eating grass and living like a slinking dog in the wild. The Plantagenet has punished him for his rebellion and appointed these lands to one of his deserving others – a certain Malenfaunt, who was lately your… host. He has a way with the vicious that you cannot help but admire, has Longshanks – have you heard how they are calling him Hammer of the Scots now?’
‘Malenfaunt’s is a parchment gift,’ she replied stonily and he acknowledged that much; Longshanks had parcelled out a deal of lands belonging to rebellious Scots, but with no way to enforce their titles, the new owners were left clutching a roll with seals and were no better off than before.
He saw the thin hemline of her lips and allowed his temper a slip of the leash.
‘Regardless of the fate of this fortalice, lady, my task is to impress on you the necessity of the inevitable – Christ’s Wounds, woman, ye sit in this mean hall as if you were married on to its owner. Have ye no shame?’
She had not.
‘I will have your word on matters. You are Guardian. You can persuade my husband not to exercise the full of his anger on Sir Hal of Herdmanston and, if the Bruce agrees nothing else with you, he can be persuaded to add his weight to this. Have I your word on it?’
He was struck, then, by what it revealed of her feelings. It does not matter, he thought to himself, if Buchan has her body back, for someone else has her heart. Usually, that would not matter to a powerful lord only interested in lands but Badenoch knew that it mattered to the Earl of Buchan. There would be more trouble over it, he knew – but he was sick of the business and had more important matters than arguing with a well-bred hoor. It was a deal of persuasion – but he was flattered that she thought him able to fulfil it, so he spoke the formal words she wanted and saw her jaw knot.
‘Have you a spare mount?’ she managed, the words ash in her mouth.
‘Ach, no – coontess…’
Bangtail was silenced by the bright-eyed stricken look she turned on him. The Red Comyn, wise enough to stay silent, merely inclined his head.
‘I shall make arrangements,’ she said and he nodded silently again, turned and clacked his high-heeled way back to the yett.
‘Mistress,’ Bangtail began desperately, but stopped again, for the upright lady had slumped and buried her dissolving face in the sieve of her loose-ringed fingers.
Roslin
Feast of St Andrew Protoclet, November 1298
They watched the long-haired star throwing off beams to the east and, for a long time, no-one spoke. Then Bruce hunched himself into his fur collar, his breath a white stream.
‘The Blessed St Andrew sends a sign,’ he declared portentously. Kirkpatrick nodded and agreed with a smile, though he had to bite his tongue to stop himself, viperishly, from suggesting that it was probably more of a sign from St Malachy.
‘Let us hope this means that Hal of Herdmanston’s news is good,’ Bruce added and Kirkpatrick shivered.
‘My teeth are chittering,’ he said in a passable imitation of the the Lord of Herdmanston, who rode far enough behind them to be out of earshot. Bruce grinned whitely at him; they moved on up the road to Roslin’s shadowed bulk, the Carrick entourage falling in behind with a clatter of hooves and metal.
The great black storm of Longshanks had finally blown itself out. Roger Bigod, the Earl Marshal, had taken his forces home, as had Hereford, and, though they were entitled to do it, having served their tenure for king and realm, Edward was brooding foul over it.
Forced to turn south himself, he came howling through Ayrshire, sacking towns and villages – save for Ayr, which Bruce burned for him, in order to prevent any aid from it. Spiteful as an old cat, Longshanks, with the staggering remains of an army already eating its own horses, took the Carrick holding at Lochmaben. Then, with a graceless final swipe of his claws, Longshanks spoiled Jedburgh and reeled off back into England, already summoning troops for a new campaign in the summer.
It had all, Bruce thought, been ruinously expensive – for both sides. Thousands of Scots had died at Falkirk, among them some of the best of the Kingdom’s community – Murray of Bothwell, Graham of Abercorne, the MacDuff of Fife. It was no way to fight the power of the English and had been a bad slip by Wallace to try to do so. Moray would not have been so foolish.
Yet matters had not turned out badly, he added to himself. His father’s influence exempted Annandale from punishment by Edward, so only the Carrick lands suffered. Wallace was discredited and, though he had to walk in a trace with the hated Red John, Bruce was a Guardian, a step nearer the seat he craved and, at last, a power in the land.
Enough of one to pluck Hal from the outlaw wilderness and back under the Bruce wing and Herdmanston remained in his hands simply because Edward’s new appointment to it, Sir Robert Malenfaunt, did not have the force to impose the royal writ against a Guardian of Scotland.
Or the balls, Bruce thought. He glanced towards the hunched shadow that was the Lothian lord. I need this wee Herdmanston man and everyone knows my interest in him, so that even Buchan balks. You would think, he added bitterly, he would at least smile over it.
Hal’s world was all bad as spoiled mutton as far as he was concerned, so that he said nothing at all on the long ride to Roslin. Once in the hall, he squatted like a brooding spider, while Henry Sientcler chattered and his children played and his wife, Elizabeth, drifted gracefully, moving like a swan to prepare for the visit of the Earl of Carrick.
All of it, Sim knew, only added to the loss of her and he felt alarm, more than he had done in the days after his lord had lost wife and bairn. Then he had offered Hal what he had always offered – a stolid friendship, a loyalty he could trust and an expertise with horse and weapons that allowed them in and out of trouble. In return, Sim got the only home he had ever known and the only man he felt he could call a friend, despite the difference in their station.
It nagged now that none of it was of any use – Isabel had gone like a morning mist and they had only found out after months of slipping and slithering round the forests and hills, avoiding the English – and Scots in their pay – who hunted Wallace.
The arrival of Bruce’s messenger to pluck them from Wallace’s last remnants came as a blessed relief, tinged with shame at feelin it.
Wallace himself, disgraced, discredited and with the old brigand settling back on him like a familiar cloak, simply shrugged and wished them God speed. Not long after, they had all the news of what had happened, at Herdmanston as well as elsewhere.
‘An ill-favoured chiel came for her,’ Bangtail told them. ‘The wee Guardian, the Red Comyn himself. Her uncle was slain at Falkirk and it made the difference.’
Hal had known it, of course, in the aftermath of the battle, in the sweating, fevered nights when he had woken from the spill of dead, white faces, the screams and the steel. MacDuff was dead and he had been the Buchan link to a say in the control of the Fife estates.
‘She told me to say it was no use,’ Bangtail went on, his face twisted with grief. ‘She said her husband would not let matters stand still now and that Herdmanston was in danger.’
Hal acknowledged Bangtail’s words and the man went off, droop-shouldered at the loss and angry at his own impotence in the matter. Hal stood there, numbed by it; Isabel was gone back to Buchan.
Ironically, he knew that, even as she returned to her gilded prison, she was safer than before and had leverage of her own – he had no doubt that part of the price for her compliance would be that neither he nor Herdmanston would suffer.
But the price was high and, even when he returned to Herdmanston to prove to all there that it was his yet, he felt the bitter cost of it every time he looked at the lonely tower chamber, the dress folded neatly, the bed – and the pardoner’s medallion she had left on the pillows.
Bruce, of course, offered sympathic noises and was struck by the darkness in Hal. Who would have thought Isabel could engender that? He had seen her, too, when Red Comyn and the Buchan had come to the Parliament at Scone to oust Wallace and redesign the power in the Kingdom.
The florid Earl had brought the Countess with him, flaunting her like some stag with a returned hind. Bruce had noted the hawk-proud bearing of her and the despair behind her eyes and felt a stab of anger – there was no doubt Buchan had burned his mark anew on his wayward wife. Yet there was defiance there, too – and loss. Who
