The pounding at the door was a great, dull bell that slammed Isabel from sleep, spilling her upright. The nun who had been assigned to sleep at her feet – latest in an endless rotation of watch-women – came awake as suddenly, whimpering and afraid.
Clothilde her name was. She was from France, part related to the kin of the Malenfaunts there and dispatched all the way from the warm dream of vineyards to the cold stone and damp of Berwick by a family who wanted rid of an unwanted child. What happened to her mother Isabel did not know, but Clothilde had been here almost all her life, as an Oblate. Isabel, who had been here for almost half a year, shivered at the thought of such a time trapped in this eggshell of stone and corruption.
‘Men are coming,’ Clothilde said in a small voice. Isabel knew the child – she could hardly see her, even at fifteen, as a woman – feared the arrival of men and the reason for their coming. Malenfaunt, Isabel knew, took money and favours for allowing a select few to plunder the delights of a nunnery and, though some of the women were willing and depraved enough, some were not and Clothilde was one.
‘Come closer to me,’ Isabel said and the little Oblate scurried to her. I am her prisoner, Isabel thought with a wry twist of smile, yet she cowers behind my nightdress. She saw the scarred forearms of the little nun, knew that the girl sat and crooned hymns and psalms to herself when she thought no-one could see, slicing her flesh for the glory of God and an offering to the Virgin to rescue her.
The door slammed open so suddenly that Clothilde shrieked. The Prioress stood like a black crow with a candle, the sputtering tallow pooling her in eldritch shadows.
‘You are to come,’ she said to Isabel, then frowned at Clothilde. ‘Get away from there, girl.’
‘Come where?’ Isabel answered. The Prioress turned the scowl on her, but it was a pallid affair by the time it rested on Isabel’s face; long weeks of realising that this Countess could not be cowed by words and was not to be beaten by sticks had sucked the surety from the Prioress.
‘You are to be released.’
The words spurred Isabel into dressing swiftly, her heart and mind whirling. Freed.
She followed the Prioress through the dark corridors to the Refectory, which seemed to be full of men – her heart thundered at the sight of the tall, saturnine Malenfaunt, leaning languidly on the table and studying a document. He raised his head and was smiling when she came in.
‘My lord earl – your wife, safely delivered.’
Bewildered, Isabel stared at Bruce, who stared back and offered a stiff little bow.
‘Good wife,’ he said blandly. Then Isabel saw Hal and her heart threatened to leap out of her throat, so that she flung one hand up to it, as if to trap it at the neck. She saw the warning in his narrowed eyes, saw the huge bearded face of Sim behind him and heard, like the tolling of a bell, the word ‘rescue’ clanging in her head.
‘Husband,’ she managed.
‘So it is, then,’ Malenfaunt declared in French, smiling with triumphant pleasure. ‘We part amicably, so to speak.’ Bruce turned a cold face on him.
‘For now,’ he answered, then held out one hand. Isabel, half numb and stumbling slightly, took it in one of her own and was led out. Behind her, Hal draped a warm cloak on her shoulders and pulled the hood up against the cold benediction of rain.
In the darkness of the nunnery garth were horses and more riders. Isabel felt a hand haul her long skirts up above her knees, then Sim was lifting her up, with a muttered apology.
‘No fancy sidesaddle, Coontess. Ye ride like ye usually do.’
His grin seemed like a bright light – then Hal was beside her and Bruce was leading the cavalcade away into the cobbles and ruts and stinking rubbish of the street, with the sea wind blowing clean and exhilerating through the bewilderment of her.
‘Isabel,’ Hal said and she leaned forward then, met his face in a fumble of salt and rainwashed lips, sucking as greedily as he until the horses parted them.
‘Aye,’ said Bruce wryly in French, ‘do not mind my part in this, mark you, for such chivalry and bravery is old clothes and pease brose to the likes of the Bruces.’
Isabel, starting to laugh with the bubbling realisation of it all, turned to answer him and heard a voice from the dark, slight shape on a big horse nearby.
‘Ye should nivver violet a lady.’
‘Dog Boy,’ she said and saw the great smile of him loom out of the dark. Then, sudden as a blow, she thought of Clothilde, trapped like a little bird and knew, for all she ached to free the girl, she could not persuade these men to risk it – nor should she.
She was crying so hard, the tears and snot mingling with the rain as Hal tried to get his horse close enough to comfort her, that she missed Kirkpatrick’s bitter growl – though Hal didn’t.
‘There will be the De’il to pay when Buchan finds his wife has been lifted like a rieved coo and his siller spent for no return.’
Neither of them missed the rain-pebbled exultation that was Bruce, grinning as he turned to them.