Sim had no-one waiting for him, save a brace or two of women who would welcome him, and no other home but the tower at Herdmanston. He found, to his surprise, that he and the others were greeted as lions and heroes, that anyone who had fought with Wallace at Cambuskenneth was entitled to respect and a fete.
The Dog Boy found the delight of a straw mattress by a fire and two hot meals a day, mean though they were. Yet he missed Tod’s Wattie, like the nag of something valuable mislaid.
When they clacked into Balantrodoch, they found the Auld Templar standing over the kisted up remains of Hal’s father, the lid off to show his swaddled body, bared face stiff with rime, sunken and blue. .. it was so cold there had been little need of the lead lining for the box, but the Auld Templar had done it anyway and rumour had it he had stripped it from the gutters and roof of Hexham Priory.
His own face shocked all who saw it, for the death of his son, following hard on the loss of John Fenton, chewed on him, harsh as a dog’s jaw. His pale cheeks were sunk, the eyes violet rimmed and, to those who had always thought the Auld Templar indestructible, the stoop of his bony shoulders frightened them. Hal remembered him, scant few months before, charging over the bridge with his hammer swinging left and right and, for a moment, felt some of the old love he’d had for this man.
It came to Hal that, if he thought grief hugged Herdmanston, then it must be throttling Roslin, where a woman wept now for her dead brother, her missing husband and the husband’s dead father, while her weans stood, bewildered. The Auld Templar, Hal thought, was the mortar that kept Roslin from dissolving into tears and for all I find him guilty of driving my da to his doom, I cannot hate him entirely.
And all this to the victors.
The Auld Templar greeted Hal with a nod, was surprised at the brief, shared moment of warmth that was no longer than the beat of a bird’s wing.
‘Christ be praised,’ the Auld Templar managed to husk out.
‘For ever and ever,’ came the litanied response and men crossed themselves.
There was precious little else to be shared round at Balantrodoch – when they came out of the crowded entrance to the Temple precincts, a sullen crowd, half begging, half resentful, watched them and their horses hungrily.
‘Stay here,’ Hal said to the Bangtail Hob, looking round. ‘Sim and I will find out if there is a possibility of quarters here. If we leave our mounts they will be eaten by the time we get back.’
Bangtail nodded, looking at Ill Made Jock, the Dog Boy, Will Elliott and the handful of others who made up the party; he wished they had come properly armed.
Inside, his breath smoking in the chill stone of the place, Hal came to a halt in mid-step, so that Sim had to dance to one side to avoid walking up his heels. He glared, then saw what had stopped Hal in his tracks.
‘Herdmanston,’ said Bruce, nodding in a grim way. He looked groomed and trimmed, healthy and young in his swaddling, fur-collared cloak, his shadow Kirkpatrick behind him. There were grim, spade-bearded knights behind him, crow-black save for the white cross that marked the Order of St John and that made Hal pause.
‘You made good time, my lord,’ Hal managed, ‘seeing as how my father is not more than a five-day dead.’
Bruce grunted, his lip pensive, thought about the lie of it, then decided Hal needed better.
‘I did not come for your father,’ he declared, ‘though it is a sore loss, all the same. A good man lost – though the cause he fought for was fine.’
He cocked his head sideways a little and smiled.
‘Ye fought in it, I hear,’ he added. ‘A born rebel Scot, it appears, Sir Hal – ye even contrived to rebel against me at the time.’
‘A happy anticipation,’ Hal answered flatly, which made Bruce lose his smile.
‘As well ye won, then,’ he countered, ‘otherwise you would not be back in the fold of my care.’
Hal said nothing, aware that he was still shackled to Bruce thanks to his fealty to Roslin. For all his passion to oppose the captors of his kin, the Auld Templar was not fool enough to attach himself to Wallace, victor or not. After what had transpired, Hal thought bitterly, it is good, if a little late, that the Lord of Roslin reins in his nature.
Bruce mistook Hal’s silence for passive acquiesence to his censure, which mollified him. He smiled at Hal, nodding his head to where a familiar figure, bulked in wool, rolled through the clamouring press of begging hands, ignoring them all with a bland, fixed smile.
‘I came down from the parliament at Torphichen with John the Steward there,’ Bruce said, his face like an ice wall, ‘to tell Wallace that Moray died. Since it seems he is too busy to attend it in person.’
‘Died on St Malachy’s day,’ the Steward boomed, coming into the tail end of this; Hal saw Bruce wince and wondered at it, but only briefly. Another death – but he was now so numbed by them that the loss of Sir Andrew Moray, who had been hovering at the edge of it since the battle at Cambuskenneth, was muted.
‘It was a curse for him, if no-one else,’ the Steward said pointedly and Bruce managed a wan smile, while inwardly heaping another curse of his own on the pile dedicated to all those who offered continual, harping references to St Malachy.
‘A curse for everyone,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘since it leaves Wallace as the realm’s sole hero and commander of the army.’
The Steward shot him a glower, then drew his cloak round him, shivering.
‘Just so. Now we will confirm him a sole Guardian, as we agreed at Torphichen.’
‘In the name of King John Balliol,’ Bruce added, his voice slathered with bitterness.
‘Indeed,’ the Steward replied blandly. ‘Bishop Wishart would say the same were he not fastened up in Roxburgh, prisoner of the English – which is a sore loss to the Kingdom.’
He smiled into the storm of Bruce’s face.
‘At least all the nobiles of the Kingdom are together at last. You and the Earl of Buchan, the Comyn of Badenoch and all the rest of us gentilhommes will stand side by side as we did at Torphichen’s parliament, smile and agree to it. God’s Wounds, if I can thole it, then you can as well.’
They would, since the alternative, Hal saw, was either the Red Comyn of Badenoch or The Bruce as Guardian, and neither faction would agree on that. Small wonder that the parliament had been held at Torphichen, with its preceptory to the Knights of St John a long-known sanctuary unlikely to be breached by murder. He wondered what Wallace had to say and wished he had not come here at all, plootering back into the mire of it all. At least Herdmanston had been a relief from that.
He made enough small talk to be polite then left, conscious of the gimlet eyes of Kirkpatrick following him, making the small of his back itch. Hal did not care for Kirkpatrick, thought him no better than Buchan’s man, Malise. The death of Fitzralph and Tod’s Wattie both burned and haunted him, for he knew who had done it – Christ’s Wounds, they all knew who had done it – but had no proof to offer that would bring the man to justice.
It was a day for the black dog to howl, a dreich, frozen world of misery, from the hungry suffering of the living, to the cowled loss of the dead. Loading his father on to a cart was almost an afterthought in the swirl of events, for the real business of Balentrodoch was for the great and good to agree that Wallace be made sole Guardian now that Moray had died.
It was not an easy business for anyone, especially Hal and the Herdmanston men, for the Earl of Buchan stood no more than a score of paces away with his kinsman, the little stiff-faced Red John Comyn standing in for his father, the sick Black John, Lord of Badenoch.
For all Buchan was an Earl, it was the vain little strut of Red John who mattered, since he was, after Balliol himself, invested with the main claim to the Scots throne in opposition to the Bruces.
The Buchans and Comyn glowered at Bruce and Hal alternately, while Hal and the others had to stand, ruffed as guard dogs and barely leashed, watching Buchan and the skulker at his back – Malise Bellejambe. It gave them no pleasure to see his battered, broken-nosed face, though he had the sense to stay quiet and keep it out of the line of sight of men he knew trembled on the brink of springing at him with blades.
They had come to append seals to previous agreements, now written up in crabbed writing by a slew of inky- fingered clerks. There were few surprises in the entire affair save one and it was clear that it was not a surprise to the Steward or the Bruce entourage, though it stunned everyone else, even Wallace. Numbed with a genuine grief over the death of Moray, he walked like a man underwater, saying little while argument, mostly for the sake of it and to score points one off the other, rolled over his head between Bruce and the Comyn.
In the end it came down to a half-hearted excuse by the Comyn that Wallace was not a knight, so could
