One of these languid men was Edward Bruce, a warped portrait of his brother, big shouldered, large chested and with the same face, only as if it had been squeezed from forehead and chin. It made his eyes slitted and his grin wider – unlike his brother, he grinned all the time.
Hal saw Kirkpatrick stiffen a little and felt a slight, sudden stab of justified satisfaction; for years Kirkpatrick had been the only retainer Bruce had closeted with him, a shadowy ferreter of secrets – aye, and worse – at Bruce’s beck and call. This was the reward for it – supplanted by those Bruce needed more.
Let him taste the bitter fruit of it, as I have, Hal thought savagely. My father dead, my home burned by my own kin after the battle at Roslin Glen, good friends dead in the mud of Stirling and Falkirk. Little reward for the middling folk who had ended up in the Bruce camp.
And Isabel. Her loss burned most of all. Gone back to the Earl of Buchan on the promise that her lover and his home would not be harmed. For six years Hal and she had kept to the bargain, though there was not a day he did not think of her and wondered if she still thought of him.
And for what? Buchan had found a way to burn Herdmanston to ruin anyway and would, Hal knew, seek a way to kill him. He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap – his father’s bleak warning echoed down the years.
Now all that was left was shackled to the fortunes of Bruce. Kirkpatrick shared the chains of it, Hal saw, though he had not considered the man an unwilling supplicant until recently, when this fresh mesnie had grown around the new Lord of Annandale and Carrick.
Not great lords, either, but an earl’s bachelor knights, fashionable, preened and coiffed. They stared at Hal and Kirkpatrick as if two aged wolves had stepped into the room, a mixture of sneer at what they considered to be old men out of touch with the new reality, the coming man that was Bruce, and envy that their lord and master treated so closely with such a pair.
Bruce showed the truth of it when he did not bother to announce Hal or Kirkpatrick and indicated that they should draw apart. Into the shadows, Hal saw with a sharp, bitter smile, where we belong.
‘Wallace,’ Bruce said in a voice so low it was more crouched than a sniffing rat. Neither Hal nor Kirkpatrick replied and Bruce, his eyes baleful in the dim, raked both their faces with an unsmiling gaze.
‘Find him. Tell him he has my love – but he must quit Scotland before it is too late for him. If nothing else, he will end up making the name of his captors odious in Scotland, for they will be Scots men, mark me. That is part of Edward’s scheme.’
Kirkpatrick, his eyes like faint lights in the cave of his face, nodded briefly and Hal jerked his head at the distant murmur and laughter at someone’s poor attempts to play and sing in the Langue D’Oc of a troubadour.
‘Finding him will be hard,’ he said, more harshly than he had intended. ‘He is a hunted man and unlikely to caw the craic, cheek for jowl, with any as declares they are friends.’
Bruce smiled. There had been a time when this would have been as incoherent as a dog’s bark, but time and exposure had improved his ear.
‘You speak their way,’ he said to Hal in elegant French, ‘and understand a decent tongue besides, so you can walk in both camps easily enough. Better yet – you have dealt with Wallace before this and the man knows you. Trusts you even. In case he does not, Kirkpatrick knows what to do when men come at you from the shadows.’
‘A comforting thought,’ Kirkpatrick answered in equally good French, though his burr added a vicious twist to the wry delivery. He jerked his head backwards at the coterie of quietly murmuring knights.
‘Why not ask Crawford there? Is he not kin to Wallace?’
Bruce merely looked at him until Kirkpatrick dropped his eyes. Only the auld dugs would do for this, he thought. At least it means he trusts us, as he does no others.
Hal cleared his throat, a sign the other men knew meant he had something difficult to hoik up on the way. They waited.
‘Wallace kens what is hid in Roslin,’ Hal said flatly. Bruce said nothing, though the problem had nagged him. He had arranged for the Stone of Scone to be supplanted by a cuckoo and the real one carried off to Roslin. Murder had been involved in it and, in the end, Wallace had found out. He had done nothing then – Falkirk fixed that – and said nothing since; Bruce now wrestled with the problem of whether he would keep his silence.
The Earl eventually shrugged, as if it no longer mattered.
‘Mak’ siccar,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and then turned away.
Later, in the cool breeze of a summer’s night, Hal stood with Kirkpatrick and watched the flaring fire from Stirling, heard the sometime thump as the wind veered.
‘Edward will be getting a lashin’ from his young queen,’ Kirkpatrick noted wryly, ‘for keeping the royal bairns up wi’ such racket.’
‘He is not short of pith for an auld man,’ Hal answered. ‘I fear our earl will have to be doucelike patient if he waits for Longshanks to get kisted up afore he makes his move.’