The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (61 page)

Stunned by the maneuver, the second Neville brother
retreated for the gate, but the Trinity lads had circled around to block his
retreat.

The Peacock reined his horse back into a tight turn.

“You’ve lost your escort!” James shouted at him.

The Peacock came on again with a fury. James calmed his steed, waiting without a jerk of movement.
When the Peacock was within three lengths, he hurled his ax at the forelegs of
the charger. The ponderous animal crumpled, whipping its rider over its
neck. Thrown to the grass, the Peacock dragged himself up from the
tangled stirrups to avoid being crushed.

James dismounted and stood over him. “Your feathers are
ruffled.”

The Peacock tried to
crawl to his feet. James doubled him over again with a kick to the groin. The
Englishman lunged at him with his dagger drawn.

James was caught
unarmed—his ax lay several paces from his reach.

The Peacock laughed at his turn of good fortune. “Did you
know my father served with Clifford?”

James eyed the ax. “I’m told swine run in pairs.”

The Peacock angled between James and the weapon. “He was
there when they dragged your old man to the Tower.”

James ripped off his
padded shirt and wrapped it around his forearm.

The Peacock stalked him. “When that Scot felon that spawned
you fell from exhaustion, they tied him to a mule’s tail.”

“The man you hung was the brother of those lads behind you.”

The Peacock swung his dagger at James’s face, narrowing
missing his mark. “Remind me to say a Mass for his pagan soul.”

James parried his wild
thrusts. “Take a last look at
your
brothers. I’m going to ransom them for so much coin, your family will
be rendered penurious.”

Neville bared his teeth in a snarling grin. “I’m told that
caged bitch of yours also had a wagging tongue.”

James lowered his arm to
offer an inviting target. “I’m going to make certain your name is never uttered
without mine.”

The Englishman swung at his ribs and missed.

James lunged at his neck. “Speak my name!”

Trapped in the chokehold, Neville crumpled to his knees.
“Black!”

“My name!”

The blood drained from
Neville’s distended face. “Douglas!”

“I am a lord!”

Heaving for breath, Neville croaked, “Sir …”

James twisted the knave’s neck to the limit.

“James!”

“Now the bonnie finish!”

“Douglas!”

James threw him to the ground and retrieved the ax.

Neville crawled away clutching his throat. He looked up from
his hands and knees to shout a curse—and heard a swish of air.

“When you arrive in Hell, commend
that
name to
Longshanks!”

The Peacock’s plumed helmet rolled down the river’s
embankment—with his head still inside.

J
AMES FORDED THE
R
IVER
I
SLA
near Perth and found the royal
cavalry guarding the approach to the ruins of an old Roman camp. Exhausted and
battered from their recent rough crossing of the Irish Sea, Keith the Marishal
and his dejected troopers sat around the abbey grounds with their heads hung
low. James made an attempt at joviality to stir them from their
morose slumber. “Did I make a wrong turn into Northumbria? If not for your
rabbit-spooking face, Keith, I could have sworn I’d interrupted an English
burial party!”

Keith, gaunt and pale, was in no mood for banter. “Why don’t
you go back to the Borders, Douglas. We’ve no need of you here.”

“Where is he?”

Keith winced to his feet and stood with arms akimbo in front
of the abbot’s quarters. “The king has given orders. No one sees him.”

“Bishop Lamberton?”

“Gone to St. Andrews to take care of his own damn business.”

Alarmed at their low morale, James now understood why Lamberton had so hastily summoned him north. Robert, although coldly unmoved by the death of his daughter Marjorie in childbirth two years ago, had become so distraught over his disastrous Irish campaign that he had sequestered himself for weeks in this isolated Cistercian monastery at Couper Angus. This most recent of the king’s increasingly frequent spirals into the black abyss of melancholy had come at an inopportune time. After five years of siege, James and his Lanark raiders had finally captured Berwick, but an English relief army was reportedly being raised in York that would dwarf the host brought to Bannockburn. He had left young Walter Stewart in charge of his siege troops with orders to avoid giving battle until he returned.

He dismounted and made a move to go around Keith. Pushed back, he drove the cavalry officer against the wall with a steely glare of warning to unhand his arm. Keith decided not to test the threat, and stepped aside.

James lit a candle from the entry’s votive grille and walked through the sanctuary, which had been darkened with black bunting. Plates of rancid food littered the chapel, and it stank from rot and burning incense. As he neared the altar, he stepped on what appeared to be a corpse wrapped in a blanket. Lesions pocked its chest, whose hair had turned white with an oily sheen. Groaning, Robert looked up at him with eyebrows thinned and cheeks riddled with sores that seeped pus in his patchy beard. He crawled off into the shadows to hide. “Don’t touch me!”

James tore off the window coverings for light. “What has
happened to you?”

Robert shielded his swollen eyes. “Malachy’s Curse. I’ll
never be rid of it.”

He was exasperated to find that Robert was still bedeviled
by his deceased grandfather’s tale of the traveling hermit who had cast
vengeful incantations. “Where is that whoreson brother of yours?”

“Those Irish savages … cut off Eddie’s head. They sent it to
London.”

He wasted no breath in mourning the greedy Edward, who had
earned his fate with his unseemly lust for a crown. As he pulled Robert to his
haunches, his hand brushed against carved ridges on the altar lintel. He
brought the candle closer. “What in God’s name is
this
doing here?”

Robert pressed his splotched forehead against the Stone of
Destiny’s cool surface. “I ordered the bishop to send it. If I sleep near it, a
healing miracle may be granted me.”

He found a water basin and dipped a clothe in it to wash
Robert’s face. “These sores are getting worse.”

“Did you come all the way up here just to mother me?”

He increased the rigor of his rubbing to punish him for the
self-pity. “
You
have conjured a miracle, for certain. Thanks to your
Irish adventuring, Caernervon and Lancaster have set aside their bickering to
join forces. If they retake Berwick while I am here tending to your fragile
wits, we’ll lose the Marches.”

Robert dismissed that possibility. “Caernervon would not have brought his queen consort and son to York if he planned to invade so soon.”

Galvanized by that news, James stood from his knee so
swiftly that he overturned the basin. “Isabella is in the North?”

“Aye, Liz received a correspondence from her father last
week. De Burgh mentioned hearing in court that Caernervon’s wife intends to
spend the summer in Boroughbridge.”

“Heard from whom?"

“The English queen herself, of course.”

He lifted Robert to his feet with a surge of excitement.
“Boroughbridge is only two leagues from York!”

Robert staggered before finding his balance, having not
stood for days. “Who could blame her? London in the summer is a piss pot of
humidity—”

“Damn it, Rob! Don’t you see what the French lass has done?”

Scratching at his own scalp, Robert stared blankly at him.
“What in Finian’s name are you bleating about?”

James paced the flagstones in a tightening circle. “Isabella
had to know that Liz’s father would gossip every detail of their conversation.
I tell you there is more method than idle chatter in this.”

Robert blinked hard, trying to clear his head. “De Burgh has
a loose tongue, but—”

“Isabella would never willingly travel to Yorkshire with
Caernervon and Despenser, unless…”

Robert leaned in, waiting to hear the rest of the thought.
“Unless what?”

“Unless she had a damn good reason.” James looked down at his muddied boots and became distracted by an army of ants scurrying along the walls toward a dollop of spilled honey. Intrigued, he traced their trail outside the nave.

Baffled by his interest in the ants, Robert followed him
through the abbey’s door. Outside, the two men tracked the ants to a newly
constructed mound of dirt near the gardens. Keith came to attention, surprised to find the king breaking
his seclusion. The marishal and his troopers watched in confusion as Robert and
James hovered on their hands and knees over the ant mound.

James scooped up half of the dirt pile and carried it
several yards away. When he dropped it to the ground, the exiled ants abandoned
their quest for the honey and retreated in panic to their queen, who remained
in the original pile. He turned back to Robert with a grin of discovery. “The English queen is coming north for more than just a change of
scenery.”

Robert suddenly understood what James was proposing, and he shook his head sternly. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Isabella has schemed this journey
to be captured. If I go after her, Caernervon will abandon the Berwick siege
and rush south to save her.”

Robert drew him away from the other men for privacy. “The
Borders must be defended. I cannot send you off into the heart of England on
some wild sortie for revenge.”

“Revenge? This has nothing to do with revenge. And you are the last one to lecture me about wild sorties!”

“The MacDuff lass is gone,” Robert said. “You have to chase
the spell this memory of her has cast over you.”

He seethed at Robert’s patronizing tone. “Back from Ireland
with your ears boxed because of your own chimera! And now you lecture me? Easy
enough for you to advise temperance! You still have your woman!”

“There is nothing I can do to bring the Countess of Buchan
back.”

“You can send me to Yorkshire to take Caernervon’s queen.”

Robert had hoped the passing of the years would soften
James’s grief, but he now saw the flame that James held for Belle still burned
white-hot. He had received reports that James had grown so reckless in his
raids that some now feared he was intentionally courting death. James had never
led him astray, true. Still, he questioned if he could trust his old friend’s
judgment on such a risky stratagem. “If Edward leaves a garrison at York and
comes at you from Berwick, you’ll be caught in a vise.”

James slammed a fist into his palm to drive home the point.
“And if I capture Isabella before Edward returns to York, the English barons
will have their cause to remove the knave from the throne for incompetence.”

Robert turned aside and stared down at the ants, admiring
the loyalty they showed to the greater cause of protecting their queen. The
warrior members of their colony had already reunited their displaced army and
were fast at work rebuilding their defensive hill. He looked up again and
studied James intently. “Do you know the worst kind of counselor a king can
have at his side?”

“Pray tell.”

“A man who has nothing to lose.”

He came within an inch of Robert’s pocked face. “I once
shared a cave with such a man.”

Robert turned aside, stung by the implication that he had
gone soft. He looked across the Sidlaw Hills and calculated the distance that
James would have to cover to accomplish the improbable feat. No Scot army had
ever made it south of the River Tees, and York was another three days of hard
riding beyond that vale. Since his ignominious return from Ireland, even the
commoners whispered that he had lost his nerve. Perhaps he
had
grown too
predictable and cautious since Bannockburn. He could not allow the English to
sniff even a whiff of weakness, particularly after his failure in Ireland. With
a slap to his thigh, he nodded his agreement. “Take Randolph with you.”

Thrilled to see the old gambler returned to form, James
punched Robert on the shoulder, a bit too hard. “I don’t need another jester. I
have Sweenie.”

“Take Randolph,” Robert insisted, rubbing his bruised arm.
“I’ll not have you and the Queen of England traipsing across Yorkshire without
a chaperone.”

I
SABELLA STROLLED ALONG THE
River Swale, filling her lungs
with the crisp Yorkshire air. The unusually cool summer of that year, 1319, had
caused the leaves to turn early, and she had not enjoyed such a pleasant outing
since her days in Paris, when she would listen to the minstrels rowing on the
Seine. How long had it been? Eleven years. It seemed like a hundred. She
leaned over the water and saw more age lines in her reflection. Accursed isle!
This slither of frozen rock and its horrid clime had taken a frightful toll on
her features. Even those randy cads in court no longer stared at her as they
once—