Bisset offered a sharp-toothed mouse of a smile.
‘Ah, but he had a close friend who is also missing,’ he declared, and that raised eyebrows, much to the secretary’s delight. He liked the possession of secrets, did Bartholomew – liked better revealing them to those who would marvel.
‘Manon de Faucigny,’ Bisset declared, like a mountebank producing coloured squares from his sleeve. ‘A Savoyard and a stone carver. A good one, too, brought over by Gozelo to do the intricate work.’
‘Where is he?’ demanded Hal and Bisset nodded, smiling.
‘Just what Master Wallace asked,’ he declared and pouted. ‘He went either south or north, two weeks after Gozelo de Grood left Scone.’
‘Helpful,’ Sim growled and Bisset, ignoring him, leaned into the tallow light.
‘It is my surmising,’ he said softly, ‘that this Manon fled when it became apparent that Gozelo was not returning when he had said he would. Gozelo left, telling the Savoyard it was for a week and no more, then did not return because he was killed, we know. This Manon fled – I know this because he took only his easily portable tools and no craftsman would leave the others except under extreme duress. He told folk he was going to Edinburgh, to meet Gozelo, but it is my belief that this was mummery . . .’
‘And he was trying to send someone in the opposite direction from the one he travelled,’ Hal finished. ‘Who?’
‘Wallace’s second question,’ Bisset declared delightedly. ‘He said your wits were sharp, Sir Hal. I give you the answer I gave him – I do not know. But Manon de Faucigny expected person or persons to be searching for him and expected also no good to come of it. So he fled. To Stirling, or Dundee. He will, I am sure, be thinking of hiding and trying not to do the obvious – run to the Flemish Red Hall in Berwick and be got away to safety.’
The Red Hall, Hal knew, was the Flemish guild hall in Berwick and he doubted it would be of any use, since the Flemings had defended it to the last man when the English sacked the town last year and around thirty had been burned alive in it. Now it was no more than charred timbers – though the Flemings were still in Berwick.
‘Why would person or persons want the man dead?’ demanded Sim.
‘For the same reason they wanted the mason killed,’ Bisset replied primly. ‘To stop his mouth. They both hold a secret, good sirs, but now only de Faucigny can tell it – and Master Wallace offers you this as promised. He said to say you would know what to do with it.’
Forget it. That was the sensible choice, but even as he turned the coin of that over in his mind, he knew it had never been a possibility. A pollard, he thought wryly. Just as refusing Bruce was a crockard. He had been summoned into the service of Bruce and, suddenly, had become part of the kingdom’s cause. Now, just as suddenly, he was part of the forces dedicated to crushing that cause – and, he realised, bound now to oppose Wallace if he encountered him. Yet he had regard for Wallace, the man still fighting when everyone else had scrambled to bow the knee. Because he has nothing to lose, Hal thought, unlike myself and others.
Hal felt trapped – like yon Trojan crushed by the coils of sea-serpent, he thought and wished he had spent more time actually listening to the dominie his father had hired to ‘put some poalish oan the boy’.
The men with him were the last of the loyal – all the others had gone off with Wallace, for the plunder in it. Sim, Bangtail, Tod’s Wattie and Will Elliott were Herdmanston men – Red Cloak had been the fifth and his death lay heavy on them all. The rest, some fifteen, were local Marchers some of whom trusted Hal more than anyone and knew a cousin, or some kin who had ridden with him before and profited from it. A few – and even this number astonished Hal – came for the belief in the realm and imagined Hal would know the right path to take when the time came.
‘Farthing for them.’
The voice licked round him like the Trojan’s snake and led him back to the present, the wet road, the August drizzle licking under his collar. He thought of the stone cross at Herdmanston, the woman and bairn buried underneath it – and how far away it seemed.
He turned into her smiling face. Hair had straggled free from under her hat and barbette; there was nothing, it seemed to Hal, that could keep the wild freedom in the woman contained for long.
‘Not worth that much,’ he responded. ‘You’ll have clippings back, even from a mite like a bonnie new siller fairthing.’
‘You are not half as country witless as you aspire to, Sir Henry,’ she said, the lilt of her robbing it of sting, ‘so I wish you would not speak as if you followed the plough.’