Candace Robb: The Fire In The Flint

The anger that arose in the pit of Christiana’s stomach was vaguer than the fear that had sent her out into the night, but it settled there throughout what was left of the night and into the next day. Neither food nor prayer dislodged it.

In the evenings throughout spring and into the summer of 1297, many of the folk of Edinburgh congregated in Murdoch Kerr’s tavern trading rumours of war. The English still held the castle that loomed above, crowning the long, narrow outcrop on which the town crouched, and their soldiers were bored and nervous, ready to take offence and resolve any slight with violence. The Scots townsfolk who had survived the initial siege and the periodic purges of suspected traitors, who had nowhere to escape to or no inclination to leave the town to the enemy, trod the streets and wynds with care. They voiced their complaints behind closed doors, or in the smoky, noisy safety of Murdoch’s tavern.

Elsewhere the tide was turning. King Edward Longshanks had considered it unnecessary to stay in Scotland, believing his deputies and troops sufficient to administer the conquered people. He had either overestimated his governors or underestimated how much the Scots valued their freedom. The occupying English were losing ground in the north. Folk spoke of Andrew Murray’s skirmishes from Inverness along the north-eastern coast to Aberdeen, and William Wallace’s to the west and up into Perthshire and Fife.

Margaret Kerr, niece of Murdoch, the taverner, spent much of her time in the tavern of late, ensuring that customers were well served. She had come to Edinburgh in early spring seeking news of her husband Roger Sinclair. Once she had learned he had joined the struggle to restore Scottish rule she’d resolved to stay in Edinburgh and do her part.

Strangely, her mother, Christiana MacFarlane, gifted with Second Sight, had predicted her daughter’s involvement in two visions: ‘I saw you standing over a table, studying maps with two men. One was giving you and the other orders, concerning a battle’; ‘On another day I saw you holding your baby daughter in your arms, your husband standing by your side, watching the true king of Scots ride into Edinburgh.’ For most of her nineteen years Margaret had suffered the stigma and deprivation of being daughter to a woman who walked more often in the spirit world than on solid ground. She’d found no practical value in her mother’s visions. But now they had given her the courage to keep her ears pricked in the tavern for information that might be of use to those fighting to restore the rightful king, John Balliol, to the throne of Scotland.

Her uncle’s business partner and kinsman of the king, James Comyn, had come to depend on her reports. Not that she was his only source of information — a member of his own Comyn family, who were related to Balliol and Murray, had come to James in late July with the news that Murray had recaptured Urquhart and Inverness castles. Most recently Murray was said to have ousted the English from Aberdeen, then continued on down the eastern coast, intending to join Wallace at Dundee. Margaret knew that although James told her much, he kept more to himself. Every so often she sensed she was telling him things he already knew. The speed with which news travelled through the war-torn countryside amazed her. Sometimes she suspected that those who had chosen to remain in Edinburgh were all there as spies.

She worried about her family, scattered and torn in their loyalties. Her brother Andrew, a priest and canon of Holyrood Abbey, had followed his abbot in supporting Longshanks until his shame provoked him to disobey. For this he had been condemned to the post of confessor to the English army encamped at Soutra Hospital, which was a death sentence — he would know too much to ever be freed. Margaret feared Andrew would take terrible risks, having little to lose. She also worried about her younger brother, Fergus, whom she’d left in charge of both her husband’s and their father’s businesses in Perth. There was little to the responsibility with the English all but halting trade, but Fergus was an untried seventeen-year-old and had never been so alone. He might very well seek adventure as a soldier. Their mother could not be depended on to advise Fergus for she had retired to Elcho Nunnery several years earlier and even though so near Perth she sought no contact with her family. Margaret’s father, too, might now get caught up in the struggle; though he had fled to Bruges to avoid trouble with the English, it was said that King Edward planned to sail soon to the Low Countries. He was assisting the Flemish in containing an uprising to thus secure their support of the English against the French, who had made an alliance with the rebellious Scots. Rebellious against whom, she wondered — they merely wished to return their king to his throne, to repel Longshanks’s attempt to annex their country to his.

And though she had tried to harden her heart against her absent husband, whenever his lord Robert Bruce was mentioned she pricked her ears in hope of hearing something of Roger. But none spoke of him. Indeed, Margaret did not even know how he had come to join the company of the Bruce, who many suspected would fight against Longshanks only as long as he thought his own ambitions for the throne of Scotland might be realised. She had never thought Roger a man to betray his own king. Sick at heart at her husband’s defection, Margaret tried to forget him by focusing her energy on the tavern and her work for James Comyn.

On this warm summer evening James himself was seated at one of the tables, listening to Angus MacLaren’s tales. The storyteller’s wild red hair clung damply to his temples and cheeks and his beard was frothy with ale, but his voice was strong, drunk or sober, and he had more tales than any man Margaret had ever encountered, many of them bawdy, but all providing a good laugh, something they all sought these dark days as a respite from the talk of war. Now Angus was sitting back, pressing a tankard against his hot neck for the coolness of the smooth wood.

The talk returned to what was on all their minds.

‘They say men are gathering round Wallace in the countryside, at Kinclaven Castle near Dunkeld,’ said Sim the server.

‘He’s doing us no good up there,’ Mary Brewster muttered, her head sinking down towards her almost empty cup.

Margaret drew closer. Dunkeld was not so far from Perth and her brother Fergus. She slipped on to the edge of Mary’s bench.

‘Have you any news of Perth?’ Margaret asked.

‘Some say the folk there are welcoming English ships,’ said Angus.

‘Who else can get through the watches on the coast?’ James said with a slow shake of his head. ‘But as to their welcoming the English, how can we know what’s in their hearts from so far away?’

Margaret glanced at him, wondering if he’d said that to comfort her. He sat with cup in hands, moving it lazily and watching the pattern in the ale. His hands were those of a nobleman, clean, smooth, unscarred. His high forehead and long straight nose were fit for a coin. He raised his eyes and caught her watching him. She realised she had lost the thread of the conversation.

It did not matter, because Old Will had pushed himself up on to his feet and careened drunkenly their way, knocking over a bench and unseating several men whose bowls of ale crashed to the floor. As the men rose, their flushed faces turned ugly and curses flew. Margaret called for Sim to refill their bowls and asked for a volunteer to take the old man home.

‘The old boller won’t thank you for an escort home,’ said Angus. ‘He’d rather crawl beneath a table and take his rest than walk out into the night with one of us steadying him. Leave him be, that’s what I advise.’