The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  There were fifteen of them, all women save for Wull, set to guard the hidden valuables of Herdmanston – the garrons of the men, the plough oxen and the milch kine of those cottars who had managed to drive them here in time.

  The Auld Chiel’s Chelleis was apt named, Dog Boy thought, even as he explained the reality to Wull and the women. It was a great bowl of close bush and stunted forest, cleared in the centre to take the livestock and the people. Unless you knew the way of it, you could be lost inside the place two steps from the edge and it was where Herdmanston always hid when the enemy came – the English name for it was Satan’s Cup and they would not go there.

  ‘God go wi’ ye,’ Wull said to him as Dog Boy left and he promised he would break himself and the garron he rode to bring help.

  An hour from the Chelleis, he ran into the armed riders.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Abbey of Scone

  Feast of the Annunciation, March, 1306

  Dog Boy had never seen food like it. When he had gone from Douglas to Herdmanston he thought he had fallen into all the blessings of Heaven when he found he could eat a white porray of leeks with boiled bacon bits in it – but this, the crowning feast for a king, was another level raised entirely.

  As was he, feted for being in the company bringing Stone and Isabel the Crowner to Scone, placed so high above the salt he was dizzy with it. Or it could have been the metheglin and ale, the Leche Lombard of pork and eggs, graced with pepper more precious than gold, or mortrews of chicken, pork and breadcrumbs, venison boiled in almonds and milk, seasoned with poudre douce.

  Hal, catching a glimpse of the sweat-sheened joy of a face, the dags of hair like black knives stuck to his cheeks, thought it was because the boy had found Jamie Douglas, the pair of them grinning and chattering and eating and drinking as if there was no chasm in rank between them at all.

  Hal had watched Dog Boy arrive with the mounted men, the youth clearly filled with the moment of it, sliding off his garron and running, shouting, to where Hal and the others were poking about in the slorach of the garth.

  ‘I have brought them,’ Dog Boy had shouted, and flung one hand delightedly back to the mass of armed men behind him, led by a slim, dark-haired youth riding at the right hand of Sir Henry of Roslin.

  ‘Look who I have brought,’ he added with a bright laugh and Jamie Douglas, with his deceptive, languid looks and lisp, had bowed from the waist, then squinted at Sim Craw and rubbed his ear.

  Hal saw Sim flush like a maid; Jamie Douglas, heir to the Douglas estates in Lanarkshire, had been in France all this time and was now returned, like a bright flame, to the side of the Bruce. The last time Hal and Sim had seen Jamie Douglas he had been twelve and Sim had cuffed him for his cheek and impudence, which he was now reminded of.

  ‘I would not care to belt yer lug now,’ he added grudgingly and Jamie Douglas, grown to the full of his youth, laughed.

  Hal and the others had known someone was coming because of a frantic scamper and a furious chopping as the Flemings started to hack axes at the wet-shrunk rawhide which bound the springald cage together.

  There was more than hurry in it, there was a feverish flurry that let everyone know, sent Hal and Sim and others flinging upwards to the roof, to peer out through the merlons to where the Flemings were dismantling their springald in a frenzy, for the screw and windlass and skeins of catapult hair were their livelihood and should not fall into enemy hands.

  Which is why they had their own lookouts to warn of a relief force.

  Hal remembered seeing Buchan, sitting like a millstone and staring at the stone keep which had thwarted him. Without a word or a sign, he had suddenly reined round and ridden off and, within an hour, there was no-one to be seen and only the ruin and litter. Not long after that the Dog Boy had ridden up with Jamie Douglas, Sir Henry from Roslin and a long hundred of riders.

  ‘Timely,’ Hal had declared, bright with the moment of it and Isabel in the crook of his arm. Then he had seen Henry’s face and the stone sank back in his bowels.

  ‘It can’t be held as Roslin can,’ Henry had explained, though the words fell like dull pewter into Hal’s head. ‘You can send yer household to the care of Roslin and I will collect the rents …’

  ‘The King has ordered Herdmanston slighted,’ Jamie declared, wiping the smile from Dog Boy’s face.

  ‘Is Bruce king then?’ Sim had growled and Jamie, smiling and uncaring as a hunting pard, had nodded.

  ‘This very day. I foreswore my chance to be knighted on this day to fulfil his wishes to come here. He will go through the entire blethers of it again when we return with Stone and the crowning Countess – but he is king as of now.’

  He offered a polite bow to Isabel who acknowledged it, aware of her soot-streaked dress and face and the frosted roots of her untreated hair.

  Now Hal sat in the abbey hall at Scone with the feast flowing round him and the music of shawm and sithole, harp and fiddle circling and swooping. Douce Dame Debonaire, the troubadour sang, while the monks, daring as swooping swallows in the risk of their souls, peeked from hiding and tried not to let their toes tap.

  Their betters – five bishops, three abbots and a slew of other clergy – were clearly safe from God’s wrath and could beat the tables in roaring time.

  And yet, while the troubadour detailed the exchange between the horse Fauvel and Dame Fortune, Hal could only see the weeping women and the bairns being kissed farewell by their menfolk, while the black feathers of smoke spilled out of Herdmanston’s shattered doorway. Roslin men, grim with what they were doing, methodically fired Herdmanston to a ruin the Earl of Buchan would have exulted over.

  ‘I am benisoned, it seems, to be burned out by kin,’ Hal had remarked bitterly and Henry of Roslin, sick with the shame and sadness of it, could not speak at all.

  From the top table, resplendent in finery that was not even his, Bruce surveyed the joy and would have been surprised to find another at the feast whose mood was as bitter as his own.

  He was king. He had been crowned by the right person, in the right place with all the correct procedure and regalia, so that all the years of careful plans had come to final fruit – yet he sat in Balliol’s coronation robes, felt the strange weight of Toom Tabard’s gold circlet on his head, all hidden away by Wishart for this very moment.

  Borrowed finery was bad enough – but because of it, he had to forsake the hiding hood and now his face, with the livid cheek scar weeping still, was there for all to see and wonder at.

  Beside him sat the Queen and the bitter gruel of that flavoured all the meat and drink that found a way to his mouth. It was bad enough that they had been so estranged – he could not go to her with what he suspected he had, with his very breath the kiss of death – but now she was smouldering resentment, with all the fire of her seventeen years, at what he had done to her household.

  It had been necessary for an age and Bruce had put it off – until the coronation loomed. He had gone to her then, been welcomed stiffly by a girl bewildered why her husband seemed to have taken a dislike to her. Wondering why he hid his face from her, all but his eyes, behind a veil like some Saracen.

  He had told her that the entire ceremony would be repeated, this time with the Stone of Scone and the hereditary Crowner, the Countess of Buchan; that name brought her head up and flared her cheeks, for she had heard the rumours of the old love and did not care for it.

  But it was the Lady Bridget, that older, pinched twist of scorn who had been Elizabeth’s nurse when she had been a babe, who set the seal on matters with her snort.

  ‘Bad enough my lady is made queen to your king of summer,’ she had spat, ‘without having to go through such mummery again, this time with yer old hoor.’

  The silence had stretched an endless age, while Elizabeth’s eyes went wide with horror and all the entourage, down to the huddled little priest at the back, waited to see what would happen.

  When it did, the sudden crack of it made them all
jump; one or two squealed – all of them shoaled away from the fallen Lady Bridget, who struggled like a beetle and sat up, bewildered, astonished and afraid. She touched her lip, saw the blood on it and moaned.

  Bruce, his knuckles stinging from the backhand slap, looked at his queen, feeling sick at what he had done – had to do, he reminded himself. Yet another stain …

  ‘I have been tolerant, lady,’ he said to Elizabeth, ignoring the whey-face sprawl of Lady Bridget, ‘and you have mistaken this for weakness. Say your farewells to all of these, for they return to your father in Ireland after the coronation. You will have new tirewomen from among my Scots subjects – and, if you need the comfort of God, there is the dean of the royal chapel.’

  He raked them all with his eyes.

  ‘What I put up with as an earl was one matter,’ he added. ‘Now I am a king and at war, so I cannot have all my doings sent back to Ireland and on to Plantagenet.’

  Yet the frightened, bloody face of Bridget, braided hate though it had been, left him feeling that stain yet and the sight of the one called Dog Boy brought it back in a rush. He remembered the boy, all those years ago round a campfire. Nivver violet a wummin, he had intoned as one of the vows a knight should follow and, even allowing for the mis-speaking of it, the memory of the strength in the lad’s voice made Bruce ashamed.

  ‘Hare, hare, hye,’ they were singing, furious, red-faced, beating tempo on the tables until the trenchers jumped. ‘Goudalier ont fet ouan d’Arras Escoterie. Saint Andrie – hare hare, goudeman et hare druerie.’

  Hark, hear it now, Jamie translated for the Dog Boy, who marvelled at how his friend and new-dubbed knight had learned French in the years he had been in that country with Bishop Lamberton. Those ale brewers are turning Arras into Scotland. By St Andrew hear it – good men and good times …

  Across the table from them sat Kirkpatrick, solitary in the crowd and counting the heads. The bishops of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld, Moray and Brechin. The abbot of Scone and another from Inchcolm. Three earls – John of Atholl, Malcolm of Lennox, Alan of Menteith, spilling alkanet-coloured gravy down their fine wool tunics.

  And that was it, apart from a slew of lesser lights, some of them dubious – Randolph for one, Kirkpatrick thought, would bear watching. Not a single Comyn, nor a Balliol – it was hardly a rich vote of confidence in the new king of Scots.

  They were bringing in brawn with mustard and starting in to toast the ‘good men and good times’, while Jamie was telling Dog Boy of how some woman called Agnes they had known as boys in Douglas had run off with Fergus the cook and they now had a pie shop in Perth. And how a falconer called Gutterbluid was still there, serving the Clifford folk who ruled now and how, one day, Jamie would scorch all of them out of Douglas Castle.

  He said it loudly and often, flushed as much at having been made a knight by a king as the wine and there was no lisp in the boy when he did it; Kirkpatrick wondered if Edward, the Covetous King, knew what hatred he had created in the north out of the generation of Jamie Douglases.

  He wondered if Edward knew what had happened here in Scone – though he already knew what Longshanks would do about it and could feel the sullen, embered wrath of the English king through the dark and the miles.

  This was the last feast – what followed would be a famine of good men and good times.

  The Painted Chamber, Westminster, London

  Pentecost, May, 1306

  Seraphs, prophets and the fulminating Judas Maccabeus all glared painted disapproval down at the huddle round the table, whose black echoes were stretched and monstrous on the walls; a wind flickered the sconces and the shadows danced like mad imps in Hell.

  I have never been warm in that bed, Edward thought moodily, as the hangings of the gilded, green-postered bed swung like banners. For all that, he looked at it longingly, perched invitingly on a dais at the far end of his private chambers; it had been a long, long day weighted with fur and cloth of gold, crown and jewels, touching stumbling youths on the shoulders, youths who knelt as tyros and rose as knights.

  Three hundred, at least, Edward thought wearily and all of them equally exhausted from their night of chapel vigil, the Templar courtyard choked with their tents and the press so great on the day that he’d had to clear a passage in the abbey with armoured knights on horseback.

  It had been worth it, though, for the ceremony, the timing – Whitsun, when Arthur himself had held his fabled plenary court at Caerleon – and the binding of so many young knights to this one day and to his son.

  He glanced at the boy, seeing his whey face and violet-ringed eyes. He had stood up well to the ritual of spending all night alone in the palace chapel. At dawn, he had knighted the boy and then the pair of them crossed to the abbey and, together, dubbed all the others.

  After that was the feast of it, complete with the masterstroke of gilded swans on which Edward himself had sworn vengeance on Bruce, promising that, once he had vanquished his enemy, he would proceed to the Holy Land.

  It was pure Arthur and only a few doubted that the King would do it, for he was magnificently prinked and preened, coloured and oiled. Not to be outdone, the prince had risen, resplendent in the heraldry of Gascony, to which he had also been newly raised, and swore loudly not to rest two nights in the same place until the Scotch had been defeated.

  There were those who knew it was an echo of Perceval’s declaration from the Round Table, when Arthur’s knights set out to find the Holy Grail – but that was part of it all. That and the minstrels and the food and the drink and the boasts.

  One or two looked at the old king and wondered, all the same … De Lacy, for one. He had seen Edward on the day news had arrived of Bruce’s murderous treachery, seen the grey cast that seemed to turn the King’s face to stone, then the mad flush that darkened it.

  ‘God rot him,’ he had exploded. ‘I will chain him like a mad dog. Let him and all those with him be cursed and their accomplices in evil with them. He is now ranked with the fratricide Cain, and with Judas the traitor, and with Core, Dathan and Abiron, who entered Hell while still living for their revolt against Moses …’

  There had been more, until the King fell to the floor and caused a mad scramble of alarm. He had lain in a dead faint for half a day and spent the next two weeks being carried about in a litter, so that de Lacy had thought he would never recover.

  He had, almost miraculously, growling for retribution and sending off Aymer de Valence to the north to commence red war. De Lacy was relieved that de Valence been handed the task – at fifty-six the Earl of Lincoln did not want to be the one raising the dragon banner in the north, with no quarter asked or given. De Lacy was the last of the old warriors from Edward’s early days – Aymer’s father, William, was long dead, John de Warenne was dead these three years since, Roger Bigod was too ill … the list went on.

  Six wars and eight years it had taken not to defeat the Scots – and here they were again, setting off with an army to burn and scourge the north.

  What settled despair in Edward, like a chill winter mist, was not the expense and weariness of yet another campaign, but the realization that there seemed no end to it; he had thought the matter done, thought Bruce, at least, valued the firm hand. Yet the very day of that lord’s spurious crowning was a slap with a metalled gauntlet – Lady Day, ten years to the very day Edward himself had declared war on the Scotch.

  This would be the last of it, Edward thought. I will burn and scourge them as they have never been. I will give them the breath of the dragon …

  But he also knew it had to be the last of it. His contemporaries were all gone and the new breed would need to step up to the ring from now on; he sat at the round table – the echo of Arthur yet again – and stared at his son – the new breed.

  He had done his best to bind him to the young firebrand nobiles, but he was not sure if the boy understood what had been done or why; even now, invited to speak to his father in his private chambers, he had contrived to bring Gave
ston.

  The King glanced sourly at the man his son favoured over all others, grudgingly admitting that the youth had borne the vigil well enough, looked fresh still. He had been the first one his son had knighted and was, the King knew, a fearsome tourney fighter, which did not endear him any better to those who distrusted his particular favour, disliked his arrogance and did not care to be dumped on their arse in the mud.

  Edward took him in, up and down in a moody glance, remembering bitterly that he had brought this one into his son’s circle thinking he would be a good influence. Of all the mistakes I have made in my life, he thought, this was the worst. It might be possible still to be rid of the man. Replace him with someone my son also favours – like that youngster, Roger Mortimer.

  Gaveston’s gilded cap of hair was bright, his tunics blue and brown – and a red silk one over all, decorated with embroidered birds in gold. His shoes, Edward noted with distaste, had been shaped particular to each foot and were, God help us all, pointed at the toe.

  ‘I summoned you, Caernarvon,’ he growled. ‘I do not recall anyone else on that list.’

  Caernarvon. The very name was a slap to a son who wanted a father; not even a son’s name, but a title.

  ‘I understood the summons to be a discussion on matters pertaining to the Scotch disturbances,’ his son replied, while Gaveston wisely stayed silent. ‘My brother here is well versed in matters of battle.’

  Edward met the cool, bland eyes of Gaveston, then flicked his gaze back to his son’s whey face. Jesu, he thought to himself, feeling the deep sinkhole of despair open in him, I have to leave the Kingdom to this one. God help it.