I reached out, wrenched the blade loose and dropped to my knees beside him.
In that same moment, Christopher lunged forward as Sir Robert leapt toward me. In the swift scuffle that followed, a scream was cut short. Comyn’s uncle dropped dead before me. Christopher snatched back his knife, then nudged at the lifeless Sir Robert with his boot.
“Merciful Father, no, no. Please, nooo,” I moaned.
This was not supposed to be. Not like this. Not here. Not now. I had called Comyn here trusting he would never do something so rash, but how could I not have protected myself? He made me do this – to raise my hand against him in a holy place.
Red Comyn glared at me as if through a heavy fog. A crooked line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and into his beard. His lips parted to a gurgle. He swallowed back the blood and coughed weakly.
He drew breath and I leaned in closer, pressing my hand across the wound to try to stop the river of blood.
He clamped both hands around my forearm. “In hell, Bruce.”
His hands fell away. He closed his eyes and just when I thought he had stopped breathing altogether his chest rose and fell again. Christopher’s light touch brushed my back. My knees shook as I stood. I picked up my weapon with slick, blood-soaked fingers and looked around. A host of angels, carved wooden figures perched up high along the length of the nave with wings outspread, gazed down at me in judgment.
“Robert, Robert,” Christopher pled, “come. We must be gone from here.”
And leave them? One dead; one dying?
“My lord? Christopher?” Roger Kirkpatrick called from the doorway. “What happened? I thought I heard –”
I staggered past Christopher, spurred by the terror of my crime. Left and right I wove, blinded by tears of madness, down the central aisle. Christopher trailed after me and shoved Kirkpatrick outside, slamming the door shut behind us.
Nigel seized the sword from my hand and gazed at my crimson palm in shock.
“Robert? What...” His face blanched, Nigel pressed my fingers into a fist, as if to hide the evidence of my sin. “Is he –”
“I... I confronted him with... with his lies.” I was shaking violently, a man who had seen battle, bodies half-hewn and piled in bloody heaps upon the muddy ground. But this, dare I think it, murder in God’s house? True or not, they would say it. Condemn me. And all my dreams would be but ashes blown away by stormy winds. Oh, Lord. What have I done? I leaned upon Nigel and pinched his shoulders with my blood-wet fingers. “He came at me then. I only meant to stop him, Nigel. I did not mean to harm him. Believe me, please.”
Nigel touched my face. His fine mouth twisted with words that would not come out. There was comfort in his dark eyes and even a trace of forgiveness. Ah Nigel, you will make a fine bishop one day. Do not judge me too harshly. I am not a man of God, like you. I am flawed and from this day forward the proof is upon me for it. The blood is on my hands.
He stroked my cheek and suddenly I became aware of the iron smell of blood. It came from me.
“Is he dead?” Nigel asked.
The others pressed in close. Silence resounded. God himself must have leaned down from the heavens to see if I would speak the truth.
“His uncle is dead.” I glanced at Christopher, who wore his shame plainly. Eyes downward, he crossed his arms over his chest. There was blood on the top of the scabbard of his sword, blood on his shirt and drops of it above his knees. I swallowed. My words were like boulders of guilt that I could hardly nudge over my tongue. “But Comyn, I think, heaven have mercy... I have wounded him. I do not know if he yet lives.”
I searched their faces, but there I saw nothing of reproach or repulsion. Nigel’s lips whispered prayers of forgiveness.
“If he yet lives,” came Roger Kirkpatrick’s voice from the top of the stairs, “I will finish him for you.”
“Roger, no!” Nigel screamed.
But it was too late. Roger was well ahead of us all. My brothers scrambled after him as they flew into the church. Their rapid footsteps clattered through the cold, brittle air. I could not move. I did not want to know or witness what I could not prevent. Comyn, if he had not already claimed his last breath, would die by my hand. Merciful God, what had I done? Why couldn’t I stop it from happening? Why hadn’t I heeded Elizabeth, bowed to sensibility, waited? Christopher stepped up to my shoulder, his mouth agape like mine.
I turned to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You saved my life.”
He grasped my arm. “And you had to save your own, as well. This is none of your doing.”
“But...” I bunched his cloak in my fingers, pulling him closer, “how will anyone know?”
Before he could say anything, if there was anything he could say, Roger emerged, knife flashing in his hand, and dashed to his horse.
“Done,” he growled, gritting his teeth. He shoved the knife back into his belt. “He will never stand in your way again.”
How could I tell him this was not the way I had meant it to be? This was not loyalty, it was stupidity, madness.
As Nigel and Thomas descended the church steps, I could see the panic plain on their countenances. Nigel came to me.
“What now? Where to?” Nigel questioned.
Thomas grabbed the reins of his horse from where it was tethered. “Act swiftly, brothers, or they will have an army after us and I am not about to stand here waiting for them to arrive.”
James Lindsay and Christopher were soon up on their mounts, their reins clenched impatiently, their spurs catching the glimmer of snowlight. The horses tapped at the packed snow with their hooves and tossed their heads in anticipation.
Christopher leaned over his horse’s neck. “Robert? We need to act first. Where to?”
For a moment, my mind was blank, my heart still gripped with terror and disbelief. It was as though I had dove into a frozen lake and when I came up there was nothing but ice above me. I heard my name over and over. I saw their faces, silver-pale like specters from the otherworld, beckoning me to yield to nothingness. But slowly, I returned. Their voices grew clearer. Then, I heard other, unfamiliar voices from further down the street – townspeople arriving to take inventory of what had happened – and that shock brought me from the edge of delusion back to the living. Aye, we had to go from there, had to act. But where, how?
“Dumfries,” I muttered. “Then... Glasgow.”
Nigel and Thomas glanced at each other and then Thomas was the first to put spurs to his horse. As I rode after him, I looked back. A small crowd was running down the road toward the door of the church.
Before morning, word would spread across the countryside like the flood of Noah’s day.
Ch. 24
Robert the Bruce – Glasgow, 1306
Bishop Wishart received me in the same barren room where Comyn and I had sworn to our pact. Its starkness echoed my fate. The garrison at Dumfries had surrendered almost immediately and its English inhabitants were chased back across the border. But this was not as I had planned it.
The pale, pink light of dawn surrounded the simple Crucifix on the wall. God and all the saints in heaven gazed at me in judgment, surely. If ever I thought myself a man of faith, I questioned it now. How could I ask forgiveness for what I had done? I was so full of shame and regret at that moment, I would have committed myself to a monastery if I thought Longshanks himself would not drag me from it and hang me by my own entrails.
On bruised knees, I knelt before the bishop and kissed the hem of his robes while cold tears betrayed my tormented soul. He laid his hands upon my head.
“Your grace, forgive... me.” I buried my face in trembling hands. Visions flooded through me – blood upon the altar, the fuller of my sword blade streaked in crimson, the last words of Red Comyn: In hell, Bruce. In hell, hell, hell... “I have committed a mortal sin for which there is no forgiveness. I took the life of another, John Comyn of Badenoch, in a place of worship... upon the very altar of Greyfriar’s Kirk.”
“Robert, my son.” He lifted my chin with a single, stout finger and gazed into my eyes with endless sympathy. His head tilted sideways as he shook it. “I can scarcely believe it was ever your intention to do harm. Tell me.”
“I cannot, in my heart, say that is true, your grace. Comyn betrayed me to Longshanks. Rage consumed me. I called for him to meet me at Greyfriar’s Kirk. He came and...” I turned my face aside.
“Go on.”
“And when I asked him why he had sold my name to Longshanks, he came at me. I only thought –” I gasped for air. Why was this so difficult? I had not slept more than two hours at a stretch since leaving the church that fateful, bitterly cold night. My dreams and waking moments were haunted by Comyn. He would follow me to my grave, whether dead or alive. “I thought he would stop. He didn’t.”
“So, you defended yourself?”
I nodded.
“And if you had not, what then, Robert?”
Exhaustion swept over me. I sank to the floor. “I would be dead.”
“And the future of Scotland?”
I looked up at him. His eyes, small and bright, spoke of larger things. His hands slipped to my arms and somehow lifted me up.
“God has plans men will seldom understand. For many years now, Robert, I have watched you struggle with that which you hold deep inside you. You want freedom for Scotland... and you want peace. But you cannot have both just yet. One must give way in order to achieve the other.”
“It is all nothing now. Nothing. I have sinned and I must do penance, for all my life.”
“Oh, doubtless you will, in ways you do not yet know. But for now, you live and you must go forward. You should be king, Robert. It was meant to be. At Irvine, you asked how long was long enough to wait. I had no answer for you then. You are no longer King Edward’s man, but your own. There is no turning back from here. Waste not another day.”
My head swam in confusion. “But what I have done... it will keep me from the throne. Who would want a murderer for king? No, I should go from here. I can take a ship to Norway. Hide there. My sister is Queen Dowager and if –”
“Hide? Fie. Shame the thought. Have you heard nothing?” He gripped me with a strength I was unaware he possessed. “If you had not raised your own hand in defense, you would be the dead one and we would not be speaking now. That would have left Scotland in the clutches of Red Comyn. Do you think that was God’s plan? Hah, I doubt He is that merciless. Or that His humor is that twisted. You have done us all a favor. If you find relief in it, I absolve you of all transgressions, my son, and may God Himself punish me by skinning me alive if I am in the wrong, but I do not think He deems you a sinner for living to see another day. It is obvious to me he wanted you to. Besides, justice is not restricted to courts of law, Robert. At times it is brutal and raw.”
For a short while, I leaned a hand against the wall. Bits of plaster crumbled at my fingertips. Muffled voices drifted up from the courtyard below. I went to the only window and looked out. There, my brothers Edward, Thomas, Nigel and a growing collection of faithful gathered, fully armed and ready. They numbered over fifty now, not including those we had left along the way. We had taken the castle at Dumfries with such surprise that there had been no bloodshed at all.
“Those men down there,” Wishart said, shuffling to my side, “do they think you a murderer? No, they look at you and they see their king. They would follow you into the bowels of hell to prove it. Years ago that’s what you hungered for, but didn’t have. Now you do. Will you cast away their faith because of your own self-doubt?”
I wiped a cold, cracked hand across my mouth. My beard had grown ragged. My hair hung down into my eyes. In two weeks’ time, I had pulled my belt several inches tighter. “You say... that I should shed my guilt because it serves no end? In the name of all that is holy, how? I took a life in God’s house. Committed sacrilege. I have no hope of heaven.”
Wishart pounded a fist on the wall and I startled. His fat cheeks flamed scarlet. “Go to Norway then. Live there in a puddle of guilt, safe and far away across the North Sea, and forever wonder what could have been, what might have been, while you hear of England’s rape of Scotland. Let all you have striven for crumble into dust while King Edward croons and bleeds us dry.”
Ah, Wishart, my cherubic ecclesiast, you deal me a greater guilt than God’s by calling to question my loyalty to Scotland.
I scratched at the frost on the window to see the men in the courtyard more clearly. “Your words are like wine on an open wound. They burn and cleanse all in one.”
“I do not grovel, Robert. It is demeaning and in contrast to my nature.” He shooed me away from the chest beside me, lifted its lid on rusted hinges and dug within. Velvet and silk spilled over the edge. From beneath them he produced a circlet of gold and held it in his old, shaking hands.
“When King Edward stole the Stone of Destiny and the coronation crown, I hid these things. Not near as grand, but they belonged to King Alexander and he used them in matters of state. This circlet was upon his brow when he was found, sadly, dead at the foot of the sea cliffs. It is yours, if you will have it.”
Extending a finger, I traced the gold filigree and heard the sound of my own sigh, floating on the frigid air. “Will the Church, the Scottish Church, will they follow suit – uphold your absolution of me? Is it possible?”
He bent and lifted the folds of velvet, laying the circlet protectively inside the chest. “Lamberton will and between the two of us, we carry a good weight, if I may so boast. If you swear an oath to defend the Scottish Church against the interference of England and rid us of their pilfering prelates, I dare predict you will find yourself with a host of holy followers.”
The corners of my mouth curved into a slight smile. “An army of monks? Perhaps we should battle Longshanks by cudgeling him with the Holy Gospel?” The morning sun through the window warmed me and the world took on brighter hues as fingers of sunlight parted the clouds and touched the land.
“There’s the spirit, Robert.” Wishart hobbled over to the table, where he had leaned his walking stick of polished walnut. “You will find a way, Deo volente.”
In the few years since he was released from his imprisonment, I had witnessed his gradual decay. His sight had faded so that he could not recognize me until I was two arm lengths from him. His joints troubled him, apparent in the stooped manner in which he walked, the way he struggled to rise from his chair, and the ease with which he tired. He pressed his full weight upon the burled knob handle of his stick. “Hungry?”
For the first time in many days I felt the rumble of my stomach. “Aye,” I admitted, “but for more than bread.”
He cuffed me lightly on the arm and winked. “Come then. We’ll see what we can do.”
Ch. 25
James Douglas – Berwick, 1306
When Bishop Lamberton was called to preside over a council at Berwick, I had no choice but to go with him, despite that it was the last place I wished to be. We rode the miles at an unhurried pace, all seeming peaceful. Snow ran in ragged lines of melting drifts over the rolling farmland of the borders. A bold sun parted cumbersome clouds, lighting the land with shafts of amber light. Shaggy cattle lifted their heads to watch us pass, while sheep scattered from our path. Along the way we heard rumors, many of them, about the Earl of Carrick. Lamberton, however, never discussed it openly, never forced his pace; in fact, he never decided anything without long contemplation. His pragmatism nettled me.
At Berwick, Longshanks’ envoys surrounded him. They pried and probed for information about Bruce, but he showed no reaction or divulged anything.
Tedious weeks later, the bishop called me to him.
He was reclined in his high-backed chair at the long table of his library. The smell of old parchment, leather and soot choked the air. A pile of documents sat untouched in front of the bishop. A snuffed candle of beeswax, meant for sealing documents, cooled nearby on the table. The ink in his inkwell was full
to the top, the quill lying clean beside it. I began to bend my knee to kneel before him, but he waved me off and then pointed to the bench nearest to me.
Tentatively, I sat down. The length of the table yawned between us. Only a smoking oil lamp shed any hint of light in the dusty confines of the windowless room. I glanced momentarily at the bishop, who was rubbing his temple with a forefinger, and then stared into the yellow flame of the lamp. His voice startled me.
“You have heard,” he began slowly, gathering breath, “of Lord Robert’s actions at Greyfriar’s Kirk? Of his seizing of castles in the southwest: Ayr, Rothesay, even Comyn’s own Dalswinton? His open defiance of King Edward?”
I laced my fingers together and nodded. “They say Angus Og of the Isles promised him galleys. I hear others have joined him, as well.”
“And what would you think if such a man were to become King of Scotland?” he asked.
The flame, which moments before had seemed so small as to be on the verge of extinction, flickered and grew, consuming its fuel now ravenously and throwing brightness into every corner.
Bishop Lamberton’s chair groaned as he shifted in it, awaiting an answer.
I raised my chin and looked at him squarely. I remembered the earl there in my father’s hall many years ago, denouncing his fealty to England. And even when I later learned he had returned to Longshanks’ embrace, I knew it would not last. At times, men say and do things against their conviction, if only to preserve themselves to fight another day. My father had done so.
“I would serve him with all my heart,” I declared.
“And if King Edward had not refused you your inheritance, what then?” He leaned forward. A stack of maps and parchment between us fluttered at his movement. “If you had Douglas back, by Edward’s grace, would you feel the same still?”
“I can take my lands back myself, if need be,” I said, the muscles across my stomach tightening, “but I can never bring back my father. I was here, in Berwick, ten years ago. I heard the screams, smelled the blood, saw little bairns limp and lifeless in their mothers’ arms... Need you ask?”
The Crown in the Heather (The Bruce Trilogy) Page 20
