Candace Robb - The Fire In The Flint

‘I had no choice but to leave him there alone,’ Margaret said, suddenly feeling defensive. So Roger meant to send her off to Perth. Damnable man, meddling with her plans.

Aylmer joined them.

‘This is my manservant, Aylmer,’ Roger said.

Aylmer bowed. ‘Dame Margaret and I have met.’

‘Of course,’ said Roger.

Aylmer was a little taller than Roger and of a muscular build, but his moon-shaped face was unscarred, so Margaret did not take him for a soldier, or thought he had not been one for long. His speech was more like James’s than Roger’s. She guessed him to be part of Robert Bruce’s household, particularly with such an English name.

‘Well, what do you think of riding to Perth, Maggie?’ Roger asked. ‘Murdoch has his Janet, and no tavern. He’ll have little need of you.’

‘Who would escort me?’

Roger gave a surprised laugh. ‘We would ride together, Maggie. I do not mean to leave you here among the English.’

Margaret glanced over at Hal, saw his arm pause over one of the horses. ‘I must consider,’ she said.

‘Consider?’ Roger cried. ‘It is decided, Wife.’

She would be damned if she would be ordered about. But she checked her impulse to take issue with his declaration when she noted Aylmer’s sly smile. They would discuss this in private.

Fergus learned that only two of his father’s former clerks were presently near Perth. John Smyth, who had been dismissed under suspicion of theft, lived a few miles out in the countryside. Fergus did not think it wise to prime a thief’s memory of his da’s business with questions about records. The other clerk was now employed by Elcho Nunnery.

Elcho — Fergus’s face burned with the memory of his humiliation there. He cursed his mother for sending a messenger warning him on one day, then refusing to see him the next. Considering that she had been well enough to walk along the river the night of the intruders, he guessed her sudden illness was either from the damp or from the lethargy that came over her after a vision, and far more likely the latter. Often as a child he had crept in to see what horrible spots or sweats she suffered in one of her frequent illnesses and never had he witnessed anything more frightening than her sleeping with her eyes opened.

But he had a right to hear what she knew, no matter how exhausted she was. It was her interference that had trapped him in Perth. He resolved that he would return to the nunnery and refuse to leave until he had spoken to her. He had his rights. And while he was there he would talk to his father’s former clerk.

Dame Katrina, the hosteleress, received him, tactfully making no mention of his previous abrupt departure. He explained his double errand, impressing on the elderly nun that he would stay as long as he must to speak with his mother. She sent a servant to inform Dame Christiana of his presence and to fetch the clerk. Even she did not believe his ma would agree to see him at once.

The clerk was an elderly man who had worked for his father when Fergus was a child. He described a leather-bound casket, the type often strapped behind a saddle, in which Malcolm had kept his private papers.

‘Oft times he sailed with it,’ the clerk said, ‘but I recall a time when he left it in the keeping of Father Stephen, late of St John’s in Perth.’

Fergus recalled the small chest of which he spoke and was almost certain his father had carried it with him when he’d departed. Perhaps there was nothing of substance to be found at home or in the warehouse.

After the clerk had returned to his work, Dame Katrina brought Fergus a plain but filling midday meal, with a mead so sweet he was still sipping it with pleasure in mid-afternoon, when his mother at last appeared. She bowed slightly to him, and Marion, close behind, said that he should join his mother out in the garden. One of the guest-house servants already held open the door.

Fergus gulped the last of the mead and followed.

His mother settled on a bench in the sun. Though her gown was a simple cut it was of fine wool, a blue-grey to match her eyes. Her veil and wimple were white and completely hid her red-gold hair. Fergus was sorry for that, but he supposed she felt more a part of the community so clothed. Even so, she was beautiful.

She proffered a hand and smiled a little at Fergus’s greeting, then patted the bench beside her.

‘Come, my son. Sit beside me and tell me how you bide upriver.’

‘You know how, Ma. The houses were searched before your messenger arrived to warn me. Who is searching, Ma, and for what?’

‘Fergus, Fergus, you have ever been hasty in speech and too quick to anger. Calm yourself. Speak first of the little things. Give people ease before you attack them.’

He knew his approach was clumsy, but she made it necessary. Years of being diverted by her had forced him into blunt tactics. She had made him tenacious. Gathering his mental armour about him, he sat down beside her and took her hand. Here her age had begun to work, enlarging the joints, raising the veins. He was sorry for that too.

‘How goes the household?’ his mother asked, easing her hand from his and angling herself so she might see his face.

‘Jonet and I are managing, though we have not enjoyed meat in some time.’

‘You were never one for the hunt.’

‘Ma, there are soldiers in the wood — ours and theirs.’

‘Ours and theirs? You mean the Scots and the English?’

‘You know that I do. Do you have any idea what documents someone is after?’

‘Do we know they are after documents?’

‘That is what they searched through in both houses,’ Fergus said, relieved that she had at last addressed the matter, though her eyes looked vague. ‘Did they not search for them here?’

‘It was impossible to ken what they hoped to find, or what they took. But they have not returned, praise God.’

‘You might better praise the prioress,’ Fergus said, ‘engaging her kinsmen in standing watch over Elcho’s gates.’

His mother reached out, touched his knee. ‘What? She has set guards at the gates?’

‘She did not tell the community?’

‘Perhaps the others, but not me.’ His mother covered her face with her ageing hands for a moment, then pressed her palms together and bowed her head, murmuring a prayer.

‘You had not thought there might be further danger?’ Fergus asked. He should not be surprised by his mother’s lack of comprehension, but he had thought that seeing her belongings tossed about, and considering the state of the kingdom, she might have understood that she was in danger.

‘Dame Agnes believes that my visions are personal,’ she said, ‘that they do not apply to others and so I am wrong to share them. Yet she seemed angry that I had not gone to her at once when I woke with a vision of intruders.’

‘Were you frightened?’

‘Yes. So frightened that I ran out of the postern gate down to the river. I feared that they were at my heels, ready to — But when at last I stopped I realised that it could not be real, because Marion had not awakened. Do you see? I had no cause to rush to Dame Agnes.’

For once, he agreed with her. ‘What is Da doing in Bruges?’

‘Avoiding the English, I thought. Hoping to avoid all the unpleasantness and protect some of his wealth.’

‘You know of nothing in his possession that might be evidence against him, from either side? Or that might reveal secrets of either side?’

‘Why are there sides? Why must men always take sides?’

Fergus closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and asked her again. And again. The conversation meandered on for a long while, but the only thing that he learned was that his mother lacked any curiosity about his father’s activities. He left her meditating on mankind’s failure to heed Christ’s message of love, which would render war unnecessary. He thought her a strange one to speak of love.