The Fire in the Flint (2 page)

On the river bank she stopped and tried to calm herself by listening to the water and imagining it washing away the residue of fear. But her attention
was drawn across the river to the cliff overhanging the opposite bank. In the midnight sun someone standing at the edge would be able to see her. She felt too vulnerable for calm.

Her mind eased a little when she remembered that the sisters would soon awaken to sing the night office; then she might seek sanctuary in the kirk. Turning her back on the disturbing cliff, she was puzzled to see lights multiplying in the priory buildings, flickering as the candle- and lamp-carriers moved in and out of the window openings and doorways. They were moving across the yard, not in the direction of the kirk but the guest house whence she had fled.

Perhaps they had been awakened by the intruder she had foreseen. She must go back, she might be able to help – why else would God have warned her? As she walked towards the nunnery she heard women’s cries and the authoritative barks of the prioress. The voices drowned out the river’s quiet song. She called out to the lay servant guarding the nunnery gate, and two sisters ran out to her, one with a lantern swinging so wildly beside her that Christiana had to shield her eyes against the dizzying dance of light.

‘Dame Christiana! We feared you had been taken!’

‘Are you injured?’ the other asked.

‘Your handmaid cannot be consoled, fearful you’re dead,’ said the first.

Christiana could not bear the dancing light. ‘Steady the lantern, I beg you.’

The sister complied, and Christiana was now able to focus on the two who seemed to speak as one. ‘As you see, I am neither dead nor injured, thanks be to God. Is the intruder still in the grounds?’

‘You knew about them?’

‘Them,’ Christiana said. So there had been more than one. She had not the energy to explain. ‘Forgive me, but I must see my chamber.’ She pushed through milling servants and sisters and into the guest-house garden, which looked trampled in the moonlight. Two voices came from the opened door, one reassuring, one pitched high with emotion. Christiana stepped over the threshold.

Dame Katrina, the elderly hosteleress, sat holding a servant’s hands as she said, ‘You are not to blame.’

‘I should have heard them on the steps!’ the servant cried.

Christiana interrupted. ‘Did they enter the hall?’ she asked.

Both women started. The servant shook her head.

Christiana hurried out and up the steps to her chamber. She found her handmaid Marion weeping in the protective arms of Prioress Agnes.

‘Marion, calm yourself,’ Christiana said with a sharpness that she had not intended. She inclined her head. ‘Prioress Agnes.’

Marion glanced up, her eyes widening in surprise, and cried, ‘You are safe! Praise God.’ She rubbed her eyes as if to clear her vision and make certain she’d seen aright.

The prioress rose from the bed, hands clasped before her waist, ever dignified. ‘Where have you been, Dame Christiana?’ Her handsome face twitched with emotion. She disapproved of women withdrawing to nunneries after their children were grown but while their husbands yet lived. She’d made it clear to Christiana that she’d expected trouble and now it had arrived.

‘I walked to the river.’ Christiana took in the room, the upturned chests, the emptied shelves. ‘Did they harm you, Marion?’

The handmaid shook her head, her breath coming in gasps.

‘Did you see them?’ Prioress Agnes asked.

‘I was not here.’

Agnes studied Christiana, then apparently decided to believe her, for she said, ‘There were three men. They pulled Marion from bed and shoved her out of the room in her shift, barefoot—’ Her gaze travelled down to Christiana’s muddied feet. ‘Her shrieks woke us all. I see that you, too, are barefoot. You ran out like that without cause? You were not fleeing from the men?’

‘I had a vision of what was to come,’ said Christiana. ‘I confess I fled, thinking I had truly seen them in the flesh. But afterwards I understood that God had sent the vision to me as a warning.’

‘What were they after?’ the prioress asked sharply. ‘Did the Lord tell you that?’

Christiana shook her head. ‘I have prayed that He take the Sight from me. I am too simple to use it. I have not the wit to ken the meaning.’

‘We shall discuss this in the morning,’ Agnes said in a tight voice. ‘Now see to your maid.’

After Prioress Agnes withdrew, Christiana sank down on the bed and picked up a small wooden box, emptied of its physick powder.

‘They have ruined all your medicines,’ Marion said. ‘And torn one of your veils.’ She lifted a square of unbleached silk.

Something in the simple gesture made it real to Christiana. Her home had been invaded, her treasured belongings thrown about, ruined. The medicines were not a serious loss, Dame Eleanor here at the priory was a skilful apothecary and healer with plentiful stores. But the clothing and the furniture held memories that would now be soiled by their handling this night. Most upsetting was the torn veil – it had been a gift from her daughter Margaret, a generous gift that she could ill afford since her husband deserted her.

The anger that arose in the pit of Christiana’s stomach was vaguer than the fear that had sent her out into the night, but it settled there throughout what was left of the night and into the next day. Neither food nor prayer dislodged it.

1

In the evenings throughout spring and into the summer of 1297, many of the folk of Edinburgh congregated in Murdoch Kerr’s tavern trading rumours of war. The English still held the castle that loomed above, crowning the long, narrow outcrop on which the town crouched, and their soldiers were bored and nervous, ready to take offence and resolve any slight with violence. The Scots townsfolk who had survived the initial siege and the periodic purges of suspected traitors, who had nowhere to escape to or no inclination to leave the town to the enemy, trod the streets and wynds with care. They voiced their complaints behind closed doors, or in the smoky, noisy safety of Murdoch’s tavern.

Elsewhere the tide was turning. King Edward Longshanks had considered it unnecessary to stay
in Scotland, believing his deputies and troops sufficient to administer the conquered people. He had either overestimated his governors or underestimated how much the Scots valued their freedom. The occupying English were losing ground in the north. Folk spoke of Andrew Murray’s skirmishes from Inverness along the north-eastern coast to Aberdeen, and William Wallace’s to the west and up into Perthshire and Fife.

Margaret Kerr, niece of Murdoch, the taverner, spent much of her time in the tavern of late, ensuring that customers were well served. She had come to Edinburgh in early spring seeking news of her husband Roger Sinclair. Once she had learned he had joined the struggle to restore Scottish rule she’d resolved to stay in Edinburgh and do her part.

Strangely, her mother, Christiana MacFarlane, gifted with Second Sight, had predicted her daughter’s involvement in two visions: ‘I saw you standing over a table, studying maps with two men. One was giving you and the other orders, concerning a battle’; ‘On another day I saw you holding your baby daughter in your arms, your husband standing by your side, watching the true king of Scots ride into Edinburgh.’ For most of her nineteen years Margaret had suffered the stigma and deprivation of being daughter to a woman who walked more often in the spirit world than on solid ground. She’d found no practical value in her
mother’s visions. But now they had given her the courage to keep her ears pricked in the tavern for information that might be of use to those fighting to restore the rightful king, John Balliol, to the throne of Scotland.

Her uncle’s business partner and kinsman of the king, James Comyn, had come to depend on her reports. Not that she was his only source of information – a member of his own Comyn family, who were related to Balliol and Murray, had come to James in late July with the news that Murray had recaptured Urquhart and Inverness castles. Most recently Murray was said to have ousted the English from Aberdeen, then continued on down the eastern coast, intending to join Wallace at Dundee. Margaret knew that although James told her much, he kept more to himself. Every so often she sensed she was telling him things he already knew. The speed with which news travelled through the war-torn countryside amazed her. Sometimes she suspected that those who had chosen to remain in Edinburgh were all there as spies.

She worried about her family, scattered and torn in their loyalties. Her brother Andrew, a priest and canon of Holyrood Abbey, had followed his abbot in supporting Longshanks until his shame provoked him to disobey. For this he had been condemned to the post of confessor to the English army encamped at Soutra Hospital, which was a
death sentence – he would know too much to ever be freed. Margaret feared Andrew would take terrible risks, having little to lose. She also worried about her younger brother, Fergus, whom she’d left in charge of both her husband’s and their father’s businesses in Perth. There was little to the responsibility with the English all but halting trade, but Fergus was an untried seventeen-year-old and had never been so alone. He might very well seek adventure as a soldier. Their mother could not be depended on to advise Fergus for she had retired to Elcho Nunnery several years earlier and even though so near Perth she sought no contact with her family. Margaret’s father, too, might now get caught up in the struggle; though he had fled to Bruges to avoid trouble with the English, it was said that King Edward planned to sail soon to the Low Countries. He was assisting the Flemish in containing an uprising to thus secure their support of the English against the French, who had made an alliance with the rebellious Scots. Rebellious against whom, she wondered – they merely wished to return their king to his throne, to repel Longshanks’s attempt to annex their country to his.

And though she had tried to harden her heart against her absent husband, whenever his lord Robert Bruce was mentioned she pricked her ears in hope of hearing something of Roger. But none spoke of him. Indeed, Margaret did not even know
how he had come to join the company of the Bruce, who many suspected would fight against Longshanks only as long as he thought his own ambitions for the throne of Scotland might be realised. She had never thought Roger a man to betray his own king. Sick at heart at her husband’s defection, Margaret tried to forget him by focusing her energy on the tavern and her work for James Comyn.

On this warm summer evening James himself was seated at one of the tables, listening to Angus MacLaren’s tales. The storyteller’s wild red hair clung damply to his temples and cheeks and his beard was frothy with ale, but his voice was strong, drunk or sober, and he had more tales than any man Margaret had ever encountered, many of them bawdy, but all providing a good laugh, something they all sought these dark days as a respite from the talk of war. Now Angus was sitting back, pressing a tankard against his hot neck for the coolness of the smooth wood.

The talk returned to what was on all their minds.

‘They say men are gathering round Wallace in the countryside, at Kinclaven Castle near Dunkeld,’ said Sim the server.

‘He’s doing us no good up there,’ Mary Brewster muttered, her head sinking down towards her almost empty cup.

Margaret drew closer. Dunkeld was not so far
from Perth and her brother Fergus. She slipped on to the edge of Mary’s bench.

‘Have you any news of Perth?’ Margaret asked.