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

by Glen Craney

  She risked a glance past the crack in the curtains. Thrice she had traveled this gloomy ceremonial route. How frightened she had been on her first arrival in London, at the tender age of thirteen. Transported up from Margate on a galley under heavy guard, she had fallen green with seasickness. This morning was balmy compared to that horrid day, when the river had frozen over for the first time in thirty years. Caernervon had met her on Westminster’s steps with a manner more frigid than the icicles hanging from the gargoyles. She had feared she would not survive a year in this mirthless land, but she had outlasted them all: Longshanks, Gaveston, Clifford, Despenser.

  And now, her worthless husband.

  Her second procession down these same treacherous warrens had taken place only three years ago, during her triumphant return from Paris. After escaping Caernervon’s clutches, she had sailed across the Channel to the protection of her brother, Charles IV, the king of France. Her cousins, overjoyed at her return, had begged her to remain in Paris, but she was determined to see her Edward installed on the English throne. Now these fickle Londoners, who had once welcomed her back as their liberator, cast aspersions on her honor and slandered her with the epithet, the She-Wolf of France. Had she made an ill-fated choice by leaving Paris? No, she would yet bring these English back to her side. She cared not a whit for their love; it was their fear she desired.

  The blast of a foghorn above London Bridge startled her from her scheming thoughts. That molding monstrosity never failed to thrust her into a despond. Only Norman dullards would cobble a veritable city of houses and shops atop a bridge. Unlike the elegant Parisian spans designed to enhance the beauty of the Seine, this squat traverse poisoned the Thames with sulfurous miasmas coughed up from hundreds of chimneys. Over the centuries, so many buildings had been haphazardly encrusted upon the buttresses that the bridge now resembled a giant beaver’s tunnel on the verge of collapse.

  At the tollhouse, where William Wallace’s severed head had once been nailed on display, a shriveled penis and testicles now hung from a stanchion.

  She snorted a vengeful puff of air at the macabre sight.

  There is the last of you, Despenser. You did not learn from Gaveston’s folly, did you? He too underestimated me. You thought you could steal my estates and cast me away in some hole, but you did not count on the troubles with France. If there was one thing besides buggery that I could rely upon from my husband, it was his whimpering insecurity. He refused to cross the Channel and pay homage to Paris, so I offered to serve as his envoy and take the babe with me as a gesture of good will. What fools you were to let us go! But I kept my promise to return, no? When I marched across that bridge out there with an army reinforced with every man you ever insulted, the two of you scampered off to the wilds without raising a sword.

  The royal procession doubled its pace across Fleet Street. Mobs from the outlying shires still loyal to Caernervon lined the way, no doubt drawn by the rumors that he would return at the eleventh hour with an army of thousands to abort the coronation. When the Abbey’s spires finally broke through the low clouds, she felt safe enough to retract the curtain fully.

  Across the way stood the Temple, once the most hallowed of confines in England, but now used as an armoury. Her thoughts returned to the Feast of the Swans, when Caernervon had pissed his breeches inside that sanctuary and his new knights had nearly drowned themselves in wine. Months later, most of them did drown, in Bannockburn’s quagmire. The young knights who rode with her son this day now blustered that they were the generation destined to bring Robert Bruce and James Douglas to the Tower.

  Several minutes later, they arrived at Westminster. Pelted by the strengthening rain, the Archbishop of Canterbury stood waiting on the portico with his drenched forehead braced against the biting wind. She thought he looked more like a duck with its bill tucked into its breast than the country’s most venerated churchman. Young Edward dismounted and, without waiting for the rest of his entourage to arrive, nodded impatiently for the traditional entry to commence. The acolytes hurried ahead of their future king and the archbishop while unrolling a carpet of red vermilion toward the coronation chair.

  Her carriage was diverted into a wynd adjacent to the south cloister. She angled her head through the window and discovered that a contingent of mounted guards had converged on her. “I must enter from the front!” When the sergeant of the detail ignored her protest and halted the carriage at a rear portal used by the monks to load foodstuffs, she threw open the door and clambered out in a rage. “Damn you! Did you not hear me?”

  “Orders, my lady,” the sergeant said coldly.

  “Whose orders?”

  “The King’s.”

  “The King is no longer—” She only then understood that he was speaking of her son, not her deposed husband. Indignant, she flung off her cloak and tried to retreat through the cloister’s garth, but the guards blocked her path. The sergeant pointed her toward a hallway that led into the chapter house.

  Her heart pounded from terror. The cloister was deserted. Where were the monks? Conniving bastard! Mortimer had waited until this final hour to have her murdered. He knew the canons would be in the minster to witness the ceremony. As the guards drove her into the bowels of the cloister, she searched the colonnades for a path of escape. Finding none, she whispered to the sergeant, “Whatever you have been paid, I will double it for your forbearance.”

  The officer said nothing as he forced her pace with a hand at her elbow. The tapers along the narrow hall had been extinguished. She gasped at the evil cleverness of Mortimer’s plan.

  This is why he tried to convince me to remain here.

  They were taking her to the abbot’s private chapel to commit the deed. Roger and the other barons would make a great show of lamentation and insist that she had been waylaid by one of Caernervon’s henchmen while praying alone to petition God’s blessing on their new king. It would be the garrote under sheepskin, or perhaps a poison. No marks would be found.

  She whispered a fervent prayer to the Virgin as the sergeant led her around a corner. When he refused to acknowledge her plaintive glance, she crossed her breast and begged, “I pray you, make it painless.” She pressed her eyes closed and waited for the cord against her neck.

  The door creaked open—a resounding chant stole her breath.

  She was escorted into the south transept, and the sergeant released her to a chair in the first row facing the raised platform on the high altar. Had the officer lost his resolve? The archbishop and clergy turned on her from their elevated seats. Their faces were cast in surprise, or was it disappointment?

  They did not expect to see me alive again.

  The sergeant waited to be dismissed while she tried to compose herself.

  Had this man risked his life to save hers? She accepted his kerchief to muffle her sobs. The barons and clerics were still staring at her, but the angle of their arched eyes revealed that they were shocked not by her continued existence, but her attire. For weeks she had debated what to wear. A gown too gaudy would have been seen as frivolous, particularly given the penurious state of the treasury. Parliament had criticized her taste as too risqué—too French, they really meant. When she had commissioned a ruby-studded girdle of silk for the wedding of her handmaiden, there had been talk of convening a trial for her dissipation of royal assets. On this day, she had overcompensated with a black satin dress, edged with grise fur and brightened only by a necklace of rubies encased in silver. These congenitally suspicious English no doubt saw in its somberness some omen of disaster or an occult message for Capetian spies to come to her aid. To the depths of Hell with them! If they persisted in calling her a wolf, then she would dress the part and—

  “My lady?” the sergeant whispered to her ear. “Are you not well?”

  She glanced down at her hands. They were shaking from her fury.

  Across the nave, young Edward sat on the coronation chair, his feet dangling from the throne in yet another reminder of the p
erverse nature of the proceeding. He stared reverentially at Longshanks’s black marble crypt, as if expecting the old man’s ghost to rise up and crown him. On a crimson pillow lay arrayed the regalia of the realm: The cross, the scepter, the royal mace, the black Rood of St. Margaret stolen from the Scots, and the infidel dagger that had wounded Longshanks at Acre. A ripple of whispers roused Edward from his trance. Only then made aware that his mother had arrived, the boy greeted her with an indifferent glance, a coldness that stung.

  She looked across the pews and studied the faces of John, Eleanor, and Joan. Those children had been the result of a miracle only slightly less astounding than divine intervention. The arrival of an heir had given Caernervon such a potent respite from his self-loathing that his nature had become altered. Although he continued to prefer the company of men, her husband would thereafter on occasion appear at her bedchamber, usually during some crisis in the realm, and he would endure the sexual act with her as if it were an expiation of his sins and a reaffirmation that he was truly king.

  As the chanting monks raised the pitch of their Te Deums, she sank into the soothing Latin intonations. She had often found refuge in this abbey, sitting for hours under its ribbed vaulting while writing letters to her father that never made it across the Channel. This was the only place in England where she felt at peace. The flying buttresses and polished Caen stone, brightly painted in reds and greens, reminded her of Notre Dame, as did the arcades hung with tapestries of vermilion and gold and the thick haze from the censing angels that swirled around the lime-washed pillars. The nave almost danced with the streams of diffused light reflected from the rose window.

  The chant ceased abruptly as the archbishop raised the jeweled crown of St. Edward the Confessor and called upon the prince to recite the concession that had been required of every king since William the Conqueror.

  “He seizes not,” Edward repeated, “but receives.”

  Isabella heard a spate of snickering erupt behind her. She knew what these English curs were thinking: Edward receives only because his mother has seized. Her eyes fell upon the Stone of Destiny resting on an exposed shelf under the coronation chair. She interrogated that imprisoned block of limestone in silence.

  What black magic do you dispense, Stone? You claim to recognize true monarchs. Have I rid myself of a useless husband only to be tormented by a recalcitrant son? Caernervon was the first English king to be anointed in your presence. Yet you stood silent while the crown was ripped from his grasp. He swooned during the deposition, they said. Fell upon his knees begging for a second chance like a child found guilty of some petty transgression. If you were true, as the Scots say, you would have screamed the day he ascended to this throne. Screamed not in recognition, but in protest. What prophecy will you now shout upon my son?

  The archbishop tapped his toe in annoyance at being forced to wait for the distracted prince to strip to his shirt and breeches. When Edward, red-nosed and sniveling, finally acceded to the prostration to accept the anointments, the cleric betrayed a note of tonal dissonance in his pronouncement of the ordo’s next demand: “You, Edward III of England, shall keep full peace and accord in God and to the Church, to the people and to the clergy?”

  “I shall.”

  “Grant thou all rightful laws and customs and defend and strengthen them in accordance to the will of God?”

  Edward flushed with pride as the archbishop raised the hallowed sword once carried by the Hammer of the Scots. So fervently did the boy despise his deposed father that he often fantasized of having been sired by Longshanks. Denied the characteristic Plantagenet ruddy complexion, prodigious height, and reddish hair, he never tired of searching for ways to alter his appearance, even wearing his locks long and wild in the fashion of that mad warrior. His hands quivered as took the sword framed with gold-gilt quillons and darkened by Welsh, Scot, and French blood. With teeth set, he heaved the point of the heavy blade toward the heavens and looked down at his mother in accusation that she deemed him incapable of the task. Then, as if directing the warning at her, he spoke the final verse of the ordo, “I shall defend and strengthen.”

  She brought a hand to her mouth, stifling a gasp at that brazen act of insolence. Her worst fears were now confirmed: She had not used her son to gain power, as the lords suspected; no, he had used her. She had seen that cruel glare before. By sheer force of will, the boy was bent on transforming himself into the man he believed to be his grandfather.

  As the lords and clerics filed up to give homage to their new king, she remembered the warning that she had confided to James years ago. Its terrible truth, she feared, was about to be proven again.

  Men make oaths. Women suffer the consequences.

  CAERNERVON PEERED OUT THROUGH THE narrow air hole of his second-floor cell in Berkeley Castle. He finally turned aside, his bleary eyes no longer able to withstand the strain. He had been confined to this miserable keep on the Welsh frontier for more than a year, forced to keep a constant watch for billowing sails above the Severen estuary that fed to the Bristol Channel. Mortimer’s henchmen had furthered his humiliation by banishing him to this keep, once one of the domains once held by the earl of Gloucester, the baron who had shamed him with the martyr’s death at Bannockburn.

  Yet each recession of the tide brought him only renewed despair. He had to keep faith that Archbishop Melton would come to release him. But what if his messages had not reached his old ally in York? No, he must not contemplate such a horrid thing. The archbishop was merely waiting until spring to bring a force. Once rescued, he would march with the cleric against that London mob with an army of fifty thousand and reclaim his crown. Melton would not fail him, for he had promised to elevate the cleric to the seat at Canterbury when Isabella and Mortimer were captured and exiled. Those two nesting vipers had cornered him in a fit of weakness. Driven nearly insane by the fear of losing another lover, he had relinquished the throne after being falsely promised that he would be reunited with Despenser on a well-appointed estate.

  He resolved not to dwell on that horrid debasement. Yet his own mind persisted in betraying him; at times he wished never to be king again, then an hour would pass, and he would be consumed by the shame. The memories of that wretched day blinded him with raw grief. Two weeks after giving up the crown, he received the news that Despenser had been executed in the same brutal manner in which he himself had ordered Lancaster dispatched: Before being drawn and quartered, his favourite had been kept alive long enough to witness his genitals be hacked off and burned.

  Oh, Hugh! My cowardice doomed you! As it doomed Piers!

  Soon he would avenge them both. In the Almighty’s eyes, he was still king. That was his only comfort. But time was running out. The terrors visited on him during the past months had caused his hair to fall out and his gums to inflame. He bled profusely from the nose and his skin had turned the shade of an overripe peach. Worst of all, he was plagued at night by visions of Lancaster’s ghost coming to murder him.

  That scheming French whore did this to me!

  Isabella had bewitched him into believing he had seeded the whelp that now wore his stolen crown. How had he failed to see through her plotting? And who was the father of that brat? Lancaster? Gloucester? Piers had warned him about the satanic mark on Isabella’s back. That Frenchwoman had seduced him to her bed to disgorge the other three brats to make Parliament believe that Edward had also been his progeny. No doubt she had whispered her treacherous plans to the little bastard before he was even severed from her cord.

  The mongrel pup would not wait his turn, as he had been required to do! When he got his hands on him, that boy will wish—a flash of swift movement came from the corner. Were the shades attacking him again?

  Filthy devils! Away from me!

  A dim light filtered through the air hole and illuminated a carving on the wall. Why had he not seen this before? He ran his hand across the etching.

  A pentagram.

  Piers has come back in spirit
to save me!

  Fifteen years had passed since his first lover had fled from their bed in a desperate exodus to escape Lancaster’s ax. Piers had vowed to return to him in spirit. The Gascon’s mother, an Albigensee, had taught her son the black art of demonic travel, and this symbol of that heresy was to accompany Piers’s specter.

  He retraced the pentagram’s outlines to speed the manifestation.

  The cell door creaked opened.

  “Piers, is that you? I knew you’d not abandon me.”

  “Turn away!” a muffled voice commanded.

  He pressed his forehead into the cot to shield his eyes. “I remember! The Devil’s Pact! Not until the light of sun!”

  Hands braced his shoulders from behind, and he pressed back into Piers’s reassuring strength. Oh Lord, this is powerful magic. His limbs trembled as Piers reached for the drawstrings on his leggings and untied them seductively. His lover’s smooth hands, so expert, reached to his waist and lowered his breeches. Caernervon arched his buttocks to receive Piers, and he felt a tremor of heat. The tip of Piers’s cock slid down his back and toward his anus. He was being teased beyond endurance.

  “This is for Thomas Lancaster,” the voice behind him whispered.

  He is acting out the part! God’s confirmation!

  Only Piers had known of their private games.

  He begged for the penetration by thrusting his buttocks higher, remembering how Piers had bragged during their intimacies of wanting to introduce the hated Lancaster to this particular form of the joust. Piers was now mimicking the dead earl being taken in such a cruel manner, just as his lover had done so many times when they had been in bed together. “Shall I play him this time, Poppy?” He imitated Lancaster’s high-pitched voice. “Don’t despoil me, I pray you!”