The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (68 page)

She looked across the
pews and studied the faces of John, Eleanor, and Joan. Those children had been
the result of a miracle only slightly less astounding than divine intervention.
The arrival of an heir had given Caernervon such a potent respite from his
self-loathing that his nature had become altered. Although he continued to
prefer the company of men, her husband would thereafter on occasion appear at
her bedchamber, usually during some crisis in the realm, and he would endure
the sexual act with her as if it were an expiation of his sins and a
reaffirmation that he was truly king.

As the chanting monks raised the pitch of their Te Deums, she sank into the soothing
Latin intonations. She had often found refuge in this abbey, sitting for hours
under its ribbed vaulting while writing letters to her father that never made
it across the Channel. This was the only place in England where she felt at
peace. The flying buttresses and polished Caen stone, brightly painted in reds
and greens, reminded her of Notre Dame, as did the arcades hung with tapestries
of vermilion and gold and the thick haze from the censing angels that swirled
around the lime-washed pillars. The nave almost danced with the streams of
diffused light reflected from the rose window.

The chant ceased abruptly as the archbishop raised the
jeweled crown of St. Edward the Confessor and called upon the prince to recite
the concession that had been required of every king since William the
Conqueror.

“He seizes not,” Edward repeated, “but receives.”

Isabella heard a spate of snickering erupt behind her. She
knew what these English curs were thinking: Edward receives only because his mother has seized. Her eyes fell upon the Stone of Destiny resting on
an exposed shelf under the coronation chair. She interrogated that imprisoned block
of limestone in silence.

What black magic do you dispense, Stone? You claim to
recognize true monarchs. Have I rid myself of a useless husband only to be
tormented by a recalcitrant son? Caernervon was the first English king to be
anointed in your presence. Yet you stood silent while the crown was ripped from
his grasp. He swooned during the deposition, they said. Fell upon his knees
begging for a second chance like a child found guilty of some petty
transgression. If you were true, as the Scots say, you would have screamed the
day he ascended to this throne. Screamed not in recognition, but in protest.
What prophecy will you now shout upon my son?

The archbishop tapped his toe in annoyance at being forced
to wait for the distracted prince to strip to his shirt and breeches. When
Edward, red-nosed and sniveling, finally acceded to the prostration to accept
the anointments, the cleric betrayed a note of tonal dissonance in his
pronouncement of the ordo’s next demand: “You, Edward III of England, shall keep
full peace and accord in God and to the Church, to the people and to the
clergy?”

“I shall.”

“Grant thou all rightful laws and customs and defend and
strengthen them in accordance to the will of God?”

Edward flushed with pride as the archbishop raised the
hallowed sword once carried by the Hammer of the Scots. So fervently did the
boy despise his deposed father that he often fantasized of having been sired by
Longshanks. Denied the characteristic Plantagenet ruddy complexion, prodigious
height, and reddish hair, he never tired of searching for ways to alter his
appearance, even wearing his locks long and wild in the fashion of that mad
warrior. His hands quivered as took the sword framed with gold-gilt quillons
and darkened by Welsh, Scot, and French blood. With teeth set, he heaved the
point of the heavy blade toward the heavens and looked down at his mother in
accusation that she deemed him incapable of the task. Then, as if directing the
warning at her, he spoke the final verse of the ordo, “I shall defend
and strengthen.”

She brought a hand to her mouth, stifling a gasp at
that brazen act of insolence. Her worst fears were now confirmed: She had not
used her son to gain power, as the lords suspected; no, he had used her. She had seen that cruel glare
before. By sheer force of will, the boy was bent on transforming himself into
the man he believed to be his grandfather.

As the lords and clerics filed up to give homage to their
new king, she remembered the warning that she had confided to James years ago.
Its terrible truth, she feared, was about to be proven again.

Men make oaths. Women suffer the consequences.

C
AERNERVON PEERED OUT THROUGH THE
narrow air hole of his
second-floor cell in Berkeley Castle. He finally turned aside, his bleary eyes no longer able to withstand
the strain. He had been confined to this miserable keep on the Welsh frontier
for more than a year, forced to keep a constant watch for billowing sails above
the Severen estuary that fed to the Bristol Channel. Mortimer’s henchmen had
furthered his humiliation by banishing him to this keep, once one of the
domains once held by the earl of Gloucester, the baron who had shamed him with
the martyr’s death at Bannockburn.

Yet each recession of the tide brought him only renewed
despair. He had to keep faith that Archbishop Melton would come to release him.
But what if his messages had not reached his old ally in York? No, he must not
contemplate such a horrid thing. The archbishop was merely waiting until spring
to bring a force. Once rescued, he would march with the cleric against that
London mob with an army of fifty thousand and reclaim his crown. Melton would
not fail him, for he had promised to elevate the cleric to the seat at
Canterbury when Isabella and Mortimer were captured and exiled. Those two nesting
vipers had cornered him in a fit of weakness. Driven nearly insane by the fear
of losing another lover, he had relinquished the throne after being falsely
promised that he would be reunited with Despenser on a well-appointed estate.

He resolved not to dwell on that horrid debasement. Yet his
own mind persisted in betraying him; at times he wished never to be king again,
then an hour would pass, and he would be consumed by the shame. The memories of
that wretched day blinded him with raw grief. Two weeks after giving up the
crown, he received the news that Despenser had been executed in the same brutal
manner in which he himself had ordered Lancaster dispatched: Before being drawn
and quartered, his favourite had been kept alive long enough to witness his genitals be hacked off and burned.

Oh, Hugh! My cowardice doomed you! As it doomed Piers!

Soon he would avenge them both. In the Almighty’s eyes, he
was still king. That was his only comfort. But time was running out. The
terrors visited on him during the past months had caused his hair to fall out
and his gums to inflame. He bled profusely from the nose and his skin had
turned the shade of an overripe peach. Worst of all, he was plagued at night by
visions of Lancaster’s ghost coming to murder him.

That scheming French whore did this to me!

Isabella had bewitched him into believing he had seeded the
whelp that now wore his stolen crown. How had he failed to see through her
plotting? And who
was
the father of that brat? Lancaster? Gloucester?
Piers had warned him about the satanic mark on Isabella’s back. That
Frenchwoman had seduced him to her bed to disgorge the other three brats to
make Parliament believe that Edward had also been his progeny. No doubt she had
whispered her treacherous plans to the little bastard before he was even
severed from her cord.

The mongrel pup would not wait his turn, as
he
had been required to do! When he got
his hands on him, that boy will wish—a flash of swift movement came from the
corner. Were the shades attacking him again?

Filthy devils! Away from me!

A dim light filtered through the air hole and illuminated a
carving on the wall. Why had he not seen this before? He ran his hand across
the etching.

A pentagram.

Piers has come back in spirit to save me!

Fifteen years had passed
since his first lover had fled from their bed in a desperate exodus to escape
Lancaster’s ax. Piers had vowed to return to him in spirit. The Gascon’s
mother, an Albigensee, had taught her son the black art of demonic travel, and
this symbol of that heresy was to accompany Piers’s specter.

He retraced the
pentagram’s outlines to speed the manifestation.

The cell door creaked opened.

“Piers, is that you? I knew you’d not abandon me.”

“Turn away!” a muffled voice commanded.

He pressed his forehead into the cot to shield his eyes. “I
remember! The Devil’s Pact! Not until the light of sun!”

Hands braced his shoulders from behind, and he pressed back
into Piers’s reassuring strength.
Oh Lord, this is powerful magic
.
His limbs trembled as Piers reached
for the drawstrings on his leggings and untied them seductively. His lover’s
smooth hands, so expert, reached to his waist and lowered his breeches.
Caernervon arched his buttocks to receive Piers, and he felt a tremor of heat.
The tip of Piers’s cock slid down his back and toward his anus. He was being
teased beyond endurance.

“This is for Thomas Lancaster,” the voice behind him
whispered.

He is acting out the part! God’s confirmation!

Only Piers had known of
their private games.

He begged for the
penetration by thrusting his buttocks higher, remembering how Piers had bragged
during their intimacies of wanting to introduce the hated Lancaster to this
particular form of the joust. Piers was now mimicking the dead earl being taken
in such a cruel manner, just as his lover had done so many times when they had
been in bed together. “Shall I play him this time, Poppy?” He imitated
Lancaster’s high-pitched voice. “Don’t despoil me, I pray you!”

Piers rammed his phallus into him, nearly caused him to faint.
A voice came to his ear. “I watched him bleed to death on the gallows.”

Who is Piers playing now?
He tried to turn, but two
sets of hands held him down. “Piers! I do not find this—”

The same voice whispered from the darkness, “Lancaster was
still alive when they castrated him and burned their butchery before his eyes.
You will now learn what it means to bear such agony.”

“Damn you! Who are you?” He struggled to escape, but the
weight of two men now pressed against his back. This was not Piers in the spirit,
but intruders all too real. A sharp sizzle was followed by the acrid stench of
smoke.

An excruciating bolt of heat shot through his bowels,
incapacitating his legs. “God’s mercy!”

“You’ll have a lavish funeral.”

“Christ save me!”

“Thousands will file by your corpse and offer prayers in
gratitude that you were blessed with such a peaceful crossing. Not a scratch
upon you. The Almighty commanded your removal from the throne. Why? Because you
were taken to your Day of Judgment so soon after being deposed. A divine
affirmation of your son’s rightful accession.”

 “I am dying!”

“Yes, you
are
dying. And even a sodomite bent for
Hell is entitled to know the method by which he is to leave this world. Yours
will be apt in irony.”

“Cut my throat! I beg you!”

“This ass that once disgraced the throne is now home to the
hollowed femur,” the assassin whispered. “About the size you fancy, I should
think. The change in temperature is a scalded iron weaving through the bone.”

Caernervon gagged on his own vomit. “Kill me! God, make
haste!”

“Nay, we would not have you excelled by Lancaster in the
pace of your martyrdom. Did they tell you his last words? He vowed to escort
you to Hell to join Gaveston and Despenser.”

Caernervon screamed until his throat gave out.

He fell to the floor, dead.

A
NOTHER
E
DWARD.

When news of the
Westminster coronation reached Lintalee, James had groused that the
Plantagenets were no more imaginative in choosing christening names than they
were in adapting their military tactics. Now, as he led his veteran hobelars
through the Kiedler Pass into Northumbria, he felt the ache of every wound he
had suffered during the past forty-five years. Robert had ordered him to invade
England again, this time to instruct the new babe-king in London on the
consequences of abandoning a truce. He had lost count of how many times he had
passed through this narrow Borders cleft that funneled between the two forks of
the Tyne River. On this morning, however, unlike during raids past, the warm June
sun did not brighten his spirits.

Sweenie rode alongside him, gnawing on a green apple to
loosen his balky bowels. Age had shrunk the elfin monk to an even more
diminutive stature, but his mind was as sharp as on that first day he had
joined up with the Scot rebels at Glen Dochart. He had served as the army’s
chaplain for so long that he had developed the keen skill of reading his
commander’s thoughts and fashioning just the right jibe to provoke him to
action. He found the art of the jestering akin to spiritual ministering; the
Almighty, after all, surely possessed a skewed sense of humor, else why would
He have brought this motley collection of ill-tempered Scots together if not
for the sheer amusement? He threw the core at the hinds of James’s horse and
observed, “Randolph will have crossed Carter Bar by now. If he reaches Durham
before us, we’ll suffer his boasts without cease.”