Robert Low - The Complete Kingdom Trilogy - The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant

Any lass with her clothes inside out, as the law demanded of whores, would do, he thought viciously, while the nag of Isabel, Countess of Buchan, fern-tendrilled hair dripping like wet autumn bracken, blue eyes weary, her smile still warm on his face, all made the dreich of this place even harder to bear.

That and Bisset, who snored softly, each one a tearing nag at Hal’s heart, for he sounded like wee John when he slept. Well, his son slept now and made no sound at all. Slept forever …

Christ, Hal thought savagely, can matters get worse?

‘Sir Hal. Sir Hal.’

The voice brought their heads round and they stared in wonder at the pair, lurching out of the dark, propelled by the stiff, haughty Sir Gervaise.

‘More little barking dogs,’ the knight said and pulled the head of his mount round and away. Hal stared at Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy a shadowed skelf close behind, hugging himself against the rain.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ Tod’s Wattie bellowed, ‘am ah glad to see ye. Ye will nivver ken whit has happened.’

Chapter Five

Roxburgh Castle

Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, August 1297

A groan; the coverlet stirred. Ralph de Odingesseles waited warily with tunic, judging tenor and temper before stepping forward to the half-asleep figure who rolled over in a rustle of straw and feather mattress to sit upright, blinking, on the edge of the canopied box bed.

Ralph moved to a covered pitcher of heated water, which he poured into a basin and brought forward. He discreetly handed his master a gilded pot and watched it vanish beneath his nightshirt; water splashed and Ralph stood patiently holding the basin, a towel and a clean tunic draped over either forearm; his master grunted, groaned and cocked one buttock to let out a squeaky fart.

Yawning, Hugh Cressingham handed the chamberpot back to Ralph, dabbed water from the basin on his face and his close-cropped head, then dried his meaty jowls on the presented towel. Slowly, he woke up and blinked into a new day.

Ralph de Odingesseles watched him, dispassionate but cautious – Cressingham was not tall, running to fat, had eyes that bulged like a fish and his cheeks were stubbled because a skin complaint made it painful to pumice off a beard and irritating to grow one. Nor did he keep his hair fashionably neck length and curled, as Ralph did – Cressingham paid lip service to his prebendery stipends by affecting the look of a monk, though untonsured, and that left him with a hairstyle like an upturned bird’s nest.

He seemed, in his crumpled white nightserk, as bland as plain frumenty, but Ralph de Odingesseles knew the temper that smouldered in the man, stoked by pride and envy.

By the time Cressingham was in tunic, hose and a cote embroidered with the – as yet unregistered – swans he claimed as his Arms, the whole sorry mess of life had descended on him afresh and Ralph de Odingesseles, coming forward with the gardecorps, was more cautious still. Experience had taught him that the storms forming on Cressingham’s brow usually resulted in a sore ear, which was the lot of a squire, he had discovered.

Sufferance, on the other hand, was better than the alternative for the son of a poor noble. Ralph de Odingesseles’s only claim to fame was that he was related to an archdeacon and his grandfather had been a well-known knight on the Tourney circuit, who had once been beaten into dented metal by the then king’s French half-brother, Sir William de Valence.

Eventually, Ralph would be made a knight and take no blows he would not return. The thought made him forget himself and smile.

Cressingham looked sourly at the smirking squire holding the gardecorps. The garment was elegant and in the new shade of blue which was so admired by the French king that he had adopted it as his colour. Not diplomatic, Cressingham thought, and made a mental note never to wear it in the presence of Longshanks.

He did not much want to wear it at all and, in truth, hated the garment, for the same reason he was forced to wear it – he was fat and it hid the truth of it. It was, he knew, not his own fault, for he was more of an administrator than a warrior, but you did not get knighted for tallying and accounts, he thought bitterly, for all the king’s admiration and love of folk who knew the business.

As always, there was the moment of savage triumph at what he had become, despite not being one of those mindless thugs with spurs – Treasurer of Scotland, even though it was a Gods-cursed pisshole of a country, was not only a powerful position, but an extremely lucrative one.

As ever, this exultant moment was followed by a leap of utter terror that the king should ever discover just how lucrative; Cressingham closed his eyes at the memory of the huge tower that was Edward Plantagenet, the drooping eyelid that gave him a sinister leer, the soft lisping voice and the great, long arms. He shuddered. Like the grotesque babery carved high up under cathedral eaves and just as unpredictably vicious as those real apes.

He slapped Ralph de Odingesseles for it, for the smirk, for Edward’s drooping eye and this Pit-damned brigand Wallace and for having to wait in this pestilential place for the arrival of De Warenne, the Earl of Surrey.

He slapped the other ear for the actual arrival of De Warenne, the hobbling old goat complaining of the cold and his aches and the fact that he had been trying to retire to his estates, being too old for campaigning now.

Cressingham had no argument with this last and slapped Ralph again because De Warenne had not had the decency to die on his way north with the army, thus leaving Cressingham the best room in Roxburgh, with its fire and clerestory.

Worst of all, of course, was the mess all this would leave – and the cost. Gods, the cost … Edward would balk at the figures, he knew, would want his own inky-fingered clerks poring over the rolls. There was no telling what they might unveil and the thought of what the king would do then almost made Cressingham’s bowels loosen.

Ralph de Odingesseles, trying not to rub his ears, went to the kist in the corner and fetched out a belt with dagger, purse and Keys, the latter the mark of Cressingham’s position as Treasurer, designed to elicit instant respect.

Like most such observances, the truth was veiled, like statues of the Lady on her Feast Days; everyone knew the Scots called Cressingham the ‘Tracherer’ and you did not need to know much of the barbaric tongue to know it meant ‘Treacherer’ and was a play on his title.

Yet he was also the most powerful in Scotland, simply because he held the strings of the purse Ralph now handed him.

He helped fasten on the belt, then adjusted his master’s arms in the sleeves of the long, loose gardecorps; Cressingham consoled himself with the fact that at least his gardecorps was refined. No riotous colours here, no gold dagging along the hem, or long slits up the sides, or three-foot tippets. Plain black, with russet vair round the sleeves and neck, as befitted someone of probity and dignity.

‘I will break fast now,’ Cressingham said and Ralph de Odingesseles nodded, took a step back and bowed.

‘The Seneschal is here. Brother Jacobus also.’

Cressingham frowned and swallowed a curse – couldn’t they at least let him wake up and eat a little? He waved his page away to fetch food and told him to let the Seneschal in, then went to brood at the shuttered window, peering through the cracks rather than open it to the breeze – even in August it was cold. Outside, the river flowed, gleaming as quicksilver and he took comfort from the Teviot on one side and the Tweed on the other, so that the castle seemed to sail on a sea, a boat-shaped confection in stone.