It was white-knuckle cold in the Priory, a place of high, shadowed walls, chill fluted stone and wide floors of glacial flags. The room held a meagre fire which only accentuated the damp and the only decoration was a bleak-eyed statue of Mary Magdalene, staring from a niche with one hand raised.
Asking, no doubt, for another log on the fire, Edward thought to himself as he approached the man seated at the table, his back to the King. A priory servant, hunkered by the flicker of flame in the huge fireplace, leaped to his feet and bowed, so that the seated man immediately knew who was behind him.
He stood, scraping back the bench and turned, bowing.
‘Your Grace,’ he said, then wiped gravy from his moustaches.
‘Sit, sit,’ growled Edward, flapping one hand and shuffling up to perch opposite, his back to the fire. He hunched himself a little, then rounded on the servant.
‘Fetch some logs and build that blaze, damn your eyes.’
Marmaduke Thweng thought the King and a two-day old corpse had much in common, but the rouge and prinking made Edward look worse.
‘Eat, eat,’ Edward declared expansively. ‘You have come a long way to deliver your charges, Sir Marmaduke, and deserve a decent pie, by God. Tell me everything.’
Thweng looked with sadness at the half-eaten bacon and beef pie, which was delicious, aware that he could not follow both commands at the same time.
‘The women follow on slowly, Your Grace, in carts as befits their station. Your son decided to send the Earl and the Bruce brother ahead with me, on horseback. He knew you would wish to see them at your soonest convenience.’
‘No doubt to ingratiate himself. Bastard boy,’ Edward scowled, eyeing the pie and feeling his belly gripe. No more food like that for me if the physickers are to be followed, he thought to himself bitterly. Crowfoot powder for the belly gripe and fare that loosens the bowels, so the act of losing a turd did not bring excruciating agony – damned black biled humours of the arse would not even allow him to sit in comfort.
His malady was well known and Thweng thought back to the moment the King had quit Scotland after stripping Balliol, the moment he had sneered that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of such a turd’. Like the ones he strained to pass now, that one, too, had been painful and costly.
Thweng knew better than to speak on that, or about why the King scowled over his son; Sir Giles D’Argentan and a whole slew of knights, who were supposed to be scouring the north in the host commanded by the prince, had all decided to go to France. For an Important Tourney. The prince, of course, had permitted them and it was only a Holy Miracle that he had seen sense enough not to go himself.
The memory of it clearly rankled stilll. Twenty-two arrest warrants had been spewed out from the King’s wrath – even for his son-in-law, the elegant fop Humphrey de Bohun. The others were all the gilded youth, the new breed Edward had so painstakingly fastened to his son at the Feast of Swans.
Even that he contrives to subvert and ruin, Edward thought. Even that …
Thweng watched him reach out and scoop up the meat of the pie and stuff it in his mouth, gravy dripping down his curled beard and off his fingers.
‘Have they found Bruce?’
Thweng shook his head.
‘Not at Kildrummy, nor Dunaverty,’ he answered and the king hunched and brooded, sucking the delicious gravy over his teeth. Gone, like the mists of those damnable hills, he thought. Vanished. Dunaverty and Kildrummy – bloody barbaric names they had there – were the last strongholds where the usurper could possibly have lurked.
It meant he was hiding in the woods and hills, with places that translated to ‘loch of the ambush’, ‘wolf’s burn’ and ‘murder hole’.
‘You could find him,’ Edward declared, sucking his fingers. ‘You are a thief-taker in your own Yorkshire lands, are you not? For the bounty?’
Thweng’s eyes narrowed, for he did not like the thrust of this; he would not be thief-taking at all if he did not need the money it brought, for decades of service to the King had been less than lucrative.
‘Trailbaston and outlaws, Your Grace,’ he replied flatly. ‘In a country I know with my eyes closed and one which seeks to help me. A different matter to hunt down one man in a strange land whose folk offer every resistance.’
‘He must be found,’ the King persisted, helping himself to more of the pie. Thweng nodded, trying not to show the inward weary sigh he felt. It would, he thought, be best if Bruce were found and dealt with if only to stop the welter of dragon-banner blood that had already claimed so many. There were a score or more and the gutters had stank with blood for two days, according to the reports. Thweng had known most of the noble dead.
‘Will you speak with the Earl of Atholl, my lord?’ he asked.
‘I will not,’ the King declared savagely. ‘He will try to plead his case, no doubt, tell me he is a kinsman of mine through his mother, who is some king’s bastard. He is for the axe, by God.’