She watched the nun scurry out into the dark and sat on a bench while the tallow sputtered. She tried not to be beaten by the crush of loneliness, the realisation that she would go from here but only back to Buchan. She tried not to think of Bruce and failed, so that the added weight of that sagged her head limply on her neck. She tried not to cry and failed.
Then, to her own surprise, she thought of Hal of Herdmanston.
In a chamber off the main refectory of the nunnery, the Prioress listened to her charges laugh in wild shrieks, flamed by the wine brought by their benefactor, who stood half in shadow, half in the blood of the sconce light.
‘Keep her fed, wined and secure,’ Sir Robert Malenfaunt declared. ‘And away from those harpies.’
‘Special, is she?’ sneered the Prioress and Malenfaunt smiled.
‘A Countess. From Scotland, admittedly, but an important one. From a powerful family in her own right and married into another.’
He leaned forward, so that his sharp, shadowed blade of a face cut close to her own.
‘Special, as you say. Worth her weight in shilling, so keep her fattened and untouched.’
He took her chin in cruel fingers then.
‘Untouched,’ he repeated. ‘I want none of your charges to put their grimy fingers near that quim.’
She pulled away from him, though her heart thundered, even as he peeled off her headcover and ran his hands over her stubbled scalp; it excited him, that style, so she kept it close-cropped for that reason. Fear and lust made her breath shorten to gasps and she knew he would bend her over the only chair in the room, throw her grey habit up and over her head and take her, grunting and panting like a dog. He did it each Christ’s Mass, to as many of the nuns as his strength and fortified wine would allow.
She was at once repelled and frantic for it.
Herdmanston, East Lothian
Ash Wednesday, March 1298
Hal watched the plough from the roof of the square block of Herdmanston, feeling the smear of ash on his forehead itch. He watched it with a warmth that had only partly to do with the sun, was as happy as any man can be on the first day of Lent, seeing his fields being turned back like bedcovers.
The ploughman was Will Elliot’s da, his two brothers darting in and out to heel exposed worms back into the ground, or watching for the twitch of an ox tail that showed dung was coming, so the brace could be brought to a halt, to dump their precious cargo into the furrow.
The earth was new bread. The frost had cracked it, the thaw and rain had watered it, a week of late February sun had warmed it and it crumbled, heaving with furiously busy earthworms, little ploughs shifting the earth into a bed for oats and barley.
Gulls screamed, the coulter-knife scooped up clod against the mouldboard, a great wave of new-turned earth rearing up, curving over and falling into a furrow. Below Hal, the Dog Boy was trying to teach the yapping terriers, all mad wriggle and fawning tails, some obedience and, from the laughter of those watching, was not having the best of it.
There was laughter, too, from the stone chapel where Father Thomas exercised his skills with a brush to construct a glowing Saint Michael, patron of the church in Saltoun, on the internal plastered walls – and emerged covered in ochre-red and looking like a man who had fallen in a slaughterhouse pit.
It was easy, on a day like this, to forget the winter, the war, the deaths. Isabel. Yet the world would not be kept back and its herald was Sim lumbering up the last steps, panting with climbing the winding stair to the roof.
‘Rider coming,’ he grunted. ‘It will be the messenger from Bruce about the ransom for Sir Henry. At bloody last – God curse all notaries and inky-fingered clerks.’
An uneasy truce had been agreed with the English, but raids continued – more from the Scots side than the English – and only the winter weather had halted them. Getting agreement on ransom, then writs of safe conduct to travel south had taken a long time and the weather had closed in the north until no more than a few weeks ago. The Auld Templar will be fretting at the delay, thought Hal. Not to mention Sir Henry’s wife and bairns, spending the Christ’s Mass without husband and father.
He watched the horse and man come up over the great expanse of open ground, studded with copses, that surrounded Herdmanston, a rise and fall that hid the rider for a time. It was only when he got closer that Hal started to feel anxious; the horse was lathered and had been ridden harder than a mere message about an exchange warranted.
The rider was from Roslin, a broad-faced man Hal knew slightly, a labourer rather than a soldier, whose right thumb, Hal noticed incongruously, was cracked open by cold and work. That must hurt, he thought . . .
It was a message from Fat Davey, who had taken over John Fenton’s duties at Roslin.
The Auld Templar had turned his face to the wall.
Cloaked in misery, they rode over to Roslin, where the Lady stood with her bairns gathered into her skirts and her lip trembling at the edge.
‘I am sorry for your loss, mistress,’ Hal told her, hearing the dull pewter clunk of the inadequate words.