Kingdom 01 - The Lion Wakes (19 page)

She had taken her chance on the road back to Buchan, knowing that her refuge at Balmullo was probably gone from her, that she would be cloistered in some lonely Keep until such time as arrangement were made to cloister her somewhere more holy and uncomfortable. The aching memory of the bruises and angry lust Buchan had inflicted added urgency to her escape; getting away from the oiled skin-crawl of Malise only sauced the affair.

Yet it was all for nothing – Bruce would not help. Even as it crushed her, she cursed herself for having given in to the foolishness of it. There had been similar in her life – an older knight and, after him, the ostler boy, neither of whose names she could remember. All she recalled was the delicious anguish, the laborious subterfuge to be in that part of the world at the same time as they were. The smile to be treasured, the fingertip touch that thrilled, the sticky paste in a pot that was valued simply because his fingers had touched it.

She had, she remembered, thought such tender secrets were her own, hugged them to herself because of that fact alone – with a murdered father and all her other kin seemingly uncaring, it was a slim path picked through thorns to the vague promise of a distant garden.

Only her old nurse had noted it all and the truth of it came out later – too late, when Trottie lay, dying slowly and gasping out her last secrets. Then there was shared laughter over the wonder and worry of a nurse confused by her charge’s seemingly bad fetlocks that needed such a pot of evil-smelling ointment.

The self-inflicted pain of it, married to the pleasure, had been a game. You need suffer only as much as you need and the promise of something real a finger-length away was an awareness that grew less innocent the closer you approached to it. When it came to losing that innocence, she knew what to do with it and put away, she thought, the foolishness of love.

Until Bruce. Until she dared hope for the distant promise of that garden.

Even as she stepped into the sun of that smile, she felt the hope shred away, like a mist before a cold wind, and it made her sag against the length of him so that, for him, it felt like a flirting.

Over her head, Bruce looked at Thweng’s long mourn of a face and knew now what the knight had meant – Isabel had to be returned, quietly and without fuss, to her husband.

There had been a time when she helped salve the loss of his wife, Marjorie’s mother, and the thrill of bedding her and cuckolding his enemy had been heady. Now the first was palling and the second was, as Thweng had hinted, too much of a risk in awkward times.

He nodded and Thweng returned it. Isabel felt his chin move on the top of her head and almost wept.

‘It was her right enow, eh?’ Sim growled, hunched up with a corner of cloak over his head and the drips sliding along it like bright pearls. Beside him, the exhausted Bartholomew Bisset snored and they could do nothing with him until he woke, that was clear.

Hal and Sim now knew who he was, for he had managed to get that out, voice slurred with fatigue – Ormsby’s scrivener and notary, the one Wallace had sworn to find and the signature on the documents pertaining to the mason’s death.

Hal had almost forgotten about the entire affair and the arrival of Bisset was an amazement in more than one way – he been sent on his way under a writ from Wallace that promised, in return for his life, that he put his tale at the disposal of Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston. When the said Sir Henry was satisfied and quit him of his obligation, Notary Bisset was free to go.

‘I am told to speak to you and no-one else, not even The Bruce,’ the fat little man had said, swaying with weariness and drenched to the bone. ‘I beg you – let me sleep before you put me to the question.’

Sim had been astounded, but Hal had more than a touch of admiration, both for Wallace’s unshakeable trust in certain folk and the fact that the little scrivener, who could simply have run off, seemed to have more chivalric honour in his butter-barrel body than any of the nobles who had spent weeks here haggling like horse-copers.

‘It was her, for sure,’ Sim repeated, dragging Hal away from studying the sleeping Bisset.

Hal said nothing. It had been her. Run away yet again and come straight to The Bruce. He felt a sharpness in him at that thought and quelled it viciously. Stupid, he thought, to go rutting after an earl’s leman. It was only what old Barnabus, the local priest, had said would happen – time had healed over the scars of his wife and woken his loins.

Any lass with her clothes inside out, as the law demanded of whores, would do, he thought viciously, while the nag of Isabel, Countess of Buchan, fern-tendrilled hair dripping like wet autumn bracken, blue eyes weary, her smile still warm on his face, all made the dreich of this place even harder to bear.

That and Bisset, who snored softly, each one a tearing nag at Hal’s heart, for he sounded like wee John when he slept. Well, his son slept now and made no sound at all. Slept forever . . .

Christ, Hal thought savagely, can matters get worse?

‘Sir Hal. Sir Hal.’

The voice brought their heads round and they stared in wonder at the pair, lurching out of the dark, propelled by the stiff, haughty Sir Gervaise.

‘More little barking dogs,’ the knight said and pulled the head of his mount round and away. Hal stared at Tod’s Wattie, the Dog Boy a shadowed skelf close behind, hugging himself against the rain.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ Tod’s Wattie bellowed, ‘am ah glad to see ye. Ye will nivver ken whit has happened.’

Chapter Five

Roxburgh Castle

Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, August 1297

A groan; the coverlet stirred. Ralph de Odingesseles waited warily with tunic, judging tenor and temper before stepping forward to the half-asleep figure who rolled over in a rustle of straw and feather mattress to sit upright, blinking, on the edge of the canopied box bed.

Ralph moved to a covered pitcher of heated water, which he poured into a basin and brought forward. He discreetly handed his master a gilded pot and watched it vanish beneath his nightshirt; water splashed and Ralph stood patiently holding the basin, a towel and a clean tunic draped over either forearm; his master grunted, groaned and cocked one buttock to let out a squeaky fart.

Yawning, Hugh Cressingham handed the chamberpot back to Ralph, dabbed water from the basin on his face and his close-cropped head, then dried his meaty jowls on the presented towel. Slowly, he woke up and blinked into a new day.

Ralph de Odingesseles watched him, dispassionate but cautious – Cressingham was not tall, running to fat, had eyes that bulged like a fish and his cheeks were stubbled because a skin complaint made it painful to pumice off a beard and irritating to grow one. Nor did he keep his hair fashionably neck length and curled, as Ralph did – Cressingham paid lip service to his prebendery stipends by affecting the look of a monk, though untonsured, and that left him with a hairstyle like an upturned bird’s nest.

He seemed, in his crumpled white nightserk, as bland as plain frumenty, but Ralph de Odingesseles knew the temper that smouldered in the man, stoked by pride and envy.

By the time Cressingham was in tunic, hose and a cote embroidered with the – as yet unregistered – swans he claimed as his Arms, the whole sorry mess of life had descended on him afresh and Ralph de Odingesseles, coming forward with the
gardecorps,
was more cautious still. Experience had taught him that the storms forming on Cressingham’s brow usually resulted in a sore ear, which was the lot of a squire, he had discovered.

Sufferance, on the other hand, was better than the alternative for the son of a poor noble. Ralph de Odingesseles’s only claim to fame was that he was related to an archdeacon and his grandfather had been a well-known knight on the Tourney circuit, who had once been beaten into dented metal by the then king’s French half-brother, Sir William de Valence.

Eventually, Ralph would be made a knight and take no blows he would not return. The thought made him forget himself and smile.

Cressingham looked sourly at the smirking squire holding the
gardecorps.
The garment was elegant and in the new shade of blue which was so admired by the French king that he had adopted it as his colour. Not diplomatic, Cressingham thought, and made a mental note never to wear it in the presence of Longshanks.

He did not much want to wear it at all and, in truth, hated the garment, for the same reason he was forced to wear it – he was fat and it hid the truth of it. It was, he knew, not his own fault, for he was more of an administrator than a warrior, but you did not get knighted for tallying and accounts, he thought bitterly, for all the king’s admiration and love of folk who knew the business.

As always, there was the moment of savage triumph at what he had become, despite not being one of those mindless thugs with spurs – Treasurer of Scotland, even though it was a Gods-cursed pisshole of a country, was not only a powerful position, but an extremely lucrative one.

As ever, this exultant moment was followed by a leap of utter terror that the king should ever discover just how lucrative; Cressingham closed his eyes at the memory of the huge tower that was Edward Plantagenet, the drooping eyelid that gave him a sinister leer, the soft lisping voice and the great, long arms. He shuddered. Like the grotesque babery carved high up under cathedral eaves and just as unpredictably vicious as those real apes.

He slapped Ralph de Odingesseles for it, for the smirk, for Edward’s drooping eye and this Pit-damned brigand Wallace and for having to wait in this pestilential place for the arrival of De Warenne, the Earl of Surrey.

He slapped the other ear for the actual arrival of De Warenne, the hobbling old goat complaining of the cold and his aches and the fact that he had been trying to retire to his estates, being too old for campaigning now.

Cressingham had no argument with this last and slapped Ralph again because De Warenne had not had the decency to die on his way north with the army, thus leaving Cressingham the best room in Roxburgh, with its fire and clerestory.

Worst of all, of course, was the mess all this would leave – and the cost. Gods, the cost . . . Edward would balk at the figures, he knew, would want his own inky-fingered clerks poring over the rolls. There was no telling what they might unveil and the thought of what the king would do then almost made Cressingham’s bowels loosen.

Ralph de Odingesseles, trying not to rub his ears, went to the kist in the corner and fetched out a belt with dagger, purse and Keys, the latter the mark of Cressingham’s position as Treasurer, designed to elicit instant respect.

Like most such observances, the truth was veiled, like statues of the Lady on her Feast Days; everyone knew the Scots called Cressingham the ‘Tracherer’ and you did not need to know much of the barbaric tongue to know it meant ‘Treacherer’ and was a play on his title.

Yet he was also the most powerful in Scotland, simply because he held the strings of the purse Ralph now handed him.

He helped fasten on the belt, then adjusted his master’s arms in the sleeves of the long, loose
gardecorps;
Cressingham consoled himself with the fact that at least his
gardecorps
was refined. No riotous colours here, no gold dagging along the hem, or long slits up the sides, or three-foot tippets. Plain black, with russet
vair
round the sleeves and neck, as befitted someone of probity and dignity.

‘I will break fast now,’ Cressingham said and Ralph de Odingesseles nodded, took a step back and bowed.

‘The Seneschal is here. Brother Jacobus also.’

Cressingham frowned and swallowed a curse – couldn’t they at least let him wake up and eat a little? He waved his page away to fetch food and told him to let the Seneschal in, then went to brood at the shuttered window, peering through the cracks rather than open it to the breeze – even in August it was cold. Outside, the river flowed, gleaming as quicksilver and he took comfort from the Teviot on one side and the Tweed on the other, so that the castle seemed to sail on a sea, a boat-shaped confection in stone.

Roxburgh was a massive, thick-walled fortress with four towers and a church within the walls. Cressingham’s room was on a corner of the main Keep overlooking the Inner Bailey and, because of that, had a proper window of leaded glass rather than the shuttered arrow slits that faced the outside. The other sides of his room bordered on a corridor, so there were no windows at all, which made it dim and dark. Not for the first time, Cressingham thought of the light-flooded solar tower and its magnificent floor tiles, where De Warenne had installed himself.

A polite cough turned him and the Seneschal, Frixco de Fiennes, stood, waiting patiently in his sober browns and greens.

‘Christ be praised,’ Frixco de Fiennes said and Cressingham grunted.

‘For ever and ever,’ he responded automatically. ‘What problems have surfaced this early in the day?’

Frixco had been up for several hours and all the lesser folk of the castle hours before that. Half the day was gone as far as Frixco was concerned and he had already dealt with most of the castle’s problems – the cook needing the day’s salt and spices, the Bottler warning that immediate ale stocks were low and small beer lower still.

The other problems he had no answer for were worse -supplies for the 10,000 men currently filtering through Berwick and heading this way, the timber to the workmen scaffolding the Teviot wall in order for minor repairs to be done, men to make spears and quarrels and bows. Where grain for bread was to come from, or fodder for animals, or bedding for horse and hound.

‘The world turns, Treasurer,’ he replied. He should properly have addressed Cressingham as Lord but that was a step too far for the fine-bred Frixco de Fiennes, who was brother to the Warden here. Frixco, however, was not brave, or clever. He should have gone to the Church but liked women too much even to suffer the slight restriction priesthood would place on his whoring – the thought of the splendid Mattie down at the Murdoch’s Tavern in the town tightened his groin so much he almost bent over, convinced it could be seen.