He rose and paced for a moment, then rounded on her.
‘Is she aggrieved?’
Her look was enough and he shook his head.
‘I do not know what …’ he began, then stopped and let his hands drop to his side.
‘Start mending that fence,’ she answered. ‘Dine with her. Spend time with her. Else you will find the chasm too broad to leap.’
He straightened, breathed deeply, then nodded and turned to her with a smile.
‘Good advice and good treatment. God keep you, Isabel – and your Herdmanston lord.’
‘I trust he is safe,’ she said and felt the deep, welling panic that he was not.
When she was gone, he went to a scrip on the table and pulled out the small, stoppered bottle, opened it and put a finger in. It came out bloody and he sniffed it suspiciously. Was that rot?
He sighed. Probably. He should have known better, even if the bottle was gilded and the cap jewelled, to have bought it from his confessed heretic Cathar physicker, even if it came wrapped in vellum and sealed with the Order’s double-mounted knights as provenance. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, would probably have sold me the same, he thought wryly.
He glanced at the crumpled parchment, knowing the Latin on it by heart – Hoc quicumque stolam sanguine proluit, absergit maculas; et roseum decus, quo fiat similis protinus Angelis.
Whomsoever bathes in the divine blood cleanses his sins and acquires the beauty of angels.
He looked at the beautiful little bottle which had done nothing at all for him. What had he expected? That the blood which flowed from His Hands and Feet had been collected in this, then translated across the centuries, miraculously, to arrive at Bruce’s moment of need?
Perhaps it was. Perhaps it really was His Divine Blood and not the escape fund of a cunning, desperate physician. He felt a chill at the idea – better it was chicken or pig, for if even the Blood of Christ Himself had failed, where did that leave King Robert Bruce?
Yet, he thought, can Christ still save the world? All the signs are against it, Lord, and there are so few righteous left in a kingdom ravaged by endless strife, where Your flock is reduced to individuals and petty tribes suffering and killing one another.
But there was a Plan. If I am not here then barbarism and madness become law, the weak have their throats cut or become slaves and the future is a terrible nightmare of cruelty and bloodletting.
I am the leash, he thought. The leash and the lash and even tormented by the Curse of Malachy I will never give in. He thought of Wallace, saw the twist of his bloody face on the day they gralloched him like a caught stag. He thought of his part in it.
I think, he said aloud, that the wee Cathar was right – this world is, in fact, Hell.
And there is no other.
Near Cupar, Fife
That same moment …
Hell vomited over the ridge. Malise saw it, falling like some huge wave of horses that seemed to snarl, ridden by open-mouthed men desperate with fear and an anger that was as good as courage.
He had been watching Kirkpatrick, stumbling along behind Malenfaunt’s horse, falling now and then to be dragged when Malenfaunt, vicious and laughing, spurred it a little to make it too fast for Kirkpatrick to keep up.
‘Walk faster,’ he would yell, ‘else you will be dragged to Carlisle.’
No-one but Malise understood the gabble of him, but all understood what he was doing. A few of the other serjeants laughed, harsh as old crows, but most did not and the leader of them frowned disapprovingly, for it was his charge to get this prisoner alive to Carlisle and then to the King himself.
What happened then, Sir Godard Heron thought, is none of my concern – but one of the red murderers of the Comyn leader would not be treated lightly. Still, he did not care for this Malenfaunt, a foresworn knight who should have lost his right hand, at the very least, for losing a joust before God.
Malise was thinking that he would have to begin to persuade Malenfaunt to find a horse for Kirkpatrick, not least because they were ambling along as if on a ride through a deer park, too slow for anyone’s liking. Mostly because Kirkpatrick looked the worse for being dragged by a thin rope fastened round Malenfaunt’s waist and he knew the Earl of Buchan wanted this one alive to face the King’s questioners; it was essential Kirkpatrick admit his witness to the usurper Robert Bruce’s murder of Badenoch.
He was on the point of saying so when the riders sprang up over the ridge and poured down on them, shrieking like the bean-shìdh.
Hal saw that the mesnie were well-armed and armoured, serjeants mounted on decent horses, though he thanked the good God that there were no warhorses among them, not even under the knight with the herons on jupon and shield.