‘Enough,’ she hissed. ‘We have been fortunate that my man sleeps like an auld log. I will risk no more. Never again, Roger – that was for sweet memory and auld times.’
Yet the fierce kiss she gave revealed the lie in it and choked his throat with all he wanted to say. The sudden arrival of a shadowed figure relieved him of the moment.
‘Mistress,’ said the shape, nodding to Annie.
‘Duncan,’ Kirkpatrick said.
‘Black Roger,’ the shadow acknowledged.
‘Good,’ said Hal, emerging from the black of the coal shed into the clear night, brilliant with stars and moon. ‘I am Hal of Herdmanston, knight. Now we’re all introduced, perjink and proper.’
Duncan nodded at Hal, stepping forward so that he was silvered by moonlight, a ghost in the dark. He was tall and broad, with a great bush of black beard grown against the cold and a cloak wrapped round him – as much to hide the weapons, Hal thought, as for heat.
‘Ye had best go back, Mistress,’ he said to Annie. ‘Lest yer man miss ye.’
She bobbed a curtsey and half-paused as if to say something to Kirkpatrick, then ducked away; Hal could feel the heat of her emotions as her face disappeared into the dark.
‘Ye are a muckhoond,’ Duncan said, soft enough so that only Hal and Kirkpatrick could hear it; Kirkpatrick wondered how long Duncan had been waiting in the cold shadows, listening to him and Annie and said as much, adding, viciously, that he was sorry if he had strayed on to Torthorwald territory.
Duncan was suddenly close enough for Kirkpatrick to have the warm smoke of his breath on his face.
‘Nichol Toller is a good man and, until ye arrived, Annie was a well-conducted wife,’ he said. ‘They dinna deserve the likes of you.’
‘You will back off a step,’ Hal said gently, though his voice held a rasp and Duncan felt the nudge in his ribs and looked down at the moon-silvered wink of steel.
‘We are off to a bad start,’ he declared and Hal nodded.
‘Let us begin again, then,’ he said. ‘I am Sir Hal of Herdmanston. You address me as “my lord” an’ you ask what you can do to assist us both and His Grace, the King.’
‘What king is that, then?’ Duncan demanded with a sneer.
‘The one ye will wish as a friend in the future,’ Kirkpatrick answered, recovering himself. ‘The one who is not in France with his empty cote and no wish to return to these shores, having been pit aside by the nobiles o’ this kingdom. Nor is it the covetous English one, whose death heralds the freedom of our realm – if ye believe the prophecies of Merlin. Have ye tallied it up yet, Duncan?’
‘Whit why are ye here?’
Kirkpatrick smiled and laid out the meat of it and what he needed – good horses and supplies enough for five, for they hoped to have three women in tow when they came out of the castle of Closeburn. Duncan was no fool; he had heard of the prisoners and said so, rubbing his beard with the idea of such a blow being struck.
‘That was weeks since. They may not be there still,’ he added warningly. ‘There has been a deal of skirrivaigin’ by folk since then and a deal of it in secret, to foil such attempts.’
‘Yet the Master of Closeburn plays chess with a prisoner,’ Hal pointed out and Duncan’s eyes narrowed.
‘Ye have good intelligencing,’ he answered, nodding. ‘He is the man for that game, right enough, and complains of havin’ no good players here. Until recently.’
‘Isabel plays chess,’ Hal answered, fixing Duncan with a grapple of eyes. ‘So does Lady Mary Bruce.’
Duncan stroked his beard, frosting with his own breath in the night chill. Then he nodded.
‘Five horses. Garrons only, nothin’ fancy – those days are long gone,’ he said, the last added with a grue of bitter ice.
‘How will ye get in?’
Kirkpatrick smiled and winked.
Berwick Castle
At the same time
Isabel tallied up the number of years a body spent in growing, then in dying. Then she thought how long a person spent in bed, asleep or awake, sick or well, fevered with lust or bad dreams. In her real world, only sickness or love justified daylight hours in a bed – yet this was not the real world and she knew that.
Snow-white sheets, a sable-fur covering, a red-velvet waterfall of privacy hangings, her head on down and linen – she dreamed of Balmullo and lay on filthy straw as if nailed. She had the imperative to move, knew she could not make her limbs work and felt like a laired toad, a salamander caught by the tail.
The room was hazily outlined and she knew people came and went, but she could not speak or even move her eyes and the panic this had first created in her – oh, what a lurch of heart, of shrieking terror that had been – was gone, replaced only by the calm slant of faint light on the stinking floor.