Robert Low - The Lion Wakes

‘The ribbons and some of the frippery will have to go,’ she said, ‘for all your good work and fine words, I am more mutton than lamb like this.’

‘Aye,’ Maggie answered with serious and surprising agreement. ‘I was hoping ye had no grand airs, Coontess or not. I was right about that, eh, Bet? The ribbons are easy removed, your ladyship.’

A sudden breeze brought the strong smell of char, raising Isabel’s head like a hound on hare scent.

‘Well,’ she said, stripping it off and fetching the old dress she had arrived in. ‘This must do for now – I will keep yours for good. There is work to be done, is there not?’

The English had raided for food, right up to the barmkin and the garth it enclosed, where cattle and desperate, frightened folk had huddled while men shot bolts and arrows at the enemy and had them back, with thrown torches besides. In the end, the alehouse and a couple of other buildings had burned but, as Maggie declared in her booming voice, ‘Ye cannot burn my vats.’ Nor could you, for they were made of stone and only the enclosing building had flamed.

It was that, in part, which had kept Hal here – though Isabel smiled at the lie that nestled at the heart of it. He stayed because he wanted her, as she wanted him, sucking the most joy they could from the time they had left.

Now she had to see to the ruin of what was left – in every sense. The debris around Herdmanston had been cleared out, the stone thatch weights found and rescued. Now a new building would be constructed round the brewing vats, but waited for labour now that men had gone to war.

‘We’ll get no help from Dirleton or Tantallon,’ Isabel declared, ‘for Bishop Bek has shown his Christian charity by burning them out.’

Maggie and Bet looked at one another; they had not known this, for Hal had only heard the night before and told Isabel of it just before they drifted off to sleep.

‘So,’ Isabel said grimly, ‘there is only us. I am no expert in making buildings, but I daresay there are folk, yourself included, who can weave the wattle. And I can at least tread mud and dung and straw in a bucket.’

They followed her down the steps, tame and admiring as sheepdogs.

Temple Liston, Commanderie of the Knights Templar Feast of St Theneva, Mother of Kentigern, July 1298

His army was sliding away like rendered grease and the expensive loss made Edward grind his teeth. Dog turd Welsh, he thought to himself, though he had to admit that bringing some several thousands of them had been the only option to overawe the Scots, who had had a year to preen and laud themselves for having won a victory.

Victory, by God – I will show them victory, Edward thought, even if good Englishmen had long since given their forty days of service and would not be persuaded further.

Yet the elaborate supply of what army he had was broken like a bad bowstring. Ships coming up the Forth had failed to arrive, forage had scrabbled what it could, but this Wallace was as smart an enemy as any Edward had faced and had left scarcely a cabbage or an ear of rye. There were precious few carcasses of livestock, either – save for a rotted pig shoved down a well. How could you hide so many cows and sheep?

He strode out of his elaborate panoply and stood under the banners in a deliberate pose, facing the assembly of lords. The pards of England drooped wearily above him, tangling in the golden snarl of wyvern that everyone knew as the Dragon Banner, which signified no quarter. To left and right hung the banners of Saint John of Beverley and Cuthbert of Durham – for you could not have enough holy help in the endeavour of red war. He rubbed his arm, where the poisoned dagger of the hashashin had all but killed him save for the Grace of God.

Sixteen years ago, he realised and hardly a night when he did not wake, slick with sweat and hagged by the wild-eyed dark face of the Saracen he had strangled with his bare hands. God’s Own Hand had been over him then – though He might have tempered the months of crawling sickness that followed that single nick.

He looked at the sweating assembly. God’s Holy Arse, how he hated most of them – and how they hated him. Each time he looked at a sullen face, he wanted to humble it, bring the great lord to his knees. Norfolk, Lancaster, Surrey and all the others who thought themselves greater than the king, the scions of the families who had tried to shackle and then subvert his father’s reign, plunging them all into a long, bloody business. Not content with that, they tried with me, too.

Percy and Clifford especially, he thought savagely, who thought themselves God’s anointed in the north, together with all the lords scrabbling for his favour and their lands in Scotland, yet prepared to break their oath as soon as his back was turned.

He was too kind, that was the problem. Even the young Bruce was not to be trusted, but that was almost certainly the fault of his whingeing father and the influence of that relactricant old schemer, his grandfather. He liked young Bruce – there was something of himself at that age in the Earl of Carrick, he thought.

If he can be bent to forgetting this foolishness of a crown, he added to himself, for there was only one ruler in Scotland. And England. And Wales. And Ireland. By God’s Holy Arse he would bring this Wallace to the quartering and the headsman and the country to the knowledge that there was only one king and that was Edward, by the Grace of God an Englishman.

For what? The thought always slid in there, like Satan at his elbow. For his son, he replied by rote, though he winced. Fifteen. Young yet and the only survivor of the brood. Left too long alone after the death of his mother… as ever, the memory of Eleanor rose up, the death of her taking him in the throat. That long mourn of a journey, the hole in his life where she should be still black and infinitely deep, unable to be filled by any amount of stone crosses raised in her honour.

Let the boy have his thatching and ditch-digging a while longer, but in the end, he would buckle to the dignity, to what it means to be heir to the Crown, or, by God’s Holy Arse, Edward would make him…

The truth of it was that he knew God had a Plan for him and that it was to rescue the Holy City. With the Welsh and the Scots securing his north and west, he could turn his will to Crusade; the thought drew him up into the glory of it, though the reality of God’s Paladin was not what he thought.

The assembled lords saw the unnaturally tall, slightly stooped figure, long-armed and lean, his hair, once a gold cap, now swan white and straggling out of the customary coiffure of curls round his ears, his beard curving off his chin like a silver scimitar. His eyes were pouched and violet-ringed, because his dressers had all their paste and powder arts in a lost sumpter wagon and so could not produce the illusion of his health and vigour.

Now everyone could see that the skin of his face had sunk and seemed to want to peel back over the cheekbones, while the one drooping eye gave him a sly look, as if he was about to visit some corner of Hell on them all. Which, thought De Lacy, might well be the truth.

‘You wish congress, my lords,’ Edward said flatly and his dislike of it was plain.

De Lacy cleared his throat. The Earl of Lincoln was the closest thing to a confidant Edward had, yet even he was not sure how far friendship stretched.

‘The army is starving,’ he declared. ‘Desertion is rife. The Welsh are… fretful.’

Someone sniggered and Edward could hardly blame him for it. Fretful was a serious understatement for what those black dwarves from the mountains had perpetrated, even on each other. For a time it had seemed as if the only battle fought on Scottish soil would be between drunken Welshmen and everyone else they staggered across. In the end, English knights had charged the worst of them down and killed eighty; now the Welsh were muttering about going over to the Scots.