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

‘Aye. As I was pointing out when ye came in – few of the nobiles like the idea. Christ’s Wounds, the Steward is the ox pulling this along and you heard him at Cambuskenneth, the night afore that melee? How did it go? “A landless jurrocks with a strong arm and no idea of what to do with it until yer betters tell ye” if I recall. Spat from a face like a bag of blood.’

He stopped and sighed.

‘I need Bruce and I need Comyn both. It was fine when Moray stood at my shoulder. Sir Andrew was their first choice and, by Christ’s Wounds I wish he had lived, for I would rather it were him here and me in the grave.’

His vehemence and clear pain at Moray’s loss stunned Hal to silence and it stretched like a shadow at sunset, to the point of painful. Then Wallace broke it with a growl that cleared his throat.

‘Go to Hexham, get yer kin hame and then forget this business entire,’ he said in a sudden, savage hiss.

‘The Savoyard …’ Hal began.

‘He is dead or fled abroad, it seems to me. Yet wee Bisset, God rest his soul, was red murdered and put to some hard questioning first. If it was Malise Bellejambe, as we all suspect, then Buchan is on the track of matters.’

‘So – all this footering after the Savoyard has gone for nothing,’ Hal pointed out bitterly.

‘It may be no more than another red murder for profit, by trailbaston long vanished. Or it may be Bruce’s men. Or Red John, or the Earl of Buchan, or even Sir William The Hardy afore he was carted away to the Tower,’ Wallace answered moodily.

‘The community of the realm is a snakepit of plots, as I am findin’ – and even Bishops are not abune poking their nebs in. My money is on Bruce, though the why of it eludes me yet – and probably will forever now. Best ye keep away from it, like me.’

He stopped and stared into the middle distance.

‘Anyway – Longshanks is coming and, win or lose, everything will be birled in the air by that.’

The name itself seemed to chill the air. Longshanks was coming and when he reached the north, he would, for certes, raise the Dragon Banner and declare no quarter. Everything, as Wallace said, would be birled in the air. Including the Countess.

‘Isabel,’ Hal murmured and suddenly found the great grave-shroud face of Wallace close to his own.

‘That especial you should forget,’ the Guardian declared firmly. ‘Bad enough ye should be trailing after another man’s wife like a wee terrier humpin’ a leg – but that it should be the Earl of Buchan’s wife is a writ for ruin. Nor does he need Malise Bellejambe to commit his next red murder on you, for there are laws and rights that will break you just as readily.’

‘There is him, too,’ Hal said, recovering himself and feeling a cold slide into him, as if steel had been thrust into his belly. ‘If I was to tak’ tent with everything else ye say, I would not forget the business of Malise Bellejambe.’

Wallace sighed and waved a dismissive hand.

‘Weel, I have done my duty,’ he said, ‘and warned you, both as the Law of the Kingdom and as a friend.’

‘The Law?’ Hal repeated and glanced sideways, to the great sheathed sword beside Wallace’s chair. Wallace flushed; the tale of Cressingham’s flaying had whirled like a spark, become an ember, then a fire that said Wallace now used a strip of the dead Treasurer’s flesh as a baldric – other strips had been dispensed all over Scotland. The fact that Wallace never denied it told a deal about how the Kingdom was changing him, even as he changed the kingdom.

He paused and then grimed a weary, slack smile across his bearded face.

‘Get ye gone. Do what ye must and I will likewise. It is better that ye forget the business of the Savoyard, but I jalouse that your neb is longer than your sense. So, if ye find the wee Savoyard and the secret he holds, I trust ye will let me ken it. Mark me – if this places a rope on yer neck for breaking the law of the land, I will kinch it tight myself.’

Hal saw the gaunt pain behind his eyes at that and nodded, then managed a smile as he turned to leave.

‘Fine turn, this,’ he said, grinning bleakly over his shoulder, ‘when a brigand like yourself becomes the Kingdom’s Sheriff.’

Spital of St Bartholomew, Berwick

Feast of St Athernaise the Mute of Fife, December 1297

The wind battered on the walls like a sullen child on a locked door, the chill haar-breath of it guttering the candles so that shadows swung wildly. The two men stood by the pallet bed and listened to the man thrash and groan.

‘Stone,’ he said. ‘Stone.’

‘He has been saying that since you brought him in,’ the priest said, almost accusingly. He had a square face with a truculent, stubbled chin and eyes that seemed as black and deep as catacombs.

The wool merchant did not like to meet those eyes, but he did it anyway, with as blue-eyed and smiling a stare as he could manage, for he needed this priest, this place.

‘He is a carver of stones,’ the merchant answered blandly, ‘for the church at Scone. An artist. Scarce a surprise that it should be in his fevered mind a little.’

‘A little? He has been repeating it more thoroughly than any catechism.’

‘A facet of his illness,’ the merchant soothed, then frowned. ‘What exactly is wrong with him?’

The priest sighed, lifted the crusie higher, so that the flame danced wildly.

‘Best ask what is not,’ he replied, then looked squarely at the merchant.

‘I do not ask how you came by him, Master Symoen. I ken you brought him here because of the nature of his condition, but there are worse matters than leprosy and I have to ask you to remove him.’

Symoen stroked his neat beard, trying to cover his alarm. The arrival of a half-babbling Manon de Faucigny, smelling like a dog’s arse and clearly diseased, had been shock enough, but this was … disturbing.

‘Worse than leprosy?’ he said and the priest laughed to himself as he saw the merchant put a hand to his mouth and step back a pace. He had seen it all in his years serving the Spital of St Bartholomew, which even the ravaging English had avoided – the lipless, noseless, rotting, foul souls who pitched up at the leper hospital were old clothes and porridge to the likes of Brother John.

Yet this Savoyard had everything. His blood was viscous, hot, greasy and tasted of too much salt. He had lacerations, ulcerations, abscesses, skin affections, partial paralysis, at least four festering bites from vermin and, almost certainly, a fever from one or more agues, each capable of killing him on its own.

‘And intestical worms,’ Brother John finished, seeing the wool merchant’s eyes widen until his brows were in his hairline.

‘Worms,’ Symoen repeated, hearing the dull clank of the word in his head, like a cracked bell. ‘Intestical.’

Manon was his nephew … he’d had hopes for the boy.

‘I can do little,’ Brother John said. ‘All I do here is mop brows and pick up the bits that drop off.’

Symoen stared at the priest, who broadened his lips in a smile.

‘A jest,’ he said pointedly, but saw that Master Symoen was not laughing. Still, the man was a considerable patron of St Bartholomew’s, so Brother John did what he knew he must. He offered every help.

‘I will do what I can,’ he said slowly. ‘But it is as if he opened the gates of Hell and guddled inside it. Every sin has been visited on him.’

The wool merchant nodded, licking his lips and breathing through his fingers, while the gaunt, sheened face of Manon swung wildly on the yellowed pillow.

‘Oh Dayspring, Radiance of the Light eternal and Sun of Justice; come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,’ Brother John intoned, and Master Symoen, in a daze, descended to his knees and clasped his hands, grateful not to be looking at the tortured face of his nephew.