His own face shocked all who saw it, for the death of his son, following hard on the loss of John Fenton, chewed on him, harsh as a dog’s jaw. His pale cheeks were sunk, the eyes violet rimmed and, to those who had always thought the Auld Templar indestructible, the stoop of his bony shoulders frightened them. Hal remembered him, scant few months before, charging over the bridge with his hammer swinging left and right and, for a moment, felt some of the old love he’d had for this man.
It came to Hal that, if he thought grief hugged Herdmanston, then it must be throttling Roslin, where a woman wept now for her dead brother, her missing husband and the husband’s dead father, while her weans stood, bewildered. The Auld Templar, Hal thought, was the mortar that kept Roslin from dissolving into tears and for all I find him guilty of driving my da to his doom, I cannot hate him entirely.
And all this to the victors.
The Auld Templar greeted Hal with a nod, was surprised at the brief, shared moment of warmth that was no longer than the beat of a bird’s wing.
‘Christ be praised,’ the Auld Templar managed to husk out.
‘For ever and ever,’ came the litanied response and men crossed themselves.
There was precious little else to be shared round at Balantrodoch – when they came out of the crowded entrance to the Temple precincts, a sullen crowd, half begging, half resentful, watched them and their horses hungrily.
‘Stay here,’ Hal said to the Bangtail Hob, looking round. ‘Sim and I will find out if there is a possibility of quarters here. If we leave our mounts they will be eaten by the time we get back.’
Bangtail nodded, looking at Ill Made Jock, the Dog Boy, Will Elliott and the handful of others who made up the party; he wished they had come properly armed.
Inside, his breath smoking in the chill stone of the place, Hal came to a halt in mid-step, so that Sim had to dance to one side to avoid walking up his heels. He glared, then saw what had stopped Hal in his tracks.
‘Herdmanston,’ said Bruce, nodding in a grim way. He looked groomed and trimmed, healthy and young in his swaddling, fur-collared cloak, his shadow Kirkpatrick behind him. There were grim, spade-bearded knights behind him, crow-black save for the white cross that marked the Order of St John and that made Hal pause.
‘You made good time, my lord,’ Hal managed, ‘seeing as how my father is not more than a five-day dead.’
Bruce grunted, his lip pensive, thought about the lie of it, then decided Hal needed better.
‘I did not come for your father,’ he declared, ‘though it is a sore loss, all the same. A good man lost – though the cause he fought for was fine.’
He cocked his head sideways a little and smiled.
‘Ye fought in it, I hear,’ he added. ‘A born rebel Scot, it appears, Sir Hal – ye even contrived to rebel against me at the time.’
‘A happy anticipation,’ Hal answered flatly, which made Bruce lose his smile.
‘As well ye won, then,’ he countered, ‘otherwise you would not be back in the fold of my care.’
Hal said nothing, aware that he was still shackled to Bruce thanks to his fealty to Roslin. For all his passion to oppose the captors of his kin, the Auld Templar was not fool enough to attach himself to Wallace, victor or not. After what had transpired, Hal thought bitterly, it is good, if a little late, that the Lord of Roslin reins in his nature.
Bruce mistook Hal’s silence for passive acquiesence to his censure, which mollified him. He smiled at Hal, nodding his head to where a familiar figure, bulked in wool, rolled through the clamouring press of begging hands, ignoring them all with a bland, fixed smile.
‘I came down from the parliament at Torphichen with John the Steward there,’ Bruce said, his face like an ice wall, ‘to tell Wallace that Moray died. Since it seems he is too busy to attend it in person.’
‘Died on St Malachy’s day,’ the Steward boomed, coming into the tail end of this; Hal saw Bruce wince and wondered at it, but only briefly. Another death – but he was now so numbed by them that the loss of Sir Andrew Moray, who had been hovering at the edge of it since the battle at Cambuskenneth, was muted.
‘It was a curse for him, if no-one else,’ the Steward said pointedly and Bruce managed a wan smile, while inwardly heaping another curse of his own on the pile dedicated to all those who offered continual, harping references to St Malachy.
‘A curse for everyone,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘since it leaves Wallace as the realm’s sole hero and commander of the army.’
The Steward shot him a glower, then drew his cloak round him, shivering.
‘Just so. Now we will confirm him a sole Guardian, as we agreed at Torphichen.’
‘In the name of King John Balliol,’ Bruce added, his voice slathered with bitterness.
‘Indeed,’ the Steward replied blandly. ‘Bishop Wishart would say the same were he not fastened up in Roxburgh, prisoner of the English – which is a sore loss to the Kingdom.’
He smiled into the storm of Bruce’s face.