has nothing to lose, Hal thought, unlike myself and others.
Hal felt trapped – like yon Trojan crushed by the coils of sea-serpent, he thought and wished he had spent more time actually listening to the dominie his father had hired to ‘put some poalish oan the boy’.
The men with him were the last of the loyal – all the others had gone off with Wallace, for the plunder in it. Sim, Bangtail, Tod’s Wattie and Will Elliott were Herdmanston men – Red Cloak had been the fifth and his death lay heavy on them all. The rest, some fifteen, were local Marchers some of whom trusted Hal more than anyone and knew a cousin, or some kin who had ridden with him before and profited from it. A few – and even this number astonished Hal – came for the belief in the realm and imagined Hal would know the right path to take when the time came.
‘Farthing for them.’
The voice licked round him like the Trojan’s snake and led him back to the present, the wet road, the August drizzle licking under his collar. He thought of the stone cross at Herdmanston, the woman and bairn buried underneath it – and how far away it seemed.
He turned into her smiling face. Hair had straggled free from under her hat and barbette; there was nothing, it seemed to Hal, that could keep the wild freedom in the woman contained for long.
‘Not worth that much,’ he responded. ‘You’ll have clippings back, even from a mite like a bonnie new siller fairthing.’
‘You are not half as country witless as you aspire to, Sir Henry,’ she said, the lilt of her robbing it of sting, ‘so I wish you would not speak as if you followed the plough.’
He looked at her. They had been together long enough for him to already know her moods by the way she held herself – anger stiffened her body, which actually enticed Hal, even if he knew the lash that would accompany it.
‘I have followed the plough,’ he said, remembering the days when, as a boy, he had trotted after the brace of oxen driven by Ox Davey, walking in that straddle-legged way ploughman do, one foot on weed, one foot on soil and a valley, deep as a hand, between. Davey had been Red Cloak’s da, he remembered suddenly.
Sim himself – older and stronger, as it seemed he had been all through Hal’s life – had showed him what to do with the worms. They would carefully pick the wrigglers, exposed by the scart of the plough, heel a hole in the soil, drop the worm in and say, like a ritual, ‘There ye be, ya bugger. Work’
Isabel was not surprised by the statement; it came to her that nothing this man did would surprise her.
‘You have not followed the plough for a while,’ she replied, smiling, and he looked at her, stern as an old priest, which did not suit him and almost made her laugh.
‘When I became a man, I put aside childish things,’ he said and, because he was perched on the back of Balius, was able to look down his nose at her.
‘And took up the pompous, it appears,’ she answered tartly. ‘I take the hint that I should also put away the
