The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (66 page)

“My dealings with Jeanne are none of your concern.”

“They are my
concern, by God! You are one of my councilors! Your sinfulness reflects poorly
on me! I know why you avoid her! You’ve wallowed long enough in this unseemly
pining for that dead Fife woman! I am sick of it!”

James came up face to face with him. “Since when did you
become so pious? Have you forgotten your dalliance on Tioram with Christiana
while your wife languished in England?”

Robert took a step back, as if expecting James to come at
him with a dagger and finish the regicide. “That was an indiscretion of youth.
I command you to take a wife and rid me of this divine punishment for your debauchery!”

“Leave off this, I warn you!”

“I am your king! And you will abide me on this!”

“Listen to you! You rant on like Caernervon!”

Robert lunged and swung wildly, but James blocked the blow.
Robert taunted him to throw a punch in retaliation.

James turned and marched out.

J
EANNE ASSISTED
E
LIZABETH
B
RUCE FROM
the royal barge, and
together they waded through the chilly breakwaters of Dornoch Firth toward the
windswept dunes below Tain. Reaching the shore, they found the ancient path
that led to St. Duthac’s sanctuary. The ground was pocked with frozen
footprints, many formed by the bare feet of pilgrims who had come here over the
centuries to petition divine intercessions. Hearing the queen breathing hard
from the exertion, Jeanne slowed their approach up the treacherous trail.
“Perhaps we should rest a bit before we attempt it.”

Leaning down to wring the water from the hem of her
traveling mantle, Elizabeth looked up to demand a retraction of the implication
that she was not capable of making the climb. How many ladies of her age could
touch their shoes without bending their knees? She had just celebrated her
forty-fifth birthday—mourned it might be a better description—but she still
became indignant when the younger ladies in her court made a fuss over her.
True, she had put on weight, and her joints ached from the rheumatism, but she
still slept only three hours a night and outlasted all of them in attending to
the duties in the new royal residence at Cardross. “I once ran to that kirk.
You can wrap me in the burial shroud the day I can no longer walk to it.”

“The king ordered me to keep tight rein on you,” Jeanne
said. “And the physicians—”

“My husband is a fine one to give lectures about
physicians! Had we listened to those blood-sucking
leeches, we’d both be in the grave.”

Seeing Jeanne take refuge in hurt silence, Elizabeth
intertwined an arm with her elbow in a plea for forgiveness. She often forgot
how withering hot her Irish temper could run. As they ascended the uneven stone
stairway that led to the wooded bluffs, she choked up with tears. Each step
along this hallowed track brought back crushing memories. Robert had begged her
to delay the arduous journey until summer, but she was determined to set out at
the first thaw to fulfill the vow she had made twenty-one years ago. On the night that she had cowered here with Belle,
near starvation and not knowing if their men were alive, she had promised the
Almighty that she would return one day on pilgrimage to this Culdee sanctuary
if her husband were kept safe and resurrected in his kingship.

Unlike Robert, who felt
perpetually oppressed by the Malachy Curse, she now looked back on their lives
together as a succession of miracles. The most recent had also been the most
blessed: Six months ago, she had given birth to a son, David. Although she had
provided Robert with two daughters after her return from captivity in England,
she had all but given up hope of producing a male heir. The pregnancy prior to
David’s had been difficult, and most Scots had expected her to lose this latest
child to a miscarriage. In a moment of despair, she had even consulted a famous
seer from Strath Fillan, who had deepened her pessimism with a report that his
scrying revealed an empty throne.

For all of these reasons
and more, the news of David’s birth had been greeted with great celebration
across the realm. But the joy was tempered by concern about Robert’s alarming
decline in health. After the parliamentary session at Arbroath, the skin-eating
disease had begun to infect his mind more frequently, and she had heard the
whispered fears that by siring an heir so late in his life, he had doomed the
kingdom to a regency and another clan war. There was also some sentiment that
Marjorie’s son, Robert Stewart, now nine years old, had been divinely destined
for the throne because of his mother’s travails in England and her martyr’s
death in childbirth.

These conflicts among his
subjects were troubling to her husband, but his most painful tribulation was
his estrangement from James Douglas. Robert’s outburst during the Brechin
inquest had fractured their already strained friendship, and during these past
years, the two men had communicated only by official correspondence. Robert was
too proud to ask forgiveness for his baseless accusations of disloyalty. And
James, equally stubborn, had repulsed all attempts at reconciliation. She had
even enlisted Jeanne as an unofficial intermediary between the two men, but to
little effect.

Now, as she often had in
the past, she tried to prime her younger companion for more news. “I should not
have taken you away from Jamie. Who will keep him out of trouble?”

Jeanne smiled at the poorly
disguised foray for gossip. “He won’t miss me, I should think.”

“Have you seen him
recently?”

“Last month. For one night, was all.”

Elizabeth shook her head at the utter stupidity of men. When
the war against England was renewed after the expiration of the two-year truce,
Jeanne had accompanied James on the campaigns, including his second daring raid
into Yorkshire, this time to Rievaulx Abbey, where they had come within a
whisker of capturing Caernervon. And yet rumors were rampant that Jeanne shared
only James’s bed, not his heart. She suspected that her escort had volunteered to
accompany her on this pilgrimage to fulfill a secret quest of her own: By
retracing the steps that Belle had walked, she was trying to better understand
the long-departed woman who still held James captive. Determined to smoke her
out on the subject, Elizabeth stole a sideways glance at her and risked, “May I
ask you a question of a personal nature?”

Jeanne gave her a wry look. “Only if I am afforded the same
opportunity.”

Elizabeth chortled at the hard-driven bargain. During their
month-long sojourn together, they had come to know each other so well that they
often conversed in an informal, even jesting, manner. “You should be the king’s
diplomat. … Why do you stay with Jamie?”

“He has never deceived me.”

“Neither has my cook, but I don’t warm my nights with him. …
Do you love him?” When Jeanne nodded, unable to speak it, Elizabeth huffed,
“Then for the sake of Finian’s fasting, why have you two not taken the vows?”

“His heart remains bound to another.”

Before Elizabeth could vent her exasperation, a flicker of
golden light above the tree line startled her. Was her mind playing tricks, or
had that been an elf spark? These old oaks looked so familiar. A shudder of
nostalgia came over her. How strange. That horrid day when she had staggered up
this same path with Belle, they had spoken of the same stubborn man. A bard in
Ulster once told her that life does not progress in a straight line, as the
Roman monks insist, but spirals through time, backtracking to the same places
and moments with certain aspects of the experience altered. Had she come back
to Tain of her own free will? Or had God led her here again for some deeper
purpose? As she grew older, she found herself pondering such questions that she
once dismissed as mystical nonsense. Returned to the present, she asked Jeanne,
“Jamie doesn’t love you?”

“I accepted from the beginning that I’d never have that part
of him.”

“Has he ever spoken to you about Belle?”

“No.”

“Insufferable creatures! These men of ours will carry their
heart wounds to their graves!”

Falling silent, they walked the rest of the way counseled by
their own troubled thoughts and memories.

When, at last, they reached the crumbling sanctuary fence
that still surrounded the kirk, Elizabeth braced against its ancient stones to
regain her wind. It was here that she and Marjorie, frightened and weary, had
crouched while Belle ran to the door. As the mists now swirled and closed in,
she shivered with a foreboding. She had no
reason to be frightened now, for their old enemies were long gone, the earl of
Ross dead and the Comyns subdued. Yet she was haunted by a dread whose source
she could not locate. She turned to call for her guards, having forgotten that
she had ordered them to remain at the barge. To avoid the admiring throngs, she
had insisted that no announcement of her arrival be sent ahead. Tightening her
grip on Jeanne’s arm, she approached the kirk with trepidation and pounded the
doorknocker, just as Belle had done years ago.

A pock-faced Culdee monk crowned with a mash of white hair
slid open the slot. “No room!” He slammed it shut, nearly pinching her fingers.

She nodded, having expected the rude greeting, and persisted
with a second knock. “We require sanctuary!”

This time, the crabby monk cracked the rusty door and poked
out his head. “Sanctuary? From whom?”

Elizabeth brought her
sleeve to her tremoring mouth. Every remembrance of that night long ago came
flooding back to her. She repeated Belle’s frantic plea, as if by reenacting
the event she might alter the past. “The English seek to capture us. You are
our last hope.”

The hermit swung the door back wide to challenge that claim.
“The English haven’t troubled these parts since King Robert chased them south.”

She winked through tears at Jeanne in conspiracy, and like
an actress about to play out an important scene, gruffly reminded the monk, “I
was told that the Culdees were the true descendants of Christ! I see now that I
was misinformed!”

The monk’s glare sharpened with suspicion. “Who told you
such a thing?”

“A brother of yours. Sweenie the Wee-kneed.”

The monk yelped with excitement. “You know the Wee-kneed?
That rapscallion! That little half-devil! Where is he? Is he with you?”

“He is in the South risking his life to save our king!”
Elizabeth snapped. “But I will tell him of the base hospitality you have
showered upon us!”

His memory jolted, the monk squinted to better see the
queen’s features. Slowly, he lowered to his cracking knees and cried, “God’s
mercy!”

Bemused by his astonishment, Elizabeth brought him back to
his feet. “It is reassuring to know, Brother Fergus, that you still offer the
same warm welcome to pilgrims.”

The monk’s baggy lids swelled with tears. “You remembered.”

Elizabeth walked to the corner of the chapel where she had
fallen asleep on that night long ago. Running her hand across the charred
walls, she saw that the stones had not been altered by a single crack or tuft
of moss. She beckoned her bag from Jeanne and, withdrawing from it a large
votive candle, lit the wick and stood over the flame while offering a prayer.
After several minutes of tearful contemplation, she placed a draw sack of coins
into Fergus’s hand. “Tend this flame for me until I die.”

Brother Fergus bowed in obeisance. When he returned upright,
he saw, for the first time, Jeanne’s features clearly in the votive’s
flickering light. His leathery hands trembled as he brought her startled face
to his failing eyes. “How can it be? They told me you were dead.”

Unnerved, Jeanne tried to pull away, but the monk would not
release her.

Sobbing, he clutched at her. “Not a day has passed that I’ve
not done penance for allowing the traitors take you.”

Elizabeth was stunned.
The old hermit was a bit dotaged, but how could he now mistake Jeanne for the
deceased Belle? She empathized with Jeanne’s hurt feelings; to be plagued by
the memory of Jamie’s old love was torment enough, but to be mistaken for Belle
in the flesh was beyond cruel. Seeing Jeanne about to disabuse the monk of his
error, she grasped the French lass’s arm to petition her forbearance.

Brother Fergus begged
Jeanne, “I pray you forgive me.”

Elizabeth nodded for her
to play the part.

“There is nothing to for—“ Jeanne doubled over from a sharp
pang.

Elizabeth eased her to the floor. “Are you ill?

Jeanne stumbled outside and vomited.

Brother Fergus hurried to his cell. Moments later, he
returned with the sanctuary’s famous healing stones. Assisting Jeanne back
inside the kirk, he lowered her to the floor and laid the stones around her.
After nearly a minute of hovering his hands over her in spiritual diagnosis, he
looked up and smiled at Elizabeth. “Do you remember the vision that so
frightened her?”