‘Hare, hare, hye,’ they were singing, furious, red-faced, beating tempo on the tables until the trenchers jumped. ‘Goudalier ont fet ouan d’Arras Escoterie. Saint Andrie – hare hare, goudeman et hare druerie.’
Hark, hear it now, Jamie translated for the Dog Boy, who marvelled at how his friend and new-dubbed knight had learned French in the years he had been in that country with Bishop Lamberton. Those ale brewers are turning Arras into Scotland. By St Andrew hear it – good men and good times …
Across the table from them sat Kirkpatrick, solitary in the crowd and counting the heads. The bishops of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld, Moray and Brechin. The abbot of Scone and another from Inchcolm. Three earls – John of Atholl, Malcolm of Lennox, Alan of Menteith, spilling alkanet-coloured gravy down their fine wool tunics.
And that was it, apart from a slew of lesser lights, some of them dubious – Randolph for one, Kirkpatrick thought, would bear watching. Not a single Comyn, nor a Balliol – it was hardly a rich vote of confidence in the new king of Scots.
They were bringing in brawn with mustard and starting in to toast the ‘good men and good times’, while Jamie was telling Dog Boy of how some woman called Agnes they had known as boys in Douglas had run off with Fergus the cook and they now had a pie shop in Perth. And how a falconer called Gutterbluid was still there, serving the Clifford folk who ruled now and how, one day, Jamie would scorch all of them out of Douglas Castle.
He said it loudly and often, flushed as much at having been made a knight by a king as the wine and there was no lisp in the boy when he did it; Kirkpatrick wondered if Edward, the Covetous King, knew what hatred he had created in the north out of the generation of Jamie Douglases.
He wondered if Edward knew what had happened here in Scone – though he already knew what Longshanks would do about it and could feel the sullen, embered wrath of the English king through the dark and the miles.
This was the last feast – what followed would be a famine of good men and good times.
The Painted Chamber, Westminster, London
Pentecost, May, 1306
Seraphs, prophets and the fulminating Judas Maccabeus all glared painted disapproval down at the huddle round the table, whose black echoes were stretched and monstrous on the walls; a wind flickered the sconces and the shadows danced like mad imps in Hell.
I have never been warm in that bed, Edward thought moodily, as the hangings of the gilded, green-postered bed swung like banners. For all that, he looked at it longingly, perched invitingly on a dais at the far end of his private chambers; it had been a long, long day weighted with fur and cloth of gold, crown and jewels, touching stumbling youths on the shoulders, youths who knelt as tyros and rose as knights.
Three hundred, at least, Edward thought wearily and all of them equally exhausted from their night of chapel vigil, the Templar courtyard choked with their tents and the press so great on the day that he’d had to clear a passage in the abbey with armoured knights on horseback.
It had been worth it, though, for the ceremony, the timing – Whitsun, when Arthur himself had held his fabled plenary court at Caerleon – and the binding of so many young knights to this one day and to his son.
He glanced at the boy, seeing his whey face and violet-ringed eyes. He had stood up well to the ritual of spending all night alone in the palace chapel. At dawn, he had knighted the boy and then the pair of them crossed to the abbey and, together, dubbed all the others.
After that was the feast of it, complete with the masterstroke of gilded swans on which Edward himself had sworn vengeance on Bruce, promising that, once he had vanquished his enemy, he would proceed to the Holy Land.
It was pure Arthur and only a few doubted that the King would do it, for he was magnificently prinked and preened, coloured and oiled. Not to be outdone, the prince had risen, resplendent in the heraldry of Gascony, to which he had also been newly raised, and swore loudly not to rest two nights in the same place until the Scotch had been defeated.
There were those who knew it was an echo of Perceval’s declaration from the Round Table, when Arthur’s knights set out to find the Holy Grail – but that was part of it all. That and the minstrels and the food and the drink and the boasts.
One or two looked at the old king and wondered, all the same … De Lacy, for one. He had seen Edward on the day news had arrived of Bruce’s murderous treachery, seen the grey cast that seemed to turn the King’s face to stone, then the mad flush that darkened it.
‘God rot him,’ he had exploded. ‘I will chain him like a mad dog. Let him and all those with him be cursed and their accomplices in evil with them. He is now ranked with the fratricide Cain, and with Judas the traitor, and with Core, Dathan and Abiron, who entered Hell while still living for their revolt against Moses …’