The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (17 page)

Isabella remained in his gaze too long for propriety. Daubing a tear, she looked to the sun to ascribe blame for the irritation and reluctantly broke off their silent exchange. She began walking toward the palace, but then turned back. “Lord d’Argentin, you did not answer me.”

“My lady?”

“Does our transplanted Scot here show promise?”

D’Argentin regarded James with suspicion, questioning why
the princess would take interest in a lowly foreign squire. “Too soon to know.”

Isabella stole a last glance of regret at James, her effort
at flirtation dying with a sigh of resignation. Trying to mask the emotion in
her voice, she gamely advised the instructing knight, one of her many admirers:
“Then you must not divulge
all
of
our secrets to him, no?”

B
ELLE FOLLOWED THE
C
OMYN MEN
up the puddled steps of Berwick Castle and looked down upon the rows and rows of new rooftops gabled in the London fashion. Married off two months ago to Tabhann, she had thought nothing could exceed that misery; but now, witnessing the tribulations of her fellow Scots here in the Borders, she felt her heart breaking again.

Almost nothing remained of the port that she remembered from her first visit here as a child. The English had built thick curtain walls to the banks of the Tweed for protection against raids, and the adjacent burgh, transformed into a bastide with its own formidable ramparts, had been repopulated with Yorkshiremen whose forges now hummed with military preparations. Beyond the gate lay grassy mounds over the mass graves of those massacred here nine years ago, the only reminder left to bear witness to Longshanks’s brutality.

The guards herded the Comyns and her into a waiting line of five hundred Scot nobles who had been summoned, under the penalty of treason, to appear and swear loyalty to the Plantagenet crown. Forced to stand in the rain for an hour, they were finally admitted into the shelter of the great hall. Near a raging hearth, Longshanks sat on a raised platform watching the arrivals as Robert Clifford roughly check them for weapons. Accompanying the king were his son, Edward Caernervon, and his Privy Council, which included the Earl of Gloucester, Hugh Cressingham, the Treasurer of the Realm, and William Ormsby, the English-appointed Chief Justiciar for Scotland.

Belle
scanned the hall and saw an unfamiliar face on the dais. At Caernervon’s side
sat a slender, sable-haired knight who playfully nudged the prince while
whispering jests at the expense of her forlorn countrymen. Raffishly coiffed
with curls and trimmed beard glossed to a point, the brazen churl wore an outlandish
tunic of crimson silk sewn lavishly with sparkling gemstones. Watching him
preen without shame, she suspected the man, so untutored as he was in the
virtue of Christian modesty, to be none other than the notorious Piers
Gaveston, a Gascon dandy whose tongue was said to be as cutting as his sword.
There was something so unnatural about his mincing presentment that she was at
the same time repulsed and incapable of diverting her gaze.

Caernervon’s future wife, Isabella, sitting on the prince’s left, also witnessed the Gascon’s risqué conduct. She turned toward Belle with a pointed glance of sickened anguish so shocking in its familiarity that Belle could not shake the absurd feeling that the princess somehow knew her intimately.

Shoved toward the swearing stand, Red Comyn discovered the
Bruces standing in the fore of the procession. Enraged by what he perceived as
an end-run around his right to the throne, the chieftain attempted to elbow his
way ahead of them. “The Comyns must be heard first!”

Clifford buffeted Red’s yapping jaw with the back of his hand, sending the chieftain reeling. Laughing, the officer regaled the king, “They trample themselves to kiss your ring, my lord!”

A groan of humiliation
rose up from the Scots—from all, that is, but the Bruces, who nodded with
satisfaction at seeing Red Comyn receive such a bruising welcome. Old Bruce the
Competitor, tottering and disoriented, was supported at the elbows by five
grandsons so varied in features and temperament that none would have guessed
them to be kin. Wrapped in the black robe of a Cambridge scholar, Alexander
Bruce was the shortest and fairest of the brood, with his soft, delicate lines
and smooth skin protected by days spent in libraries. Edward Bruce, the second
eldest, was stout, edgy, constantly in motion, pushing always, his sienna hair
as wild and raging as his smoldering hazel eyes. Unlike their older siblings,
twins Thomas and Nigel had inherited the optimistic nature of their Irish
mother, and even in this hour of confrontation and discord, they traded broad,
hail-thee-well grins with comrades.

Yet it was Robert Bruce whose firm stance and determined brow made clear that he now governed the clan. Although an accomplished knight well into his twenties, he was rumored to prefer the comforts of the English court to the demands of his Scottish rank. His entrance had been met with icy glares from his fellow countrymen, for there was talk that he had tarried in bringing up his troops to aid Wallace at Falkirk. But that was just slander, Belle knew, spread by the Comyns to shunt responsibility for their own malfeasance.

Longshanks ignored Red’s protests and offered his
jewel-spangled hand to the lady accompanying the eldest Bruce brother. “Dearest
Liz. I’ll never forgive Rob for stealing you from my court. I trust marriage is
agreeable?”

The former Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of one of
Longshanks’s most valued allies, the Earl of Ulster, curtsied stiffly, allowing
her strawberry blonde curls to fall over a green bodice that had been expertly
tapered to announce her ample bosom. “It is all I dreamed of and more, Sire.”

Belle found Robert’s choice for his second wife troubling.
His first, the Scot daughter of the Earl of Mar, had died two years ago in
childbirth, leaving him a weakly daughter, Marjorie. Robert had remarried into
high nobility, true, but she would have preferred another Scot lady, and one a
bit less arrogant. Elizabeth was tall, freckled, and big-boned; every inch of
her impressive frame, which tended toward a meaty fleshiness, was cast in
vibrant shades of red. She could have been one of those fire-haired warrior
queens who once ruled from the sacred mound of Tara. And yet, there was none of
that Irish acceptance of fate’s inevitable damnation in her temperament. Raised
in the rarefied air of the London court, Elizabeth reportedly insisted on the
finest of accommodations and was said to despise the brutish journeys across
the Ulster moorlands to visit the Irish holdings of her father.

Longshanks draped his vulture-winged arms across the
shoulders of Robert and Edward Bruce. “Ah, lads, I had no doubt you’d rush to
my side. Children, Rob! Has it not been a year? And still our lovely Liz has
not bloomed? Delay much longer, and I’ll suspect you of being distracted from
your husbandly duties.” He playfully slapped the back of Edward’s head, each
tap more forceful. “And you, Eddie? Not a word since you took leave from my
household?”

Damned from birth with a face that never camouflaged a thought, Edward Bruce tried to protest, “That arrangement was not by my—”

Robert silenced his
impulsive brother with pinch to the nape of his neck in what only appeared to
be sibling affection. As if to gain a distance from the taint of his fellow
defeated Scots, Robert made it a point to speak the London dialect that he had
learned as a boy in the Plantagenet court. “I have been occupied by troubles in
our Galloway domains, my lord. Comyn and his outlaws harass me without cease.
If you would recognize my right to the kingship—”

“I pay your debts!” Longshanks screamed, suddenly turning
apoplectic. “Do you now expect me to buy you a kingdom?”

Robert was driven onto his heels by the swift alteration in
the king’s mood. “My lord, I have been a loyal vassal—”

“Loyal to my overly
generous purse!” Longshanks shouted so shrilly that his hounds sprawled near
the hearth erupted with howling. He contemptuously surveyed the
slump-shouldered Scots. “He who rids himself of shit does good business.”

A wave of muttering
rippled through the scowling Scots.

Seeing the Competitor
baring his toothless gums in a half-snarl, the king settled into his chair and
ordered old Bruce to the base of the dais. “I shall hear it from you first,
Lord Annandale.”

Robert tried to mitigate the king’s ire by stepping in front
of his grandfather, but Clifford forced the Competitor to the fore. Shaking
with the palsy, old Bruce shuffled pitifully to the dais, begrudged a difficult
collapse to his knee, and mumbled the oath. Having swallowed his enforced dose
of shame, he glared his grandsons to their prostrations.

Robert was the last to descend.

The English barons eased their martial stances, placated
with this, the most significant of the many debasements that would follow that
morning.

The Earl of Gloucester, cousin to the Bruces, assisted the Competitor back to his feet. Deprived of his dream to become king of Scotland, the Bruce patriarch could only offer him a browbeaten nod in gratitude for the kindness.

Amused by their groveling prostrations, Longshanks turned
next to Red Comyn. “You should be quite accomplished at this exercise, Comyn.
God knows, you’ve practiced giving oath to me so many times, we’ve lost count.”

The chieftain, still woozy from Clifford’s blow, stumbled to
his knees. “My lord, as always, the Comyns shall keep true with you. May I present
my son, the Lord of Badendoch, and my nephew, the Lord of Buchan.”

While Tabhann and Cam mealy-mouthed their oaths, Longshanks
squinted beyond their shoulders and found Belle still standing. Seeing her
shove away Red’s hand when he tried to pull her down, the king mulled this rare
demonstration of defiance. “Your men have barked, Comyn. It seems your women
will not. I’m not surprised. My houndsmen tell me the orneriest bitches always
mate with the puniest males. A law of nature.”

Red labored under the
delusion that Belle, not he, had been insulted. “You will remember her, my
lord. At your behest, she is the wife of my nephew.”

“Her father’s skull
still hangs from Stirling Bridge,” Clifford reminded the king. “The son of
MacDuff continues to prosecute his banditry in the Selkirk.”

Longshanks did not
receive the reaction that he had expected from the mention of Ian MacDuff’s death.
Instead, he found Belle distracted by the block of limestone resting below his
feet. “Do you recognize it, my lady?”

“No, my lord.”

“Of course not. What was I thinking, asking such a question?
Your crass traditions denied you the right to remain in its presence. I am your
liberator. Gaze on it to your heart’s desire. I believe you call it your Stone
of Destiny.”

Belle stared dumbfounded at the crude lump. Iron rings had
been driven into its sides so that it could be carried like a lump of rock
salt. Could this disappointing chunk of common quarry truly be the Stone of
Miracles? When it slowly dawned on her what base treatment it had suffered in
captivity, she stumbled from faintness and nearly fell.

Robert Bruce rushed to her with an arm for support. She saw from Robert’s ashen expression that he
shared her distress. She had refused to believe her father’s insistence that the
relic held no special powers, but here the Stone sat before her, a silent
witness to Scotland’s humiliation, impotent as the craven men who stood around
her.

Longshanks enjoyed her torment. “Tell me, Lady Buchan.
Is it true the Stone must scream before one can be accepted as your king?” When
she did not answer him, he slammed his heel into the block and sent a chip
flying from its corner. “Did you hear it scream?”

Belle rushed forward to
salvage the shard, but the guards drove her back.

Longshanks jumped to his feet, ricocheting his chair. “I
asked if you heard it scream!” He drove his heel into the Stone’s soft
limestone again.

Many of the Scots turned away, unable to watch the sacrilege.
Finally, Robert Bruce put a stop to the abuse. “We heard it, Sire.”

Satisfied with that concession, Longshanks strode with
loping steps to the table that held the Ragman Rolls, the derisive title given
to the shameful oath documents. “Afford me obedience, and you will live in
peace. Deny me, and you will suffer the same fate as this city that chose
defiance nine years ago.”

Rousing from his
whispers with Gaveston, Caernervon pointed out two hooded men who stood at the
entrance. “Father, not all the dogs have yelped.”

The Scots parted to make
a path for two unidentified arrivals.

One of the newcomers
lowered his cowl. “In accord with your command, my lord, I present myself, along with
my clerk.”

There was a rumble of surprise, and then an explosion of
excitement. The Scots, who had long prayed for the return of their beloved
Bishop Lamberton, rushed up to be the first to gain the cleric’s hand and
welcome him home.