Sim, as ever, never voiced any of it, but simply scowled back at the pair of them.
‘I hope you have the spear, Dog Boy,’ he whispered harshly and had back an exasperated grunt.
‘I have, shoved through the grass as I crawled. And it is Aleysandir, not Dog Boy. I have said this afore.’
‘Aye, aye,’ muttered Sim, untangling the confection of rope and wood and iron. Dog Boy had never been the same after finding out that he had a real name. Sim recalled how and when that had been uncovered: from the houndsman rolls at Douglas Castle when Jamie and Dog Boy had raided it. Christ betimes, a fistful of years ago now.
That was when Sir James had found his own new name — the Black Douglas — for what he had done to the English garrison in his own dispossessed keep. He had taken it from the occupying English by as clever a ruse as the one they now planned, but knew he could never hold the place — so he had wrecked it.
He and his men had soiled everything spoilable, from fodder to well, stacked the cellar with loot, pissed on it, and then lopped the heads off the surrendered English — and their Scots lackeys — before roasting the lot in a fire. The Douglas Larder, they called it with grisly humour and the memory of it was as black as the stones they left. Blacker still was the scowl of Jamie, but only because he had had to do this to his boyhood home and his rightful inheritance.
There was no scowl on him now, all the same, only the mad gleeful grin that always made Sim’s flesh ruched as goose-skin.
‘Ah, you are a cunning man, Sim Craw,’ James Douglas enthused in a hissed whisper, clapping the man on his sodden shoulder. ‘This will take the shine off Randolph.’
Sim eyed the dark, wild-haired lord sourly. As if this is for the glory of Douglas over Randolph, the latter sitting at Edinburgh and wondering how to take its castle, us sitting at Roxburgh and pondering the same. Now the lord of Douglas is out to scoop Roxburgh in a single blow and it is mainly to put Randolph’s nose askew … not for the first time, Sim marvelled at how the diffident, lisping lord of Douglas could turn, in an eyeblink, into a red-handed killer with a heart the same shade as the Earl of Hell’s own cloak.
Using my cunning to further himself, he added moodily to himself as the ladder finally unveiled its grapple-hooked top, with the slot for a spearshaft. Twenty feet of it was coiled up, the rope steps bolstered with wool-padded wood to keep them just far enough from the wall for a foot to fit — his da and other well-diggers had taken the idea from the miners at Leadhouse and Sim had recalled it from his boyhood, and then adapted it for this one purpose.
Now he moved to the crag of rock on which the blocky gatehouse was built and looked up, shaking mirr from his eyelashes. He nodded to Dog Boy, who put his back to the rock and cupped his hands, while Sim took the long pike-spear and shafted it into the slot on the ladder, handing it to James Douglas.
Then he stepped into Dog Boy’s hands, heard him grunt and curse.
‘You are getting fat, Sim.’
Fat and auld, Sim agreed, stepping on to the Dog Boy’s shoulders, then up to a toehold on the rock, then higher still on the treacherous wet until he could climb no more. He reached out one hand and felt the slap of the spearshaft in it, and raised it, waving it as high as he could, balanced precariously with the sibilant mirr making tears on his face. Teetering, he lifted it higher still with two hands, straining until he felt the ladder on top of it slide over the crenellation; he heard the grate of it catching.
He tugged the cord and the ladder unravelled with a soft pattering, as if a cat ran down the stones. Sim felt a touch on his boot, looked down and saw the Black himself staring anxiously up.
‘Are you certes you want to be first?’
Sim did not answer. He knew the reason for the Black’s concern: too old for this sort of work. But it is my ladder, Sim thought to himself. Mine. So he said nothing at all, tugged hard to make sure it had settled, and then started to climb.
Frixco, mollified by shouting at the gate guards, hurried back through the wet to the main hall, aware of the glares at his back — more so than ever before, he knew. It was the way of things, as arranged by custom and so by God, that those he had power over would resent it and scowl when they were sure they would not be seen.
But Frixco, for all the time he had been here — Christ’s Bones, eighteen years at least — had always been seen by the English as a Gascon and by the Scots as an interloper, no matter his stripe. Gascons had been preferred under the old Edward and under the new — especially under the new, for Gaveston, the King’s favourite, had been a Gascon.
But Gaveston was dead and the lords who had murdered him circled and scowled and barked at the King and his loyal barons, two dog packs with bristling hackles. Now every Gascon serving King Edward was under suspicion from all those not of the King’s mind: a warden had been appointed to Roxburgh town, forced on the King by his Ordinancer barons to ensure the loyalty of the castle’s Gascon garrison commander, Sir William de Fiennes, Frixco’s brother.
Inside the hall, the blast of heat and noise drowned Frixco in delight for a moment, so that he took his time shaking out his wet cloak and chaffering with those feasters nearest him, but he had one task left before he could join in and hurried after it, out of the hall and up the steps to the private chapel.
The Prisoner knelt, a humble supplicant, before the carved wooden panels brought out specially for this day: the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The Prisoner, permitted this worship for the Holy Day, knelt at the ninth, the third Falling of Christ, and Frixco hoped the man was not about to argue for lengthy prayers at all fourteen; he had come to return him to his prison and then get to the food and the drink.
‘It is time,’ he said and had no response, so he repeated it, more loudly.
Hal did not hear him, lost in the carving, which was very beautifully rendered, every agony transcribed lovingly. Christ prone, held up by one hand, the other gripping the crushing weight of his Cross. He remembered all the other times he had attended Confession at the wee stone chapel in Herdmanston, waiting in the queue, Lord Hal or no, while others shuffled in. There had hardly been time to babble out a sin because there was only Father Thomas issuing pardons.
Father, I have stolen. Father, I have sworn. I ate meat at Lent. I beat my wife. I drink. Most folk knew already what others would murmur in supposed secret and those who took longer went on the end of knowing nudges and looks from those waiting impatiently. Must have done red murder, or robbed a bishop at least, they would offer with irritated scowls.
Were any prayers ever answered? Were God and His saints asleep? Was the Lord still a refuge? Non accedet ad te malum — there shall no evil befall thee.
Seven years. For her, too … He wondered if Isabel’s prayers had been answered and hoped, at least, that she was no longer in a cage. Yet he thought that unlikely. The treacherous Isabel MacDuff had been hung on the walls of Berwick by old King Edward, with the tacit agreement of her husband, the Earl of Buchan. Longshanks had done it because she had dared to place the crown on the head of Robert Bruce and Buchan had agreed to it as a warning to cuckolding wives everywhere. He would have killed the cuckolder, Hal, if he had been able.
Hal’s attempt at seeking her out in a dashing rescue had ended with his own capture and, for a time, it looked as if Buchan would have his final triumph — but then the old King Edward had died. A miracle, Hal thought, which left him held at the new king’s pleasure, inviolate until he was remembered and dealt with.
The new Edward had had more to occupy his mind and now Hal had been here in Roxburgh, forgotten, for seven years. The stumbled Christ looked back at him with blank wooden eyes and Hal admitted that the Lord might well still be a refuge — for certes, Hal no longer feared anything, though he was relieved, every day, to discover that this was not because he no longer desired anything.