The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas

by Glen Craney

  James dared not question Robert’s judgment in front of the barons. Instead, he came aside the king’s ear and, with a tight-lipped whisper, begged, “Rob, a word alone with you.”

  Robert, shaking and sweating profusely, wheeled wild-eyed on him. “And you, Lord Douglas, shall henceforth address me as a king!” He marched out of the council session to gain the seclusion of his privy chamber.

  Stunned by the outburst, James followed on Robert’s heels and pushed his way inside before the door could be barred. When Robert had finally stopped throwing anything within his reach, James sought to douse the fit with calmness. “What has happened?”

  Eyes bloodshot and darting, Robert paced in an ever-tightening circle. He picked up the stoker at the hearth and drove it against the stones in the wall. “Soules’s jilted mistress came to Liz and revealed the plot! That snake was scheming my murder!”

  “Then hang Soules. But Brechin has only followed his conscience.”

  “Are you in league with them?”

  James was driven to his heels by the charge. “Have you gone mad?”

  “Why do you oppose me on this?”

  “Brechin is beloved by all,” James reminded him. “You’ll only blacken your good name by his execution. It is not worthy of you. Gain Brechin’s fealty by earning it with mercy.”

  Robert clawed frantically at the weeping lesions on his arms. Only weeks ago, the sores had appeared healed, but now they had returned with these manic rages. “I will tell you what is not worthy of me! You sleeping with that French nun outside the bonds of matrimony! Bringing ridicule and divine curses down upon my rule! That is why the pope denies my petitions! You will marry that woman at once!”

  “My dealings with Jeanne are none of your concern.”

  “They are my concern, by God! You are one of my councilors! Your sinfulness reflects poorly on me! I know why you avoid her! You’ve wallowed long enough in this unseemly pining for that dead Fife woman! I am sick of it!”

  James came up face to face with him. “Since when did you become so pious? Have you forgotten your dalliance on Tioram with Christiana while your wife languished in England?”

  Robert took a step back, as if expecting James to come at him with a dagger and finish the regicide. “That was an indiscretion of youth. I command you to take a wife and rid me of this divine punishment for your debauchery!”

  “Leave off this, I warn you!”

  “I am your king! And you will abide me on this!”

  “Listen to you! You rant on like Caernervon!”

  Robert lunged and swung wildly, but James blocked the blow. Robert taunted him to throw a punch in retaliation.

  James turned and marched out.

  XXXVI

  JEANNE ASSISTED ELIZABETH BRUCE FROM the royal barge, and together they waded through the chilly breakwaters of Dornoch Firth toward the windswept dunes below Tain. Reaching the shore, they found the ancient path that led to St. Duthac’s sanctuary. The ground was pocked with frozen footprints, many formed by the bare feet of pilgrims who had come here over the centuries to petition divine intercessions. Hearing the queen breathing hard from the exertion, Jeanne slowed their approach up the treacherous trail. “Perhaps we should rest a bit before we attempt it.”

  Leaning down to wring the water from the hem of her traveling mantle, Elizabeth looked up to demand a retraction of the implication that she was not capable of making the climb. How many ladies of her age could touch their shoes without bending their knees? She had just celebrated her forty-fifth birthday—mourned it might be a better description—but she still became indignant when the younger ladies in her court made a fuss over her. True, she had put on weight, and her joints ached from the rheumatism, but she still slept only three hours a night and outlasted all of them in attending to the duties in the new royal residence at Cardross. “I once ran to that kirk. You can wrap me in the burial shroud the day I can no longer walk to it.”

  “The king ordered me to keep tight rein on you,” Jeanne said. “And the physicians—”

  “My husband is a fine one to give lectures about physicians! Had we listened to those blood-sucking leeches, we’d both be in the grave.”

  Seeing Jeanne take refuge in hurt silence, Elizabeth intertwined an arm with her elbow in a plea for forgiveness. She often forgot how withering hot her Irish temper could run. As they ascended the uneven stone stairway that led to the wooded bluffs, she choked up with tears. Each step along this hallowed track brought back crushing memories. Robert had begged her to delay the arduous journey until summer, but she was determined to set out at the first thaw to fulfill the vow she had made twenty-one years ago. On the night that she had cowered here with Belle, near starvation and not knowing if their men were alive, she had promised the Almighty that she would return one day on pilgrimage to this Culdee sanctuary if her husband were kept safe and resurrected in his kingship.

  Unlike Robert, who felt perpetually oppressed by the Malachy Curse, she now looked back on their lives together as a succession of miracles. The most recent had also been the most blessed: Six months ago, she had given birth to a son, David. Although she had provided Robert with two daughters after her return from captivity in England, she had all but given up hope of producing a male heir. The pregnancy prior to David’s had been difficult, and most Scots had expected her to lose this latest child to a miscarriage. In a moment of despair, she had even consulted a famous seer from Strath Fillan, who had deepened her pessimism with a report that his scrying revealed an empty throne.

  For all of these reasons and more, the news of David’s birth had been greeted with great celebration across the realm. But the joy was tempered by concern about Robert’s alarming decline in health. After the parliamentary session at Arbroath, the skin-eating disease had begun to infect his mind more frequently, and she had heard the whispered fears that by siring an heir so late in his life, he had doomed the kingdom to a regency and another clan war. There was also some sentiment that Marjorie’s son, Robert Stewart, now nine years old, had been divinely destined for the throne because of his mother’s travails in England and her martyr’s death in childbirth.

  These conflicts among his subjects were troubling to her husband, but his most painful tribulation was his estrangement from James Douglas. Robert’s outburst during the Brechin inquest had fractured their already strained friendship, and during these past years, the two men had communicated only by official correspondence. Robert was too proud to ask forgiveness for his baseless accusations of disloyalty. And James, equally stubborn, had repulsed all attempts at reconciliation. She had even enlisted Jeanne as an unofficial intermediary between the two men, but to little effect.

  Now, as she often had in the past, she tried to prime her younger companion for more news. “I should not have taken you away from Jamie. Who will keep him out of trouble?”

  Jeanne smiled at the poorly disguised foray for gossip. “He won’t miss me, I should think.”

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  “Last month. For one night, was all.”

  Elizabeth shook her head at the utter stupidity of men. When the war against England was renewed after the expiration of the two-year truce, Jeanne had accompanied James on the campaigns, including his second daring raid into Yorkshire, this time to Rievaulx Abbey, where they had come within a whisker of capturing Caernervon. And yet rumors were rampant that Jeanne shared only James’s bed, not his heart. She suspected that her escort had volunteered to accompany her on this pilgrimage to fulfill a secret quest of her own: By retracing the steps that Belle had walked, she was trying to better understand the long-departed woman who still held James captive. Determined to smoke her out on the subject, Elizabeth stole a sideways glance at her and risked, “May I ask you a question of a personal nature?”

  Jeanne gave her a wry look. “Only if I am afforded the same opportunity.”

  Elizabeth chortled at the hard-driven bargain. During their month-long sojourn together,
they had come to know each other so well that they often conversed in an informal, even jesting, manner. “You should be the king’s diplomat. … Why do you stay with Jamie?”

  “He has never deceived me.”

  “Neither has my cook, but I don’t warm my nights with him. … Do you love him?” When Jeanne nodded, unable to speak it, Elizabeth huffed, “Then for the sake of Finian’s fasting, why have you two not taken the vows?”

  “His heart remains bound to another.”

  Before Elizabeth could vent her exasperation, a flicker of golden light above the tree line startled her. Was her mind playing tricks, or had that been an elf spark? These old oaks looked so familiar. A shudder of nostalgia came over her. How strange. That horrid day when she had staggered up this same path with Belle, they had spoken of the same stubborn man. A bard in Ulster once told her that life does not progress in a straight line, as the Roman monks insist, but spirals through time, backtracking to the same places and moments with certain aspects of the experience altered. Had she come back to Tain of her own free will? Or had God led her here again for some deeper purpose? As she grew older, she found herself pondering such questions that she once dismissed as mystical nonsense. Returned to the present, she asked Jeanne, “Jamie doesn’t love you?”

  “I accepted from the beginning that I’d never have that part of him.”

  “Has he ever spoken to you about Belle?”

  “No.”

  “Insufferable creatures! These men of ours will carry their heart wounds to their graves!”

  Falling silent, they walked the rest of the way counseled by their own troubled thoughts and memories.

  When, at last, they reached the crumbling sanctuary fence that still surrounded the kirk, Elizabeth braced against its ancient stones to regain her wind. It was here that she and Marjorie, frightened and weary, had crouched while Belle ran to the door. As the mists now swirled and closed in, she shivered with a foreboding. She had no reason to be frightened now, for their old enemies were long gone, the earl of Ross dead and the Comyns subdued. Yet she was haunted by a dread whose source she could not locate. She turned to call for her guards, having forgotten that she had ordered them to remain at the barge. To avoid the admiring throngs, she had insisted that no announcement of her arrival be sent ahead. Tightening her grip on Jeanne’s arm, she approached the kirk with trepidation and pounded the doorknocker, just as Belle had done years ago.

  A pock-faced Culdee monk crowned with a mash of white hair slid open the slot. “No room!” He slammed it shut, nearly pinching her fingers.

  She nodded, having expected the rude greeting, and persisted with a second knock. “We require sanctuary!”

  This time, the crabby monk cracked the rusty door and poked out his head. “Sanctuary? From whom?”

  Elizabeth brought her sleeve to her tremoring mouth. Every remembrance of that night long ago came flooding back to her. She repeated Belle’s frantic plea, as if by reenacting the event she might alter the past. “The English seek to capture us. You are our last hope.”

  The hermit swung the door back wide to challenge that claim. “The English haven’t troubled these parts since King Robert chased them south.”

  She winked through tears at Jeanne in conspiracy, and like an actress about to play out an important scene, gruffly reminded the monk, “I was told that the Culdees were the true descendants of Christ! I see now that I was misinformed!”

  The monk’s glare sharpened with suspicion. “Who told you such a thing?”

  “A brother of yours. Sweenie the Wee-kneed.”

  The monk yelped with excitement. “You know the Wee-kneed? That rapscallion! That little half-devil! Where is he? Is he with you?”

  “He is in the South risking his life to save our king!” Elizabeth snapped. “But I will tell him of the base hospitality you have showered upon us!”

  His memory jolted, the monk squinted to better see the queen’s features. Slowly, he lowered to his cracking knees and cried, “God’s mercy!”

  Bemused by his astonishment, Elizabeth brought him back to his feet. “It is reassuring to know, Brother Fergus, that you still offer the same warm welcome to pilgrims.”

  The monk’s baggy lids swelled with tears. “You remembered.”

  Elizabeth walked to the corner of the chapel where she had fallen asleep on that night long ago. Running her hand across the charred walls, she saw that the stones had not been altered by a single crack or tuft of moss. She beckoned her bag from Jeanne and, withdrawing from it a large votive candle, lit the wick and stood over the flame while offering a prayer. After several minutes of tearful contemplation, she placed a draw sack of coins into Fergus’s hand. “Tend this flame for me until I die.”

  Brother Fergus bowed in obeisance. When he returned upright, he saw, for the first time, Jeanne’s features clearly in the votive’s flickering light. His leathery hands trembled as he brought her startled face to his failing eyes. “How can it be? They told me you were dead.”

  Unnerved, Jeanne tried to pull away, but the monk would not release her.

  Sobbing, he clutched at her. “Not a day has passed that I’ve not done penance for allowing the traitors take you.”

  Elizabeth was stunned. The old hermit was a bit dotaged, but how could he now mistake Jeanne for the deceased Belle? She empathized with Jeanne’s hurt feelings; to be plagued by the memory of Jamie’s old love was torment enough, but to be mistaken for Belle in the flesh was beyond cruel. Seeing Jeanne about to disabuse the monk of his error, she grasped the French lass’s arm to petition her forbearance.

  Brother Fergus begged Jeanne, “I pray you forgive me.”

  Elizabeth nodded for her to play the part.

  “There is nothing to for—“ Jeanne doubled over from a sharp pang.

  Elizabeth eased her to the floor. “Are you ill?

  Jeanne stumbled outside and vomited.

  Brother Fergus hurried to his cell. Moments later, he returned with the sanctuary’s famous healing stones. Assisting Jeanne back inside the kirk, he lowered her to the floor and laid the stones around her. After nearly a minute of hovering his hands over her in spiritual diagnosis, he looked up and smiled at Elizabeth. “Do you remember the vision that so frightened her?”

  Elizabeth blanched, thrust back to the moment forever seared into her memory: Before the Earl of Ross had captured them on that fateful night, Belle had told her of being awakened by a strange dream of James running toward her carrying an infant.

  Brother Fergus kissed Jeanne’s womb. “This day we have been twice blessed. The saint has brought you back to us … with the promised child.”

  XXXVII

  DESPITE THE LATE WINTER CHILL, Isabella’s anger boiled as she sat waiting in her carriage outside the Lion’s Gate of London Tower. After raising a rebellion army in France and marshaling the support of the fractious English barons, she had deposed Caernervon, rendering him the first monarch in England’s history to suffer such ignominy. Yet because she was French, and a woman, these London quislings now refused her the privilege of witnessing her own son be knighted in preparation for his coronation that afternoon. Even the lowly scribes who stood at the wall slits to record the ritual were being accorded more access than her.

  Oui, remember this day in your chronicles, you feckless monks! England will not soon forget the First of February in the Year 1327.

  She looked up with bitter regret at the cruciform window high above her. Four bloody years had passed since her ambitious paramour, Roger Mortimer, an accomplice in the coup, cheated Caernervon’s execution ax by escaping through that aperture. She had finally surrendered to Mortimer’s persistent advances, but only to enlist his aid in chasing her husband and his rapacious favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, off to Wales. Yet she soon learned to her dismay that she had merely replaced one inconstant lout with another: Mortimer was now pitting young Edward against her, puffing her son with flattery and stoking him to invade Scotland as the first ac
t of his reign.

  As the royal herald rode past her window, she muttered unheard curses at the new crest that Mortimer had commissioned to celebrate his rise to power.

  Roger, you trumpet your escape from that Tower as if the Almighty Himself had reached down and plucked you from the block. But it was I, not God, who saved you. Do you forget the soporifics that I secreted into your cell that night? The gaolers who fell asleep on your watch paid dearly enough with their heads. You would be rotting in the grave had I not commissioned the galley at Dover to take you to Paris. I warm your bed, but do not think me blinded to your schemes. You will not shunt me from the governance of my son!

  At last, the prince appeared on the ramparts to accept the dull acclamation of the throngs, whose loyalty had been purchased with coin that the realm’s treasury could ill afford. Shod in sandals and dressed in a kirtle of velvet opened at the breast, young Edward could barely crane his narrow head and dark brown curls above the merlons. When the smattering of cheers dissipated, the boy descended the steps, followed by John of Hainault, a mercenary officer from the Continent hired for his protection. Escorted to a white stallion caparisoned in gold and black, Edward mounted and, offering his mother not even a nod of acknowledgment, rode off for Westminster with Mortimer at his side.

  Her eyes welled up. Child, you promised I would rule with you.

  All around her, the Tower grounds echoed with ghostly screams. Incensed that she had been left behind, she ordered her postilion to catch up with the royal procession. Her nerves, already frayed by the upheavals of the past months, were now shaken to the bone by the rattling clops over the cobblestones of Lower Thames Street. The city was strangely quite for this hour, a rare occurrence that she found blessed, until she realized that the crowds had merely become tense and surly on spying her approach. Even the weather had turned traitorous, seducing her with a glint of morning sun, only to give way to a lacerating mix of sleet and rain. Mortimer had tried to cower her to remain in her quarters, ostensibly for her safety, but she would not allow him to flaunt himself as the boy’s prime councilor. These English ingrates needed reminding that the daughter of a French king had saved them from a hapless monarch bred of their own bloodlines.