The Steps to the Empty Throne

PART ONE

Chapter One

Even strong men, hard-bitten, grim-faced men winced as the horseman rode right into the church, iron-shod hooves striking sparks from the flagstones, their noisy clatter stilling all talk and reverberating hollowly under the hammer-beam roof. Stracathro was no mighty church, merely a prebend of the nearby Cathedral of Brechin, and horse and rider seemed enormous in its narrow echoing constriction.

Both mount and man were indeed large, the former a great and ponderous warhorse, massive of build, thick of leg, shaggy of fetlock, such as was necessary to carry the burly, weighty man with the extraordinary length of leg, clad in half a hundredweight of steel armour richly engraved with gold. Right up to the altar steps, the length of the church, the horseman rode, with behind him other striding armoured figures led by one notably broad, squat, pugnacious of jaw, with a tonsured bullet head, who bore a mitre painted on his dented black steel breastplate.

The waiting, watching men, as of one accord, drew further back against the bare stone walls of the little church.

Up the steps into the chancel itself the rider urged his cumbersome steed, there to pull it round in a lumbering half-circle, its great hooves scoring and slithering on the polished granite.

Turned to face the nave and all the waiting throng the big man remained seated in the saddle, grinning. The thick-set individual with the underhung jaw took up his position at the other’s right hand stirrup, and the remainder, who had followed him up, ranged themselves on either side. The long shoulder-slung sword of one of them knocked over a tall brass candle-stick flanking the altar, with a crash, spattering hot wax. There was a curse. Somebody laughed loudly.

The man on the horse raised his hand. He was handsome, in a heavy-jowled, fleshy, em purpled way, in his late fifties but with strangely youthful-seeming hot blue eyes and a leonine head of greying hair, bare now, with the great crested war-helm banded with the gold circlet hanging at his saddle bow.

”Have him in, then,” he cried.

“God’s blood—must I sit waiting here?” There was just the slightest impediment in the man’s speech, but it lost nothing in forcefulness thereby.

As men at the door hurried out, a voice spoke up, old, quavering, but tense.

“Highness—I do protest! To use God’s house so!

It is ill done …”

The speaker was a frail and elderly man, not in armour like most of those present but wearing the robes of an ecclesiastic, sorely stained and patched—William Comyn, Bishop of Brechin.

This was one of his churches.

“Silence, knave!” A knight nearby raised a mailed gauntlet and struck the Bishop, a blow that sent the old man reeling. A second buffet was descending, when the steel-clad arm was grasped and held.

“Enough, Despenser! Let him be.”

The English knight found himself staring into the grey eyes of a young man, richly dressed in only half-armour over velvet tunic and hose, worn with long soft doeskin thigh-boots and a short satin-lined heraldic riding-cloak slung from one shoulder. The velvet-clad arm that restrained the steel gauntlet was steady, strong, despite its soft covering.

“Curse you—unhand me! Unhand me, I say!” the Englishman shouted.

“No man mishandles Despenser so. Even you, my lord Earl!”

“Then let Despenser not mishandle an old done man, see you.

And a churchman, at that,” the young man returned, though he released the other’s arm.

“A traitorous clerk! Raising his voice…!”

“In this place, might he not have some right?”

The two stared at each other in very different kinds of anger, the one hot, the other cold. Sir Hugh le Despenser was a noted commander, veteran of much warfare; Robert de Bruce, twenty-two-year-old Earl of Carrick, was a scarcely-blooded warrior, his campaigning spurs still to win, a sprig of nobility, merely the son of his rather—or more significantly, the grandson of his grandfather, the old Competitor, barely a year dead. All around men held their breaths, their glances more apt to dart up towards the figure that sat his saddle in front of the altar than towards either of the protagonists, or even old Bishop Comyn, who shaken, leaned against the wall.

The long-legged horseman was no longer grinning. His heavily good-looking features were dark, thunderous, a mailed hand tap tapping at that gold-circled helmet at his saddlebow. Then abruptly he laughed, head thrown up, laughed heartily-and men breathed again. The hand rose, to point down the church.

“Whelps snapping!” he shouted, chuckling.

“I’ll not have it.

Before the old dog! Enough, I say. If my friends must bicker, let them choose better cause than a broken-down old Scots clerk! A mouse squeaking in its barn! Shake hands, fools!”

The two down near the door eyed each other doubtfully;

neither would be the first to reach out his hand.

“Robert, my young friend—your hand. Sir Hugh—yours.”

That was genial. Then, in one of the man’s lightning changes of front, as hands only faltered, the big man roared.

“Christ God!

You hear me? Do as I command, or by the Mass, I’ll have both your hands off at the wrist, here and now! I swear it!” And the speaker’s own hand fell to the pommel of the great two-handed sword that hung at his side.

Hastily knight and earl gripped hands, bowing towards the altar.

As still the roof-timbers seemed to quiver with the sudden storm of fury, a clanking sound turned all eyes towards the door.

The clanking was not all made by armour-clad men; some of it was made

by chains.

Strangely, the new advent was brilliant, splendid, colourful, compared with all that was already in the church—where, apart from a few handsomely dressed individuals such as the young Earl of Carrick, most men were in the habiliments of war, not the vivid panoply of the tourney but the more sober and often battered practicalities of stern campaigning. Eight men came in.

The first admittedly was an ordinary English knight, less well turned out indeed than many present, a mere captain of cavalry.

But he carried one end of a rope. Behind him came a breathtaking

figure, magnificently arrayed, a tall, slender man of middle years and

great dignity, despite his hobbling gait, who walked with a slight

stoop, head bent. Bareheaded, he wore no armour but clothes of

cloth-of-gold and worked silver filigree with jewelled scintillating

ornamentation, and over all a most gorgeous tabard or loose sleeveless

tunic, heraldic ally embroidered in blazing colours, picked out in gold

and rubies, depicting, back and front, the red Rampant Lion of Scotland

on a tressured field of yellow, a coat of such striking pride,

brilliance and vigour as to challenge the eye and seem to irradiate the

somewhat sombre stone interior of the little church. In his hand he

carried a flat velvet bonnet rimmed with pearls, to which was clasped

with an enormous ruby, large as a pigeon’s egg, a noble curling ostrich feather that tinkled with seed pearls. On either side this splendid personage was flanked by an ordinary man-at-arms, each of whom kept a clenched hand on the bejewelled and bowed shoulders.

The man was limping slightly, and being tall, had obvious difficulty in adjusting his stride to the short chain of the leg-irons which clamped his ankles. The rope from the knight in front was tied to his golden girdle.

Behind, between another couple of soldiers, came a burly man with a bandaged head, dressed in the finest armour in all that building, gleaming black and gold, but also with his legs shackled. He made a less careful business of the difficult walking, and in fact stumbled and tripped constantly, scowling and cursing, to the imminent danger of the handsome crimson cushion which he carried before him and on which precariously rested in sparkling, coruscating splendour the Crown of Scotland and the Sceptre of the Realm. A heavy portly figure, older-looking than his forty years, he kept his choleric head high and glowered all around him—John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, Constable of Scotland, the proudest and most powerful noble in a land whose nobles were proud above all else. another rope was tied around his middle, and trailed behind to be held by the aproned grinning scullion from Montrose Castle’s kitchens, who Drought up the rear of the little procession, a white painted rod in his hand.