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

‘Oh King of the Kingdoms and their Desire; the Cornerstone who makest both one: Come and save mankind, whom thou formedst of clay. Come, Oh Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all kingdomss and their Salvation: Come and save us, Oh Lord our God.’

‘Stone,’ babbled Manon. ‘Stone.’

Nunnery of Saint Leonard, Berwick

Vigil of the Nativity, December 24, 1297

The woman with the cross sat at the head of the table, where the head man would usually sit; many other women, in similar grey clothes, sat around her. Isabel had seen brides of Christ before, though not in their setting and was shocked at the removal of headcovers, the shrieking laughter, the splashes of wine.

The woman who had brought her in saw her face and laughed as the woman with the cross got up and came to Isabel, dragging her from the room by an elbow. The door was closed on the gull-chatter.

‘You were instructed to take her to my quarters,’ the woman with the cross snapped at Isabel’s guardian, who gave back a sullen pout. The sharp crack of palm on cheek made Isabel leap and her grey guardian reeled back and fell, her headcover awry; she cowered on the flagstones, whimpering and holding her face.

‘Obey,’ the woman with the cross said, soft and sibilant, then turned to Isabel. If she strikes me, Isabel thought, I will rip the face from her.

The woman saw the fire in those eyes and smiled at it. Not for long, lady, she thought viciously.

‘I am Anna, Prioress of Saint Leonard’s,’ she said. ‘You will be taken to my quarters and made comfortable.’

The other nun climbed to her feet, nursing her face with one hand.

‘This way, mistress,’ she said numbly and Anna’s voice was a lash.

‘Countess. She is a countess, you dolt.’

The nun cringed and bobbed apologies, then scuttled off so fast that Isabel had to walk swiftly to keep up, through a bewilder of barely lit stone corridors sparkling with cold rime.

The nun led her through a door into an astonishment. Isabel stared at the fine hangings, the clean rushes, the benches, chairs and chests, the fine bed – and the fire. This was the warm room of a great lady, not a nun, even a Prioress.

‘Countess,’ the nun said in a dead voice and Isabel felt some pity then.

‘That was a hard blow,’ she said and the nun looked bitter as a thwarted rat, then to the left, then right. Finally, she moved to the wall, holding the light high and, satisfied, turned back to Isabel.

‘This place,’ she said in a whisper so soft Isabel could barely hear it, ‘is cursed.’

The light made mad shadows dance on her face as she indicated the wall she had just peered at.

‘There is a hidden way to watch,’ the nun said. ‘He likes it. All the women here are his.’

Isabel felt a sudden deadening sickness, for she knew the ‘he’ the nun spoke of, had endured the company of him since he had plucked her from the burning bridge at Stirling. A demon she had seen him as then and though sense and better light had revealed him to be a dark, saturnine man, that first impression was not far from the truth.

‘Sir Robert Malenfaunt,’ she said and saw the nun shiver, so that tallow from the candle spilled down on to the back of her hand; she never flinched.

‘All the women are for his pleasure,’ she declared suddenly and half-sobbed. ‘They are brought here and never allowed to leave.’

Isabel remembered the griming eyes of Malenfaunt, surveying her in better light. They had lit like balefires when he learned who she was and she had disliked him from that point, even though he had given her no cause and treated her with scrupulous politeness.

She watched the nun scurry out into the dark and sat on a bench while the tallow sputtered. She tried not to be beaten by the crush of loneliness, the realisation that she would go from here but only back to Buchan. She tried not to think of Bruce and failed, so that the added weight of that sagged her head limply on her neck. She tried not to cry and failed.

Then, to her own surprise, she thought of Hal of Herdmanston.

In a chamber off the main refectory of the nunnery, the Prioress listened to her charges laugh in wild shrieks, flamed by the wine brought by their benefactor, who stood half in shadow, half in the blood of the sconce light.

‘Keep her fed, wined and secure,’ Sir Robert Malenfaunt declared. ‘And away from those harpies.’

‘Special, is she?’ sneered the Prioress and Malenfaunt smiled.

‘A Countess. From Scotland, admittedly, but an important one. From a powerful family in her own right and married into another.’

He leaned forward, so that his sharp, shadowed blade of a face cut close to her own.

‘Special, as you say. Worth her weight in shilling, so keep her fattened and untouched.’

He took her chin in cruel fingers then.

‘Untouched,’ he repeated. ‘I want none of your charges to put their grimy fingers near that quim.’

She pulled away from him, though her heart thundered, even as he peeled off her headcover and ran his hands over her stubbled scalp; it excited him, that style, so she kept it close-cropped for that reason. Fear and lust made her breath shorten to gasps and she knew he would bend her over the only chair in the room, throw her grey habit up and over her head and take her, grunting and panting like a dog. He did it each Christ’s Mass, to as many of the nuns as his strength and fortified wine would allow.

She was at once repelled and frantic for it.

Herdmanston, East Lothian

Ash Wednesday, March 1298

Hal watched the plough from the roof of the square block of Herdmanston, feeling the smear of ash on his forehead itch. He watched it with a warmth that had only partly to do with the sun, was as happy as any man can be on the first day of Lent, seeing his fields being turned back like bedcovers.

The ploughman was Will Elliot’s da, his two brothers darting in and out to heel exposed worms back into the ground, or watching for the twitch of an ox tail that showed dung was coming, so the brace could be brought to a halt, to dump their precious cargo into the furrow.

The earth was new bread. The frost had cracked it, the thaw and rain had watered it, a week of late February sun had warmed it and it crumbled, heaving with furiously busy earthworms, little ploughs shifting the earth into a bed for oats and barley.

Gulls screamed, the coulter-knife scooped up clod against the mouldboard, a great wave of new-turned earth rearing up, curving over and falling into a furrow. Below Hal, the Dog Boy was trying to teach the yapping terriers, all mad wriggle and fawning tails, some obedience and, from the laughter of those watching, was not having the best of it.

There was laughter, too, from the stone chapel where Father Thomas exercised his skills with a brush to construct a glowing Saint Michael, patron of the church in Saltoun, on the internal plastered walls – and emerged covered in ochre-red and looking like a man who had fallen in a slaughterhouse pit.

It was easy, on a day like this, to forget the winter, the war, the deaths. Isabel. Yet the world would not be kept back and its herald was Sim lumbering up the last steps, panting with climbing the winding stair to the roof.

‘Rider coming,’ he grunted. ‘It will be the messenger from Bruce about the ransom for Sir Henry. At bloody last – God curse all notaries and inky-fingered clerks.’

An uneasy truce had been agreed with the English, but raids continued – more from the Scots side than the English – and only the winter weather had halted them. Getting agreement on ransom, then writs of safe conduct to travel south had taken a long time and the weather had closed in the north until no more than a few weeks ago. The Auld Templar will be fretting at the delay, thought Hal. Not to mention Sir Henry’s wife and bairns, spending the Christ’s Mass without husband and father.