‘Bigod,’ Sim Craw admired, ‘it never fails to maze me how such a well-bred wummin kens every low-born chiel from here to beyond The Mounth.’
It was a slash through Long Jack’s spluttering and Hal broke in before it boiled up to something ugly.
‘Take us to Wallace,’ he said. ‘Myself, the Countess and Kirkpatrick.’
‘A Bruce man?’ Long Jack spat back, leaping on this fact to save his face. ‘I am as likely to shove my dirk in the Wallace hert.’
‘Ye are skilled at that,’ Hal replied, losing his own temper. ‘Bangtail Hob will testify to it afore God.’
‘Swef, swef.’
The new voice rolled over the tension like a flattening boulder and the figure who stepped out of the dark was as large, a barrel-shaped man whose hair furzed out from under a confection of hat. He had a face dominated by a fat nose that drooped like a pachyderm’s over a sprawl of moustache, shrewd, heavy-lidded eyes and a way of swinging his head like a blind, hooded hawk when he turned. Hal knew him at once.
‘Sir Tham Halliday,’ he said and had back a nod before the head swung back, the gaze almost as heavy as the hand he laid on Long Jack’s shoulder.
‘Bring them, as Will bidded.’
Scowling, Long Jack turned and led the way, while Sim, Stirk Davey and the Dog Boy looked at each other and then into the dark, which hid a multitude of sins clenched in a horde of unseen hands.
The meeting, when it finally came, was a strange affair and Isabel noted it mainly because of the shock at the sight of Wallace and for the reversal of characters between Kirkpatrick and Hal.
Wallace was slumped in a curule chair, a pose that Hal remembered well enough for it to pain him; the hand-and-a-half, he noted, was hung, scabbarded, on a wall and that was a difference from before, for Wallace would once never have allowed the hilt of that weapon more than a fingertip from him. Hal wondered if the belt that it hung from was really made from the flayed skin of Cressingham, the English Treasurer of Scotland who had died at Stirling Brig.
Wallace was gaunt, wasted, galled with too much bone at knee, elbow and cheeks. His eyes were the worst part of him and everyone saw it. They were the washed-out eyes of a netted fish in opaque waters, slightly bewildered and infinitely weary. They brightened at the sight of Isabel and a smile split the close-cropped beard; his hair, too, was all but shaved and he saw the shock this gave the Countess.
‘Shorn,’ he said ruefully, ‘like an old wether. Nits and lice – it is good to see you, Countess. I see you have leaped the dyke.’
She could not reply for the sight of him and Hal stepped into the silence.
‘You have my thanks for the rescue of her,’ he said in the French Wallace had offered up. The poor coin of his voice rang hollow even to his own ears.
‘Aye, well,’ Wallace replied laconically. ‘I think that comes true from the Countess and only from politeness out of yourself.’
‘Bangtail Hob,’ Hal said and Kirkpatrick sighed, started forward with his mouth opening to block the breach of the conversation. Wallace spoke over him, silencing him before a word got out.
‘Aye, Bangtail was a sadness,’ Wallace admitted. ‘Necessary, all the same, else he would have told where we were. I had tired and sick folk who couldn’t spend another night in the cold and wet.’
‘He fought for you once,’ Hal reminded him savagely. ‘He would have said nothing.’
‘He would have told the next hoor he lay wi’,’ Wallace replied wearily, breaking into Scots. ‘And if ye were no’ blind with grief ye would ken this.’
‘Ye might have held him for a day or two,’ Hal insisted hotly. ‘He helped save yer life, in the name of Christ.’
The eyes flashed, the old fire escaping from under hooded lids, but diffused like pump water from a spout blocked by a finger.
‘Long hundreds have done so. Thousands. The dead pile up round me like leaves in November.’
He leaned forward a little, tense as a hound on a leash.
‘Freedom,’ he said hoarsely, ‘is never got for free. It is paid for in suffering, more by some than others. Yet “dico tibi verum, libertas optimum rerum” – which is, afore ye say it yerself, everything I ever learned training as a priest. And these words ye ken already, Hal of Herdmanston.’
I tell you the truth, the best of all things is freedom. Hal had no answer to it.
‘Fine words,’ interrupted Kirkpatrick, the Latin lost on him, dropping the bag into the silence with a heavy, solid shink. Wallace turned the weary gaze on him.
‘The Earl of Annandale and Carrick,’ Kirkpatrick said softly in French, ‘sends this for your regard. Enough coin to pay for passage to France.’
‘Why would the Bruce think I need his coin?’
Kirkpatrick smiled thinly.
‘To add to the safe conduct letter the Comyn extracted from the Pope, in the name of King John Balliol,’ he replied. ‘Now you can flash the Bruce coin back at them and avoid being shackled by obligements to either one.’
‘Or end up manacled to all of ye, in the mire of yer damned feud,’ Wallace countered.