‘There is gruel to break yer fast.’
Wallace nodded, then rubbed the greasy tangle of his chin ruefully.
‘I have no siller left to offer ye,’ he said and Patie nodded sorrowfully, as if he had expected the news.
‘An’ ye a dubbed knight, no less,’ he answered, shaking his mournful head on the inequity of it. ‘Whit happened to yer siller, then? Wager or drink?’
Wallace laughed, remembering.
‘The most o’ it went on a wummin,’ he said and Patie sniffed. Hawked and spat.
‘Worth it, was she?’
‘She was,’ Wallace agreed, the image of her sharp and blade-bright in his mind when he had come to the priory weeks before with his handful of scarred, filthy army.
‘A coontess, no less.’
It was the last shine of glory and tarnished even then and he had known it was all over even as he stood, hip-shot, while the nuns of Elcho squealed and ran. He had tossed the red robin’s-egg ruby carelessly back to Isabel as she clasped her exhausted, trembling tirewoman, Ada, with her free hand.
‘I will take ye to Roslin,’ he had told her. ‘Ye will have to make yer own way to Herdmanston – I am no’ welcome there in these days.’
She had nodded, not knowing the why of it and too relieved to be free to do any asking. Wallace did not offer an explanation.
Patie’s final grunt shook him back to the moment and the dungheap; he saw the man was looking at the scarred pewter sky with a calculated, expert squint.
‘A good crop, if there is little rain and less war.’
‘No war, Patie,’ he answered and could hear the sorrowed loss of it in his voice, so that he was almost ashamed. No war, for his men were scattered and gone after taking Isabel, Countess of Buchan, to Roslin – Long Jack Short, Ralf Rae and the worst of them were briganding out of that old stronghold of outlaws, the Selkirk forests. Jinnet’s Jean and others were probably hooring with the English in Carlisle and robbing them blind when they could.
And he was here. Once he had ruled the Kingdom as sole Guardian, now he sheltered in the mean holding of a sokeman of his sister’s man, Tham Halliday, Laird of Corehead, because the castle itself was under watch. Soon, he knew, he would move to a house in Moffat, or another near Glasgow, those hiding him risking the penalty of harbouring, lying low until …
What? The thought racked him, as it had done from the moment he had woken to find most of the remaining men gone. Those left, he had realized, were starving and wasted, so he had given them what coin he had and watched the last of them melt away.
France, perhaps. The Red Rover, de Longueville, would get him away as he had done in the past and he and that old pirate had fought there before – but the French had given up as well and now no-one opposed the English; the idea of that burned him, but the old fire of it had little left of the great body to feed on save heart.
There was nothing in France for him – other than the relief of the Bruce; he almost managed a smile at that, but could not quite manage it, or the spit that went with it.
‘No war, Patie,’ he repeated.
Patie fumbled himself shut, wiped his fingers on his tunic and nodded meaningfully.
‘I would lay that aside, then, while ye break yer fast,’ he grunted. ‘Ye are scarin’ the bairns.’
Wallace looked down, was almost astonished to see the hand-and-half sword clasped in his right fist, so much part of him for so long that he no longer recognized it as a presence. He had woken with it clenched there, walked out of the mean hut with it and stood pissing with it. He had learned to do so many things left-handed, because the right was always occupied by that weapon. Naked, notched and spotted with rust, it was as done up as he was himself – yet sharp and ready.
He remembered cutting men down at Scone with it, carving bloody skeins off the fine English knights at Stirling’s bridge, slicing through the jawbone of the Templar Master, Brian de Jay, in the forest of Callendar.
His sword, so much part of him for so long, quenched in blood and wickedness, he thought. Now it was no more than a monstrous frightener of bairns.
Like myself.
Church of St Thomas of Acon, London
Thursday of Mysteries, April, 1305
He had risked it and was sure the dice had gone against him. When Lamprecht reached the herber’s stall he looked round and was sure the cloaked man was the same one he had seen. He was sure, also, that it was Kirkpatrick; there was something sickly familiar in the oiled way the man moved, turning sideways, stepping careful as a fox and never bumping or being jostled.