Insurrection

by Robyn Young

  ‘Take us now,’ added Wishart, ‘and I swear by God you will not stop this insurrection.’

  The discussion rambled on in much the same way as it had for the past week, through the thunderstorms that heralded the beginning of July into these savagely hot days, when men from the Scottish camp had thrown themselves into the river to cool off.

  Robert felt his attention slipping. He gazed at the English camp that stretched towards the sea. Beyond, the coastline rose into parched fields and crumbling cliffs towards Ayr and Carrick. This was the closest he had been to his boyhood home since he was nineteen, when he visited Turnberry before leaving for England, the only time he’d spent in his earldom since he had been awarded it. Affraig drifted into his thoughts.

  Much suffering there is. I came to see if our hope may lie in you. Our lord.

  At least with the English ensconced in talks here they would not be harassing his people. Robert looked back as Clifford continued. Henry Percy was staring at him. The menace in the man’s eyes made him shift in his seat, his sluggish mind at once alert.

  Robert had remained silent through most of the negotiations, until the day before when the oppressive heat and Percy’s arrogance became too much and, accusing the lord of trespassing on his land, he had demanded reparation. Percy had bitten at once, his invective filled with threats. The two had risen, going for their swords, until the steward and Clifford had ended the discussion. Robert had ridden back to the Scots’ camp ahead of James and the others, urging his palfrey into a furious gallop until they were both panting and sweat-soaked. All the way back his mind had been filled with an image of Percy and Clifford dragging the Stone of Destiny from the altar at Scone. And him with them, sword out to defend them.

  ‘We remain at an impasse,’ James was saying wearily. ‘Let us return to discuss it tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ said Percy, switching his gaze from Robert to the steward. ‘Our officials at Berwick expect this done before the month is out. That is what King Edward demanded. I want these talks finished. Today.’

  Robert saw James looked troubled. He understood why. Percy and Clifford would eventually be forced to imprison them, despite the risk of further rebellion, in order to fulfil Cressingham’s orders. It was only due to the fact the knights were relatively inexperienced commanders that it hadn’t happened already. A veteran like John de Warenne or Humphrey de Bohun’s father would have run rings around Wishart’s arguments. Besides, it wouldn’t be long before reports reached them that Wallace was leading an attack on Dundee. When that happened their ploy would be over.

  Clifford rose and gestured to Percy. The two of them walked away from the table, out of earshot. Douglas grimaced into his empty goblet while Wishart watched the English intently. When the knights returned, Robert noticed an unpleasant smile on Percy’s face.

  ‘We will accept your surrender terms,’ said Clifford. ‘On certain conditions. You will remain here under guard in order to compel the rebels to cease their violence. When we see clear evidence of this we will take word of it to Berwick, along with the men Sir Hugh has ordered taken prisoner, namely Lord Douglas and Wallace. Your lands will be forfeit until such time as King Edward decides otherwise.’

  James nodded, but before he could speak, Clifford held up his hand.

  ‘As a sign of good faith that you will keep your word once we have sealed this agreement, we require a hostage.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Wishart.

  Percy’s eyes moved to Robert.

  Seeing this, James answered at once. ‘No. As an earl, Sir Robert’s ransom is too high.’

  ‘Not him,’ said Percy harshly. ‘His daughter. We know he kept her with him when he left Carlisle. His father told us.’ Percy’s blue eyes narrowed in cold satisfaction. ‘The Lord of Annandale told us much – how he loathed his treacherous son and wished him dead.’

  The heat had drained from Robert’s face at the demand. He rose at Percy’s words, his stool tipping over behind him.

  The three men faced one another, full of anger, frustration and concern. Outside, evening was drawing in, promising another oppressive night. Inside the steward’s tent lanterns exuded a buttery warmth.

  ‘If we agree to their demand we buy ourselves more time.’ This was Wishart speaking. ‘We knew we would have to make concessions, sacrifices even. The English must be kept occupied here if Wallace is to succeed in the east.’

  ‘Robert will not allow his daughter to be used in this way,’ responded James. ‘And I do not blame him. He will not speak of what history is between himself and Lord Percy, but I would not trust the English with his child.’

  Wishart let out a hiss of breath. ‘We have until tomorrow morning to give them our answer. If we do not produce the hostage they will come for us in force.’

  ‘Let the sons of whores come,’ growled Douglas, brandishing the goblet of wine the steward’s servant had poured for him. His cheeks were mottled, his words slurred and filled with violence. ‘I’d like to see them bleed. See them bleed for what they did in Berwick. Enough talking. Enough waiting, God damn it!’

  The steward kept his focus on the bishop. ‘You are speaking about an infant, your grace. She could be harmed when they discover our deception.’

  ‘I’m talking about our kingdom!’

  ‘Let us offer another hostage then. One of us.’

  ‘Why not Bruce’s child?’ demanded Wishart, his eyes narrowing. ‘This isn’t sentiment, is it? It is something else. You’ve been keeping him close since he arrived.’

  ‘As you said yourself, we couldn’t necessarily trust him.’

  ‘And yet on the first night you told him our plan when I asked you not to. Come, James, I can see you have something on your mind. Some scheme you have not shared.’

  For a moment, James didn’t speak. When he did, his voice was low, cautious. ‘He is the grandson of Sir Robert of Annandale. His veins flow with the same blood, your grace. The blood of Malcolm Canmore.’

  Robert stood by the fire staring across the encampment. The first stars had appeared, scattered in the deep. As he watched, one went shooting through the heavens, a faint trail of light gone in the blink of an eye. In Carrick, when he was young, in late summer he would lie on his back on the cliffs under the vault of the sky watching the stars fall.

  Over in the high steward’s tent he could see the gleam of lanterns. They were in there now, Wishart and the others, discussing his future and the future of his daughter. Well, they could talk all they wanted. He was done with words.

  There was a cold clarity that came with pure fury. It had burned away Robert’s doubts and indecisions and had lit before him a single path. Not the many he had faced over these past weeks – no, these past years – just one direction with one destination at its end. It was perilous and he didn’t know what he would find on it. But he knew with utter certainty that he must step out upon it. Everything had led him here.

  There were footfalls as Alexander came up behind him.

  ‘We are set,’ murmured the lord.

  ‘The women are ready?’ Robert asked, without turning.

  ‘Yes. They will go down to the river with the servants. My men will go with them.’ Alexander’s voice lowered further as three knights passed, wearing the colours of Lord Douglas. ‘The escort will not seem strange, not after the arrow. Nes and Walter will be waiting by the river with the horses. Half the squires are there already. The rest will meet us shortly.’ Alexander paused. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They will guess where you have gone. They might follow.’

  ‘Not when the negotiations need to be concluded. Not even Percy would risk the rebellion continuing just to track me down. By the time anyone comes for us Turnberry will be secure.’ Robert turned to Alexander. ‘I need to know that you are with me.’

  Alexander smiled. It was a hard expression, but one Robert found reassuring.

  ‘We are with you.’

  ‘We’ll have to l
eave the tents and the wagon,’ said Robert, glancing round at their camp. ‘But the nights are warm and we have blankets.’ He saw Katherine and Judith duck out of their tent. The maid had his daughter balanced on her hip and held the pail they had been using to bring water from the river. Judith was with her, looking scared. She too had a pail, inside which were some of their belongings. Carefully, cautiously, all through the evening, they had been decamping, ferrying bits of their gear down to the banks of the river, where Nes had taken Uathach and the horses. To better pasture, Robert had loudly instructed.

  As the women walked away down the hillside, Katherine playing her part, talking idly to the wet nurse, Robert nodded to Alexander. ‘I’ll meet you by the river.’

  Heading away, he moved through the circles of men around the fires, past vacant tents, through the strange hush of the camp. Behind him their ring of fire was swallowed by the gloom. Ahead, in the distance, the land rose into the contours of hills. Above, in the darkness, the stars burned like beacons.

  54

  The men struggled with the stone, their breaths echoing in the chapel. Rain bled down the tall windows beyond the painted screen that enclosed the shrine of the Confessor. The interior of Westminster Abbey was cool. Shafts of pallid daylight seeped through the arches of the choir, filtering into hushed chapels where nobles kept their silent sleep, entombed and gilded, waiting for the Day of Judgement. In the pale light the Stone of Destiny glittered softly, like frost or starlight.

  King Edward watched the men lower the rock into the ornately carved chair, hollow where the seat should be. Close by stood his master painter, who had decorated the coronation chair with an image of a seated king surrounded by mythical birds and trailing flowers. As two of the men stepped back, a third took up the wooden seat that would cover the stone, trapping it inside. Truly, Scotland was under England’s dominion.

  Edward would never sit upon this throne. It was for his heir and the line that stretched into the future, all the reigns of kings to come mounted upon his legacy. Years earlier in Bordeaux he’d had a fresco painted, showing a king surrounded by knights bearing the symbol of the dragon. The king in the painting had been seated upon a stone throne, wearing a gold circlet, bearing a broken blade and a golden staff. Now, that image was almost reality. As Brutus and Arthur before him, his name would be remembered for a thousand years. Scotland’s throne, Arthur’s crown, the Confessor’s sword: these ancient symbols of Britain’s sovereignty were displayed in the heart of his kingdom before the shrine of his namesake. This should have been the greatest of days. It should have marked the fulfilment of the oath he’d sworn twenty-three years ago, when he had come to this abbey barefoot, walking on a carpet of flowers.

  He could still hear the drums.

  Westminster Abbey, England

  1274 AD

  Like a heartbeat, slow and solemn, the sound reverberated off the buildings of Westminster Palace. Edward’s pace matched the drums’ rhythm, his bare feet crushing into perfume the velvet of scarlet roses and the silk of white lilies. The flowers, carefully plucked of thorns, had been handed out that morning to the crowds thronging the thoroughfare from the palace to the abbey. Women crossed themselves as he passed. Men bowed their heads and children were lifted up so that in the years to come they could tell their sons and daughters that they were there; they had seen the day their king was crowned.

  Against the boundless blue of August sky banners of gold silk billowed from balustrades and archways, festooned for the occasion of his coronation. It was the first many of his subjects had known. Only grizzled men and old wives remembered his father’s, over half a century ago.

  At Edward’s side walked Eleanor, radiant in a gown of white samite, clustered with pearls. They had returned to England three weeks ago. She had been with him when he had taken the Cross, bound on crusade, with him all through the months in Palestine – months that had seen war against the Saracens, the birth of his daughter and an attempt on his life by the Mamluk sultan, Baybars. And she had been with him when messengers from England had arrived to tell him his father was dead.

  Eleanor’s veil drifted before her face as she walked beside him. As Edward caught her eye, she smiled breathlessly. It was a momentous day for her too. She would enter the abbey towering before them as his wife. She would leave as his queen.

  Leading the way were bishops and priests garbed in ceremonial robes, some swinging censers that trailed clouds of incense. Behind Edward and Eleanor came a stately procession of earls and barons, lords and knights, mounted on barded destriers, all displaying the arms of their households on surcoats and shields, pennons and trappers. The earls heading this procession bore the royal regalia: Curtana, the rod and sceptre, and the jewel-spangled crown. As the clergy funnelled into the abbey, followed by the royal couple, the riders did not stop, but urged their horses on into the cavernous interior. The abbey was ablaze with a thousand candles, the flames reflected in gilded walls and stained-glass windows, marble and onyx tombs, mosaics and painted screens. More banners of gold silk rippled from pillars.

  Edward walked past the ranks of men and women who filled the galleries, all the way to the crossing of the church, where a wooden dais had been erected, so high a horse and its rider could enter beneath. Upon the platform, festooned with scarlet flags, the Archbishop of Canterbury waited. At the steps of the dais the royal couple halted. The air was filled with the clinking of bridles and brash snorts of horses.

  Edward paused before mounting the platform, his eyes moving to Eleanor. Through the gossamer of the veil she smiled. Turning, he climbed the steps alone beneath the vault of Westminster Abbey.

  How long had he waited for this day?

  Last night, he had spent his final hours as a mere mortal alone in the sumptuous palace chamber where his father had gasped his dying breath. The bedchamber was decorated with scenes, the most vivid of which displayed the crowning of the Confessor. In the painted chamber, surrounded by faces of long dead men and the ghost of his father, Edward had been flooded with memory.

  Boyhood came dimly in the form of his mother’s arm tight around his shoulders as he watched his father sail out from Portsmouth, bound for France without him. On the heels of this recollection came a mirror image of his father at the palace, grim and silent, watching him ride away into exile. Edward recalled the coming of the Valences and those lavish gifts of land and money his father had bestowed upon them that so angered and alienated his English magnates. He remembered the trouble growing in Wales and the red mouths and clenched fists of the barons in parliament, Henry wilting under their barrage. He remembered his godfather, Simon de Montfort, rising like some charismatic demigod to tower over his father and the king’s face crumpling in anguish as he learned of Edward’s pact with his betrayer.

  Gradually, the memories faded to a single image: that of his father limping from the gates of Lewes Priory, Montfort and his men grinning in the torchlight, like wolves whose quarry walked insensibly towards them. They had jostled one another, eager to see the humiliation of the king, humbled before the victor of the civil war, God’s own warrior, the man who had taken Henry’s kingdom and stripped his authority. It was then, more than at any other time, even in exile in Gascony under the banner of the dragon or on the rain-drenched fields of war in Wales, that Edward truly feared he would not live to wear the crown.

  This day had been a long time coming.

  Edward approached the archbishop, waiting on the dais. There, standing in a shaft of sunlight before the crowds, he took the coronation oath. His voice rang as he promised to defend the Church, do good justice and protect the rights of the Crown. When it was done, the archbishop led the way down the steps of the dais, through swirls of incense to the high altar. Here, to the pure voices of the choir that rose in a fountain of song, Edward’s mantle was removed to reveal a simple linen undershirt. Taking the vessel of holy oil from the Bishop of London, the archbishop moved to perform the unction that would turn Edward from a man
into a king. Intoning in Latin, the archbishop dipped his finger into the oil. He hesitated, his finger hovering over Edward’s chest.

  Glancing down, Edward realised what had made him pause. Above his heart, visible through the open neck of the shirt, a knotted scar made an ugly pattern of violence on his skin; the wound made by the Assassin Sultan Baybars had sent to kill him.

  The attacker had come in disguise to his lodgings in the city of Acre, bearing gifts and a message from Cairo. Eleanor was with him when the man had struck. Edward had thrown the Assassin off, slamming him against a wall and punching him repeatedly until his knights had pulled him back and run the man through. It was only when Edward staggered round to Eleanor and saw the horror filling her face that he realised he had been stabbed. The dagger, partially embedded in his chest, had missed his heart, but that did not matter: an Assassin’s blade meant poison. As he fell to his knees, the breath leaving him, Eleanor had rushed to his side. It was her hand that removed the dagger, causing the blood to spill hot across his chest. The last thing he remembered was her mouth moving over the gaping wound, her lips splattered red as she tried to suck out the poison. When he came to, Eleanor was weeping in the arms of her maid, covered in blood, and his knights were watching grimly as a skilled Arab surgeon stitched the wound, sending delirious waves of agony through him.

  The archbishop reached out and smeared the oil on Edward’s chest. Then, the anointing done, he took up a phial of precious chrism. Edward went down on his knees as the voices of the choir lifted. He closed his eyes as the Latin washed over him and felt a cool sensation as the chrism was trickled on to his head.

  Once the unction was done, he returned to the dais. There was a sigh from the watching congregation as he mounted the steps, a king in body and spirit, transformed like Christ himself. Now, the earls who bore the symbols of kingship came forward to invest their new king with the regalia of the realm: a tunic and mantle of gold, Curtana and the rod and sceptre. Last came the crown, embossed with rubies, sapphires and emeralds, as big as eyes. When it was placed upon his head, Edward stood to hear the cheers of his people.