Hal had seen Douglas and Randolph at the Christ’s Mass feast, red-faced and greasy with joy and victory, reeling to their feet every so often to throw toasts at Bruce, the hero king. Isabel, as ever, had been quietly scathing.
‘You would think they had fought the Philistines,’ she muttered. ‘Instead, they took a kingdom from the son when, in all his life, they never managed to take as much as an ell of good Scots dirt from the father.’
It had been a harsh judgement on a victory which had cost so much blood; Hal mentioned it now for the enjoyment of seeing Kirkpatrick wince at the memory of his attempts to hush her as politely as could be managed.
In the end, only Dog Boy had soothed Isabel. He had moved up from below the salt, seeing her distress from down the length of the table, and brought his new wife, the smiling Bet’s Meggy, to be reminded to her. They had fallen at once to talk of Bet’s Meggy’s mother, whom Isabel had known; Hal had nodded his thanks and relief to Dog Boy, marvelling at what the years had created: a tall, dark copy of Sir James Douglas in the livery of a royal houndsman, with his round-eyed son taking care of his wee sister down at the end of the feast table and trying to miss nothing of this glorious night.
Hal had been sorry to leave them, if nothing else at court.
‘How is your lady?’ Kirkpatrick asked with a lopsided smile, breaking Hal’s reverie. He was leaning back, at ease and with one foot carelessly thrown over the arm of his seat, dangling and bobbing to some unheard music; his boots smoked gently from the heat of the fire.
‘Fine as the sun on shiny water,’ Hal answered and Kirkpatrick heard the uncertainty, cocking an eyebrow.
‘She talks to God a wee bit more than she did,’ Hal added, almost defiantly, and Kirkpatrick nodded as if he had known that all along. He had not and the knowledge of it made him need to hide his frown; there was nothing worse, in his opinion, than a good woman gone to piety. A cage would do that, all the same, and he said as much.
‘These surroundings are safer and more of a comfort,’ he added, waving his cup to encompass Herdmanston and all in it. ‘You have restored a deal of it.’
The smell of cut wood and stone dust permeated the air and every time he breathed it in Hal was reminded of Sim, who had worked so hard before to restore a burned-out Herdmanston. The absence of that great soul was still an unbalmed sore.
‘There is a roof over us,’ he said, to chase away the memory, ‘but the floor above that is unfinished, while the top still opens to the sky. And the outbuildings are being redone in stone — harder to tear them down.’
Kirkpatrick nodded soberly at this pointed reminder that war still lurked, an unseen beast just beyond the hill, capable, he knew, of sweeping back and destroying all this and his own place at Closeburn, for all the victory at Bannock’s burn.
‘Must have cost a fair sum,’ he added, innocent as a nun’s headsquare. ‘The King is convinced that you achieved it with the rents from his gift of Cessford.’
Hal stuck his nose in his cup and said nothing. The barony of Cessford was the Bruce reward to Herdmanston for his service, a poisoned chalice of burned-out manor and ruined fields whose folk needed as much help as Herdmanston or they, too, would starve.
‘Or using rents from Lady Isabel’s wee holding at Balmullo, which is hers by right,’ Kirkpatrick added gently, swinging his foot still and seeming to take great interest in it. ‘Of course, that is also long burned out by a wrathful Buchan when he lived. So both it and Cessford needs money more than sends it.’
‘God provides,’ Hal replied carefully and Kirkpatrick laughed softly.
‘He does, I am sure of it.’
‘Your point, Kirkpatrick?’
Hal’s voice was sharp as the spice in the lees of Kirkpatrick’s cup and, before he could reply, another voice cut across.
‘His point concerns God’s provision.’
Isabel came the last few steps up to the fire, having entered the hall unheard and unseen. She wore soft wool in a colour of green which perfectly set off her autumn bracken hair, left daringly loose under a simple white kertch. Kirkpatrick started to his feet for a polite bow and she graciously waived the honour.
‘The King himself sends his good wishes,’ Kirkpatrick said, resuming his old position. ‘He asks if you would attend the court and himself with your expertise and grace, though he does not insist on it.’
‘Nicely put, Kirkpatrick,’ Isabel answered. ‘And well delivered. I will not, of course, attend the King but I will give you an ointment he can physick his face with. There is no balm I can offer for him and his Queen — he will have to find that cure for himself. You may tell him that.’
Kirkpatrick managed a wan smile. The Queen, newly returned with the Bruce sister and his daughter, Marjorie, had swept into a court unused to her and a king who had never known what to do with the luscious young Elizabeth de Burgh.
Obsessed with the imperative for a legitimate heir, he had thought to put her at her ease regarding what he considered the most important trouble to their marriage — the rumour of his leprosy, whose very breath could kill. So he had brought out the women he had sought comfort from in the Queen’s years of captivity, adding a dash of wee bastards like a sprinkle of bile to it.
It was designed to put the newly arrived Queen at ease, since it showed that the women the King had been ploughing — and the offspring circulating, all self-aware and defiant — were fine and healthy and that rumours of leprosy were just that.
Of course the women, younger by far and sweeter and more proud, had rotted the moment with their own display and Isabel, there at Hal’s side for the Christ’s Mass feast, had shaken her head in sorrow and muttered: ‘Fenêtre d’enfer.’
Window of Hell was apt enough, Hal thought, to describe the sewn-into dresses, slit daringly up to the thigh, fox tails hanging underneath at the back so that the strained fabric did not fold into the crack of their buttocks, front cut to the navel, so tight on the hips and groin, to show off their little fecund round bellies, that folk called them mumble-cut because ‘you can see their coney-lips move, but you cannot hear what they say’.
Isabel knew then, from the purse-mouthed, fake-gracious smile on the Queen’s face, that the court was no place to be from now on; Elizabeth would scourge the mistresses from it, for she was no longer the naïve girl Bruce had known and her English captivity had robbed her of what sweetness she’d had and replaced it with intrigue.
Kirkpatrick watched Isabel fold into composure on a stool brought by Mintie, hands arranged neatly in her lap, fur-trimmed gown draped round her shoulders against the draught. No fenêtre d’enfer here, Kirkpatrick thought, and a wheen of years on her — but still a woman to take your breath away.
‘So,’ she declared eventually, sweet as new honey. ‘You did not come here with the King’s wishes or requests, for he made the same at Edinburgh and had the same answer. So why are you here?’
Kirkpatrick nodded slowly and took a deep breath, as if about to plunge under cold water.
‘God’s provision,’ he answered, echoing Hal’s earlier answer and seeing the Lothian lord’s bewildered frown.
‘A provision,’ Isabel added, lowering her voice, ‘made possible by His Apostles. Is that not why you are here, Black Roger?’
That name, so redolent of the dark nature of the man, coupled to the conjuration of the Apostles, chilled the air and made the wine lees even more bitter. Kirkpatrick’s foot stopped swinging and Hal lost the frown as the realization washed him.
‘The King’, Kirkpatrick said slowly, ‘was curious as to why Hal went to Glaissery with twenty armed men. He thought it overly solicitous of some wee Order relics, but was not unduly worried when I told him the history of de Bissot’s sword. Which is why you had that blade gift from him. He values loyalty and friendship these days, does King Robert.’