Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

‘King Edward has been given the advice the Holy Father gave to the beggar,’ Parcy Dodd answered and folk shifted expectantly, for a story was as warming as the fire they dared not light.

‘I am half afraid to enquire,’ Jamie Douglas said laconically and Parcy grinned his wide grin, the rain pearling on his nose.

‘The Pope is visiting town,’ he began, ‘and all the people are turned out and dressed up in their best cloots, all lining the way from the gate, hoping for a personal blessing from the Holy Father. One stout burgher, a man of stature and local note, has put on his best fur-trimmed cloak and gold chain for the moment, for he is sure that sight will pause the Pope and that the Holy Father will bless him.’

‘A bad plan,’ Horse Pyntle grunted, ‘for your clerical is a magpie for the shine and yon burgher will not, I suspect, own it long if he flaunts it at such a high heidyin.’

‘Ah,’ Parcy declared, as if he had been expecting that very point, ‘but he is standing next to a beggar, a man with more stain and rag than cote and who smells like a privy on a hot day. The stout burgher thinks to impress His Holiness by handing such a man a coin at the crucial moment. Certes, as the Holy Father comes walking by, the burgher ostentatiously offers the coin, the beggar takes it, bites it with the one black tooth he has left and vanishes it into his rags. The Pope leans out of his litter then — and speaks softly to the beggar. The burgher is stunned; the Holy Father ignores him and passes on, having spoken only to the beggar.’

‘Aye, well,’ muttered Yabbing Andra, uneasy at Parcy’s constant blasphemies, ‘the Holy Father is more interested in the poor and feeble ones.’

‘Just what the burgher thinks,’ Parcy declared cheerfully, ‘so he thrusts the rest of his bag of coin at the beggar and trades cloots with him. Then he sprints down the street — for certes, the crowd parts before a man who smells so badly — and flings himself almost into the path of the Pope’s processing litter. Sure enough, the litter stops, the ringed hand beckons and the burgher proudly walks up to get the blessing he has worked and paid so dearly for.’

Parcy paused and grinned.

‘Then he hears, hissed in his now flea-bitten ear: “I thought I told you to get yourself to Hell away from my path, you beggarly misbegotten pile of shite.”’

There were a few loud barks of laughter, a lot of headshaking and admiration for Parcy risking his soul with such a tale. But they were cheered by it, all the same, Jamie saw — and they would need such heart for what they intended.

‘When it is darker, then,’ Hal declared, capping the laughter like a candle snuffing flame.

They went back to sitting, dripping in the rain, and the Dog Boy thought of what he had learned: Berwick had been put in the charge of Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The knight with stripes and little red birds, Dog Boy recalled, whom I almost tumbled off his fancy horse.

He is like snot on your fingers, de Valence said to himself. You think you have got rid of it and then, the Lord alone knows how, it appears again, on the other hand. He looked at the Dominican and wished him as gone as the Italian abbot and the King, both ridden off to the safety of the south.

Leaving me, he added bitterly to himself, with the ruin of it.

And it was a ruin. What was left of the army straggled south by a dozen different routes, too fearful of what snarled at their heels even to find time for loot and rape, too sodden to burn anything. The lords who were left would be of no help in bringing them to order; those who were mounted had long since vanished and those unhorsed were either already dead or taken.

The vellum rolls lay like white mourning candles on the table in front of him, a litany of lost lives and shattered hopes painstakingly scraped out by the clericals. Even now they were not complete; new revelations of the fate of the barons who had fought at Stirling were still being discovered.

One at least was accounted for and de Valence was soured to his belly at what he would have to tell his sister, Joan. Your son, the young lord of Badenoch, is not coming home — slain by the same God-damned Scotch rebels who murdered your husband.

Faced with that, the canting cadaver that was Jean de Beaune, piously name-changed to Brother Jacobus, was a misery de Valence could have done without, but the matter the Dominican had thrown at him would not be lightly dismissed. Yet de Valence vowed he would scourge the Cathar-hunting little prelate back to Carcassonne if he had to wield the whip himself.

‘The lady Isabel,’ he persisted, ‘is within the King’s Peace.’

More so now than ever, he said to himself, for she could easily become a counter in the game of ransom.

‘She has been accused,’ Jacobus growled. ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live.’

‘The accuser is more of a Devil’s spawn than the lady in question,’ de Valence spat back. ‘Malise Bellejambe has been the creature of the Comyn for as long as I can remember, God forgive my kin for it. I know him well enough for he came to me only recently, hoping to slither his way into my patronage, and I sent him away as I would the serpent in Eden.’

‘God be praised,’ Brother Jacobus intoned at this last, crossing himself piously.

‘For ever and ever,’ de Valence answered by rote. ‘Now this Malise seeks your patronage — is there not a reward for exposing a witch? Apart from the love of Christ and Mother Church?’

‘You stand in the path of the Inquisition,’ the Dominican persisted.

‘I obey my king,’ de Valence replied savagely, weary of the whole business. He saw his clerks hovering, arms full of rolls that almost certainly continued the litany of ruin for his king’s cause.

‘She is a heretic.’

‘You have proof? Other than the word of a disenfranchised, dismayed worm like Bellejambe?’

‘I … that is …’

‘You mean no,’ de Valence interrupted roughly, and waved a hand so that the candles guttered in the wind of its passage. ‘Get you gone, Brother.’

‘I will investigate further …’

De Valence glared at the Dominican.

‘You will not go against the King’s Peace. Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barleycorns — within that, Brother, Lady Isabel MacDuff is inviolate until the King himself decides her fate.’

‘Or God,’ Brother Jacobus persisted. ‘You may find that the good folk of this town consider the Lord’s Will takes precedence over suffering a witch to live in the King’s Peace.’

De Valence’s ravaged hawk of a face made Jacobus recoil a little.

‘Should the good folk of this town voice this opinion,’ de Valence said, soft as a blade slice on skin, ‘I will know where to look for the cause. Fomenting discord and riot in a town under my command is treason, Dominican, and I have been given the writ of Law here.’

He leaned forward a little, the candlelight turning his face to a twisted mask of shadows.

‘Break it, Brother, and you will discover that, for all there is no torture permitted in England, your Inquisition is a squalling baby compared with what I can inflict on those who thwart the King’s writ. Pleading a knowledge of Latin will not help you.’

For a moment, they were locked in stares, and then Brother Jacobus turned on his heel and swung away. De Valence waited until he was almost at the door, the trailing wind of his fury making the sconces dance madly, before calling out.

‘Jacobus.’

The Dominican whirled, his face a scowl.

‘You forget your station.’

The prelate’s face flushed so that the veins stood out, proud as corded rope. Then he bowed.