‘Nearer twenty,’ Hal corrected when Sim hoiked this up and Sim grew even more morosely silent at the truth of it. Out of all that time, Hal thought bleakly, Isabel and I have had no more than a year and a day in total together, tallied in months here, a week there.
Yet he would give as much for the same again.
‘The new lord of Badenoch keeps her fastened,’ Sim said suddenly, as if reading Hal’s mind. Hal looked up and saw the grim gimlet of Sim’s eyes, pouched and rheumy, but hard enough still.
The new lord, Hal thought, and almost laughed aloud. The youth Kirkpatrick had almost killed in Greyfriars, until Hal had prevented it, thinking enough blood had been spilled on a holy altar with the death of the father, the Red Comyn.
‘Aye,’ Sim agreed, seeing that chase itself across Hal’s face. ‘The stripling is grown to man and come into his lordship of Badenoch and all the attainments thereof. Mind you, the most of it he can actually lay his hands on without an army at his back consists of Malise Bellejambe and Badenoch has confirmed that man in the duty once given him by the Earl of Buchan: keep her in her cage.’
Bellejambe. Sim saw Hal’s eyes turn to haar on grey water.
‘I had hoped Malise Bellejambe was gone down the brae,’ Hal said flatly. ‘Then hoped the opposite, for I want to end his life myself.’
‘He lives yet,’ Sim said, and then laughed dryly. ‘Greyer, as we all are these days, but his heart is as black as ever, I hear.’
Bellejambe, who was guilty of murder by knife and poison, who had snaked his way after Isabel on behalf of her husband until, finally, he had coiled round his capture. Hal did not want to think of what he had done to her, was almost rushed off the bench he sat on with the mad, frantic urge to charge down to Berwick.
It washed over him like fire, sank and ebbed, leaving him trembling and bitter with the reality. Seven years detached from swordplay or even wearing maille or riding a horse. Nothing left of his Herdmanston lands but the title. No men at his back and no future at his front. Some gallant rescuing knight, he thought, who has even been forgotten by the King I helped put on the throne.
But not by Isabel. He was sure of that and it nagged him like a knife in the ribs, the knowledge that she had squatted in her cage for seven years, willing him to her rescue. It was a scorching force that, every now and then, drove him to his feet as if to rush there alone and beat the walls down. The effort of staying shook him like ague and it had been this way for all of the seven years; the old weals on his knuckles told of the blood he had spilled hammering uselessly on stone and door.
An hour later, the world changed again when a squire came up and declared that the King requested Sir Hal of Herdmanston’s presence in his chambers. The boy said it politely enough, for he was court-skilled enough to realize that there might be more to this old man than poor clothes and a bad haircut, since the King was not only seeing him in private, but had requested it.
‘Come as you are,’ the servant added, seeing Hal hesitate and look down at his tunic. Sim laid a hand on Hal’s wrist as he started to move after the servant.
‘Dinna fash when you see him,’ he hissed, his Lenten fish-breath close to Hal’s ear.
Which was not a comfort to a man anxious about meeting a king he had not seen for so long. Eight years ago, the Bruce had been freshly crowned, awkward under it and hag-haunted by what he had done to the Red Comyn in Greyfriars.
Even behind Roxburgh’s walls, Hal had heard the argument, the monks of Bishops Wishart and Lamberton piercing the stones with their shouted debates, that it had not been red murder because there was no ‘forethocht’ in it. Rather, according to the carefully primed monks, it was a chaude-melle, a ‘suddenty of temper’ brought on by the lord of Badenoch’s provocations. Besides, Hal thought as he clacked into the great nave on his thick-soled shoes, the new Joshua of Scotland could not be so base as to have deliberately sought the murder of a rival.
But he remembered the stricken Bruce, seemingly struck numb and appalled at his act of temper. Seemingly. Even now, Hal was hagged by the possibility of mummery, for the speed of Bruce’s recovery, the smoothness with which Kirkpatrick and himself had been sent to make sure the Red Comyn was indeed dead, all left an iced sliver of doubt.
The bloody altar and the high, metal stink rolled out of Hal’s old thoughts, so that he paused and stood, mired in memory. The way Badenoch’s heels, those vain, inch-lifted heels on his fancy boots, had rattled like a mad drummer as he kicked his way out of the world, splashing his own puddled gore up even as Kirkpatrick made sure …
‘Sir Henry.’
The familiar voice wrenched him back and he stood in front of a clean altar under the great bloom of stone and glass that formed the nave window of the abbey. A figure, silhouetted against the stain of light, walked forward and the servant boy stepped back, bowing.
‘Hal. God be praised.’