He patted Hal again.
‘Anyhow – not your problem. Let that flea stick to the wall,’ he said. ‘Tak’ yon wayward wummin home and be done with matters until Bruce or myself send word. Send that wee scribbler Bisset away as well and forget about dead masons – Christ’s Bones, Hal, there are corpses enow in every ditch from here to Berwick.’
It was sound advice and Hal was determined to follow it and praise God for having slid out from under the threat of Longshanks so easily. Yet the nag of the mystery stuck him like a stone in his shoe every now and then – when ‘yon wayward wummin’ gave it a chance.
The Countess of Buchan, Hal thought miserably, was both an irritation and a delight. She was wearing her only dress, a fitted green affair whose sleeves flapped loose because she had no tirewoman to sew her into them. She wore the same battered riding boots Hal had seen at Douglas. Yet now she affected a barbette under her chin and a neat wee hat to go with it, a smile that never reached her eyes and a sidesaddle on a palfrey – handing Hal the bold Balius.
‘It is,’ she had declared winsomely, ‘not seemly for me to be returned astraddle a warhorse, according to the Earl of Carrick and Sir William Sientcler and every other one of the community of the realm who passes and seems to have an opinion on it.’
She clicked her teeth closed, biting off more and widening the smile.
‘So, as a knight, you had better take the beast home to the Earl of Buchan’s stables.’
Hal had stammered some platitude about treating the beast like silk and gold, but the truth was he felt a long way from the ground after Griff and felt the raw power of it in every step.
He should not even have been riding the beast at all – no sensible knight used a warhorse except for battle and, besides, it was not his. As Isabel winsomely pointed out, cheerful as a singing wren, she had probably already ruined the beast by using it like a common palfrey and, because it had been stalled at Balmullo, which was hers in her own right, she could give permission and did so.
Hal viewed this last with a jaundiced eye, but could not resist the chance of it.
For all her cheer, the lady herself seemed clenched as a curled fern, full of brittle laughter and too-bright eyes, which only softened when she laid them on the Dog Boy – and there was a fondness they shared.
More than ever he reminded Hal of his dead son – yet each time, the memory of it seemed less of an ache just because the Dog Boy was there. Hal marvelled at the change in the lad in so short a time and could only speculate on what had tempered the steel in him, down in that dark hole, listening to Gib’s bones crunch. Hardly a friend, Gib, but even hearing a mortal enemy screaming his way out of the world would change you forever.
‘That and the dugs,’ Tod’s Wattie had said, in the grim firelit tale he had told the night he had arrived. ‘They died hard and sair, the dugs, and the only blessin’ of the lad being in the pit was that he was dragged from it senseless an’ so never saw them.’
Hal knew, from the unfocused eyes and the hard set of him, that Tod’s Wattie had watched them die and that had altered him, too. The mere mention of Malise Bellejambe sent him coldly murderous and Hal saw him now, hunched aboard his garron, his face a dark brooding of furrow and brow.
It was a sorry cavalcade, he thought. He had sent Bangtail ahead, to secure the inn and warn them that a cavalcade was coming down the road, because Bangtail had some sense about him and could handle an encounter with suspicious English from the Bothwell garrison. Not that Hal thought many of them would venture out so far from the safety of the half-finished castle, but it was was better to be prudent; besides, Bangtail swore he spoke French, though Hal was sure it was just enough to order another ale or get his face slapped by any well-spoken woman.
Then there was Bisset. The man jounced on a cart like a half-filled sack of grain, since the insides of his thighs had been rubbed raw on the journey to Annick and he could no longer ride. He was going as far as Linlithgow and would then go south to Edinburgh, while Hal went north.
Fussy, precise and complaining, Bisset was also, Hal realised, brave and a man of his word. He had promised Wallace to deliver information and he did. He had promised to deliver Wallace’s request to pursue the matter and he did that, too, though Hal wished he had laced his lip on that part.
‘The dead man was Gozelo de Grood,’ Bisset had told Hal and Sim, quiet and head to head. ‘Almost certes. He disappeared from Scone in the summer of last year. Stabbed the once and a killing stroke, very expertly done. Not robbed.’
‘Apart from his name,’ Sim growled, ‘we are no better informed.’