The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant. Robert Low
watched the nun scurry out into the dark and sat on a bench while the tallow sputtered. She tried not to be beaten by the crush of loneliness, the realisation that she would go from here but only back to Buchan. She tried not to think of Bruce and failed, so that the added weight of that sagged her head limply on her neck. She tried not to cry and failed.
Then, to her own surprise, she thought of Hal of Herdmanston.
In a chamber off the main refectory of the nunnery, the Prioress listened to her charges laugh in wild shrieks, flamed by the wine brought by their benefactor, who stood half in shadow, half in the blood of the sconce light.
‘Keep her fed, wined and secure,’ Sir Robert Malenfaunt declared. ‘And away from those harpies.’
‘Special, is she?’ sneered the Prioress and Malenfaunt smiled.
‘A Countess. From Scotland, admittedly, but an important one. From a powerful family in her own right and married into another.’
He leaned forward, so that his sharp, shadowed blade of a face cut close to her own.
‘Special, as you say. Worth her weight in shilling, so keep her fattened and untouched.’
He took her chin in cruel fingers then.
‘Untouched,’ he repeated. ‘I want none of your charges to put their grimy fingers near that quim.’
She pulled away from him, though her heart thundered, even as he peeled off her headcover and ran his hands over her stubbled scalp; it excited him, that style, so she kept it close-cropped for that reason. Fear and lust made her breath shorten to gasps and she knew he would bend her over the only chair in the room, throw her grey habit up and over her head and take her, grunting and panting like a dog. He did it each Christ’s Mass, to as many of the nuns as his strength and fortified wine would allow.
She was at once repelled and frantic for it.
Herdmanston, East Lothian
Ash Wednesday, March 1298
Hal watched the plough from the roof of the square block of Herdmanston, feeling the smear of ash on his forehead itch. He watched it with a warmth that had only partly to do with the sun, was as happy as any man can be on the first day of Lent, seeing his fields being turned back like bedcovers.
The ploughman was Will Elliot’s da, his two brothers darting in and out to heel exposed worms back into the ground, or watching for the twitch of an ox tail that showed dung was coming, so the brace could be brought to a halt, to dump their precious cargo into the furrow.
The earth was new bread. The frost had cracked it, the thaw and rain had watered it, a week of late February sun had warmed it and it crumbled, heaving with furiously busy earthworms, little ploughs shifting the earth into a bed for oats and barley.
Gulls screamed, the coulter-knife scooped up clod against the mouldboard, a great wave of new-turned earth rearing up, curving over and falling into a furrow. Below Hal, the Dog Boy was trying to teach the yapping terriers, all mad wriggle and fawning tails, some obedience and, from the laughter of those watching, was not having the best of it.
There was laughter, too, from the stone chapel where Father Thomas exercised his skills with a brush to construct a glowing Saint Michael, patron of the church in Saltoun, on the internal plastered walls – and emerged covered in ochre-red and looking like a man who had fallen in a slaughterhouse pit.
It was easy, on a day like this, to forget the winter, the war, the deaths. Isabel. Yet the world would not be kept back and its herald was Sim lumbering up the last steps, panting with climbing the winding stair to the roof.
‘Rider coming,’ he grunted. ‘It will be the messenger from Bruce about the ransom for Sir Henry. At bloody last – God curse all notaries and inky-fingered clerks.’
An uneasy truce had been agreed with the English, but raids continued – more from the Scots side than the English – and only the winter weather had halted them. Getting agreement on ransom, then writs of safe conduct to travel south had taken a long time and the weather had closed in the north until no more than a few weeks ago. The Auld Templar will be fretting at the delay, thought Hal. Not to mention Sir Henry’s wife and bairns, spending the Christ’s Mass without husband and father.
He watched the horse and man come up over the great expanse of open ground, studded with copses, that surrounded Herdmanston, a rise and fall that hid the rider for a time. It was only when he got closer that Hal started to feel anxious; the horse was lathered and had been ridden harder than a mere message about an exchange warranted.
The rider was from Roslin, a broad-faced man Hal knew slightly, a labourer rather than a soldier, whose right thumb, Hal noticed incongruously, was cracked open by cold and work. That must hurt, he thought …
It was a message from Fat Davey, who had taken over John Fenton’s duties at Roslin.
The Auld Templar had turned his face to the wall.
Cloaked in misery, they rode over to Roslin, where the Lady stood with her bairns gathered into her skirts and her lip trembling at the edge.
‘I am sorry for your loss, mistress,’ Hal told her, hearing the dull pewter clunk of the inadequate words.
‘Aye,’ added Sim and then tried to brighten matters. ‘We will ride south and bring your man home, mind you, so have comfort in that.’
It was a comfort, too, Hal saw, but only a little one. He met Fat Davey in the main hall of the stone keep that was perched on an outcrop of rock and surrounded by the timber and ditch of the old motte and bailey. They had started rebuilding Roslin in stone, but work had ceased when the Sientclers were captured, the money hoarded for expected ransom. At least they can start anew on that, Hal thought bleakly. Two dead, one to be freed and no money paid out at all.
Fat Davey was grateful for Hal’s offer to take the Auld Templar to Balantrodoch, as was proper. Him and his clothes, his maille, his equipage and his warhorse all belonged to the Temple in common; another knight would have it.
But not everything, it seemed. Hal found Fat Davey’s face staring into his own like a bleak moorland that sucked the life from any muttered commiserations.
‘It was too much for him, the loss of John Fenton and then his son,’ Fat Davey said, shaking his head. ‘He just took to his bed and stared at the wall.’
He paused, fought for control and wrenched it into himself.
‘Save for the once,’ he added, fished in his pouch and brought out a small linen bag, handing it to Hal.
‘He said, just before the last, that you should have this,’ he said, his cheeks a shadow of the squirrel satchels that had once bulged there. ‘For varying reasons, he said. Not least of them being ye are the only grown Sientcler free and in the world.’
Hal thought of the Auld Templar’s son, dead in the Tower and almost certainly bowstring murdered, or starved like The Hardy. Grandson Henry, father to the three bairns still at Roslin, was held in one of Edward’s own castles, Briavel in Gloucester and, with luck, would be home soon – if Edward continued to think Fitzwarin more of a gain than the loss of a Sientcler prisoner. Or was not simply feeling waspish over the Scots affair.
His shadow was long, dark and unpredictable, Hal thought and soon Edward Plantagenet would be back, when matters would rush like a flood. There would be no exchanges then, when Longshanks turned all his energy to the Scots; Hal had a moment of panic to be on the move, to have Henry Sientcler back with his wife and weans before the raging storm of a vengeful king broke on the world.
Hal realised that Davey was right – with his own father dead and the Auld Templar himself stiff in the neighbouring chamber, Hal was the only adult Sientcler left out in the world; the linen bag suddenly started to burn the palm of his hand.
He tipped it out, saw that it was a ring and heard the thunder in his ears for the seconds it took him to realise it was not the seal of Roslin.