These were just enough to afford him vittles, but not enough for the finer things. Lamprecht had a box filled with plenary indulgences, pinches of the ashes of Saints Martin and Eulalia of Barcelona, Emilianus The Deacon and Jeremiah The Martyr. He still had a tooth of the Serpent – actually, he had several such teeth – a portion of the robe of Saint Batholomew The Apostle, a pinch of the earth on which the Lord Himself had stood, plus many others.
He had his finest cache, which he hoped the Templars would buy – three fingernails of St Elizabeth of Thuringia, only raised to sainthood thirty-odd years ago, so her relics were powerfully potent.
He was no fool, as Malise had declared – though Lamprecht had to admit that trying to sell the likes of Malise the thong of Moses’ sandal had been a bad error – but no-one who could afford it wanted plenary indulgences, or a thorn from Christ’s Crown these days. They preferred earthly necessities, like food and fuel for fires. As usual, the poorest were the ones who sickened first and they could barely afford the lead quatrefoil amulets.
So he smiled, though the purse he had been promised seemed to fade slowly away and he knew that his best chance of salvaging anything from this was to remove himself, in secret, far from the coming wrath of this wrong Sir Henry’s friends.
Outside, it rained on the dark of a Berwick glazed with a few pallid worms of light, the rat-eyed red wink of the castle braziers squirming through the rain as the garrison kept watch. It wasn’t the Scots they feared so much as the wrath of Longshanks if they lost the fortress.
For all the rain and dark, Hal thought, you could find Berwick easily enough by the smell, a heady mix of smoke, clot and rot that sifted out a long way, like the snake-hair of Medusa, barely shifted by a wind that was little more than a damp nudge.
They splashed across the ford with the old ruins of the bridge to their right, troll shadows in the dark. No-one challenged them and they came up through the repaired defences of wooden stockade, ditch and wall, under a gate that should have been guarded but was not – Bruce had predicted as much and garnered silent admiration from the others in the small cavalcade.
They climbed off the wet, mud-spattered garrons and led them up the sliding cobbles, ankle deep in fishbones and the old spill of dogs, pressed closer and closer by the leaning walls of the poorer houses, where the strewn rushes were never cleared and stank with the humours that brought on liver-rot, worms, palsy, abscess, wheezing lung and every other filthy ague.
Fitting, then, that this street, bordered by lurching houses that drifted like timber-rotted ships in a slow wind of alley, should puke them out at the leper house of St Bartholomew, a shrouded ghost of stone in the shadows – save for one area, spilling butter-yellow glow out through the cracks of great double doors that led to a garth and then under an archway to the street.
The dripping band stopped and Bruce offered a grin to the Dog Boy. Dressed like the rest of them in plain tunic and rough cloak fastened with an iron pin, with no blazoned jupon or blaring heraldic shield, the Earl of Carrick looked like the Dog Boy’s da and was clearly enjoying the entire event.
Unlike Kirkpatrick, who did not like the idea of the heir to Annandale and the rightful throne of Scotland dressed like a peasant and putting his life in such danger.
He had said as much at length, about the foolishness of an earl of the kingdom plootering about, risking his neck in a foolhardy adventure with a band of scum. The band of scum had growled back at him for that – Bangtail Hob, Lang Tam, Sim and Will Elliott, all scowling angry. Even Hal had curled his lip, seeing he was included in the insult until Bruce had told Kirkpatrick, in a voice like the flat slap of a blade, to keep his teeth together.
Now they handed the reins of their stolid, dripping garrons to Will and slithered wetly away to their assigned tasks. Sim and Hal took up positions on either side of the great doors; no-one spoke and the Dog Boy, a loop of rough cloth over his head as a hood, took a deep breath and moved forward.
Hal felt his throat constrict at the sight of the lad, looking smaller than ever against the great double door, heavy with beams and thick with studded nails. Beyond it was the cookhouse, the yellow-red glare of it unable to be contained even by a door like this, because it was the one part of the spital that never slept.