The Lion at Bay. Robert Low
over and over. Wood will burn even if drawn through water and the willow will droop if sown out of season.
Five years she had resisted her natural inclinations, shackled by the knowledge that, if she stuck to the bargain, Hal would remain safe from Buchan’s wrath.
Did he still hold feelings for her, after all these years?
Could she fortress herself against the promise of them for longer?
Riccarton Chapel
Midnight
The tchik, tchik seemed like a forge hammer on an anvil in the chill dark of the place, bouncing off the hidden stones; the sparks seemed big as cartwheels. It did not seem possible for any one of them not to start a major conflagration, never mind smoulder some firestarter charcoal into embered life.
‘There are dead folk here,’ Sim Craw intoned. Lamprecht snorted; he heard the fear in the man’s voice and it pleased him to see this great beast rendered trembling by the dark and the dead. Neither of them held any fears for Lamprecht.
‘That is the usual purpose o’ a crypt,’ Kirkpatrick said dryly and his face was suddenly looming out of the dark, reddened as an imp’s in the fires of Hell, cheeks puffed as he blew the spark into a tiny blossom of flame, fed the nub end of a candle to it and then the candle to the lantern.
Light bloomed, making them blink and look away even as they crept closer to it. For all his insouciant airs, Hal thought, Kirkpatrick is as ruffled as the rest of us; he had heard the lantern’s loose horn panels rattle in the tremble of the man’s hand. Then he looked at the red-dyed devil face of Lamprecht and corrected himself. All ruffled save this, he thought.
Four stone kists glowered in the flickering shadows and Hal saw that every wall of the place was niched with small, square holes. The common folk are turfed up in the chapel yard but this place is reserved for the priests, Hal thought, with the stone tombs for the start of it then, when only the bones are left, they are stuffed in a hole in the wall. Cloistered in death as in life.
‘Is this the very kist, then?’ Sim hissed and Hal saw the only one without a heavy cover.
‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick grunted, moving to the door at the top of three worn stone steps. It led to the inside of the chapel and Hal hoped it would be an easier opening than the one that had led to this place.
Choked with weeds and disuse, it had to be dug out and each grunt and thump of it panicking them with discovery. They had brought three of the steers with them, to pretend they were gathering them up from grazing among the dead, but it was not much of an excuse. Dog Boy had been left at the entrance, as much for the trinity of kine as a guard for the backs of the ones in the crypt.
‘Ach – it is empty.’
Sim’s voice was still a hissed whisper, but disappointment had robbed him of his fear, so that it was loud and seemed louder still in the echo of the place.
‘Weesht.’
Kirkpatrick’s scowl was matched by a notched eyebrow of Sim’s own.
‘I only thought there might be someone in it,’ he protested. Loudly.
‘I have no care if Christ’s very bones are in it,’ Kirkpatrick spat back. ‘I should have handed ye a horn and had ye announce us.’
‘Open the bliddy door,’ Sim responded in a low mutter and Kirkpatrick drew out his dagger, the four sides of it winking malevolently. Hal and Sim waited, half-crouched as if the niches of the place would erupt shrieking demons, but there was only the smell of stone and old must. Yet the square holes of the place seemed like accusing black eyes on Hal’s back.
The rending creak was a rasp along all their nerves, so that Kirkpatrick stopped at once and everyone froze.
‘No horn needed,’ Sim growled bitterly and Hal silenced him, deciding that matters had gone far enough between him and Kirkpatrick. The latter put away his four-sided dirk and heaved the door open, heedless of the shrieking grate of it.
‘Who is in here anyway?’ he demanded into their wincing. ‘A rickle of old bones, yon wee priest and Jop himself, too huddled in a hole to be a bother.’
Jop was not cowering, for they found him after creeping, mouse-quiet, through the chapel, a place as simple as a barn, no transepts, with a second-storey campanile and beams just visible in the light.
Vine leaves painted an eye-watering green adorned the corbels and capitals of pillars built into the half-stone walls and lurid, flaming scenes from the scriptures jumped out from rough white plaster on every side; Hell burned more fiery in the glimmer of Kirkpatrick’s lantern.
There was a font near the door, no more than a large bowl on a plinth and, apart from an altar on a dais, nothing else but a worn flagged floor. Above the altar was a painting of Saint Christopher bearing the Christ Child, who scowled disapprovingly at the unlit sanctuary lamp.
There was no sign of the priest they had seen earlier – but Jop was up and fiercely challenging when they came through the door to his room, up some stairs of the wooden campanile and one level below the belfry itself.
‘Who’s this – who the De’il are you?’
He was big, Hal admitted, seemingly bigger in the low-ceilinged room, already crowded with a truckle bed, a stout kist and a brazier of red coals. Copper hair, a fierce eye, big shoulders – for a moment they all three thought they had stumbled on The Wallace by accident.
Yet a second glance told the truth of it – the face was the same, but as if someone had stuck bellows in the mouth and puffed it up. The eye was fierce, but the heart behind it was not. The height was the same, but the shoulders were fatty and the belly an ale cask.
‘Jop,’ Kirkpatrick declared and hauled out the four-sided dirk, so that the big man backed away, collided with the truckle and sat so hard Hal heard it splinter.
‘Who sent ye?’ the man hoarsed out and Kirkpatrick chuckled.
‘Nobody in London, if that is what ye think,’ he replied. ‘Though ye will speak of that place afore we are through.’
‘No English neither,’ Hal added. ‘Though Longshanks will be anxious to ask you aboot the cross ye have snugged up somewheres.’
Jop blinked and sagged, which brought a vicious chuckle from Kirkpatrick.
‘Aye, we ken of it. Ye will tell us where we can find it.’
‘It were only half the cross. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, the coo shite, had half of it,’ he offered to Kirkpatrick. ‘We helped shift some loot from the back o’ the minster where it had been hid, for Mabs in Sty Lane, though it was ower treacherous to try at that time, wi’ Pudlicote’s skin still wet on Westminster’s door.’
‘And did you take it to yer kin, The Wallace?’ Hal asked.
‘Him?’
Jop was scorning and wiped some sweat from his palm across dry lips, watching the wink of the knife.
‘If ye see him, offer my blissin’,’ he said sourly. ‘God be wi’ The Wallace, for he ne’er took from a man but all he had.’
‘Meaning?’ demanded Hal, and Jop, his tongue like a lizard, spilled it all out like water from a spout.
He had sought out Wallace in the hope that his kin might shelter him and buy the gilded half-cross he had brought with him, for it was well known The Wallace had the hard cash of a dozen good raids.
Hal and Kirkpatrick shared brief glances.
‘So Wallace knows all this?’ demanded Kirkpatrick and Jop curled a lip.
‘Aye, he does. Laughed. Then took the shine,’ he said in a bitter whine. ‘I had six and Lamprecht had six. Bliddy Wallace took mine, for The Cause he says.’
He spat into the coals of the