‘Ormsby’s arms,’ he repeated. ‘We will add his head to them, by an’ by and mak’ a man of him.’
No-one spoke as Wallace stepped in, careful in bare feet, his head seeming to brush the roof.
‘A good thought, comin’ here, lads, but Ormsby has fled his bedroom. Out of yon unshuttered wind hole in his nightserk, so I am told. That must have been a sight – what have ye there?’
‘Papers,’ Hal declared, feeling the ones he had hidden burn his side as if still aflame. ‘There was a fire.’
Wallace peered and nodded, then looked at the chambered library on the wall.
‘State papers, nae doubt,’ he declared, ‘if the Justiciar of Scotland saw fit to try and burn them. So they might be of use – when I find a body that can read the Latin better than me.’
‘It will be hard,’ Hal said, not correcting Wallace on who had been doing the burning. ‘Sim put the flames out with a pint of the great man’s pish.’
‘Did he so?’ Wallace laughed and shook his head. ‘Well, I will find a wee clever man with a poor nose to read them.’
Hal, who was also uncomfortably aware that he was not admitting his own reading skills, laughed uneasily and Wallace strode back to the door, then paused and turned.
‘Mind you,’ he said, innocent as a priests’s underdrawers, ‘I am wondering why yon chiel of The Bruce – Kirkpatrick is it?’
Hal nodded, feeling the burn of the eyes, while the sconce torch did bloody things to the Wallace face.
‘Aye,’ Wallace mused. ‘Him. Now why would he birl his hurdies out that self-same unshuttered window not long since, as if the De’il was nipping his arse?’
He looked from Hal to Sim and back. Outside, something smashed and there were screams. Wallace shifted slightly.
‘I had best at least try to bring them to order,’ he said, his smile stained with fire, ‘though it is much like herdin’ cats. I will seek you later, lads.’
His departure left a hole in the room into which silence rushed. Then Sim let out his breath and Hal realised he had been holding his own.
‘I do not ken about the English,’ Sim said softly, ‘but he scares the shite out of me.’
Nor is he as green as he is kail-looking, Hal thought and decided it was time the pair of them were elsewhere.
The quiet of the chapel refuge was feted with a blaze of expensive waxen light and the soft hiss of babbled prayers, so that the flames flickered as the huddled canons gasped for air.
Cramped as it was, a clear space existed where Bruce knelt, though he did not bow his head. There was a fire in him, a strange, glowing flow that seemed to run through his whole body, so fierce at times that he trembled and jerked with it.
He looked at the painted walls of the chapel. In a cowshed, Mary nursed the newborn Child by her naked breast in a bed, while Joseph watched from a wooden chair to the right. They smiled at Bruce. In the foreground, the heads of an ox and an ass turned and regarded him with their bright, mournful eyes. An angel stood and regarded him coldly in the background and above, in Latin, the words The Annunciation to the Shepherds seemed to glow like the fire in his body.
Bruce bowed his head, unable to look at the face of the smiling Virgin, or the disapproval of the angel. The deed was done, the secret safe according to the gospel of Kirkpatrick, breathing hard from having had to run from burning the evidence.
More sin to heap on his stained soul. Bruce thought of the man he had killed, a perfect stroke as he cantered past the running figure; it was only afterwards he had seen it to be an old priest. Longshanks had replaced a lot of the livings here with prelates of his own and these were, Bruce knew, much hated and fair game for the lesser folk – but a priest, English or not, was a hard death on the soul of a noble, never mind an earl.
The Curse of Malachy – his hands trembled and the candle in it spilled wax down on to the black-haired back of it, cooling to perfect pearls.
The Curse of Malachy. His father had given the Clairveaux church where the saint was buried a grant of Annandale land in return for perpetual candles, and Bruce, for all he sneered at the spine his father seemed to have lost, knew that it was because of the Curse of Malachy. Every Bruce feared it as they feared nothing else.
The canons chanted and he tried to blot out the Curse and the thought that it had led him to slay one of their brothers on holy ground. Innocents, he thought. The innocents always die.
He saw the tiles in front of him, an expanse of cracked grey. Letters wavered, small and faint, in the top corner of one and felt a desperate need to see them clearly. Squinting, he read them: ‘D i us Me Fecit. The mark of the maker, Bruce thought. Alfredius? Godfridus?
Then it came to him. Dominus Me Fecit. God Made Me. He felt his hand tremble so violently that the candle went out and wax spilled on to his knuckles. The mark of the maker. God Made Me. I am what I am.
‘My lord of Carrick.’
The voice brought him round and his sight wavered, blinded by staring at the candle and the tiles.