‘Come as you are,’ the servant added, seeing Hal hesitate and look down at his tunic. Sim laid a hand on Hal’s wrist as he started to move after the servant.
‘Dinna fash when you see him,’ he hissed, his Lenten fish-breath close to Hal’s ear.
Which was not a comfort to a man anxious about meeting a king he had not seen for so long. Eight years ago, the Bruce had been freshly crowned, awkward under it and hag-haunted by what he had done to the Red Comyn in Greyfriars.
Even behind Roxburgh’s walls, Hal had heard the argument, the monks of Bishops Wishart and Lamberton piercing the stones with their shouted debates, that it had not been red murder because there was no ‘forethocht’ in it. Rather, according to the carefully primed monks, it was a chaude-melle, a ‘suddenty of temper’ brought on by the lord of Badenoch’s provocations. Besides, Hal thought as he clacked into the great nave on his thick-soled shoes, the new Joshua of Scotland could not be so base as to have deliberately sought the murder of a rival.
But he remembered the stricken Bruce, seemingly struck numb and appalled at his act of temper. Seemingly. Even now, Hal was hagged by the possibility of mummery, for the speed of Bruce’s recovery, the smoothness with which Kirkpatrick and himself had been sent to make sure the Red Comyn was indeed dead, all left an iced sliver of doubt.
The bloody altar and the high, metal stink rolled out of Hal’s old thoughts, so that he paused and stood, mired in memory. The way Badenoch’s heels, those vain, inch-lifted heels on his fancy boots, had rattled like a mad drummer as he kicked his way out of the world, splashing his own puddled gore up even as Kirkpatrick made sure …
‘Sir Henry.’
The familiar voice wrenched him back and he stood in front of a clean altar under the great bloom of stone and glass that formed the nave window of the abbey. A figure, silhouetted against the stain of light, walked forward and the servant boy stepped back, bowing.
‘Hal. God be praised.’
‘For ever and ever,’ Hal repeated by rote and then, remembering too late, bobbed his head and added: ‘Your Grace.’
He was aware of figures and the servant, dismissed with a wave, sliding off into the shadows, then he looked up from the floor, blinking, as Bruce swung round into plain view.
The height and the body were the same, tall and hardened, unthickened by age — he must be in his fortieth year, Hal thought wildly, yet his hair is still mostly dark.
But the face. Hail Mary, the face …
It had coarsened, the lines of age in it deepened to grooves, the skin lesioned and greyish, so that he looked older than his years — Christ’s Wounds, Hal thought, he looks older than Sim. The right cheek — that old wound, Hal remembered, given to him by Malenfaunt in a tourney à l’outrance — was a thick weal of cicatrice. As if in balance there was the slash taken in the fighting round Methven, a gully of old scar tissue that began above the left brow, broke over the eye and continued down the inside of his cheek almost to the edge of his mouth.Two such dire wounds would have been bad enough, but there was more in that face than hard usage, Hal realized with a sudden shock. There was now clear reason for the whispers of sickness — or even the famed Curse of Malachy.
Yet the eyes were clear and quizzical, the smile a wry lopsided twist as he saw Hal’s shock. He should look at himself, Bruce thought, and was not as sure as he had been when Kirkpatrick convinced him that Hal was the very man for the task he had in mind.
Seven years had not been kind to the lord of Herdmanston; he was too lean, too stooped, too grey — Christ in Heaven, too old. And had not handled weapons for all that time, so that the rawest squire could probably beat him.
He had pointed this out to Kirkpatrick, who had waved it away with a dismissive ‘tschk’.
‘He will muscle up and recover his skills as we go,’ he had argued, then put the only argument likely to win the moment. ‘Who else can you trust for a task like this, my lord king, but the auld dugs?’
So Bruce took Hal’s hands in his own and smiled into the recovering eyes.
‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Your king is pleased to see you back in the world and back in his service.’
It was the ritual jig of kingship, played for long enough now that Bruce had forgotten any other way and the next words were an old part of it.
‘What reward can your king bestow on his faithful subject?’
The answer should have been a low bow and something about how new freedom was the only reward required, with a profuse bouquet of thanks for it.
‘The Countess of Buchan.’
There was a sharp suck of breath that turned Hal’s head to the prelate who made it, standing with his eyes shock-wide in his smooth, bland face. The one next to him was older, more seamed, less shocked; he even seemed to be smiling.
The silence stretched as Bruce blinked. No one had spoken like this for some time and his mind was whirled back to the times when he and Hal’s Lothian men had shared fires in the damp mirk. The one who now served Jamie Douglas — Dog Boy — had been one of them and they had all been plain speakers; he had taken delight in that then and the memory of it warmed him now.
‘I should have expected no less from you,’ he answered with a slight bark of laugh. Then he indicated the two prelates.
‘This is my chaplain, Thomas Daltoun, and Bernard of Kilwinning, former abbot of that place and now my chancellor. Sirs, this is the bold Sir Hal, proving that seven years’ captivity has not dulled him any.’
The prelates nodded and then, sensing the mood, made their obeisances to the King and left, whispering away across the flags with an armful of seal-dangled scrolls. Bruce watched them go — waiting until they were out of earshot, Hal saw.
‘The Countess of Buchan’, he said, turning the full weight of his blunt-weapon face on Hal, ‘is married to Henry de Beaumont.’
He waited, viciously long enough to see Hal’s stricken bewilderment, and then laughed again, a sound like shattering glass.
‘Alice Comyn inherited the title when the Earl died, for he repudiated Isabel at the last. The lands are actually held by me, as king, of course. Henry de Beaumont married Alice and now claims to be Earl of Buchan, a vellum title only. He does not care for me much and not only over his Buchan lands — he was twice handed Mann by the Plantagenet and twice had it removed by the Ordainers. Since I took it last year, he has precious slim chance of ever getting that isle back and less of claiming the lands of Buchan.’
He paused, his face now looking like a bad clay mask.
‘Isabel MacDuff is now no more than a lady from Fife,’ he went on. ‘Though I am sure the title was never the attraction between you and her.’
Bruce did not add — did not need to — that he once had an interest there himself when he was younger and Hal, who had known it then and come to terms with it well enough since, simply nodded.
He wondered, though, if kingship had driven all obligation for Isabel’s sacrifice out of him.
‘A lady of Fife in a cage,’ he dared, aware that this exchange was Bruce’s revenge for his bluntness and fighting the anger it brought, at the easy way Bruce assumed he was ‘back in service’, with no questions asked of seven years’ captivity. More galling yet was the realization that it was true, since there was little else for him and no other way to set about freeing Isabel.
‘Indeed,’ Bruce answered smoothly. ‘As was my sister until recently. And she and my wife and daughter are all held captive — but we shall soon have release for them all.’
He lost the frost in his voice, fuelled it with a smile.
‘I have not forgotten Isabel’s bravery in defying husband and Comyn entire to be a hereditary MacDuff Crowner,’ he added gently, and then drew himself up a little, shaking the soft from him like a dog coming out of a stream.