Which was why the great and good, knowing whose little secrets-ferreting agent he was, were forced to give way and hem their mouths tight when he was preferred through them towards the presence of the King.
He felt their eyes searing his back. He heard growls and someone spoke in a thick, foreign way which was probably German or Brabant. Hainault’s men, he thought, and was mercifully glad he could not understand what had been said and so did not have to react to it.
Inside the sweltering room, he knelt dutifully and waited. It had been the abbot’s room, but the simple austerity of that monk had been washed away in the comforts of a royal household which took a score of wagons to transport.
Flames danced in the mantled hearth, which had seldom seen such a luxury of sparks – and did not need it on such a muggy night, Walwayn thought – while the blaze of expensive tallow gilded the oak panelling and a long table festooned with parchments and dangling seals. A dish of diced spiced meat covered with breadcrumbs was half-buried under the scrolls, the debris of it trailing here and there where careless fingers had spilled it.
The King was sitting at one side of the table, dressed in a simple wool robe of green, his hair curled and gilded, a habit he had begun years before in order to emulate the golden cap of the now-dead Gaveston. Surreptitious as any mouse, Walwayn glanced up from under lowered lashes and bowed head, thinking the King looked liverish, though that might have been the green robe.
The chamber jigged with mad shadows from the disturbed candles; another mark of muster, Walwayn thought to himself, is the way no one seems to sleep if the King does not – and he, for certes, is too feverish to sleep. Feverish, bordering on panic, to get his army gathered and on the move.
‘My lord John of Argyll is with the fleet?’ the King demanded and Walwayn heard the deferential, almost soothing affirmative from one of the cluster around the table; Mauley, he recognized, seneschal and commander of the King’s Royal Household troops.
‘The Red Earl is muttering about visiting his daughter,’ a voice interrupted – Beaumont, the one who wanted to be Earl of Buchan. Walwayn knew that his own master, the Earl of Hereford, had a grudging respect for Henry de Beaumont, if only because he was a fighting man with a long pedigree and a reputation for adventurous daring.
‘The Red Earl may ride where he pleases,’ the King answered waspishly. ‘It is not him I need, but the Irishers he brought with him. And his daughter remains safe in Rochester – tell him so.’
Walwayn knew the Red Earl of Ulster would be dealt with politely, since his support was vital and his situation awkward – the daughter safely shut in Rochester was Bruce’s wife and effectively the Queen of Scotland. Not that anyone there acknowledged there being a king in Scotland; their adversary was always, simply, ‘the Bruce’, or now and then ‘the Ogre’.
‘I need foot, my lords,’ Edward declared, his voice rising, almost in a whine of panic. ‘As fast as it accumulates, it melts. I need foot.’
‘We have two thousand horse, my liege,’ a voice answered, liquid with balm. ‘More than enough to crush the rebellious Scots.’
The King turned his drooping eye on this new face: the Earl of Gloucester, the young de Clare who vied with Despenser for the royal favour and who, despite being the King’s nephew, was losing out to the charms of ‘the new Gaveston’.
‘I have fought the Scotch before, my lord of Gloucester. Foot will be needed, trust me,’ Edward said flatly. He said it kindly, all the same, and Despenser scowled, but then saw his chance, leaping like a spring lamb into the silence.
‘Besides – we have Sir Giles back with us.’
The name buzzed briefly round the room and made the king smile. Sir Giles d’Argentan was the third-best knight in Christendom, it was said – with the other two being the Holy Roman Emperor himself and, annoyingly, the Bruce. Imprisoned by the Byzantines, Sir Giles had been freed because the King had paid his extortionate ransom and summoned him to fly like a gracing banner above the army sent to crush the Scots.
Walwayn saw the others – Sir Payn Tiptoft, Gloucester, de Verdon – nod and smile at the thought. As young men barely into their twenties they and others – Gaveston and his own lord, Humphrey de Bohun among them – had been in the retinue of the King when he was still a prince. Idolizing the older, brilliant dazzle of d’Argentan, they had all trooped off with him to a tourney in France, leaving the Prince’s army hunting out Wallace in the wilds. Twenty-two of them had been put under arrest warrants by a furious Edward I and they all wore that now like some badge of youthful honour binding them together.
That had been eight years ago and the gilded youth of then were tarnished and no wiser, it seemed. Particularly the King himself, who now turned to the patient, kneeling Walwayn.