‘Events are moving,’ he said portentously. ‘I have issued an ultimatum to those Scots lords still serving King Edward, so that they have until November of this year to swear fealty to me or be dispossessed of their Scots lands.’
Hal thought about it, but could only see that this would bring the English down on their heads, which was no help to taking Berwick or freeing Isabel, and said so. Bruce’s smile widened; the cheek stretched and seemed almost to be parting.
‘Just so. King Edward will have no choice. He must muster an army and come at us. And I shall take his last fortresses from him, so they cannot be used in the furtherance of his rampage.’
Hal saw it then, acknowledging it with grudging admiration. The English would plooter north in the old style, achieve nothing and, because they had no firm bases or supply, would suffer even more quickly than usual and retire, because Bruce would not face them in the field.
‘Indeed,’ Bruce confirmed, touching two fingers to the cheek, as if to reassure himself that it was not split and leaking. It was an old habit, Hal saw, ingrained over the years.
‘When Edward Plantagenet fails again, it may be that his own disaffected will round on him,’ the King went on. ‘The Scots lords who follow him will see sense and abandon him. The Kingdom will be secured.’
Your crown will sit steadier, certes, Hal thought; he wondered if he had said it aloud and was flustered enough to say the next thing that came into his head. ‘A decent enough plan. If they ask a truce, then the release of captives will be part of it.’
Bruce, eyebrows raised, offered him a slight mocking bow, so that Hal flushed with his own presumption.
‘I need your service, Lord Hal,’ Bruce went on but Hal was not sure what use he could be and said as much, adding — again forgetting he addressed a king — that he was equally unsure if he had the belly for the work now.
Bruce nodded, as if he had considered the matter, which was true. He also knew that he had already captured the man, yet the triumph of bending Hal to the royal will was not as savage a joy as with others he had snared; it seemed like calming a fine stallion you must geld.
‘If it will provide belly, let me tell you that the reward will be our utmost effort to free Isabel and her safe delivery into your care,’ he answered. ‘If events work out as planned, Berwick will fall to us. At worst, we will negotiate the freedom of all captives.’
He saw the gaff of that go in.
‘As for your abilities,’ he went on, ‘they are well remembered.’ He paused and smiled, lopsided so as not to strain the cheek. ‘Betimes, someone vouches for you.’
He raised one hand into the red and gold stain of light from the nave window. There was a pause, and then a figure stepped forward from the shadows, limping a little, moving slow and silent across the flagged floor.
An auld chiel, Hal thought. Another wee monk?
Then the light poured through the nave on to the iron-grey head, turning it to blood and honey and a shock of the familiar.
‘Ah, Hal,’ said Kirkpatrick, almost sadly. ‘You were ever a man for good sense, save ower that wummin.’
ISABEL
He came to me in the night. He does not do it often these days — so little that, may God forgive me, I was almost glad to see him in my loneliness, for he has long since ceased to pain me with his foulness, which is harder for him to achieve each time. He blames me and beats me for it, but even that strength is going from him. You gave me Malise Bellejambe, Lord, an image of Man in my world, for there is no other here save those I can remember. Is it my own sins that make You even more cruel than he is? I do not understand, O God, for what he does to me is surely cruelty to Yourself. May it be that this is a mirror to make me understand that nothing can protect me, O God, unless it is the shield on which there is no device, but all the heavens and the sun displayed. The only pure thing I have to offer You is my mind. Take it, Lord, and offer me that shield.
CHAPTER THREE
Palais du Roi, Paris
Feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, March 1314
The stink of it swamped from the Île des Juifs, pervasive and acrid, wrapping round them like snake coils so that the Queen of England had to raise a scented hand to her nose. It was an irony that the fire which had burned Isabella’s hands and arms so badly the year before should now be of a help; the wounds had festered and she wore scented gloves to hide the glassy weals.
Out on the Seine, the daring were collecting the ashes of her godfather, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Temple, burned the day before alongside Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy. They had recanted their confessions publicly and her father had ordered the pyre built and the two Templars roasted slowly on it. Too slowly, as it turned out, for de Molay had uttered a long and pungent curse prophesying that his tormentors would be in Hell within the year.
Isabella thought her godfather’s name would live a long time in memory, as a martyr to the Order and not least because of the Curse he had brought down on the Pope and her father. She said it aloud, which made Beaumont, Badlesmere and the young Earl of Gloucester shift a little at the daring in it. They were well used to this slip of a queen having the cunning of a fox and more backbone than her husband, but they kept those thoughts to themselves.
As they did their views on the Templars — but publicly at least, the Order had been condemned at Vienne two years since and England’s king had followed the Pope’s instructions on it. Now the Knights of St John were taking over the Templar holdings and, for all he might gnaw his nails, Edward could do nothing about it without annoying the Holy Father, whom he needed.
‘Will my father see us?’ Isabella asked and the envoy, bland face setting itself like a moulded pudding into regret and sadness, began to expound on why King Philip of France would not. The curt wave of the scented glove cut him off in mid-flow and no one marvelled at the 18-year-old girl’s poise and command.
Well, there it was. Her father, it seemed, was in mourning for what he had had to do and she wondered if it was genuine contrition, or because he had been cursed. If she knew her father at all, he would be gnawing his knuckles with concern, as much about the macula on his glory as on his soul. Both agonies, she thought, will last long after the smell and the ashes have blown away.
This was the Philip the Fair she remembered, the handsome, cunning, treacherous, vain father and king she had known. The one who could commit the vilest acts, yet agonize over the stain on his relationship with God — but even that man seemed strangely diminished by what had happened, as if this last act of spite had sucked all the juice from him. That and the six-year search for the Templar treasure which Isabella knew had spawned this plot in the first place, a search which had uncovered … nothing.
She had no doubt that the news of the latest outrage on the last Grand Master of the Order of Poor Knights would be speeding to all the hidden ears; she wondered what they would do with their hidden treasure, these last angered Templars of the Order.
Not hand it over to her desperate husband for his wars, certes, so he would have to rely on Isabella, who had to persuade her ailing father to permit King Edward of England to mortgage the ducal dues of Gascony to the Pope, since Philip of France was Edward’s liege lord for those lands. In return, the Pope would loan Edward the money to help finance his latest enterprise, a war against the Scotch.
It was a complex dance that Isabella knew well, the intricate gilded steps that took in the wool-eager mercantile houses of Pessagno in Genoa, the Bardi and Peruzzi of Naples. None of them bothered in the slightest that their biggest rival, the Florentine Frescobaldi, had ruined themselves with similar speculative loans to Edward I.