Nigel Tranter - The Path of the Hero King

“Not untended-the saints pity me! There is an old monk, a friar. One Mark, of Kintore. Reputed hereabouts as a physician.

He would dose me every hour with his noxious stews, daub me with stinking brews made from the offal of toads and the like! The man’s a pious hypocrite, for by …”

“Then we will be quit of him. I will be your physician now. A cailleach, my old nurse, taught me much of the art. It is time you were rescued, from monkish and knightly fools both! And from yourself, I think! Let me but restore myself, from my journey, and we shall make a start.”

“No need …” the King began-but he might as well have spoken to the wind.

Christina MacRuarie was as good as her word, and better. It was not long before she had the invalid out of that mill house altogether and into a nearby cottage whose occupants presumably got short shrift. Admittedly this was small, little better than a cabin, with earthen floor, turf roof, and walls of smoke-blackened clay; but somehow she had got the place cleaned up, arranged a more comfortable bed, and brought in some simple furnishings from heaven knew where. Moreover it was warm, with a well-doing fire of holly and ash logs.

Bruce, of course, did not admit that this was any great improvement;

indeed he complained that the heat made his itch the worse.

But that was an error of tactics, for Christina promptly declared that that would soon be put right. He discovered that she intended to wash him down with some salve of her own concocting. No amount of outraged protest had any effect on her-and the deplorable Gibbie Hay, not to mention Neil Campbell who had brought her, not only had deserted him quite but were completely in the woman’s pocket The sufferer’s resistance to this feminine assault on his integrity was vehement, but more vocal than physical. The strength just wasn’t there, he discovered-and this was a young woman as vigorous as she was determined and unscrupulous. Neither royal commands nor appeals to her better nature were of any use. Taking shameless advantage of the situation, she stripped him naked and began to wash off the friar’s medications from his shrinking body with warm water.

“Dia -but you are thin, Robert!” she declared, ignoring all that he was saying.

“You are worn down to the bone! This is the work of no sudden sickness. What has happened to you?”

Bruce well knew himself to be in poor shape. Long months of privation, poor feeding, and sleeping out in all weathers had taken their toll. He recognised that his present illness was more probably a result of a general physical run-down, than the other way round.

“I have had little time for growing fat,” he told her briefly.

“I know what you have been doing, and how you have been living. Sir Neil has told me much. And the word of your fightings and warfare has not failed to reach even Moidart. But this-this wretchedness of the body speaks of more than hard living. And this of the skin. So dry and red. It is grievous to see …”

“Then, of a mercy, cover me up, woman!” he exclaimed. He was acutely embarrassed by this open inspection of his shuddering cringing body. Even though he had lain with her not a few times and they were no strangers to each other’s nakedness, to have Christina, or any woman, peering and poking and dabbing at him, was highly distressing, highly unsuitable-and not a little humiliating in the all too obvious feebleness of his shrunken masculinity.

Paying no attention to his requests, she went on with her ministrations.

But perhaps she gave him her own comment.

“We must make a man of you again,” she said.

”I swear this is not what Irode all the way from the West to see! Turn

over, Robert-turn over.”

Her washings and anointings, however to be deplored, at least produced some easing of his itch. Not that he admitted it. And he had to concede that she kept Brother Mark away, indeed kept everybody away. Moreover the food which she brought him presently was incomparably better than any he had been offered for long-not that he had any appetite for it. The fact that she sat by his bed and more or less forced it into him, of course, was cause for legitimate complaint.

In the midst of all this feminine attention, the Earl of Lennox arrived unheralded from the South, with 200 men. Even Christina MacRuarie could not prevent a belted earl from having audience with his monarch, and Bruce was enabled to pour a flood of his troubles into his old friend’s ear. Unfortunately Malcolm of Lennox was altogether too much of a gentleman successfully to resist the Isleswoman’s methods, and before long found himself on the wrong side of that cot-house door. The King more or less resigned himself to the inevitable.

Nevertheless that night Christina alarmed him in a new and major fashion; first by producing a pile of sheepskins and plaids over and above his own; and then by authoritatively allowing Lennox, Campbell and Hay, and one or two others, to come and say a very brief goodnight before shooing them out again like a hen wife with poultry, and shutting the door behind them in remarkably final style. By the light of the flickering log-fire she laid out the sheepskins, one on top of another, on the floor at the side of his bed, and arranged the plaids on top, thereafter proceeding calmly to undress herself. The King eyed all this with mixed feelings;

but even so he was quite unprepared when, standing in unabashed, complete and lovely nakedness, she threw back the covers of his own bed, and urged him to move over somewhat as she was coming in beside him meantime. The sick man’s protest that he was in no state for haughmagandy or anything of the sort, met with no least response.

Settling in alongside him, she took him in her arms, not fiercely or passionately, but gently, comfortingly, her soft firm shapeliness enfolding him. He held his limbs stiffly-but that was all his reaction.

“You needed a woman once before, Robert,” she murmured.

“I

think you need one again-only differently. The other will come, in time. But now you require some cherishing, some kindliness.”

“I am not a child, a babe!” he mumbled, seeking to turn away.

But she held him strongly. And because she lay slightly higher in the bed than he, and her breasts warmly and cares singly encompassed his face, he found it scarcely feasible either to move or complain satisfactorily. Here was a struggle which apparently he did not sufficiently wish to win.

So he lay, and presently even began to relax. Sensing it, she gathered him a little closer, not to smother or constrain him but to soothe and cradle him. Gradually the warmth and smooth strength of her had its way with him, and he felt more at rest than he had done for long.

“Why do you do this?” he asked presently, not very clearly, from the hollow of her bosom.

“Because some woman should. And because of my love for you.

One day, perhaps, your Queen will thank me for it!”

At that the man stiffened momentarily, but she calmed and quelled him with hand and voice, almost as a mother might.

“Hush you, hush you,” she said.

“Your Elizabeth will look for a man, will she not? When she comes back to you? Not a shrivelled gelding. Nor yet a corpse! She cannot cherish you. So I shall.”

He did not argue the point.

“Have you had news of her? Of her state? Of late.”

“Aye. Bishop Lamberton makes shift to send me word when he may. He is warded not far from her, has contrived to visit her. At Burstwick Manor, in Yorkshire. She is held secure, but less hardly than in Edward’s days-the old Edward. She is well enough. But …” He left the rest unsaid.

“You did not give her a child?”

“Think you our state was such that she would have thanked me for making her pregnant? We have been on the move, hunted or homeless, almost since we were wed.”