Kirkpatrick gave him a jaundiced eye. He had a woman he would marry before too long and the bounty of that and the lands she brought was a glow in the core of him. He would risk much for that – but love? He had never considered love in the matter of getting wed and said so.
Dog Boy, bright with the joy of Bet’s Meggy, little Bet and Hob, laughed at how the nobiles arranged such matters. Yet he had to agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the risk: he had watched the cavalcade quit Berwick, the hunched and smouldering King Edward in the centre of it, so there was a better chance of sneaking up the walls than if he had been there. A slight shift in risk, but welcome all the same and he said as much, to give heart to everyone.
‘King Edward has been given the advice the Holy Father gave to the beggar,’ Parcy Dodd answered and folk shifted expectantly, for a story was as warming as the fire they dared not light.
‘I am half afraid to enquire,’ Jamie Douglas said laconically and Parcy grinned his wide grin, the rain pearling on his nose.
‘The Pope is visiting town,’ he began, ‘and all the people are turned out and dressed up in their best cloots, all lining the way from the gate, hoping for a personal blessing from the Holy Father. One stout burgher, a man of stature and local note, has put on his best fur-trimmed cloak and gold chain for the moment, for he is sure that sight will pause the Pope and that the Holy Father will bless him.’
‘A bad plan,’ Horse Pyntle grunted, ‘for your clerical is a magpie for the shine and yon burgher will not, I suspect, own it long if he flaunts it at such a high heidyin.’
‘Ah,’ Parcy declared, as if he had been expecting that very point, ‘but he is standing next to a beggar, a man with more stain and rag than cote and who smells like a privy on a hot day. The stout burgher thinks to impress His Holiness by handing such a man a coin at the crucial moment. Certes, as the Holy Father comes walking by, the burgher ostentatiously offers the coin, the beggar takes it, bites it with the one black tooth he has left and vanishes it into his rags. The Pope leans out of his litter then – and speaks softly to the beggar. The burgher is stunned; the Holy Father ignores him and passes on, having spoken only to the beggar.’
‘Aye, well,’ muttered Yabbing Andra, uneasy at Parcy’s constant blasphemies, ‘the Holy Father is more interested in the poor and feeble ones.’
‘Just what the burgher thinks,’ Parcy declared cheerfully, ‘so he thrusts the rest of his bag of coin at the beggar and trades cloots with him. Then he sprints down the street – for certes, the crowd parts before a man who smells so badly – and flings himself almost into the path of the Pope’s processing litter. Sure enough, the litter stops, the ringed hand beckons and the burgher proudly walks up to get the blessing he has worked and paid so dearly for.’
Parcy paused and grinned.
‘Then he hears, hissed in his now flea-bitten ear: “I thought I told you to get yourself to Hell away from my path, you beggarly misbegotten pile of shite.”’
There were a few loud barks of laughter, a lot of headshaking and admiration for Parcy risking his soul with such a tale. But they were cheered by it, all the same, Jamie saw – and they would need such heart for what they intended.
‘When it is darker, then,’ Hal declared, capping the laughter like a candle snuffing flame.
They went back to sitting, dripping in the rain, and the Dog Boy thought of what he had learned: Berwick had been put in the charge of Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The knight with stripes and little red birds, Dog Boy recalled, whom I almost tumbled off his fancy horse.
He is like snot on your fingers, de Valence said to himself. You think you have got rid of it and then, the Lord alone knows how, it appears again, on the other hand. He looked at the Dominican and wished him as gone as the Italian abbot and the King, both ridden off to the safety of the south.
Leaving me, he added bitterly to himself, with the ruin of it.
And it was a ruin. What was left of the army straggled south by a dozen different routes, too fearful of what snarled at their heels even to find time for loot and rape, too sodden to burn anything. The lords who were left would be of no help in bringing them to order; those who were mounted had long since vanished and those unhorsed were either already dead or taken.
The vellum rolls lay like white mourning candles on the table in front of him, a litany of lost lives and shattered hopes painstakingly scraped out by the clericals. Even now they were not complete; new revelations of the fate of the barons who had fought at Stirling were still being discovered.