Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

Berwick

Octave of the Visitation, July 1314

He was in there, the King of England. Jamie said it twice so that Hal would hear, though he was not sure if it had worked, for the man gave no sign. Just kept staring across the mirk of a sodden day at the faint grey streaks and worms of pallid light that marked Berwick.

‘Are we going for him then?’ demanded Yabbing Andra, and Horse Pyntle snotted rain and worse from his nose, which was expressive enough.

‘We are bliddy not,’ Sweetmilk replied vehemently, and turned uncertainly to the Black Sir James Douglas. ‘That’s the right of it, is it not, yer honour?’

‘That’s the right of it,’ agreed Jamie Douglas, clapping Sweetmilk on his rain-sodden shoulder, hard enough to spurt water. ‘We are not here for the glory of snatching the son of Longshanks at all.’

He paused for effect and lowered his voice to a mockingly husked whisper.

‘We are here, lads, for … love.’

We should not be here at all, Kirkpatrick told himself, on a mad-headed fool’s errand like this. But he kept it to himself, for there was no way of avoiding it and he owed the Herdmanston lord this much and more.

He eyed the man who stared unflinchingly into the grey mirk; if the Devil was here to give him it, Kirkpatrick thought, Hal Sientcler of Herdmanston would sell his immortal soul for the power to drag Isabel MacDuff out of her cage and to his side with his eyes alone.

He crossed himself for the thought and waited, sitting with the others in the dubious shelter of a copse of trees while the twilight drained the land of colour and the rain filled it with misery.

It had been raining since the evening of the battle, Kirkpatrick thought, a downpour that drowned what was left of the fields and ruined the last chance of a harvest. Livestock plootered in mud, promising hoof rot and murrains — famine was coming with the winter and it would be hard.

He muttered as much aloud, so that Jamie Douglas turned to him. Expecting the uncaring rasp of the Black’s hatred of all things English, Kirkpatrick was surprised.

‘Sair,’ agreed James Douglas. ‘The price of bread will be crippling. The poor always suffer worst.’

Hal, face pebbled and eyes burning, turned at last from trying to see her through the miles and mist. Kirkpatrick nodded and smiled, aware — as he had been since he had hauled Hal to his feet beside the body of Badenoch — that he had been responsible for the Lothian knight’s crazed pursuit of that lord.

He had it that I was killed and that it had been his fault, Kirkpatrick thought. I was not and cannot — will never — reveal that I had just given up and lay there, waiting for Badenoch to kill me like a done-up heifer. Now I have the guilt of having driven Sir Hal to slaughter Badenoch, the man he stopped me killing once before — Christ’s Blood, here’s a tangle of sin and redemption that even God would have trouble unravelling.

It had been the last act of a bloody day, the stunning glory of it numbing yet. Such a victory, such a tumbling of great English lords to dust and ruin — aye, and death. The tallymen had been busy as fiddlers’ elbows noting the names: the Earl of Gloucester, slain. Sir Robert Clifford, slain. Sir William Marshal, slain. Sir Giles d’Argentan, slain. Tiptoft, Vescy, Deyncourt, Beauchamp, Comyn — great names whose holders were all slain, brothers and cousins and nephews all.

Fifty of the great and good of England were no more than a nick in a hazel stick now, a notch the thickness of a palm for an earl, the breadth of a finger for a banneret, the width of a swollen barleycorn for a lesser knight.

Hundreds of hazel sticks — and not one sliver for any of the great slather of corpses, blanching in the wet, stripped naked so that their wounds showed red and puckered as hag’s holes on the blue-white of their marbled skin. Thousands of them, Scots and English, Gascon, Hainaulter, Welsh, all left unrecorded so that, on the Scots side, folk could exult that only three had died: Sir William Airth, Sir William Vipond and, like justice from God, Sir Walter Ross, third son of the Earl of Ross.

Others had been more fortunate and survived to be ransomed, the greatest of them being Robert d’Umfraville, the Earl of Angus, and Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, taken prisoner at Bothwell just when they thought themselves safe.

The de Bohuns particularly, Kirkpatrick knew, had been so dragged in the dust of Bruce’s glory that you had to wonder how that family had so angered God: the Earl’s nephew, Henry, killed like a battle sacrifice by Bruce himself; the Earl and his kinsman, Gilbert, taken prisoner to be used as a ransom bargain for the return of all the imprisoned Bruce women — sister, wife and daughter.

And Isabel MacDuff.

All we have to do is wait, Kirkpatrick thought, in the safe and the dry while wee advocates arrange the business of it. By year’s end, Isabel could be back at Hal’s side and no risk in it at all. He had dared to argue that when he and Sir James and the King had considered the matter, with Hal waiting to be told whether he would be assisted to such a daring rescue.

Hal had not said a word — but the look Kirkpatrick had from the King would have stripped the gilt from a stone saint, so that he had given in with a wave of the hand.

‘Sir Hal has waited long enough,’ the King had declared.

‘Isabel has waited long enough,’ Hal corrected tersely. Which was a truth Kirkpatrick had not considered at all, so that it fell on him like a dropped brick; seven years, he had realized, in a cage on a wall, waiting for rescue. Aye — overdue indeed.

In the end, of course, Bruce had officially forbidden it. No one, especially Sir James Douglas, was to set as much as a toe on a Berwick wall. Truces had been arranged. There was his own sister and wife, the Queen, waiting to be released; matters were delicate and not to be plootered across with heavy feet.

Kirkpatrick had agreed while shooting Hal warning glances to stay quiet; he knew the Lothian lord would go anyway. He was sure Bruce knew that, too.

So, while Edward Bruce and Randolph stumbled down the muddy roads to Wark and out to Carlisle as the mailled fist, the King returned the bodies of Gloucester and Clifford — and the boiled bones of Humphrey de Bohun — with all due care and mercy, as the lambskin gauntlet. And turned a blind eye to Sir James Douglas, Kirkpatrick and Sir Hal of Herdmanston, riding off on their own towards Berwick with a knot of hard-eyed men.

The day dripped on, and then a rider flogged a sodden garron through the grey and skidded to a halt in a shower of clots.

‘He is left,’ Dog Boy declared, wiping his streaming face while the steam came off him like haze. ‘Headed out to Bamburgh and then York with a great escort against capture.’

Jamie’s face brightened with the possibilities at once, but caught sight of Hal’s own and shrugged, shamefaced, abandoning the glory that might have been.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Love it is then, though you can scarce blame me for thinking of scooping up such a prize as Edward of England.’

‘Less risk in that,’ Kirkpatrick growled morosely, but Dog Boy, shaking water from him, grinned into his damp-smoke mood.

‘Would ye not risk the same for your own wummin, then?’ he demanded. ‘For love?’

Kirkpatrick gave him a jaundiced eye. He had a woman he would marry before too long and the bounty of that and the lands she brought was a glow in the core of him. He would risk much for that — but love? He had never considered love in the matter of getting wed and said so.

Dog Boy, bright with the joy of Bet’s Meggy, little Bet and Hob, laughed at how the nobiles arranged such matters. Yet he had to agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the risk: he had watched the cavalcade quit Berwick, the hunched and smouldering King Edward in the centre of it, so there was a better chance of sneaking up the walls than if he had been there. A slight shift in risk, but welcome all the same and he said as much, to give heart to everyone.