He slapped her. A quick sharp blow, smacking across her face. She staggered but recovered her balance. In that eternal instant just after the blow, when everything she had ever assumed about her future was changing forever, she felt her own pride stiffen and made a point of remaining standing and not falling down as her husband had. Nicolette jumped forward and seizer her arm; her other attendants rushed to her from their mats in the shade, but Isabella shook off Nicolette’s arm and raised a hand to her other attendants to show she need no assistance. Her left cheek burning red, her eyes icy, she curtsied slowly to her husband. “I only wished to be of help, my most noble lord,” Isabella said in a flat, low voice.
“I will settle the Scottish problem!” Edward snapped in the direction of his own retinue of young men, who seemed by their stiff postures to be wishing their clothes looked less festive and more military. “Go to Lord Pickering. Tell him to send the cavalry out to suppress these rebels. I want this Wallace found and hanged!”
The frightened aides scurried away. The prince, suddenly finding himself at a loss for what to do, followed after them with Peter by his side.
Now, at last, Isabella rose from her curtsy. With her first step she staggered, and Nicolette snatched her arm to steady her. “You’re dizzy!” Nicolette erupted and added a vile epithet in French.
“Shh!” Isabella said. “I am unhurt.”
They walked toward the door of the palace arm in arm. Under her breath so that none but Isabella could hear, Nicolette said, “I hope your husband goes after the Scotsman himself. This Wallace will kill him for certain”
24
A BIT NORTH OF ITS GEOGRAPHIC CENTER, BRITAIN IS pierced by two jagged slashes of water that dart inland, one from the east and the other from the west, cutting the island nearly in half. The bottleneck of land that remains is a beautiful rolling plain, broken here and there by sudden promontories that jut into the north Atlantic sky. This land is the doorway to Scotland, and Stirling Castle was its gatekeeper. Rising on the noblest of the promontories, its stony battlements gazed out for miles in all directions, daring all comers.
Safe within the walls of this castle sat Lord Pickering, head of the English army in Scotland. He was in the great room with his generals, discussing the deployment of their forces, when he received the royal messenger. Reading the note the prince had sent him, Pickering replied to the messenger, “Please report that I have already sent out the cavalry. And assure the prince that I shall catch Wallace one way or another.”
The messenger left as Pickering burned the message.
At the same time, at another castle not far away, Robert the Bruce lay in bed with a young Nordic beauty. She was drowsy; the lids hung heavily over her vacant blue eyes. But the lovemaking had not defused the restlessness of Robert’s spirit. He lay on his stomach, turned away from her on the bed. She stirred and kissed his neck, but he didn’t respond.
“I wanted to please you,” she said.
He seemed not to have heard her, then at last he muttered, “You did.” But he was numb as she nuzzled him again. She sagged back, and he still stared away, lost in thought.
But then he became aware of her and realized her feelings were hurt. He tired to explain what he’d been thinking. “In Lanark Village,” he said, “The king’s soldiers killed a girl. Her lover fought his way through the soldiers and killed the magistrate.”
The blond beauty he’d spent all night and most of the morning with just looked at him blankly.
“He rebelled. He rebelled!” Robert insisted. “He acted. He fought! Was it rage? Pride? Love? Whatever it as, he has more of it than I.”
The blue eyes only appeared vacant; Robert’s young lover understood exactly what he was saying. She turned away from him. “You might have lied,” she said toward her pillow.
Robert heard the hurt in her voice. He knew there was no way to explain it away, to make her believe even for a moment that he cared about her or anything else in his life with the kind of passion he’d just been marveling at. “I’m too arrogant to lie,” Robert said at last.
He rose, pulled back the curtains, and squinted at the sunlight. Late morning. It was time.
He dressed in fresh clothes and left her there in his bed with an empty kiss that she welcomed with an empty smile.
He moved grimly up a dark castle staircase. He followed a servant who carried a candle against the gloom. The reached a door, which the servant unlocked. Young Robert took the candle and entered the room, the light from the tallow and wick barely penetrating the darkness.
Robert willed himself forward and placed the candle on a table in the center of the room. There was a shuffle in the dark; then, as if floating out of the black waters of a murky pool, came a face drifting into the candlelight. The boundaries of the face — the tip of the nose, the point of the chin, the bottoms of the ears, the mounds of the cheeks == were eaten away. A leper. Robert the Bruce, the Elder — Robert’s father.
The younger Bruce had steeled himself for the sight, and now he did into look away. His father, isolated in his disfiguration, looked back at him with the eyes of the condemned. And yet there was no pity there for himself or anyone else. The elder Bruce enjoyed these visits from his son; the chance to advice counsel, direct — to plot his son’s ascension to the throne of Scotland — it was now all he had.
“Father an armed rebellion has begun,” young Robert said.
“Under whom?”
“A commoner named William Wallace took the English at Lanark, and now people flock to him.”
“A commoner? So no one leads Scotland.”
The old man paused to ponder, and young Robert waited in heavy silence, broken only by the sputtering of the tallow in the candleflame. The elder Bruce lifted his yellow eyes and pointed a half finger at his son.
“You will embrace this rebellion,’ he said in his dusty voice. “Support it from our lands in the north. I will gain English favor by condemning it and ordering it opposed from our lands in the south. Whichever way the tide runs, we will rise.”
But young Robert did not get up immediately to carry out his father’s wishes as he usually did. He kept his seat and struggled to find the right words fro something that, at the time, he would have said held only the mildest interest for him; an yet his mind could not let it go. “This Wallace,’ Robert said. “He doesn’t even have a knighthood. But he fights with passion, and he is clever. He inspires men.”
“And you wish to charge off and fight as he did,” his father said.
But his father was not surprised; it was almost as if he’d been wondering when such emotion would spring out of his son. He shot back. “It is time to survive! Listen to me! You are the 17th Robert Bruce. The sixteen before you have passed you land and title because we ride both sides of every road. Press your case t the nobles. They will choose who rules Scotland.”
“They do nothing but talk!” Robert said.
“Rightly so! They are as rich in English titles and lands as they are in Scottish! Just as we are! You admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage. So does a dog. It is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a ma noble. And you must understand this: Edward Longshanks is the most ruthless king ever to sit on the throne of England, and none of us, and nothing of Scotland, will survive unless we are as ruthless, more ruthless, then he.”
Young Bruce rose heavily and moved to the door. But his father’s voice reached out and caught him there.
“Robert… look at me. I wish the world were different, and courage and conviction alone were enough. They are not. Even with my nose and ears falling from my head, I can face this fact. So must you.”