‘She talks to God a wee bit more than she did,’ Hal added, almost defiantly, and Kirkpatrick nodded as if he had known that all along. He had not and the knowledge of it made him need to hide his frown; there was nothing worse, in his opinion, than a good woman gone to piety. A cage would do that, all the same, and he said as much.
‘These surroundings are safer and more of a comfort,’ he added, waving his cup to encompass Herdmanston and all in it. ‘You have restored a deal of it.’
The smell of cut wood and stone dust permeated the air and every time he breathed it in Hal was reminded of Sim, who had worked so hard before to restore a burned-out Herdmanston. The absence of that great soul was still an unbalmed sore.
‘There is a roof over us,’ he said, to chase away the memory, ‘but the floor above that is unfinished, while the top still opens to the sky. And the outbuildings are being redone in stone – harder to tear them down.’
Kirkpatrick nodded soberly at this pointed reminder that war still lurked, an unseen beast just beyond the hill, capable, he knew, of sweeping back and destroying all this and his own place at Closeburn, for all the victory at Bannock’s burn.
‘Must have cost a fair sum,’ he added, innocent as a nun’s headsquare. ‘The King is convinced that you achieved it with the rents from his gift of Cessford.’
Hal stuck his nose in his cup and said nothing. The barony of Cessford was the Bruce reward to Herdmanston for his service, a poisoned chalice of burned-out manor and ruined fields whose folk needed as much help as Herdmanston or they, too, would starve.
‘Or using rents from Lady Isabel’s wee holding at Balmullo, which is hers by right,’ Kirkpatrick added gently, swinging his foot still and seeming to take great interest in it. ‘Of course, that is also long burned out by a wrathful Buchan when he lived. So both it and Cessford needs money more than sends it.’
‘God provides,’ Hal replied carefully and Kirkpatrick laughed softly.
‘He does, I am sure of it.’
‘Your point, Kirkpatrick?’
Hal’s voice was sharp as the spice in the lees of Kirkpatrick’s cup and, before he could reply, another voice cut across.
‘His point concerns God’s provision.’
Isabel came the last few steps up to the fire, having entered the hall unheard and unseen. She wore soft wool in a colour of green which perfectly set off her autumn bracken hair, left daringly loose under a simple white kertch. Kirkpatrick started to his feet for a polite bow and she graciously waived the honour.
‘The King himself sends his good wishes,’ Kirkpatrick said, resuming his old position. ‘He asks if you would attend the court and himself with your expertise and grace, though he does not insist on it.’
‘Nicely put, Kirkpatrick,’ Isabel answered. ‘And well delivered. I will not, of course, attend the King but I will give you an ointment he can physick his face with. There is no balm I can offer for him and his Queen – he will have to find that cure for himself. You may tell him that.’
Kirkpatrick managed a wan smile. The Queen, newly returned with the Bruce sister and his daughter, Marjorie, had swept into a court unused to her and a king who had never known what to do with the luscious young Elizabeth de Burgh.
Obsessed with the imperative for a legitimate heir, he had thought to put her at her ease regarding what he considered the most important trouble to their marriage – the rumour of his leprosy, whose very breath could kill. So he had brought out the women he had sought comfort from in the Queen’s years of captivity, adding a dash of wee bastards like a sprinkle of bile to it.
It was designed to put the newly arrived Queen at ease, since it showed that the women the King had been ploughing – and the offspring circulating, all self-aware and defiant – were fine and healthy and that rumours of leprosy were just that.
Of course the women, younger by far and sweeter and more proud, had rotted the moment with their own display and Isabel, there at Hal’s side for the Christ’s Mass feast, had shaken her head in sorrow and muttered: ‘Fenêtre d’enfer.’
Window of Hell was apt enough, Hal thought, to describe the sewn-into dresses, slit daringly up to the thigh, fox tails hanging underneath at the back so that the strained fabric did not fold into the crack of their buttocks, front cut to the navel, so tight on the hips and groin, to show off their little fecund round bellies, that folk called them mumble-cut because ‘you can see their coney-lips move, but you cannot hear what they say’.
Isabel knew then, from the purse-mouthed, fake-gracious smile on the Queen’s face, that the court was no place to be from now on; Elizabeth would scourge the mistresses from it, for she was no longer the na?ve girl Bruce had known and her English captivity had robbed her of what sweetness she’d had and replaced it with intrigue.