‘Malise,’ she declared, ‘see to the care of the others and the stabling of their horses. Find room for them all where you can – but be polite in the asking.’
Malise hovered malevolently for a moment, caught Buchan’s eye and bowed obsequiously.
‘My lord’s visit?’ Isabel asked and Buchan, goblet in hand, nodded to the litter, perched near the fire and surrounded by the grim-faced men.
‘Wallace,’ he growled. ‘He is sick from a wound, so I brought him here. You have some skill with the medical and can be trusted not to blabber.’
She tried hard not to blink, to stay as stone, but it was difficult. Wallace was outlawed and harbouring him was as good as a death sentence to Buchan, only just returned to the favour of King Edward. Her skill with ‘the medical’ was one more perversion of her sex and station and she had thought that, if her husband had considered it all, it was to add it to the black sin of her.
Isabel looked her husband full in his fleshy, pouch-eyed face and had back a cool, wordless stare; she realized, suddenly, what the stooping weight he bore was and that there was steel in the man – more so than even she had thought, with his dogged persistence in carrying on resistance to the English, whether openly or covert.
‘I will take to your chambers,’ he gruffed, ‘so that folk will spread the word that this was merely the Earl coming to take his rights of his wife. Happily for you, I need sleep more than your loins for the moment, so you need not fash over it.’
He did not wait, but barrelled off into the hall’s dim, smoke from the torches fluttering like dark insinuation in his wake.
The men round the litter parted deferentially when she came up and the figure on it, half propped up on his elbow, gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.
‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes – though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’
She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.
She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.
‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. Then came this.’
‘There is rot in it,’ Isabel said flatly and Wallace chuckled harshly.
‘I ken that, lady,’ he replied. ‘Pain, too – if ye as much as blaw on it, it hurts as bad as if ye had struck me.’
‘We will needs do more than blow on it,’ Isabel answered and Wallace’s throat apple bobbed twice, then he nodded. The smile was gone.
‘Ah spier ye, lady – fit’s gan wrang?’
The voice was thick, the accent strange from the black-carapaced Fergus the Beetle. Isabel explained as best as she thought the man would understand and he nodded, blued bottom teeth sucking his top lip, brows lowered in a frown and eyes peering from the tangle of hair and beard, his face dark from sun and dirt, sheened with grease as protection against wind and rain.
‘Ah howkit oot a daud o’ muck frae it,’ he told her. ‘Black as the De’il’s erse, beggin’ the blissin’ o’ ye, lady. Wull he gan live yet?’
‘Away with ye, Fergus,’ Wallace said gently, hearing this. ‘Leave the good wummin to her skill.’
She had water heated and brought, with cloths and a keen, sharp skewer; Wallace followed it with his eyes, then met hers. Isabel felt clammy at what she had to do to a wound that hurt with a breeze on it, but he swallowed once, then nodded.
‘Hold him,’ she ordered and his men went to shoulders and feet. She hovered the skewer over it and saw him brace – then she struck.
He howled, thrashed, vomited and fainted. The skewer went flying from her hand and skittered across the rushed flags; even as it did she knew she had failed.
It took ten minutes for him to recover. Slick with new sweat, he managed a wan grin from the whey of his face.
‘I have the idea o’ it, now, lady,’ he said and held out his hand for the skewer. ‘Ye have the strength o’ purpose but no arm for the deed.’
She handed it to him and he wrapped all but the last fingerjoint length of it in a cloth while she watched, fascinated and appalled. Could she do this if it were her suffering?
He placed the tip of the skewer gently, just where she indicated and the blue-black mass seemed to Isabel to be pulsing now. Then he nodded to Fergus and the others, who came up and placed their hands on him in readiness.