Sixteen years ago, he realised and hardly a night when he did not wake, slick with sweat and hagged by the wild-eyed dark face of the Saracen he had strangled with his bare hands. God’s Own Hand had been over him then – though He might have tempered the months of crawling sickness that followed that single nick.
He looked at the sweating assembly. God’s Holy Arse, how he hated most of them – and how they hated him. Each time he looked at a sullen face, he wanted to humble it, bring the great lord to his knees. Norfolk, Lancaster, Surrey and all the others who thought themselves greater than the king, the scions of the families who had tried to shackle and then subvert his father’s reign, plunging them all into a long, bloody business. Not content with that, they tried with me, too.
Percy and Clifford especially, he thought savagely, who thought themselves God’s anointed in the north, together with all the lords scrabbling for his favour and their lands in Scotland, yet prepared to break their oath as soon as his back was turned.
He was too kind, that was the problem. Even the young Bruce was not to be trusted, but that was almost certainly the fault of his whingeing father and the influence of that relactricant old schemer, his grandfather. He liked young Bruce – there was something of himself at that age in the Earl of Carrick, he thought.
If he can be bent to forgetting this foolishness of a crown, he added to himself, for there was only one ruler in Scotland. And England. And Wales. And Ireland. By God’s Holy Arse he would bring this Wallace to the quartering and the headsman and the country to the knowledge that there was only one king and that was Edward, by the Grace of God an Englishman.
For what? The thought always slid in there, like Satan at his elbow. For his son, he replied by rote, though he winced. Fifteen. Young yet and the only survivor of the brood. Left too long alone after the death of his mother . . . as ever, the memory of Eleanor rose up, the death of her taking him in the throat. That long mourn of a journey, the hole in his life where she should be still black and infinitely deep, unable to be filled by any amount of stone crosses raised in her honour.
Let the boy have his thatching and ditch-digging a while longer, but in the end, he would buckle to the dignity, to what it means to be heir to the Crown, or, by God’s Holy Arse, Edward would make him . . .
The truth of it was that he knew God had a Plan for him and that it was to rescue the Holy City. With the Welsh and the Scots securing his north and west, he could turn his will to Crusade; the thought drew him up into the glory of it, though the reality of God’s Paladin was not what he thought.
The assembled lords saw the unnaturally tall, slightly stooped figure, long-armed and lean, his hair, once a gold cap, now swan white and straggling out of the customary coiffure of curls round his ears, his beard curving off his chin like a silver scimitar. His eyes were pouched and violet-ringed, because his dressers had all their paste and powder arts in a lost sumpter wagon and so could not produce the illusion of his health and vigour.
Now everyone could see that the skin of his face had sunk and seemed to want to peel back over the cheekbones, while the one drooping eye gave him a sly look, as if he was about to visit some corner of Hell on them all. Which, thought De Lacy, might well be the truth.
‘You wish congress, my lords,’ Edward said flatly and his dislike of it was plain.
De Lacy cleared his throat. The Earl of Lincoln was the closest thing to a confidant Edward had, yet even he was not sure how far friendship stretched.
‘The army is starving,’ he declared. ‘Desertion is rife. The Welsh are . . . fretful.’
Someone sniggered and Edward could hardly blame him for it. Fretful was a serious understatement for what those black dwarves from the mountains had perpetrated, even on each other. For a time it had seemed as if the only battle fought on Scottish soil would be between drunken Welshmen and everyone else they staggered across. In the end, English knights had charged the worst of them down and killed eighty; now the Welsh were muttering about going over to the Scots.
Which had all been his own fault. A ship arrived and those expecting food had found its cargo to be wine. To offset the disappointment, Edward had issued it to the army, the Welsh had sucked it up and, on empty bellies, had gone fighting mad – he’d had to let Aymer de Valence lead a charge of horse to bring order back and Welshmen had been killed. Now the rest were sullen.
The Devil with them all, Edward thought savagely. Let the Welsh desert to the Scots – at least then I will know the enemy and can shove them back into Satan’s arse, where they all fell from in the first place.
First – find your enemy.
‘No news, my Earl of Lincoln?’
De Lacy heard the mocking tone, but also the underlying desperation in it. If the Scots army was not found, and quickly, they would have to leave for the south and do it all again next year. The realm of England and its king, De Lacy knew, could not afford that.