‘This is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he said. ‘Sir Hal, no less. He and I are here after his light o’ love, the Coontess o’ Buchan.’
She had heard the tale of it, which raised eyebrows on Hal, for he had not realized. My love life is a bliddy geste, he thought savagely, for all to gawp at.
Kirkpatrick knew Annie would have sucked up the story of it and now she stared at the troubadour tale turned reality, standing with his soaked boots and mournful face on her doorstep. She bobbed a curtsey as one hand went to her mouth to keep her heart from surging out of it.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The poor man. The lady. Oh. Come away in. In, afore ye freeze.’
Hal glanced sideways at Kirkpatrick and caught the sly grin and wink as he ducked through the door.
Her husband, Nichol, was a bluff-faced barrel of a man, at once suspicious of two strangers within his house and eager for their news and the payment promised, which would sweeten his wife for weeks to come.
‘Ye can sleep in the coal shed,’ he declared and shot a sharp glance to silence the start of protest from his wife. ‘And eat separate an’ what ye are given.’
Yet, while he pressed them for news of the roads and whether carts laden with coal could go up and down from Glasgow, he took Hal’s boots and worked on them, almost as if his hands were separate from his nature.
In the end, of course, he gave more than he got in news and Hal marvelled at the subtle cunning of Kirkpatrick that unveiled the presence of too many English soldiery in Closeburn and that it had to do with the prisoners within.
‘The Maister o’ Closeburn is seldom seen,’ Nicholl informed them, stitching quietly and speaking with an awl in one corner of his mouth, ‘at table or elsewhere. He plays chess and has found himself a clever opponent he is reluctant to give up, it is said, even though the others who came there at the same time have moved on.’
‘A wummin?’ asked Hal before Kirkpatrick could stop him; Nichol glanced up, beetling his brows.
‘I never said so,’ he replied, then lost the frown and shrugged.
‘There were wummin arrived,’ he admitted. ‘The sister of King …’
He stopped, looked at them and carried on working needle through leather; Hal knew he was in a fury of worry about having started to mention Bruce and the word ‘king’ in the same breath among strangers who might report him. Kirkpatrick chuckled reassuringly.
‘Dinna fash,’ he soothed. ‘No tattle-tongues here. It is to be hoped the sister does not share the fate o’ her wee brother, God wrap him safe from further harm.’
There was a flurry of hands crossing on breasts, but Nichol grew taciturn from then on and, eventually, the conversation died; Hal and Kirkpatrick went off to the dubious comfort of the coal shed – which, Hal pointed out, was mercifully emptied, save for old dust.
‘Aye,’ Kirkpatrick mused. ‘Poor commons, it seems. Too many to heat in Closeburn these days. To feed, too, for certes.’
‘Which means it is stappit full of folk we need avoid,’ Hal replied uneasily, knowing that the task they had set themselves was made harder.
‘It can be done,’ Kirkpatrick said out of the coal dark of the place. ‘We need Duncan.’
Hal had been told of Duncan of Torthorwald, another Kirkpatrick but one who had followed Wallace and now suffered for it; he was outlawed and Torthorwald held now by the Master of Closeburn.
‘He is prospering, is my namesake,’ Kirkpatrick had declared. ‘Closeburn and Auchencas and now Torthorwald, with Lochmaben handed to him to hold, on behalf of the Bohuns.’
And Hal had heard the bitterness there.
‘Will this Duncan help?’ Hal asked, wondering if a man who had fought in support of a Balliol king – and so a Comyn – would offer assistance to a Bruce. There was no reply and, eventually, Hal fell asleep.
He woke to the sound of rustle and grunt, a throaty sound bordered between shriek and hoarseness, so that he lay quiet in the velvet dark, unlatching the dirk from inside his tunic. The rhythm of it ended in the rasp of mutual breathing and then a faint, whispered voice.
‘Did we wake him?’
‘Naw. He dreams of his lost love and what he will do when he gets her back.’
Kirkpatrick slid out of the warm depth of Annie and silently blessed Hal and his countess for it had been that honeyed tale, as much as his hand at her fork, which had persuaded her to part with her old charms while they waited at the coal-shed door for Duncan.
He did not know of her desperate need to find a little of what had been lost between then and now, in the compromise of poverty and the grief of bairns lost in birthing, but he felt a little of it touch him, a tendril of something sharp and sweet.
It brought the knowledge, complete and out of the casket, of what he had given up all those years ago, sacrificed to the lure of the wider world and all its possibilities. His hand idled back to her wetness and she slapped his arm.