Insurrection: Renegade [02] (32 page)

Still no answer.

‘This is my wife, Lady Elizabeth, Egidia’s niece.’ Robert paused. ‘Your new mother.’

The word caused little reaction in the girl. She merely nodded dutifully.

As Robert stared at the silent child, his words gumming in his mouth, he felt Elizabeth move beside him.

She went and crouched in front of Marjorie. At eighteen and with no child of her own, she was tentative. ‘Would you like some honey cake? It’s warm from the oven.’

The knot in Marjorie’s brow vanished, a spark of life appearing in her blue eyes. When she nodded, Elizabeth took her hand and led her into the shadows of the house, leaving Judith and their belongings to be dealt with by the steward. Robert followed them, feeling an unexpected rush of gratitude towards his wife.

In the smoky warmth of the hall, a servant was banking the fire. One of the older Bruce’s hunting dogs, as fat and unexercised as its master, was stretched out by the hearth, watching from under hooded eyes as more logs were stacked in the blaze. Two other servants sat at one of the trestles polishing an array of silver dishes and goblets, and Elizabeth’s maid, Lora, was seated by the fire, mending one of her mistress’s gowns. They all glanced up curiously as Marjorie entered at Elizabeth’s side.

On one table were several objects. Marjorie, who was already showing more interest than uncertainty as she looked around the well-appointed hall, brightened considerably as she saw them. There were two felt dolls with plaited woollen hair and velvet dresses beside a cup and ball game. The most impressive object, however, was a model of a castle, painstakingly carved from ash. The girl fixed on it as Elizabeth escorted her towards the table.

‘Your father had this made for you.’

Letting go of Elizabeth’s hand, Marjorie slid on to the bench in front of the toys.

As his wife called one of the servants to bring honey cake and spiced wine, Robert watched his daughter peer in through the slit windows of the castle. ‘Here,’ he said, crossing to her. ‘It opens. Like this.’ He pushed up the silver catch on the side, so that the front swung open on tiny hinges.

His daughter gave a happy intake of breath as three floors were revealed, one containing a miniature wooden bed, one a table and bench, the other a carved wooden fireplace and two ivory figures, a man and a woman. Robert, drinking in the pleasure in Marjorie’s face, wished he had brought her here sooner, but it had taken a year living in England before he had felt secure enough to do so. His infrequent visits to London remained tense affairs, where he was watched constantly by Humphrey or others of the king’s men. Now though, watching his daughter play, Robert couldn’t deny there was a deeper reason he hadn’t summoned Marjorie sooner. In truth, he hadn’t just been afraid for her safety. He had been afraid of the stranger she had become. He thought of his own father, the distance between them not lessened by a year under the same roof. ‘Did you see much of your uncles in Rothesay?’ he asked to distract himself.

Marjorie nodded, placing one of the ivory figures in the top room of the castle. ‘Niall tells me stories.’

‘He does?’ Robert brightened at the revelation, keen for news from home. The long silence from his brothers and comrades had been unbearable, the knowledge that they thought he had betrayed them a sore in his heart. ‘Well, your uncle Edward lives here and I expect if you ask he’ll do the same.’ He paused. ‘Did Niall and Thomas speak of me?’

Marjorie’s attention remained on the castle.

Before she could answer, Edwin called from the doorway. ‘A message, sir.’ The steward held up a scroll.

Leaving his daughter playing and his wife frowning after him, Robert crossed the hall and took the parchment. As he saw the royal seal he felt a tug in the pit of his stomach.

‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked as he read.

Robert looked up. ‘The Scots have attacked a company of the king’s men outside Edinburgh. The truce is broken. King Edward wants to bring his plans for invasion forward. He has summoned me to arms.’ Looking back at the parchment, he felt a spark of hope.

Under the veil of suspicion at court, he’d had no chance to uncover anything of the prophecy, just the maddening elation among the men of Edward’s supreme victory in gathering the four relics beneath him – a fact that led many to believe the king would soon crush the last will of the Scottish rebels and take full control of Britain. Neither had Robert found a scrap of evidence, beyond his suspicion, of the king’s complicity in the murder of Scotland’s king. He knew, in order to get closer to the truth, he needed to win the king’s faith, but to do that he needed to prove himself and there had been no opportunity, until now.

On the heels of hope, came the sinking thought of the battlefields ahead of him. Once again, he was being called to raise arms against his country.

Elizabeth looked from Robert to Marjorie. ‘When do you leave?’ she murmured.

‘Three weeks.’

They fell silent, staring at one another.

Into the hush, Marjorie’s voice came cool and clear. ‘They do not speak of you.’

Robert glanced at her.

‘Niall and Thomas,’ said his daughter, removing one of the figures from the castle. ‘They do not speak of you.’

Chapter 26

Brechin, Scotland, 1303 AD

While girls made hawthorn garlands for May celebrations and wheat and rye ripened in the fields, the men of England prepared for war. Tailors mended tears in gambesons, farriers shoed horses and squires whetted dull blades and cleaned rust from their masters’ mail coats in barrels of sand. Bidding wives and children farewell, leaving crops flourishing under clement skies, knights donned armour and bands of cloth decorated with the red cross of St George and made their way to the point of muster, called to arms by their king.

Converging on the east coast, the train of knights and squires, infantry, archers, pack-horses, mules, carts and siege engines wound for miles, raising a pall of dust over the Great North Road. Summoned in the wake of the attack on Segrave’s company, it was the largest force Edward had gathered since the campaign that had seen the deaths of ten thousand Scots at Falkirk. The sum of a king’s revenge.

After pausing at York to amass supplies, Edward continued towards Scotland, crossing the border at the beginning of June, where he split his forces. The Prince of Wales was set in charge of a large company and sent into Strathearn to burn, loot and, in the king’s words, raise hell, while Edward himself led the main body of the army towards the east coast, passing beneath the indomitable shadow of Stirling Castle, which the Scots held firm against him. Meanwhile, a fleet of Irish ships, under the Earl of Ulster’s command, harried the west coast by sea.

By August King Edward reached the town of Brechin, where he set about besieging its castle. Built on a rocky outcrop over a river, the fortress was well-garrisoned and supplied and, after a fortnight’s bombardment, the stout walls and the pluck of the men within continuing to frustrate him, Edward was forced to bring in more siege engines by sea to Montrose. Needing heavier ballast than stones with which to counterweight these new machines, he sent a company under the command of Aymer de Valence to nearby Brechin Cathedral to strip its roof of lead.

Robert squinted up at the square tower, which was shrouded in scaffolding. Although broad, it was still only half the height of the round tower that loomed behind it, almost one hundred feet high. They brought to mind two brothers standing side by side, one tall and slender, the other short and squat. In the midday sun they cast stunted shadows across the cathedral yard and cemetery, beyond which were the manses of the canons and the bishop’s palace.

A fly landed on his cheek and crawled towards his mouth, until he swiped it away. The heat had brought them out in swarms, along with the horseflies that tormented the destriers.

‘What are you waiting for, Bruce?’

Robert turned at the voice, which brayed above the general hubbub of men and horses that crowded the precinct, stinking up the air. His gaze fixed on the speaker, standing in the shade of an oak, holding a pewter goblet.

Aymer de Valence’s chiselled face was flushed, his dark eyes narrowed beneath the rim of his upturned visor. Around him, sheltering from the glare, stood other knights and nobles, among them Thomas of Lancaster and Ralph de Monthermer, drinking the wine Valence had commandeered from the bishop’s palace. Servants continued to hurry from the palace conveying casks of the stuff, along with meat pies, bread and cheese for the invaders. A little way away, lined up in the sun, faces red with heat and anger, stood Brechin’s bishop and canons. English squires paced close by, hands on swords, watching them.

‘Well?’ Valence gestured at the tower. ‘Send them up, for Christ’s sake. King Edward needs this lead tonight.’

Robert bore Valence’s contempt with the same turn of the cheek he had learned to employ often on the march north. ‘Get climbing,’ he ordered the group of foot soldiers, whose tunics were dusty from the piles of rubble they had just cleared from the masons’ trays. Beneath the bulk of his mail no one could see his rigid shoulders, or his fingers under the steel-plated gloves flexing to curl around a weapon and cleave Valence’s skull. The infantry, who Robert had been ordered to raise from his Scottish estates by the king, went to work, hefting the wooden trays they had emptied.

Robert stood alone, watching as they began to ascend. He could have protested; told the son of a whore to send his own foot soldiers, but Edward had expressly set Valence in charge and any disrespect to his cousin’s authority would be an affront to the king. Above all, Robert knew he must maintain the illusion of obedience and loyalty. Aymer had been watching him like a hawk since the start of the campaign. But he was not the only one. The closer they had come to Scotland, the more Robert found himself aware of everything he said or did, until he no longer felt he inhabited his own body. It was as if he were a puppet on strings, manipulated by those around him, moving only according to their expectations. The pretence had become exhausting.

The men looked awkward on the flimsy ladders that zigzagged the tiers of platforms, supported by spindly conifer frames. It was slow going, each pair struggling with the trays they carried between them, forced to climb one-handed.

‘Blood and thunder, we’ll be here till Judgement Day,’ complained one of Valence’s men.

A merciful breeze cooled the sweat on Robert’s face and stirred the dead hawthorn blossom that littered the grass. On it, he caught a faint briny smell, perhaps from the lagoon at Montrose. Some miles to the east, the town had witnessed the day, seven years ago, when the royal arms had been stripped from John Balliol’s tabard, the same day Robert and the Knights of the Dragon had entered the abbey at Scone to take the Stone of Destiny.

Robert was pulled from his thoughts as one of the soldiers on the ladders lost his footing. The man fell with a shocked shout to sprawl on the narrow platform a few feet below him. His comrade, connected to him by the masons’ tray, kept his balance, but dropped the tray, which plummeted three floors of the square tower to shatter on the dusty ground. Aymer’s knights jeered, wondering – in voices loud enough for the Scots on the scaffold to hear – how many pieces the youth would have broken into had he dropped from the same height. A wager was called as to which of them would fall first. Ralph de Monthermer was the only one who didn’t join in the jests. Standing there, his yellow mantle with its green eagle garish in the sunlight, the royal knight nursed his wine in silence, observing the first of the youths as they reached the top platform, his eyes occasionally drifting to Robert.

Just above the top platform the square tower finished abruptly. The masonry there was paler than the bottom sections, only recently whitewashed. The first two men set down their tray and moved to reposition one of the ladders, eyeing the drop to the yard below. Between them, they laid it diagonally on the roof of the cathedral’s nave, which rose at a slanting angle to the tower. Beyond, the round tower pointed like a stone finger to the sky. The slabs of lead were blue in the sunlight. Armed with a chisel, one of the men crawled up the rungs and began to prise up the slabs, passing them down to his comrade, who stacked them in the tray.

Soon a line was formed and they picked up a rhythm. Once a tray was filled, two men would hoist the heavy container and inch their way down the ladders to where two carts waited to take the loads to the English siege lines surrounding Brechin Castle. Each pair was panting and drenched by the time they reached the wagons. The young Scot on the roof, levering off the lead, shifted further up as the blocks around him began to disappear. His comrade, belly down on the ladder, took each slab as it was handed to him.

Robert was directing the men offloading the lead on to the carts when he heard the shriek. He turned sharply, shielding his eyes from the sun, to see the man on the roof had lost his footing and was sliding fast towards the edge. Loose rectangles of lead skittered away from under him and crashed to the ground, causing the men below to duck and scatter. As his legs shot out into sky, the man managed to twist round and grab hold of the roof. He clung there for dear life, feet kicking desperately.

‘Help him!’ Robert roared, cupping his hands to direct his shout at the man on the ladder, who seemed frozen by the spectacle.

There was another shriek as the young Scot slipped further, panic making him lose his grip. He was screaming something incoherent as his comrade reached out a hand.