‘He offers the usual pay,’ he added, ‘but we do not need it with what you brought. I could tell him to go to the De’il.’
‘Best leave that hoarded up where we hid it,’ she declared. Her voice was soft, yet there was steel in it, like the fangs at the edge of a velvet maw, Dog Boy thought, afore it bites you. ‘It is more dangerous in the light of day than in the dark and so cannot be of value in these times at least. Yet there is more to supporting Robert Bruce than siller, my Hal, and you know it. There is what happened in the deer park to set the seal on it, if even seal were needed.’
Hal had given in, of course and, when Dog Boy heard it, he turned his fondling of the hounds to a farewell. Next day, they had left Herdmanston – Hal, Dog Boy, Mouse, Ill-Made Jock and Sore Davey, leaving Sim Craw as reeve and having to ride off under the sour arch of his scowl at being left behind.
Now Hal stood watching the Bruce’s back, feeling the cold seep up through the worn Greyfriars flagstones and wondering at the greeting he had had when he’d arrived, straggling into Lincluden under a pewter sky and a rain fine as spray.
‘Stay close,’ Bruce had said, the welted cicatrice on his cheek writhing like a lilac worm as he spoke. ‘I will have need of good men I can trust here.’
The flickering rushlight did nothing for his face, nor that of Kirkpatrick at his back and the three of them sat in a sparse nun’s cell like plotters.
Afterwards, Hal wondered how much had actually been plotted before he had arrived – or why he was needed in it. Once he might have gathered fifty good riders to him, hobilars all – but that was ten years gone and most were dead or too old and worn by war, while the young went with other commanders. Younger ones, Hal thought morosely, with more belly for the work of herschip raiding.
Belly, he realized, was what he lacked these days and nothing made it plainer to him than the day he rode a handful of men to Greyfriars, to find Bruce slithering himself into a maille shortcoat, hidden under the loose length of a brown wool gardecorps. The hood of it was drawn up and tightened under his chin to hide the cheek-scar from view; it wept still, that scar and Hal marvelled at how it never healed. Perhaps there had been poison on Malenfaunt’s blade?
He dismissed that, remembering that Bruce had plucked the dagger from his cheek and rammed it under Malenfaunt’s chin, into his mouth, pinning and slitting his tongue. Malenfaunt spoke in mumbles these days, Hal had heard, but had not suffered from any poison.
At the time, Bruce’s hidden maille had seemed more than prudent, for this was an awkward meeting in a town dominated by Comyn and their supporters – the very kirk, Greyfriars, had been founded by Red Comyn’s grandmother, the formidable matriarch Devorguilla, at the same time as she had laid the stones of an abbey so she could be kisted up alongside her husband. Sweetheart Abbey it had become as a result and a powerful icon of the Comyn.
Yet Bruce need not even have been here, sheriff’s court or not, for Longshanks himself would not be attending – sick in a monastery, surrounded by the arm of St David, a portion of the chains of St Peter and a tooth said to be proof against the thunder and lightning of God’s wrath.
‘Mayhap he has over-exerted himself,’ Kirkpatrick had said wryly when this news reached the Bruce cavalcade and those who knew that Longshanks’ queen was pregnant again laughed.
Yet Bruce had sent riders off to request a meeting with the Lord of Badenoch not long after and no-one was the wiser over it – not least the Lord of Badenoch, standing there as straight and tall as he could make himself, arms behind his back to thrust out his chest and the red badge on it. Gules, three garbs, or; Hal smiled, as he always did when he recalled his father dinning the lessons of heraldry into a boy who only wanted away to the trout and calling fields.
Badenoch stood near the altar, watching the brown-clad Bruce cross the flagstones towards him. Like a monk’s arsehole, he said to himself. Does he think dressing in a parody of piety would allay suspicion?