by Glen Craney
The second task, now at hand, was even more daunting. These high curtain walls were designed to prevent easy scaling, and the English believed that he and his Scot raiders carried no siege equipment. But Sim Ledhouse had put his mind to an invention that might turn the tide of the war, if it performed as promised. The clever blacksmith had calculated that by connecting two lengthy hemp ropes with a series of folding planks, they could roll up the flexible ladders, carry them on their backs on the quick, and unroll them when they were positioned under these walls.
Two shrill whistles came from the far side of the keep. That was Ledhouse’s signal. He was in position at the postern gate, ready to create the diversion.
James nodded for the sons of the Galloway crone to load their crossbows with the grappling hooks, which had been attached to the top ends of the rope ladder. The timing of their launches would have to be precise. He and the lads whispered to three together—and fired at the rampart nearest to Belle’s cage.
The hooks snaked the ropes into the black sky … the iron claws held. The ladder planks cascaded into place, just as Ledhouse had designed.
James went up first, promising to signal when he reached the top.
SCALDED WITH HOT JUICES FROM the tray dropped into his lap, Caernervon howled and shot up from the table to his feet. He ripped down his wet leggings with no consideration for modesty. “Idiot! I’ll have your head sewn on that sow’s neck! My God, I am boiled! Piers, help me!”
Alerted by the shouting, Clifford rushed from the allures outside the tower and came running into the hall. He found the chamber in chaos and the king rolling on his back with his breeches halfway to his thighs. Despite Caernervon’s ravings, Clifford did not hurry to the king’s side, but kept his gaze fixed upon Gaveston, who sat limp, negligent to his lover’s plight.
Gaveston looked down in horror at his sleeves and found them soaked from sweat chills. Trembling, he tried to rise from the chair and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach. His green face contorted from confusion to agony.
“Piers!” The king writhed on the floor like a hooked worm. “Help me!”
Clifford glanced through the window toward the tower defenses. His guards were no longer at their stations. He turned and scanned the tables.
The queen had disappeared.
The officer ran out through the door, leaving the king and his favourite writhing on the floor. The servants and other guests, fearful of being blamed for the poisoning, had scurried off.
“I am dying!” Gaveston screamed. “Poppie, I am dying!”
Caernervon tried to assist the retching Gaveston to a chair. He called for his physician, but no one answered him. Abandoned, he dragged his favourite out of the hall and down a dark corridor, crying for his guards.
Hands reached from the shadows and stifled the king’s screams.
THE TOP EDGE OF THE rampart crumbled, forcing James to hang on by one arm. Regaining his grip, he pulled himself over the wall.
Two English guards stood across the allure, not twenty paces away.
His breath quickened as he surveyed the battlements.
There was the cage. And Belle, covered by a hooded robe, sat huddled in the corner with her back to him.
He could have used the Trinity lads at his side now, but he feared another crossbow shot to bring them up would give his presence away. He slid alone along the shadows between walls and the tapers. As the guards strode closer, he drew his dagger and slit the throat of the man on the left. The second guard turned to speak to his fellow sentry—an uppercut to his jaw sent him tumbling over the ramparts.
That would be signal enough for the lads.
Rubbing his knuckles, he stalked his way toward the cage, hiding behind each buttress along the tower wall. How long he had dreamt of this moment. What would he say to her? How would he explain his failure to come for her at Kildrummy? Would she even recognize him now?
He stole along the wall from corbel to corbel and came to the hoist beam that dangled the cage over the moat. He dared not call out for fear that her reaction would alert the guards. The beam’s edge was no wider than his foot, forcing him to inch his way slowly toward the roof.
Atop the cage, he reached down to test the latch. The door was unlocked. Strange, he thought. Grasping the edge of the cage’s roof, he flipped head over heels, kicked in the grille, and landed on the cage floor.
Belle sat slumped over in sleep.
He quietly crawled across the cage. Closing his eyes, he captured her shoulders and turned her, pressing a kiss to her lips to prevent her from screaming
She returned the passionate kiss and pulled him closer.
How desperately he had missed that embrace! She edged him into the shadows and lay next to him. She felt so vibrant and strong. Thank God for that. He opened his eyes to see the face that had remained etched in his mind for five long years.
A firm hand replaced her lips on his. “Get away! At once!”
Had her voice become so altered? Confused, he pulled back her hood. In the dim light from the torches, he saw, for the first time, the face that had spoken those words of warning.
Isabella of France pressed her hand against his chest to ease the shock to his heart. “Clifford suspects you are here.”
He reeled against the bars. “But where is …” His question died with a gasp.
Isabella took his face into her hands to bring him back to the moment’s urgency. “Your lady remains in Berwick. Clifford placed an imposter here in her stead. I bribed the woman to take her place and warn you.”
Despairing, James could not force himself to move.
“Do not fail your countess now. Live, and come for her another day.”
Shouts rang out near the north walls—Ledhouse and his men were in a hot fight. Outnumbered, they wouldn’t hold out for long.
Isabella pulled him, listless with a heavy heart, to his feet. She climbed out the door of the cage and clambered onto its roof, beckoning him to follow. When they were both atop the cage, she led him across the beam that extended several feet from the tower’s wall. They reached the allures just moments before the English soldiers poured down the gangway. She dragged him into the shadows and swept him into a side alcove. When the pounding of boots receded, she inched her eyes beyond the corner of the buttress and saw that the way was clear again. She kissed his hand and sent him running for the wall to escape.
Covered by the flickering darkness, James slid to his stomach and dived under the protection of a crenellation. He reached up and groped the edge of the walls until he found the grappling hook that the Trinity lads had shot up again. He wrapped his leg over the merlons, grasped the rope in preparation to rappel down, and—
He fell from a blow to the back of his head.
Tabhann raised his sword, hot for the kill. “Aye, I never believed you were gutted. I was born for that deed, not Sim Ledhouse.”
James rolled aside, narrowly avoiding the blade’s thrust.
Tabhann chased him to the rampart’s edge and pressed the sword to his throat. James arched over the side with his head dangling. Tabhann raised his weapon for the finishing blow—
A grappling hook shot over the wall and jerked the blade from his grasp.
Hiding in the shadows, Isabella slid an abandoned pike across the stones.
James pounced on the weapon. Behind him, the shouts came closer—the English guards were rushing up the ramp. He prodded Tabhann toward the beam that extended the cage over the wall.
Tabhann tried to delay until Clifford’s men arrived, but the punishing thrusts drove him backwards.
“Climb it,” James ordered.
Given no choice, Tabhann crawled onto the beam and backed away from the rampart. When he was atop the cage and beyond James’s reach, he grinned. “Fool! You can’t reach me now! You’ve condemned yourself!” He pointed out James to the onrushing English soldiers. “Douglas! Over here!”
James slithered back into the shadows with Isabella. Hidden f
rom view, he shouted in his best Yorkshire accent, “Douglas escapes! On the cage!”
Tabhann lost his preening grin. Unable to kneel and hide without risking a fall, he tried to stave off a volley. “Don’t fire”
Hearing the Scot voice in the darkness, the guards unleashed their arrows.
Tabhann looked down at blood oozing over the gravy stain on his shirt—his chest was riddled with fletches. He tried to shout a curse at James, but his words faded as he fell to his death.
THE DOOR TO THE QUEEN'S chamber flew open, moments after Isabella slid into bed and wrapped herself in the covers.
Armed with a torch, Clifford marched in with a contingent of soldiers.
Thankful that she’d had time to put on her gown, Isabella pulled the sheets to her neck and acted dazed, as if she had been asleep. She had seized on the chaos of Gaveston’s attempted poisoning—she suspected Lancaster, but the culprit could have been any of a dozen men in court—to rush from the hall and exchange places with Belle’s impostor while Clifford was distracted. She hoped the officer wouldn’t notice that her hair had not been brushed out, or that the candle next to the bed was still smoking from having been snuffed only seconds before he entered. Shielding her eyes from the harsh light, she shouted at him, “How dare you, sir!”
“Orders, my lady.”
“Orders to invade the privacy of my boudoir? Issued by whom?”
Ignoring her demand, Clifford searched behind the curtains and furniture.
She was infuriated by his refusal to answer her with anything but a smug smile, a gesture that she knew was aimed at the irony of her sham protest. Because of the king’s neglect of her, many whispered behind her back that she had come to regard nights alone a privilege.
“I will lodge a protest of this with my father!”
“You must be a sound sleeper,” Clifford observed in a veiled challenge. “To remain undisturbed by the shouting outside.”
“If you intend to persist in this debasement, then dismiss these men!”
She held her breath while the officer debated her demand. She might be a despised Frenchwoman among the English courtiers, but she knew Clifford needed no reminding that she could still cause him problems should her flighty husband decide to appease her at the officer’s expense. As she hoped, given the man’s reputation for caution on the military field, Clifford chose the better course of discretion and ordered his soldiers out.
Alone with her now, Clifford kept searching the chamber, rifling through the intimates in her wardrobe. “The Black Douglas lurks in this tower.”
She cackled to dismiss that suggestion as absurd. “That coward would never show his face in Roxburgh!”
“You left the feast at a very convenient time.”
Her heart raced. Did he suspect her? “Where is my husband?”
“For his safety, he is being escorted back to Berwick.”
“And he leaves me in this sty? Without a word of his departure?”
Clifford saw the covers ripple near her on the bed. He raised his blade, ready to impale the intruder—and tore away the sheets.
Gloucester, half naked, lay next to the queen.
The earl erupted from his hiding in the bed and drove Clifford with a pointed finger toward the door. “You pox-cheeked trough maggot! Do you forget your fucking station? Speak a word of this to anyone, even to those cunted hedgehogs you whore on, and by God I will see you remanded on the next ship to Brittany for violating the privacy and honor of the Queen!”
Speechless, Clifford bowed in contrition and hurried from the chamber.
When the door slammed shut, Gloucester tapped the footboards.
James crawled out from under the bed frame.
Isabella hurried the two men toward a side door.
James delayed to thank her, but she sped him off with a whispered assurance, “Your lady has all your stubbornness and more. She survived to see Longshanks admitted through the gates of Hell. She will not allow my titmouse of a husband to outlast her, either. Now go, and God be with you.”
XXIX
THREE SHARP WHISTLES—THE SIGNAL of Robert’s courier—flushed a bevy of swallows from the treetops of Ettrick Forest. James leapt from the dense brush and flagged down the approaching riders, hoping to learn why the English had not retaliated for his Roxburgh raid. In the four months since his failed attempt to rescue Belle, the Borders had been so quiet that he feared Caernervon had already launched his expected invasion of Scotland by sea.
Twenty horsemen arrived, led by a dark-faced man who reined to a halt and sniggered, “St. Fillan must have cast a spell on Clifford’s nose! I could smell your sorry Lanark asses all the way from Peebles.”
James stepped back and cursed under his breath. Thomas foccin’ Randolph.
His raiders, aware of the simmering rivalry between the two men, grinned at the promise of entertainment that this encounter held. Instead of dispatching the traitor to the block, Robert was now grooming his turncoat nephew into one his most trusted lieutenants. Even more galling to James were the rumors that Robert had mistaken Randolph for him at Inverurie.
Dismounting with a flare, Randolph reached into his saddlebag and tossed a charred brick at their boots. “A souvenir from Edinburgh Castle.”
James examined the kiln marks on the brick while his men hooted down Randolph’s claim that he had retaken the well-defended crag fortress from the English.
“No mortal could scale those walls,” McClurg insisted.
Randolph greeted his old comrades with handshakes and backslaps. “There you’re wrong, you stinking Unholy Ghost!”
James kept a skeptical distance. “Edinburgh is truly ours?”
“Aye, Jamie! You should have been there!”
As the Lanark men crowded around Randolph, mesmerized by the vision of the Scottish Lion once again flying above those hallowed heights, James threaded their ranks to protest, “I would have been if you had told me—”
“We sat under that rock for two months,” Randolph bragged. “One fine summer morn, I told the lads, ‘I don’t have the patience of Jamie Douglas, just waiting for starvation to take its course.’”
James reddened. “The Hell you say! When did I ever—”
Sweenie threw an elbow at James’s ribs. “Will you let the man finish?”
As James was shoved to the rear, Randolph rubbed the dust from his mouth and continued his report. “Now, where was I?”
“Below Edinburgh’s walls!” Ledhouse reminded him.
“Aye, lads.” Randolph turned to each man with exaggerated intensity, regaling his rapt audience in the round. “There I was, staring up at that rock thrice the height of St. Andrew’s spire, and I said to myself, ‘If Jamie Douglas can scale Roxburgh, then by Christ I owe it to him to have a run at these ramparts, even if they make Constantinople’s towers look like Aberdeen cattle pens. The English had raised the walls ten—no, twenty lengths higher. Mind you, the fact that you lads failed to hold Roxburgh tower longer than it takes a Northumbrian to enjoy a good shit gave me pause, but not for long.”
Sweenie kept hammering at the kneecaps of those around him to keep from being crushed in the listening scrum. “How many English defended it?”
Randolph swept his hand across an imaginary parapet. “A thousand if there was one, my tonsured heretic sprite.”
“Two hundred half-starved conscripts,” James insisted from the rear.
“So up we go, one at a time. Thirty against two thousand. The night was so pitched you couldn’t see your hand at your nose. A good thing that was, lads! No looking down into the depths of Hell that awaited us if we fell. I’m leading the way, of course. When I gain the crest, I reach for the ledge. And a rock breaks off and lands with a crash that would wake the dead.”
“Guards?” Sweenie cried, flinching from the vision.
Randolph stood shadowing over the monk. “Aye, you boot-stomped plug of devil dust! English men-at-arms as thick as these oaks! And just as stout! One calls
out, ‘You’re a dead man, Scottie!’”
Sweenie slammed his knuckle of a fist against his tiny palm. “Damn the ill fortune!”
Randolph lowered his voice to draw them all closer. “Lads, I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t calculating the very words I’d soon be saying to my Maker. But St. Fillan be my witness, a miracle was granted me that very instant, for the guard just laughed and moved on. The brainless scouser was only trying to scare his mate with a false alarm.”
“The Almighty be praised,” Sweenie declared, releasing a held breath. “Truly, a sign of the righteousness of our cause.”
Randolph parried and punched at James to imitate his fight with the sentry. James fought to escape the clench, but his struggling only served Randolph’s purpose in reenacting the scene as he described it, blow by blow.
“When the last man was up and over, the alarums rang out,” Randolph said. “And the garrison came on us like the locusts on Pharaoh. But when, I ask you, lads, could three thousand Yorkshiremen hold back thirty Scots?”
Untangling from Randolph’s hold, James was determined to put a stop to the yarn before the number of Edinburgh’s defenders grew to be half the population of England. “You conveniently failed to explain how you got to the top of that tower.”
“Did I now?” Randolph reached into his saddlebag again and emptied the remainder of its contents at James’s boots.
A rope ladder, threaded with wooden plank, unfolded across the ground.
Randolph smothered a chuckle. “We plundered this marvel from an English patrol near Falkirk. “Someone carelessly abandoned it at Berwick.”
Ledhouse’s eyes rounded. “That’s my ladder!”
Randolph slapped Ledhouse’s back in mock commiseration. “I’m sure the bards will mention that when they sing of my conquest.”
James nodded with a grin, good-naturedly accepting the brunt of the jest. “You came all this way to regale us with your exploits, did you?”
From the shadows, Randolph brought forward a horse that carried a blindfolded man whose hands were bound.
