A merciful siege was not to be. Longshanks knew his strength. He knew our weakness. He raced back and forth along the length of our paltry ditch on his powerful steed while Scottish arrows fell fecklessly around him. Then he reined hard and rode away some distance. Cheers erupted from Berwick... but died just as abruptly when he thrust his sword above the waving plume of his helmet and charged, alone.
His great warhorse leapt over the ditch, landed on the thin lip of earth abutting the stockade and then crashed through. A host of English soldiers, knights and footmen alike, poured over the ditch, wading up to their waists in reeking muck, and clambered over the collapsing palisades. Swords and axes glinted in the pewter light of the smoky, cloud-choked day.
The Flemings of Berwick, who had sworn on their lives to protect the town, holed themselves up in the Red Hall. They died there, in smoke and flames, while the rest of the town perished by the sword. Somehow, amidst the butchery, my father had me retrieved from my post by the very archer who had foretold our doom. Brusquely, he shoved me along through the dim corridors and threw me into the room where my stepmother, Eleanor de Ferres, was soothing my two younger brothers, Hugh and Archibald. Having not seen what I had, they were oblivious to the events occurring beyond the castle walls. Hugh, four years younger than me, rattled a pair of bone dice in a wooden cup, apparently for no other reason than to hear the clatter they made. Eleanor sang a lullaby to Archibald, although her voice cracked with strain, while she rocked him softly in the cradle of her arms.
She brushed away the ringlets from little Archibald’s forehead, then laid him gently in the middle of her bed as if he were an egg she were afraid might crack. Then she ordered Hugh to bed. As she tended to them, I crept toward the door and when my hand touched the latch, I heard her soft but sure voice.
“James, you are needed here. There are dozens to defend the walls. We have only you.” She extended an ivory hand toward me.
I closed my fingers around hers and let her lead me to the bed. As I burrowed beneath the down coverings, she swept stray locks of hair away from my forehead. A smile, genuine and yet tentative, graced her mouth.
“You will have a brother or sister come autumn... if all goes as it should,” she revealed. Then her smile vanished as quickly as it had come.
“A sister this time, if you please. No more wee brothers.” I squeezed her trembling hand in reassurance.
“We will consider ourselves blessed with whatever God sees fit to give us.” Awkwardly, she pulled the coverings up and tucked us all in. “And it will be your duty, as the bigger brother, to make sure they are all safe. You understand?”
“Aye.” I rolled over and laid my arm across Archibald’s small chest. For hours I listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing before I fell into a fitful sleep where I knew not nightmare from memory.
As Berwick smoldered and the screams of the dying cut inside our ears, my brothers and I kept company in that room, the shutters drawn tight and a solitary peat brazier glowing meagerly. Every now and then, we heard a sound like thunder rattling the walls. It was not thunder, high up in the sky, but stones flung from the powerful arm of a trebuchet. We always knew when another one was coming. First came the shouts of warning from our own, as they watched the great machine being loaded; then came the groaning of the windlass and the dull thump and twang as the engineer pulled the pin and the arm arced skyward. Most of the time it fell either short or wide of its mark. Most of the time.
Our bellies roared for food. The town had fallen within hours, but my father was not so quick to surrender the castle. I was old enough to know that he would, in time, have to yield. The soldiers brought us dark bread and watered wine to sustain us, but Archibald was not happy with such fare and flung his scrap of bread at the wall in a tantrum. Hugh stuffed chunks into his cheeks, as if he feared he’d get no more. The smell of food, or perhaps it was the smoke or the stench of something as yet unknown to me, made me retch, even though I was never more famished in all my short life.
Eleanor read to us in a calming voice that put my rampant heart at ease of one William Marshall, a knight of England no less, who served five kings. I always admired that of her, for not all womenfolk could read. We clustered at the base of a small folding table tucked against the wall, carved by the careful hands of some of the very Flemings who had since perished together brutally in their refuge of companionship. Atop it sat the one symbol of comfort we possessed – a cross of silver-gilt two hands high. In its center, a single, vermilion jewel glittered. I was more intrigued by the light playing off its facets than the significance of the crucifix itself or the purport of recited verses. Every now and then my stepmother would pause, reread a passage and gaze at me sincerely, as if to break the spell the jewel had cast upon me and note the special importance of the words so meticulously penned on the ocher pages pressed beneath her fingertips. My father had stolen her away from her English parents while they were staying in Scotland. Against their wishes, he made her his wife and my brother Archibald was born within the year. My own mother, Elizabeth, sister of James the Stewart, had died when Hugh was born. My memory of her was but a fleeting shadow and it seemed my stepmother had always been there in the fore.
For three long days and three even longer nights, we huddled together, our hearts racing in unison, our eyes fixed upon the door, our voices hushed so we could hear above our own words any sound from without. Minutes seemed more like hours. A day like a week. Hugh was content to stare into the glow of the peat brazier and hum nonsense, but wee Archibald yearned to exercise his legs. Within a few hours of our first day of seclusion he had inspected every inch of the room, including whatever piles of dust he could gather in his hands from beneath the bed or strands of cobwebs from behind the furniture. He was too much like me in his energies and tenfold more vocal. When Archibald at last wept himself into utter exhaustion, to pass the time I scratched letters onto the bottom side of an overturned stool with the knife Father had given me and pointed to each as Hugh repeated them. He was a dull lad. No matter how many times his tutor, Eleanor or I patiently sat with him, marking letters into a clay tablet and then letting him trace them again with a stylus, he could not remember the proper way to write them.
I dug my knife into the wood, but Hugh paid no heed.
He tugged at his lip with a thumb and forefinger. “Edward,” he muttered. “Edward, son of Henry, son of John, son of Henry, son of –”
“No, Hugh,” I corrected, as I grabbed at his hand and guided his finger over the letters. He had a penchant for memorizing
lineage, even that of English kings, though I doubted he knew of whom he spoke. “This is your name: H – U – G –”
The clang of metal on metal erupted in the corridor. I lowered my knife and watched the door. Eleanor snatched up sleeping little Archibald from the bed and retreated into the furthest corner of the room. My little brother thrust his bottom lip out and began to wail. Eleanor buried his face against her breast to muffle his betrayal, but he only cried louder. I heard the thud and rattle of weapons falling to the floor. I tucked my meager blade up into the loose folds of my sleeve and then pulled a wide-eyed Hugh into my arms. When the door burst open, tottering on its rusty hinges, it was not my father’s guards before us, but soldiers of England, harbingers of Longshanks.
Ch. 4
James Douglas – Berwick, 1296
The first through the door was tall and gaunt of cheek. Over his hauberk was a coat of vibrant red quartered by purest white. He was too young yet to be a lord of any influence, but clearly he held himself in some esteem. Not an earl or a lord, possibly the bastard of one or the other, but more likely the son of an English baron. His piercing dark eyes swept the room. I noticed the faintest smile of satisfaction as his gaze fell upon Eleanor.
“The door,” he murmured, gesturing at it as he strutted toward Eleanor. Four others closed in behind him, grinning with superiority. The door groaned shut. His heels clicked with each haunting stride. He
halted a few feet from her and removed his conical helmet, dropping it to the floor. Then he peeled his coif of mail from his head with rehearsed precision. He went to the window and threw open the shutters. I blinked away blinding sunlight. His tight ringlets of blue-black fell from crown to collar and glistened with oil in the afternoon light.
Eleanor tucked her fitful bairn tight against her breast, even though he struggled to free himself of her protective grip. As the soldier reached a long arm toward Archibald, Eleanor lunged toward the folding table. With Archibald clamped beneath her left arm, she snatched up the silver-gilt cross and swung it at the man. His head bobbed to dodge the blow. White teeth gleaming, he snarled and ripped Archibald from her as easily as if he were plucking petals from a daisy. Archibald tumbled into the legs of another soldier, with a beard halfway down his chest, who laughed and then kicked my wee brother for sheer sport. The laughter ended when Archibald bit him in the calf. A moment later he had Archibald hanging in the air by his shirt.
“Don’t harm that one,” the red-coated leader barked, jabbing a finger toward Archibald.
“Christ, Neville, the pup deserves a lesson,” the bearded one begged. “Shouldn’t go ‘round doing that to his elders. Least of all me. I’ve no tolerance for brats.”
“Douglas’s brats, mind you, so leave him be. The king will want them all in one piece.”
Then he turned his eyes, as dark and cold as a January night, back on Eleanor. Her trembling hands crept over her belly, where her child was growing.
As he hovered closer, she brought the cross back to strike another blow. He swept it from her grasp and sent it clattering across the floor, then pinned her to the wall beside the table.
He chuckled with amusement as she flailed her fists at him. “First – let us reap our harvest.”
Neville slammed her down on the table. She winced as her head snapped back and struck its unforgiving surface.
“Quiet now. Close your eyes, sweet one. It will be over... soon enough.”
“Our turn then?” the youngest and greenest of them piped. Panting, he pressed closer.
“Shut up, you fool,” Neville growled. “Hold her for me.”
The youth flew forward and clamped her wrists between his long, grimy fingers as he trembled with excitement.
Undaunted, the filth flipped up my stepmother’s skirts and then fumbled beneath the bottom of his heavy hauberk for the cord on the flap of his hose.
I was a boy yet, but not blind. I had seen the older pages and handmaidens coupling in the buttery and in the bushes behind the mews. The stallion mounting the mare. The ram covering a ewe. But I knew the difference in what I was bearing witness to. I saw the tears cold as sleet against Eleanor’s cheek, the plea for mercy in her gentle eyes.
Neville had wedged his knee in between her clamped legs and even as she fought to writhe from him he probed recklessly with his hips. The tendons in Eleanor’s neck went taut like the chords on a harp. Neville tried to kiss Eleanor’s quivering mouth, but she jerked her head to the side. He locked his hands on both sides of her jaw, wrenched her face around and pressed his foul mouth onto hers even as a scream rose and died in her throat.
Then suddenly, Neville howled – his ecstasy turned to agony. Eleanor’s teeth were latched onto his lower lip. He ripped himself from her and shoved her onto the floor, where she landed face down with a resounding thud. One hand holding up his leggings, he pulled the back of his other hand across a blood-soaked chin and stepped toward her. Heaving with sobs of pain, Eleanor clutched protectively at her belly.
I do not remember letting go of Hugh... or drawing out the knife I had kept concealed. Only that I found myself on the violator’s back, my blade up high and then arcing down toward his neck.
He reeled around and whipped his arm back just enough to deflect my blade. Its sharp edge glanced cleanly across his cheek.
I fell to the floor and rolled away. As I did so, the knife slipped from my grasp. A red river poured from the gash on the side of Neville’s face. His eyes blazed at me with abomination.
My palm burned. I locked my fingers in a fist. As I glanced again at Eleanor – she who had held me when a young boy’s nightmares stole away sleep, taught me my letters, told me tales of fairies and smiled with patience whenever she tended to my bruises and scrapes – I knew I would do it again. For her. For Hugh or Archibald. For anyone.
And deep, deep inside me, while the blood streamed red from Neville’s gaping flesh, I held no shame for my newfound hatred.
“What here?” boomed a voice from the doorway.
The pimple-faced one stuttered, “N-n-nothing, Sir Marmaduke. We were only –”
A mailed knight walked into the room. Older, authoritative, he admonished them all with a glance. Most of all Neville.
Eleanor, shaking with tears, retreated into the corner. Archibald dove into her trembling arms and stroked away her tears with tiny hands.
The soldiers drew back from Sir Marmaduke as he approached Eleanor, his well-worn face soft with concern. For a moment, he studied her, though she would not meet his gaze. Then he tilted his head and turned back toward his charges. Hands behind his back, he approached Neville.
“Humph,” he grunted. “I would ask, but knowing what trouble you have evoked time and again... Bother having you about sometimes, Neville. Not the pretty ‘peacock’ today, are you? Wipe the blood off your face. I shall deal with you afterward.”
Sir Marmaduke lifted my heavy chin with a thumb and forefinger. “Take this one... no, take all of them. To the hall. Let King Edward decide what’s to become of them.”
Then I felt the back of my shirt twisted into a wad. I was hoisted to my feet, thrust out the door – Hugh behind me, Eleanor and Archibald before – and escorted to the great hall by four grumbling guards, who swung their swords at their sides with each damning stride.
In the great hall of Berwick, before the dais, my father was down on both knees, the soot of the burning town on his surcoat and the blood of Englishmen speckling him from head to foot. His hands were bound at the base of his spine, his wrists so raw they oozed.
“Father!” I cried, rushing forward.
I had not made it within twenty feet of him before the butt end of a pike belonging to one of the king’s guard jammed into the soft of my belly. Winded, I crumpled to the floor in a heap. Only the pile of rushes there, decaying and littered with dirt shaken from muddy boots, softened the blow to my head. The room spun around me in a whirl of color, the threads of the tapestries on the walls blending with the riot of scarlet, green and azure adorning the coats of the English intruders. While I struggled to push myself up, a plaintive voice filled up the hall.
“My beloved nephew, Richard of Cornwall, is dead,” the king lamented. “Smote down by a ragged army of butchers and fishmongers... sliced to pieces like boar for Christmas dinner. When they brought him to me there was nothing of his once comely face to recognize. It was only by the ring I had given him that he was identified.”
Longshanks paced the length of the dais in front of the head table, his hands clasped behind his back. He paused at one end, raised his chin and drew a long breath. His flaxen beard, streaked with white at the corners of his mouth, was meticulously trimmed. Every hair on his head lay precisely in place. The scarlet cloak that flared from his angular shoulders was fringed with pristine ermine. Kingliness imbued even the air he breathed. He was absolute power. But he was neither a gentle nor a forgiving king. If ever a trace of either existed in his soul, they had long since given way to grimmer traits.
“You are to blame for this, Douglas,” he accused, turning his long, pinched, severe face toward my father. “My nephew’s death lies on your head. As does that of every corpse littering the streets of Berwick and the fields beyond it.”
The king’s left eyebrow drew far up onto his forehead until it touched the gold circlet he wore. He slipped from the dais and walked toward my father.
Father met his accusing star
e with unwavering certainty. “I differ, my king.” The last two words dripped from his tongue like burning oil. He straightened his shoulders. “I would not have murdered women and children as they ran from me.”
Longshanks drew his sword from his scabbard. With a gasp, I shot up from the floor and dove at the king’s legs to topple him. My cheek smacked against one of his long fine-edged shinbones. As I jerked at his leg fiercely, he brought his other leg back and levied a kick forceful enough to propel me toward the side tables. The side of my face collided with the stout legs of a bench and as I skidded beneath the table the bench landed on top of me. I shoved it away and clutched a throbbing jaw. I swallowed back a pool of blood. My tongue found something loose and floating. Scurrying from beneath in indignant fury, I held out my palm and spat a tooth into it. I was beyond angry just then, and my father knew it. A smirk of satisfaction passed over his lips when I clamped the tooth tightly in my fist and spat blood onto the floor. The blood that pulsed from the empty place in my mouth had the sharp, obsessive taste of revenge to it.
Tugging at his lower lip, Hugh whimpered. Eleanor tucked his head against her ribs and shushed blubbering little Archibald. She swayed slightly, still reeling from the shock of the past hour, as though trying hard to stay on her feet.
“Quiet your bastard,” Longshanks drawled, leering at her, “or I will have his tongue.”
Sir Marmaduke strode toward the king from the far end of the hall, knelt hastily and then whispered into Longshanks’ ear.
“He lives?” the king queried, glancing sideways at me with icy regard.
“Very much.” The knight nodded, then stood aside.
“Pity,” he muttered. Then to my father the king remarked, “I see your whelps come by their impudence honestly.”
He strolled back toward the head table, certain I was too humiliated to be of any further threat. With his head held high in royal arrogance, he dragged the tip of his sword through the rushes, then jammed the point into a crack and pivoted to face my father.
The Crown in the Heather (The Bruce Trilogy) Page 4
