She could hear the sound of hammering. The cage. Malise had taken delight in telling her of it all the long journey across from Closeburn and she was not surprised, that first night they had stopped at Devorguilla’s abbey in Dumfries, when he had come to her.
Sweetheart Abbey, they called it and the irony was not lost on her. She had fought and he had beaten her almost senseless, then forced his way into her. It had been mercifully short that first time, but he had done it since and more than once in the same night; she knew it was as much to do with the power he had now as with the act itself.
Malise would have been surprised at this, for he thought he was secret with his thoughts. The first time – Lord, that first time; after all the fervid dreams he’d had, he thought he would die of pleasure, especially when she fought and he had her, as he had always imagined it, naked and helpless and trembling at his feet.
She would have been surprised, too, that the foulness he spilled on her, thought and deed, was not from vicious hate but the opposite – Malise had found his love at last. She was his and his alone. At last, he could share all his thoughts and dreams with her, for she was not shared with anyone, saw no-one else.
So she had it all from him, all the things he could not tell anyone else, the cruel and obscene things he had kept to himself and now emptied on her like spilled seed.
Tortures of men and women, killings of them and children, too, in the name of her husband and for the greater furtherance of the Comyn and Badenoch and Balliol – and for his own pleasure and interest.
He knew bodies as well as any Bologna surgeon, she realized in that part of her mind which was turning as feverish as her body. He spoke of nerves laid bare, muscles racked or slashed, breasts torn off, the monstrosity of forced couplings.
Once, musing on whether he would fare better than his master and get her with child, he revealed how such a creature did not amount to very much.
‘If you have it in your belly,’ he marvelled, ‘everyone lauds you for it, but the truth is that it is hardly anything of interest. I cut such a lady open once and it was such a frog of a thing with a big head, all curled and sticky. I threw it to the dugs.’
By the time they were crossing the Tweed into Berwick, she was littered up and barely conscious; the castellan, Robert de Blakebourne, took one look at her and savaged Malise away, cursing him.
Malise, concerned that he had gone too far, took to gnawing his nails and making his mind to be more circumspect while the castellan, a good man, tried to prise the lady loose from him entirely – and failed, with orders from an earl and King Edward himself.
A girl, Agnes, fed Isabel bread soaked in watered wine and she had been grateful for that because of the thirst – then watched the girl steal her last jewel, a locket with his hair; she hoped Malise did not catch the quine, for there would be blood.
She wondered where Malise was. There had been too much blood already and she knew now that what had happened to her was the punishment of God for all her sins. She tried to call out her own name, but could not speak and all that came into her head was ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena’ and then ‘panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie’.
She lay in the tower room while they took away the shutters and made the window into a door leading to the cage they were fixing on the wall. When she was better – and the weather warmer, the castellan had insisted – she would be forced into the cage, in full view for most of the day, though she could retire ‘for purpose of her privies’ by asking her gaoler, Malise.
Blakebourne had also, for mercy, insisted that the cage be on the inside wall of the Hog Tower, so only the castle would see and not all the gawpers who chose to come up from the town itself.
Apart from the workmen, no-one came. When they had gone for the night, leaving her in the chill dark with the cold swooping talons through the open door-window, she breathed softly, easily, regularly. Started to count them – one, two. Out, in. Measuring her life.
She knew the dark was closing in. She liked the dark. In the dark she could dream up the sun of Hal and bask in it.
Closeburn Vill, Annandale
The day after …
They walked the market on a day of blue and gold and cheesecloth clouds, where breath still smoked and people bundled themselves up and stamped their feet. Closeburn was too small for a decent market and seemed to consist mainly of deals being done for the staples, the fleece skins of sheep slaughtered at Martinmas. Hal, who knew the business well, reckoned the clip would fetch a good price when it, in turn, was sold in the spring.