It was unheard of to treat knights captured in battle as common criminals. They were always treated honourably. My husband’s men exchanged worried glances. The rules of war were being flouted and it put everyone at risk, including themselves. But no-one dared speak. With clenched fists and impassive faces, they left the chamber without a word, knowing better than to argue with my husband. The prisoners were taken away and within a week the killings began.
The following day the bishop of St Andrews was brought in under armed guard, together with the elderly abbot of Scone, a pitiful scrawny man of God. They were dirty and unkempt but the bishop seemed certain his ecclesiastical privileges would protect them. He stood upright in the centre of the chamber amidst a crowd of his captors, defiance shining out of his eyes.
‘Well, Lamberton?’ growled my husband. ‘So you think that one moment you can kiss my ring and swear to uphold our agreements for peace, while the next you slither away like the snake you are and urge your followers to take up arms against me.’
The bishop said nothing.
‘How wrong you are,’ said my husband, menace lacing his every word. ‘Let me tell you, Sir Bishop, if it wasn’t for your cloth I’d have you strung up with the rest of them. I’m almost tempted to do so anyway but I’m told it would most likely imperil my soul. Instead I shall let you rot in one of my deepest dungeons. You can spend your remaining days, and I pray they be many, chained to a wall in a stinking pit and we’ll see how much you regret your actions.’
William Lamberton’s eyes didn’t even flicker. He must have known what would happen to him the moment he was taken.
‘And take your creature with you,’ shouted my husband, indicating the poor shivering abbot who was cowering behind the younger man’s cloak. ‘Did he think putting a metal circlet on a traitor’s brow would make the man a king? If he did, he is a fool and deserves his fate. Take him away. He can be locked up elsewhere.’
He turned to the captain of the guard.
‘Keep them close and fetter them. The clank of chains as they ride south will remind them of their sins.’
He laughed as they were taken away.
‘I hear we have Wishart, wife,’ he said to me as he rubbed his hands together. ‘Is that not good news?’
I murmured my agreement. I’d heard that morning from one of my women that the bishop of Glasgow had been taken at Cupar Castle where he’d fled from the English army. Aymer de Valence’s men had caught the Scots unawares near Perth and slaughtered them in their thousands. It was said the Scots were asleep and not expecting the English to venture out before daybreak. I remembered Sir Robert’s words last summer about men who slept in the heather and wondered how he could have allowed such a thing to happen.
The remnants of the Scottish army had scattered and were being picked up in ditches and gullies by the victorious English but of the so-called Scottish king there was no sign. Although I knew it was wrong, I breathed a sigh of relief that he was still alive. Whatever he’d done I didn’t want him to die a traitor’s death.
I was surprised by the bishop of Glasgow. He was in full armour, his hands bound and his face bloody. My husband surveyed him grimly.
‘I see you are ready for celebrating Mass, Sir Bishop. Do those garments help you in your spiritual duties or is it perhaps that you fancy yourself still on the battlefield? You do know the difference, don’t you?’
He thrust his face close to that of the elderly bishop, who looked back at him with hatred burning in his eyes.
‘Silent for once, I see Wishart,’ said my husband. ‘Frightened we might take you for a common soldier and string you up on the gibbet alongside your countrymen? I must consult with my lawyers and see if you have removed yourself outside the protection of your cloth by donning that chain-mail. I have a suspicion it might be so. Then I can treat you like a treacherous churl without incurring the wrath of His Holiness. Think what I can do with you then.’
The bishop’s face flushed red with rage.
‘You thought to take me for a fool, I see,’ said my husband. ‘I heard what you did with my royal gift. That timber I gave you in the spirit of peace was intended for your cathedral roof. It was for the glory of God, Sir Bishop, not for you to build siege engines.’
He eyed the bishop with venom. They were like two fighting cocks, but my husband wore the spurs while the bishop was sorely wounded. There could be no doubt as to who would be the victor, just the method with which he would effect the coup de grâce.
‘Take him south,’ said my husband. ‘The deepest dungeon in the Tower. Make sure he is chained and there is no need to be gentle.’
Sainte Vierge, but I was tired of this violence. I was swamped by a ceaseless tide of hatred and revenge, wallowing in a mire of bloody gore, a never-ending glorification of one man’s might over another. I could not believe God intended for us to act thus, yet our English bishops said nothing. They donned their armour, summoned their men and led them into battle, following the banners of their earthly king.
My husband was a stranger to me in those days. He commanded my presence by his side but barely noticed me. I steeled myself to feel nothing as he consigned young men to their hideous deaths and old men to die in chains, but my heart rebelled.
The next day a young Yorkshire knight, Sir Christopher Seton, was dragged before my husband. He was mud-spattered, his clothes in tatters, his face bruised and bloody. He’d been taken at Loch Doon two weeks previously and brought here to face justice at my husband’s hands. With his wrists bound tightly behind his back, he was thrust by one of his guards into a kneeling position below the huge carved chair in which my husband sat.
‘Ah, the brave Sir Christopher,’ sneered my husband. ‘We have heard much of you. You should have taken more care over your loyalties, Seton. A Bruce for a wife was not a sensible choice.’
I wondered if it was one of Sir Robert’s sisters he had married.
‘I hear you felled one of my good men in battle,’ continued my husband.
‘I was defending my king,’ said the man, speaking with difficulty through his swollen lips.
‘Your king is here before you,’ said my husband in his coldest voice. ‘Do you not recognise him?’
There was a long silence where neither man spoke.
‘The lord of Badenoch?’ queried my husband. ‘What of him?’
He had risen, pushing himself up with his arms and was standing full height looking down on his prisoner. He was wearing his emblazoned tunic and furred robes and looked every inch a powerful leader and a man bent on revenge.
‘Do you recall the strikes you made that day in Dumfries or were you just defending your so-called master? Did Comyn draw first? Was that it? A sharp little dagger unsheathed against his enemy? Or did you butcher him in cold blood on the steps of the high altar?’
Sir Christopher Seton said nothing. My husband was going to have him killed whether or not he admitted to the murder of John Comyn.
We didn’t know who had wielded the swords that day in the church of the Greyfriars. Two men had died and there were plenty of witnesses to say that a group of Bruce’s men, and Sir Robert himself, were there. But as to what actually took place inside the church, nobody knew, or if they did, they weren’t telling.
I looked at the young man’s fair hair which fell in lank strands across his forehead, and thought to myself - it could be Edmund. In twenty years time my son would look like this: young, fresh, at the start of his grown-up life. I wanted to weep for these young men and their lost futures, but I didn’t dare.
My husband sat down again. I knew he couldn’t stand for long, it was too painful.
‘It matters not which it was, Sir Knight. Whether you struck the death blow or not, it was murder most foul and you will pay the price. To take up arms against your king is treason and that is the death you will have, a traitor’s death.’
Sir Christopher’s face betrayed little. He was a brave man and would, I felt sure, go to the gibbet with his head held high.
‘Take him to Dumfries,’ said my husband to the guard. ‘If my memory serves me right there is a small hill outside the town. You can hang him there.’
He turned back to Sir Christopher.
‘Not just hanging, Sir Knight. We will have your guts pulled out while you are still alive to feel the agony, and then your head will be severed from your body and your body sliced in four. What price your support for the traitor Bruce then?’
But the young man still said nothing. He stared ahead, looking beyond my husband into a distant future, to a life which would never be his.
Our progress through the wilds of the north was painfully slow. My husband’s litter managed barely three or four miles before we had to stop. He had exhausted himself at Durham and I was afraid for him. I had no idea what would happen to my children if he should die.
Not far from Hexham Abbey, at Newbrough, Ned joined us, fresh from his triumphs in the north-east. He arrived clad in full armour, riding his huge black warhorse. His months in the saddle had burned his skin a ruddy brown and lightened his hair to a gleaming gold. He looked like a prince and I had to admit it was a relief to have him with me. He was someone to share the burden of my husband’s illness.
‘You will be pleased, father,’ he said as the three of us sat together that first evening. ‘Aymer and I have taken Kildrummy. We thought it might take some months, but they had a turncoat in their midst.’
‘Were they there? Did you capture them?’ said my husband eagerly, a slight flush of pink on his cheeks.
He was asking about Sir Robert’s women: his wife, his sisters and his little daughter. The word was they’d been sent to Kildrummy because it was the strongest castle in the north-eat and considered safe. Obviously it was not strong enough or safe enough.
‘We thought they’d be in the tower,’ said my stepson. ‘But they must have slipped away down the ravine in the dark. Aymer thinks they’ll head north to the ports and take ship to the Orkneys or more likely Norway.’
I remembered Sir Robert had a sister married to the king of Norway. Doubtless they’d be safe there as I didn’t think my husband would go to war with the king of Norway over a parcel of women.
‘The north-east is loyal,’ murmured my husband, assessing the situation through narrowed eyes.
‘Yes,’ said Ned, easing his neck after his long day in the saddle. ‘The earl of Ross will bring them in.’
I thought of those poor women fleeing through the heather, hunted down like animals by my husband’s army and by their own countrymen just because of who they were. Women are blameless in these matters. They are mere shadows of their husbands and yet they suffer. I wondered where they’d sleep, where they’d find shelter and what they’d find to eat? Ned didn’t say if kinsmen or friends of Sir Robert were with them but I hoped for their sakes they were not alone.
‘My father doesn’t look well,’ Ned said to me when we sat together in my small draughty chamber at Thornton Manor where we’d halted for the night.
‘No,’ I said sadly. ‘The bouts of pain are more frequent and he suffers from the flux but refuses to rest.’
‘The bloody flux is a cursed disease,’ said my stepson, pouring himself another cup of wine. Then he gave a short laugh. ‘Your brother Louis told me your grandfather once had to cut a hole in his breeches he had it so bad.’
I sat there in the dying light thinking of the horrors and indignities of war. I knew war was brutal but I hadn’t realise it would brutalize my husband.
‘Are we headed for Carlisle?’ asked Ned, sipping his wine.
‘Yes.’
‘Do we winter there or are we returning south?’
‘I don’t think your father is well enough to make the journey south. I think we shall have to winter in the north. He can summon a January parliament at Carlisle.’
‘Five months,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘What are you planning?’
‘Oh nothing of any importance. I was just thinking. Soon we’ll be finished here and I don’t fancy kicking my heels in this benighted part of the realm until January.’
At that moment there was a wild knocking at the door and one of my husband’s attendants burst in.
‘His grace!’ he cried. ‘He’s dying!’
I thought he was dead. He lay motionless in his bed, not moving, while his physician prodded and poked and sighed.
‘It is the same as before, my lady,’ he said mournfully. ‘He has expended too much of himself and will not rest. I’ve had him bled but each time he endures one of these attacks he becomes weaker. What with the bloody flux soon he’ll have no strength left.’
I looked at my husband, lying as still as a corpse. His breathing was so shallow I would have thought him gone to God if it were not for the slight flush of colour on his cheeks. What would I do without him? Since our marriage he’d been my whole existence and I was not sure if there was another.
Together the physician and I kept our vigil throughout the night and through the next day. Time ceased to have meaning and my world shrank to the confines of this small undecorated chamber in the wild border country and the man who lay silent and still beneath the covers of the bed.
At the end of the third day he stirred, his eyelids fluttered, and my husband returned to me.
‘You frightened me,’ I said, wiping away tears of relief.
He smiled weakly. ‘I’m tough. You won’t get rid of me yet, not while there’s work still to do.’
‘I do not want rid of you, husband. What would I do without you?’
Perhaps it was my pleas, but the next afternoon he called for his clerk and began to make provisions for our children. There was a lengthy document giving the Norfolk inheritance to Thomas once Roger Bigod was gone, and one granting lands of seven thousand marks to Edmund, and another which provided for the care of his youngest daughter, our little Eleanor. Ned signed the guarantee to care for his sister should my husband die before she was married. I was well dowered. Everything had been agreed before my marriage in that lengthy wrangling between the French and the English envoys, and I already knew which castles and manors I would receive in my widowhood. My husband had thought of everything.
‘Norfolk will go before me, wife,’ he said. ‘Of that you can be sure. I shan’t leave this world until the rogue is safely in his tomb. He’s been a thorn in my side these past ten years, always defying me, always making trouble with the others. But I’m pleased with the deal I did, for now our boy can have his estates and title. Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk - how does that sound?’
‘And Edmund?’ I asked anxiously.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said my husband pondering the future of his favourite child. ‘Perhaps my late cousin’s title. earl of Cornwall? What do you think?’
‘Whatever you decide, my lord,’ I said. ‘These are your gifts and you must bestow them as you think fit.’
‘True, but I’m tired now and my mind is befuddled. I’ll think on it some more tomorrow.’
But next day there were other matters to attend to. If I’d known I would have pressed him, I would have urged him to settle Edmund’s future there, that moment. But I didn’t know for we none of us can see the future, and in not knowing the die was cast and the uncertain future made.
In the worst of nightmares there is always an end, a time of waking, a realisation that one’s fears are of the darkness and not of the day. But at Lanercost Priory on the edge of the windswept border country there was to be no cessation of pain and grief as my husband’s personal vision of hell engulfed us all.
We arrived shortly before Michaelmas. We were ten miles short of the castle at Carlisle but my husband had a preference for the austere surroundings of the lonely priory just a s
tone’s throw from where the great wall had once been. He said he would go no further.
To the south-west there was nothing to see but bare rolling hills and occasional clumps of stunted trees. Above us to the north stood dark forests and beyond that, I was told, the wilds of the Cheviot Hills which guarded the Lothian, a county loyal to the English Crown. The priory had suffered grievous attacks by the Scots ten years ago but little damage had been done.
‘They burned some of our houses, my lady,’ explained the prior, ‘but, thanks be to God, our church was unharmed. They sneaked away through the forest when the English armies returned. Even that ruffian Wallace came with his men, but as you see, we are still here. God and our blessed Saviour protected us well. And it is a rare treat to see his grace again.’
‘He has been here before?’ I said, surprised, for my husband had said nothing.
‘Oh yes, my lady. Many, many years ago, with the queen, the Lady Eleanor. That was a fine visit for his grace. He took over two hundred deer from the Inglewood. Those were good days, not like now. Now we fear the killing and burning will never end.’
We’d not been there a day when a man, who looked as if he’d been travelling for days without stopping, arrived with news.
‘We have the women,’ laughed Ned. ‘They were caught by the earl’s men.’
And for the rest of the day my husband went round with a smile on his face.
It was a miserable day when they brought in Sir Robert’s women. Up from the south-west, swathes of torn cloud carried the first fat heavy drops of rain and by midday we were marooned in a clammy sea of low-lying fog.
It was out of this blanket of mist that a group of men and women trailed into our midst. There must have been at least thirty of them, wrapped in thick dark cloaks with Earl Ross’s men in armour with swords at their sides. I caught a single glimpse of the women as they were roughly bundled into one of the priory buildings.
The Pearl of France Page 26
