Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

‘Dog Boy did this,’ Isabel said suddenly, sinking into the lee of a rough wall. ‘I saw him when he came here and heard the alarm raised later — yet he escaped.’

‘Well minded,’ Hal said admiringly. ‘He did and was raised in station for his daring. The way he told the tale involved rooftops and running.’

He was half our ages, Kirkpatrick wanted to add but did not.

‘How did he get out?’ Isabel persisted patiently and Hal, nodding, frowned and thought.

‘The Briggate.’

The distant clanging of the alarm iron brought their heads up, like stags hearing a baying. There was shouting.

‘Shut fast now,’ Kirkpatrick mourned bitterly.

They went on all the same, walked round a corner and into four men of the Watch. They knew nothing yet and Isabel was on the point of saying so when Kirkpatrick, panicked, gave a sharp yelp like a dog. Hal saw the hackles of the Watch come up, already bristled by the alarm.

‘Run,’ he said.

They ran, she gathering up her wet habit and looping it through her belt as she went, making a pair of fat breeches to the knee so her legs moved more freely. They went down streets and up alleys like gimlets through butter, half stumbling over the cursing sleepers seeking the shelter of the narrowest of places, where the houses almost came together like an arch against the rain.

Up steps, over courts, and Kirkpatrick, turning to tumble a water-sodden butt in the path of their pursuers, was stunned to hear her laugh and Hal’s answering wild cry of ‘gardyloo’. Like bliddy weans, he thought bitterly, with no idea of the dangers here.

Panting, drenched, they paused to gasp in air and Hal clung to Isabel, who grinned back at him from her pearled face. The warp has found the weft, he thought, the song the throat. No matter what happens now I am as happy as when the sun first found shiny water and I know it is the same for her.

They moved on, at a gentler trot now, burst into a wynd and shrank back from fresh rush lights, mounted on a cart. Behind, the Watch flames bobbed — one less, Hal noted with grim satisfaction — and circled in confusion.

There was a smell here, a stink they all knew well, and Isabel covered her nose, while Hal and Kirkpatrick fell into the old trick of it, breathing through their open mouth.

The dead were here.

There were a heap of them. Brought and dumped, they were the ones too weak from hunger or disease to stay in this world any longer. Two men in rough sack overtunics worked with grunts under the poor light of damp torches to load them on the cart.

Kirkpatrick looked at Hal.

‘They will not be taking them to anywhere inside Berwick,’ he said pointedly and Hal, after a pause, nodded and drew out his dagger. Isabel laid a hand on his arm and strolled forward, folding her hands into her nun’s tunic, hearing Hal and Kirkpatrick slide sideways into the dark.

The two men paused and looked up, saw what it was and waited deferentially. One even hauled his rough hood from his head.

‘Sister,’ the taller of the pair said. ‘Ye are ower late to bring succour to these.’

There was bitterness there, but whether at convent charity or his own condition at having to manhandle the nuns’ failure was a mystery; his comrade nudged him sharply for his cheek.

‘I am sorry for it,’ Isabel said piously. ‘Right sorry for this and everything else that will happen.’

The first man shuffled, made ashamed by the vehemence of her words.

‘Ye cannot tak’ the weight of God’s judgement all on yerself, Sister,’ he said.

‘I am glad you feel so,’ Isabel answered. ‘And so doubly sorry for this.’

They were puzzled as long as it took for the tall man to feel the savage wrench that took his head back, baring his throat for Hal’s dagger. The other, bewildered, half turned and took Kirkpatrick’s thin, fluted dagger through the eye.

There was silence for a moment or two, broken only by ragged breathing, the whisper of rain and the choke of dying men; blood washed down the cobbles into the open gurgling trench of the drain. Isabel looked at the two men and tried to feel some pity for innocents, but failed. The world was full of innocents, all as dead as these, she thought. A wheen of them are scattered nearby — and more are on the cart. They, at least, would serve the living one last time.

Then, in a flurry of movement, they stripped the rough tunics from the men and put them on. Isabel flung off the nun’s habit and stood soaking in her undershift while Kirkpatrick tried not to stare at the cling of it. She shot him a warning glance as she climbed up on the cart and silenced Hal with another, so that he saw the inevitability of it.

‘If you make a single comment on what has been exposed here, Black Roger of Closeburn, I will blind you, so I will.’

Kirkpatrick, with a wan grin, held up his hands in mock surrender and watched, admiringly, as Isabel laid herself down amid the loaded corpses, as if settling for the night in a feather bed.

‘Roll on your side, lady,’ Hal advised, ‘lest the rain get in your eyes and make you blink.The right side, mind.’

So you do not have to look into the blue-tinged wither of an old woman with her own marbled stare, Hal thought. Christ’s Wounds, I have missed the courage of this woman among all else.

They each took a shaft and heaved; the cart ground reluctantly away, the torches bobbing and trailing sparks into the night.

Malise hurried through the slick streets, wrapped in a dark cloak and a hot fury. He might be a great lord, he ranted to himself, but de Valence had no right to speak to him the way he did. Jacob the Jew, indeed.

He wished he’d had the courage to spit Gaveston’s old nickname for de Valence right in the Earl’s face when Pembroke had looked down his long, hooked nose at him. It had been hard enough getting entry to the castle at all and his anger and fury at that had been fuelled by the fact that he had been sent from it in the first place by the same Earl.

But the guard knew him and let him in — eventually — growling that the ‘enemy was at the gate’. Malise suspected differently, saw the Earl himself in the bailey, naked sword in hand but unarmoured and sending men right and left with barely concealed irritation.

He had elbowed through them and demanded to know what had happened to Isabel MacDuff. Then he had had the Look.

‘Gone, though the matter is nothing to do with you,’ the Earl had spat coldly and rounded on a luckless passing serjeant.

‘You — Hobman, is it? Yes. Go to the gate, find out who let this man in and arrest him. Then take the gate yourself and let no one in. You hear? No one. We are under attack here.’

He turned back to Malise.

‘You will go with him and leave. If I see you again I will make you suffer for the irritation in my eye.’

‘There is no attack. They came to free her,’ blustered Malise. ‘You must send men to the town gates or she will escape …’

A look brought Hobman’s hand on his shoulder and his firm voice in Malise’s ear.

‘Come along now, there is a good sir.’

The soaking rain trickled down Malise’s neck and brought him back to the moment, the night and the wet. He recoiled away from the dark mouths of alleys, fearing the feral eyes and worse that he imagined lurking there, and tried to work out what the bitch would do.

Not alone, he thought and the savage exultation of it drove into him like a spike: the Lothian lord, Hal of Herdmanston. It had to be him, silly old fool, come to rescue his light o’ love as if he was Sir Gawain plucking the Grail from a high tower.

There was no way for her to escape, he thought. But if it were me, I would head for the gate nearest the Tweed where the old bridge, destroyed so often that Berwick had given up rebuilding it, was no more than a staggering line of black stumps like rotting old teeth.