Marjorie started to wail at the thought of being parted and Buchan grimaced with distaste, then turned his gaze back on Isabel.
‘You are bound for Berwick, where you will share the same fate, but on my own terms,’ he said, which was sinister but left Isabel none the wiser. He jerked his head and, obedient as a belly-fawning mastiff, Malise moved to her, his grin feral in the dark ruin of his face.
‘Malise will see to it. I commend you to his care,
ma Dame
. I commend you to God, for this is the last time you will see me. Never ask to do so, for it will be refused.’
He saw her, still lush and ripe – yet her face was haggard and there was snow in the autumn russet of her hair. She was, Buchan thought, a woman in the same way that a lion could be called a cat.
The memory hit him of the power he had had over her, the punishments he had inflicted for her transgressions, when he had gloried in her being stripped to ‘twa beads, yin o them sweat’. Her transgressions …
‘The last gift I shall give you will be the head of your lover when we find him, which you may care to look on before it is put on a spike.’
Which at least let her know that Hal was alive and free – and that she would live herself, though the triumphant sickle on Malise’s face made her wonder if that was preferable. When she turned to her husband again, there was only a hole in the air where he had been.
‘Come, lady.’
It was not a request and the hand Malise held out was not an invitation. With a chilling stone sinking in her belly, she looked into his too-bright eyes and realized she had been handed to her worst nightmare.
Closeburn Vill, Annandale
Vigil of St Athernaise of Fife, December, 1306
They came down to the English-dominated lands of the Bruce in a mourn of snow and sleet, stumbling from abbey to priory through brutal, metalled days of silvered frost and skies of iron and pewter. They were deferential and pious or garrulously merry when circumstances demanded it and no-one spared a single suspicious glance for two packmen, sweating south like snails with their lives on their backs.
Kirkpatrick had purchased the cheapjack wares from two delighted mongers paid more than they could earn in a year; one of them announced that he was quitting the travelling life for good and now Hal knew why, even as he applauded the disguise in it.
‘It is perfect,’ Kirkpatrick enthused, watching Hal eye up the hide packs, black with old grease against the weather. ‘We are travelling at the right time, coming up to the Christ’s Mass.’
He had that right, too, for they were in great demand for ribbons and silk thread and needles from folk who could ill afford the cost. It had become the fashion for burghers, cottars and serfs to give gifts to the manor ‘for the glory of Christ’s Mass’ and, though an acorn tied with bright ribbon, or a sacking purse sewed up with silk thread seemed nothing, it was a sacrifice to folk who had little to begin with. And was done, Hal saw, out of only the hope of future favour.
So they tramped, horseless, down the days towards Closeburn, where Kirkpatrick had said Isabel lay.
‘Three women,’ he had told Hal. ‘Taken to my kinsman’s holding, together with Niall Bruce and the Earl of Atholl.’
‘The women might be gone,’ Hal had answered morose and hopeful at the same time. The ‘or worse’ was left unsaid, for he could not be sure, in his sinking cold belly, that a vengeful King Edward could kill Niall and an earl of the realm and yet spare the women.
‘Aye, right enough,’ Kirkpatrick had declared, ‘but I am charged to seek out the King’s sister and wee daughter, so that is what I will do. Will you come?’
There was no refusing it and he had made what provision he could for those he left behind. He remembered the thrashing Sim Craw, soaking his pallet branches with sweat and steaming in the cold air, while Dog Boy and Chirnside Rowan looked on.
‘Take him to the King,’ he had said. ‘Neil Campbell will help. When that is done, go where ye will.’
Chirnside Rowan, who wanted home, nodded agreement, but Hal could hardly find the courage to look Dog Boy in the face and, when he did so, his heart creaked like a laden bridge.
‘I ken,’ he said softly, ‘that there is little left at Herdmanston, less at my kinsman’s Roslin. I may never return to it, even if this venture is a success, for I am outlaw and there is nothing for me there.’
Dog Boy felt stunned by it, could not move nor speak.
‘I took you from Douglas,’ Hal went on, speaking faster now, as if to rid himself of the words, ‘at the behest of Jamie’s stepma and never regretted it for an eyeblink. Now I release you. Find Jamie and tell him this – he will take you into his care and, Heaven willing, you will both be back at Douglas when God and all His Saints wake up in this kingdom.’
The youth’s face was with him now, as he stood in the snow-humped riggs of a backcourt, feeling the wet cold seep up through his ruined soles. Pale and stricken at the thought of never seeing Hal again, the Dog Boy had brimmed his tears over and they had clutched briefly; the ache of it now was sharper than the keening snow wind.
Kirkpatrick tapped on a door, then again, then stood away from the faint light that would be spilled when someone came to answer it. He was grinning to himself when he saw it was her, her hand raised with a smoking crusie in it, the other clutching the wrap of warm wool to her as she stood, peering uncertainly.
‘Who is it there?’
He stepped forward, into the falling faintness of the crusie’s glow.
‘Annie,’ he said. ‘Bigod, yer as lovely as ever ye were.’
Hal was astounded at the sharp yelp and the plunge of darkness as the crusie fell to sizzle in the snow. There was a pause and all their eyes adjusted.
‘You …’ she said and Kirkpatrick, still grinning, nodded. The blow took him by surprise, a calloused round-house slap that whipped his head sideways. Then Hal heard her burst into tears and Kirkpatrick felt the soft warmth of her, flung into his arms.
‘Annie,’ he said, working the jaw to see if any teeth had been loosened.
‘Ye cantrip, reeking dungheap,’ she replied and sprang from him, hands on hips and the wrap flowing free so that Hal saw the considerable matronly curves of her through a dress too thin for the biting wind. She will catch chill, he thought wildly, then looked right and left to see if any of the nearest of her neighbours had come to spy.
‘I will return, ye said,’ she accused. ‘And so ye have – a dozen years later.’
‘Fifteen,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and then wished he had not piled the truth on it.
‘I was a lad,’ he added weakly. ‘With scarce any chin-hair.’
Her voice lowered too, with a swift backward glance – o-ho, thought Hal, there is a husband in this mix.
‘And I scarce had quim fluff,’ Annie hissed, ‘neither of which stopped ye.’
‘Ye were not unwilling,’ Kirkpatrick replied desperately, for this was not entirely on the track he had planned. But he and Hal saw her face soften. It was plumped and blurred a little from the heart-stopper Kirkpatrick remembered, but still brought a stirring in him. First love, he thought with a sudden ache of loss and a leap of envy at what the hidden man in the house behind her had achieved over him.
‘Weesht on that,’ she said, with another quick, birdlike flick over one shoulder. ‘I have a man noo – a good man who makes a fair livin’ from shoemaking and merchanting in charcoal and I am Mistress Annie Toller. I dinnae want to present him with an auld love on his threshold.’
‘Then do not,’ Kirkpatrick declared with a rueful smile. ‘Present me as Rab o’ Shaws, a cheapjack in need of shelter. This is Hal o’ Herdmanston likewise. Tell him we will give fair pay in ribbons and geegaws for warmth and whatever food he can spare.’
She shivered and not entirely from the cold.
‘Black Roger,’ she said softly and Kirkpatrick jerked at the name while Hal cocked his head with interest; this name was new.
‘We hear of ye from time to time,’ Annie went on. ‘And that is the name that comes with it. If ye are back here on dark business, Roger, ye can go your way.’
‘Nothin’ o’ the kind,’ Kirkpatrick lied. ‘I need ye to find Duncan, all the same. I need his help on a matter.’
‘What matter?’
Kirkpatrick bridled.
‘Annie, it is freezin’ cold – yer turnin’ blue on the step here.’
‘What matter?’
Kirkpatrick turned and indicated for Hal to come forward.
‘This is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he said. ‘Sir Hal, no less. He and I are here after his light o’ love, the Coontess o’ Buchan.’
She had heard the tale of it, which raised eyebrows on Hal, for he had not realized. My love life is a bliddy
geste
, he thought savagely, for all to gawp at.
Kirkpatrick knew Annie would have sucked up the story of it and now she stared at the troubadour tale turned reality, standing with his soaked boots and mournful face on her doorstep. She bobbed a curtsey as one hand went to her mouth to keep her heart from surging out of it.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The poor man. The lady. Oh. Come away in. In, afore ye freeze.’
Hal glanced sideways at Kirkpatrick and caught the sly grin and wink as he ducked through the door.
Her husband, Nichol, was a bluff-faced barrel of a man, at once suspicious of two strangers within his house and eager for their news and the payment promised, which would sweeten his wife for weeks to come.
‘Ye can sleep in the coal shed,’ he declared and shot a sharp glance to silence the start of protest from his wife. ‘And eat separate an’ what ye are given.’
Yet, while he pressed them for news of the roads and whether carts laden with coal could go up and down from Glasgow, he took Hal’s boots and worked on them, almost as if his hands were separate from his nature.
In the end, of course, he gave more than he got in news and Hal marvelled at the subtle cunning of Kirkpatrick that unveiled the presence of too many English soldiery in Closeburn and that it had to do with the prisoners within.
‘The Maister o’ Closeburn is seldom seen,’ Nicholl informed them, stitching quietly and speaking with an awl in one corner of his mouth, ‘at table or elsewhere. He plays chess and has found himself a clever opponent he is reluctant to give up, it is said, even though the others who came there at the same time have moved on.’
‘A wummin?’ asked Hal before Kirkpatrick could stop him; Nichol glanced up, beetling his brows.
‘I never said so,’ he replied, then lost the frown and shrugged.
‘There were wummin arrived,’ he admitted. ‘The sister of King …’
He stopped, looked at them and carried on working needle through leather; Hal knew he was in a fury of worry about having started to mention Bruce and the word ‘king’ in the same breath among strangers who might report him. Kirkpatrick chuckled reassuringly.
‘Dinna fash,’ he soothed. ‘No tattle-tongues here. It is to be hoped the sister does not share the fate o’ her wee brother, God wrap him safe from further harm.’
There was a flurry of hands crossing on breasts, but Nichol grew taciturn from then on and, eventually, the conversation died; Hal and Kirkpatrick went off to the dubious comfort of the coal shed – which, Hal pointed out, was mercifully emptied, save for old dust.
‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick mused. ‘Poor commons, it seems. Too many to heat in Closeburn these days. To feed, too, for certes.’
‘Which means it is stappit full of folk we need avoid,’ Hal replied uneasily, knowing that the task they had set themselves was made harder.
‘It can be done,’ Kirkpatrick said out of the coal dark of the place. ‘We need Duncan.’
Hal had been told of Duncan of Torthorwald, another Kirkpatrick but one who had followed Wallace and now suffered for it; he was outlawed and Torthorwald held now by the Master of Closeburn.
‘He is prospering, is my namesake,’ Kirkpatrick had declared. ‘Closeburn and Auchencas and now Torthorwald, with Lochmaben handed to him to hold, on behalf of the Bohuns.’
And Hal had heard the bitterness there.
‘Will this Duncan help?’ Hal asked, wondering if a man who had fought in support of a Balliol king – and so a Comyn – would offer assistance to a Bruce. There was no reply and, eventually, Hal fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of rustle and grunt, a throaty sound bordered between shriek and hoarseness, so that he lay quiet in the velvet dark, unlatching the dirk from inside his tunic. The rhythm of it ended in the rasp of mutual breathing and then a faint, whispered voice.
‘Did we wake him?’
‘Naw. He dreams of his lost love and what he will do when he gets her back.’
Kirkpatrick slid out of the warm depth of Annie and silently blessed Hal and his countess for it had been that honeyed tale, as much as his hand at her fork, which had persuaded her to part with her old charms while they waited at the coal-shed door for Duncan.
He did not know of her desperate need to find a little of what had been lost between then and now, in the compromise of poverty and the grief of bairns lost in birthing, but he felt a little of it touch him, a tendril of something sharp and sweet.
It brought the knowledge, complete and out of the casket, of what he had given up all those years ago, sacrificed to the lure of the wider world and all its possibilities. His hand idled back to her wetness and she slapped his arm.
‘Enough,’ she hissed. ‘We have been fortunate that my man sleeps like an auld log. I will risk no more. Never again, Roger – that was for sweet memory and auld times.’
Yet the fierce kiss she gave revealed the lie in it and choked his throat with all he wanted to say. The sudden arrival of a shadowed figure relieved him of the moment.
‘Mistress,’ said the shape, nodding to Annie.
‘Duncan,’ Kirkpatrick said.
‘Black Roger,’ the shadow acknowledged.
‘Good,’ said Hal, emerging from the black of the coal shed into the clear night, brilliant with stars and moon. ‘I am Hal of Herdmanston, knight. Now we’re all introduced, perjink and proper.’
Duncan nodded at Hal, stepping forward so that he was silvered by moonlight, a ghost in the dark. He was tall and broad, with a great bush of black beard grown against the cold and a cloak wrapped round him – as much to hide the weapons, Hal thought, as for heat.