The Honor Due a King (17 page)

She clutched the mirror to her breast. “And now? Can you say you love me now? I am growing old, Robert – my hair thinning, the circles growing dark beneath my eyes. Look. See how the skin sags here?” She pinched a small pocket of flesh beneath her jaw.

“Come now. Self-pity is a sin in one whose beauty is known afar. You hardly look the part of Methuselah, I do swear. As for years slipping away – well, they have not escaped me, in case your eyes have not uncovered that blinding truth. And you, you were a flower in the bud when I met you. The bloom is yet there.” My hand fell from her arm. I pulled at the roots of my hair as I circled the room.

Why in the name of Heaven must Our Maker fashion women to be so bloody complicated?

I halted in my tracks. “Very well, if this is to be a parley of truth, then hear. I loved who you were, once. I thought when you came back, you would be every bit the same. It didn’t take but a day to understand that the years we have lived through have changed both of us. Both for better and for worse. And I believed somewhere, somehow, I would find a part of you I used to know. That one day or night, we would hold each other and rediscover it. A man and a woman, yearning to be close. Husband and wife, united by the Church and blessed to –”

“Blessed? No.” Her eyes dampened. She placed the mirror on top of the chest feebly, went to stand before the hearth and stared into the amber flames. “Can you not see that we have been cursed from the very start, Robert? Cursed, plainly. My father refused you. King Edward denied you my hand for years. And then we were flung apart for an eternity while you battled ... and I withered. Even in the happy times, we were never
blessed
, Robert. God did not see fit to give us children. Perhaps I was never meant to have any.”

“Then if that is so,” I said, joining her on the other side of the hearth with only its dwindling warmth between us, “we’ll bear that sorrow together. But don’t let it destroy the joy we once had. Let it live again. Let me be near to you, Elizabeth. Tell me all that troubles you. Everything.” I splayed my fingers upon the warm stones of the hearth, wanting, waiting for her to place her hand over mine. Instead, she stood apart, swallowing back tears, as if I could offer her no comfort. Damn her for putting up these walls.

“Everything,” I whispered, going to her. On my fingertip, I caught the first trickle spilling from her eye. “I’ll not leave you alone until you tell me. By God, I have scaled higher walls than this.”

The tiny chin quivered. “You truly want to know?” She closed her eyes to dam back the tears. “Remember ... at Tyndrum, that morning?”

“Aye, you gave James a letter. It was from his brother. What a jealous fool I was to think it might have been something else. How swiftly everything changed in the span of a few hours, didn’t it? I thought we would all make it safely to Ireland. All of us.”

“I was going to tell you something.”

“Ah, aye. What was it then?”

Her eyes opened. “That I was with child.”

Sorrow choked my throat and I swallowed, hunting for words of solace. “My God ... I’m sorry. So sorry. I didn’t ...” But there had never been a child. Conceived, but not carried. Our child. Mine. “What happened?”

“I lost it – the child. At St. Duthac’s. That is why we never made it to the Orkneys. The Earl of Atholl sought refuge for us there because I could not go on. I was suffering great pains. Couldn’t eat or sleep to gain strength, nor walk or ride to go on. He carried me up the steps of the chapel and laid me before the shrine. There I bled a pool from between my legs, gripped with a pain more cruel than any I have ever known. Finally, I expelled a contorted, monstrous clot. A wee, misshapen lump of flesh. A boy. That much you could tell. But I lost him. Like all the others. Oh, I never told you of those, Robert. I spared you. Never wished to put the pain on you when you had so much else to bear. I lost them all. Only, that one made it longer. But not long enough. He was months and months away from his time.”

Her eyes never left mine. But there was no hint of eased pain, only a void, a distance, a placid acceptance of something I did not yet fathom.

“You see, it was never meant to be, Robert. God gave you one dream, a great one: a kingdom. But he kept the simplest of things from you: a child. While other men, men like your brother Edward, litter the world with their get but refuse to marry, you have a barren wife ... and that is your curse. Me.

“There was a time when I thought you could keep me safe from all harm. Then I discovered it wasn’t true. I had no one to protect me, no one to care for. No one but myself. All alone with nothing but my thoughts and my prayers. You – at least you had your freedom.”

She had never said anything about losing any babes before. Never mentioned it in all those blissful years we shared together. Never gave up her merriment to darken a single of my days with her.

“Ask me again,” she continued, pushing away from the hearth, less piteously and more harshly, “to lie with you and conceive your child when you have known the sorrow of carrying a babe inside you, only to have it die and nearly lose your own life in the process. I beg of you, if indeed you love me as you say, touch me not. Accept how things are, Robert. Spare me the pain, now that I have made it yours.”

Once, aye, once I had loved her more than anything. Given up my dreams to be with her, my pride even, until I uncovered a way to have it all. Now, I did not know whether I pitied or resented her. Pitied her for the sorrow she had chosen to bear alone. Or resented that she had taken it upon herself to serve as a vessel for my progeny at the expense of her own health and life and kept this secret from me all that time. If there was any blessing in this divine irony, it was that I should cherish my grandson even more. Yet even that did not ease the twisting in my groin, knowing that my own wife shirked my nearness, recoiled at my touch, and blamed me for the sorrow abiding in her soul.

“You could,” she began, “annul our union. Take another wife. One who can give you sons. I’d not hold it against you, Robert. I decided that long ago, during the years in England. I wanted to come back, if only to let you know and yet ... once here, I could not say it. I should have, before now. Let me go.”

I could only shake my head. But I could not look at her.

“Then please yourself as you will. Have whatever woman you want. Don’t even bother to think of me. I’m sure you forgot about me a time or two while I was gone.”

Words more wounding than any sword blow ever struck. Because they were true.

Vaguely, I was aware of Elizabeth leaving me, the door standing open, the fire slowly dying ... the rustle of someone standing in the doorway, the sound of my name.

“Robert? Uncle? Are you well?”

My eyes straining, I squinted into the half-light. “Thomas? What are you doing back here? Bloody far from Ireland, aren’t you? I don’t know whether to embrace you or shield my heart ere you speak.”

Thomas Randolph stepped into the room, looking gauchely about, as if he did not belong there. “Your pardon, Uncle. Fresh from Ulster. With news.”

I cleared my throat. “Go on. No one else here. My brother Edward?”

His hair was tousled from the wind, his cheeks striped with the sun. “Lives yet. Took Carrickfergus and is ready for you to join him with ample forces to take the rest of Ireland. And, as he so puts it, to accept with your aid what he has so long deserved: his own crown. Seems he believes you owe him for doing what the rest of us consider our duty.”

“Arrogant bastard hasn’t changed.”

“Coming then?”

I plucked up Elizabeth’s robe from the floor and tossed it on her bed. “Aye. Nothing here to hold me.”

***

Carrick, 1316

W
alter and James were to serve as regents in my stead. The proper documents were secured naming young Robbie as my heir.

With several hundred fresh men and far better provisioned than we had ever been in those days of being hunted by the English, Randolph and I rode over the Lothian hills and across Carrick, passing near Loch Doon where my first love Aithne lived with her son Niall. I nearly called a short reprieve there before going on, but we were expected by Edward before the onset of winter. So on we rode, through the heart of wild Galloway to the shores of glittering Loch Ryan.

As we were boarding our galleys for the voyage, a messenger arrived. When he dismounted from his lathered horse, his steps lagged with sorrow. He bent his knee before me and bowed his head. Such an approach never bore out well.

“Sire, our beloved Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, left this earth peacefully in his sleep three days past at his home in Glasgow.”

At my side, Randolph lowered his chin. “May the Lord bless and keep his soul.”

“Scotland has lost a great champion ...” I said, “and I an even greater friend. Without him, I would never even have taken the first step.”

I thanked the messenger for his trouble and paid him handsomely in coin, for it is never an easy or welcome task to be the bearer of such news, even for the passing of an old man like Bishop Wishart, who late in life had endured two lengthy terms of imprisonment at English disfavor. Only his frock had spared him a traitor’s fate upon the gallows. If I was glad for one thing, it was that he had come home to Scotland and died here, not in an English dungeon.

How hard it was to see Scotland’s shoreline fade into the gray, spitting mist of the sea. Hard to receive the news of Bishop Wishart’s death and know that one more friend was gone from me. Harder yet to leave my wife, who I had longed to be reunited with for so many wretched years, when in my heart I questioned where I had gone wrong and if all our troubles could be put right.

Always there was the ghost of the Elizabeth I had once loved body and soul, loved beyond life, loved her because she needed me, admired me, reveled in me and I in her. I left home, not so much because Edward needed me, but because I did not know what to do or say or how to act around Elizabeth. When she had needed me to keep her safe, I had failed.

But there were no answers to be found in Carrickfergus. No lightning of revelation. Nothing but a troubled sea and gloomy sky and long-reaching swells of dun-colored earth and a thousand starving soldiers to pass the winter with.

Edward, as ever, was unbearable.

Robert the Bruce – Carrickfergus, Ireland, 1317

M
y brother Edward: High King of Ireland. A precarious and provocative title. As empty in meaning as it was within the hollow of its silver circle. But it pleased his head. Too well, I daresay.

Like the high-hearted fool I was, I offered to fight with him to establish his foothold there. Naturally, he took this as a submission on my part that I would be fighting
for
him. I held my tongue, if only to finish the task. Meanwhile, King Edward of England was embroiled in his own battles at home and could ill afford to follow us over the Irish Sea. The time, although never good, was never better.

Randolph and I arrived in Carrickfergus in Ulster late in the fall of that year. Edward was in good spirits, although he had sparing little to show for his endeavors thus far. He derived his sustenance from debauchery rather than food. While his men quarreled over a shoulder width’s space at the campfire to warm their rag-wrapped fingers and were rationed out food that came intermittently by ship, since nearby farms had been stripped clean already, Edward reveled in his self-created glory. He drowned himself in it while looking for his true self at the bottom of a barrel of ale.

There was a time when he had lived as much as I did with the conviction that freedom was all – a time when he had bedded down on the bare ground with the very men who fought under his command and drank from streams cold with melted snow as he knelt beside battle-bruised soldiers and rallied them with words of encouragement. Now, I had arrived in this smoky, overcrowded hall which reeked of vomit, urine and unwashed bodies to witness him hurling insults at those who served him. Instead of brewing stratagem and weaving alliances, he rolled in drunkenness and bedded wenches young enough to have been his daughters.

The brother I once knew had been impetuous, grating, crude, but loyal and driven, however flawed. The Edward Bruce who received me at Carrickfergus barely raised his head to acknowledge me above his heaped trencher. He had become slovenly, irrational, and was clearly suffering from some strain of melancholy. Drink and hoarded food had increased his girth. Through the fog of ale that must have clouded his head, I believe it took him a few moments to recognize me. He raised a ragged eyebrow, scratched at a bristly chin, curled his lip in disgust and mumbled at me to join him.

Our relationship deteriorated further in the passing months as autumn gave over to winter. At my brother’s beseeching, I had come well in advance of to plan out the campaign; instead, I spent my days with Randolph exploring ways of bypassing Edward’s illogical stream of orders. If not for my nephew, I would have been driven to a fit of insanity and thrown myself from the sea cliffs.

I negotiated with Irish chieftains, mostly to no good end, and practiced tolerance while Edward’s hotheaded barbs and reckless ways frayed at my wits. The only reprieve came when he slept from noon until midnight

Day after day, night after night, it rained. In my bed, I lay awake, tossing and turning, while raindrops lashed at the windows and hammered upon the roof. A trail of water flowed around the frame of the glazed window of my bedchamber, trickled down the lower portion of the plastered wall, and gathered in a pool in the nearest corner, slowly seeping between the planks to dampen the room below.

A chant arose in the great hall. Fists beat in unison on the tables. A primeval rhythm pulsed through the posts of my bed. The beating grew and grew until it collided in a great rumble. A roar. A crash. Wood splintering. Then, a big cheer and tumbles of laughter broken by guttural protests. Another evening of drunken oblivion. Another brawl.

I relinquished any illusions of sleep and got up from my bed, pulled on my leggings and boots and plucked up a wrinkled shirt. I tugged the shirt over my head as I went out my door, forgetting to duck the low lintel and nearly knocking myself senseless. I rubbed at my head as the pain faded to a dull throb, feeling a lump there, and descended the dark and narrow stairs until a yellow glow and the stink of smoke told me the hall was not far.