Insurrection (44 page)

Despite these losses, the archers of Carlisle kept firing and Robert’s men continued to sling rocks down, and soon the confusion below turned into a rout as the enemy soldiers fell back across the moat. As they ran they exposed the piles of smouldering straw heaped against the gates and now Robert was yelling again for water. The burning piles hissed as the buckets were emptied on top of them. In among the piles of masonry, the mud was strewn with arrows, shields and bodies. Some of the wounded were dragging themselves towards the bridge. Others moved in to help, but were repelled by arrows, which the defenders continued to shoot over the walls. As the horns blew, the last of the infantry retreated, leaving the dead and dying behind them. On the walls, the morning glowed golden in the sweat-soaked faces of the triumphant defenders.

39

It was midday when the Scots at the north-east gate pulled back. They made three more attempts to get through to the gates and finish the fire they had started, but, the ground thick with corpses and rubble, they couldn’t make the same steady advance they had made the first time. The heaps of sodden straw were stubborn against the torch flames and the defenders ever more determined after their success. Finally, the infantry were withdrawn with heavy losses and the host retreated into the fields, the cheers of the people of Carlisle following them. The host remained there for several hours, men tending to wounded comrades as more companies joined them from around the city.

Robert and his forces rested warily, sharing wine and warm loaves of bread, brought by townsfolk. The priests helped the wounded, administering the last rites where necessary. Bodies of men and women were laid out, as reports filtered in slowly from other parts of the city. The gates and walls had held, the Scots unable to break through. The large fire near the castle, which had engulfed several buildings including a vintner’s, was still burning fiercely. It had been started by a Comyn spy, who had apparently come into the city with the flood of refugees and had been hiding out, waiting for the attack. He had been captured by knights of Annandale and hanged from the castle walls.

At last, the Scottish host moved out, defeated by their lack of siege engines and the city’s staunch defence. After an hour, they had become a haze in the distance, crows circling over their slow-moving lines, eager for the worms disturbed by their trudging feet.

Robert sat on the edge of the walkway. Draining the last of the wine from his skin, he closed his eyes against the afternoon sun. His throat burned from the smoke and dust in the air, and he had a cut on the side of his head that hadn’t stopped bleeding. He couldn’t remember getting it. The others were celebrating around him, their voices sharp with relief, but he couldn’t muster the will to join them. Today was only the first battle. Carlisle was now an island in a sea of enemy soldiers. North, south: neither was safe. His father was confident King Edward would win this war and return their lands to them, but the thought of that victory made Robert uneasy. Several days earlier he had overheard his father saying to one of his knights that the king planned to depose the treacherous Balliol. The lord had spoken, in a tone of keen expectation, of the throne that would need to be filled, not once mentioning Robert – the one to whom that right had been passed.

‘Sir.’

Robert glanced round as Christopher Seton crouched beside him. The fair-haired squire, whose face was smudged with grime, held out Robert’s broadsword, which he had kept during the siege. ‘Here, sir.’

As Robert took the blade an image came vividly to mind of his grandfather watching while the Earl of Mar girded him with it the day he was knighted. Pride had gleamed in the old lord’s black eyes. The memory filled Robert with a profound sense of loss, not just for the man himself, but for a time when things had been clear and his own path certain. Now, everywhere he turned, the way seemed shadowed and obscure. He felt his brother had spoken true that morning in saying their grandfather would not have fought against Scotland, but what the old man would have done if faced with this dire predicament seemed impossible to guess at.

‘I wanted to thank you, Sir Robert,’ said Christopher, in his blunt, northern English dialect. ‘If you hadn’t pulled me down I  . . .’ The squire frowned at his hands, bruised and bleeding from heaving the sacks over the walls. ‘I owe you my life,’ he finished.

As Robert went to dismiss this, not wanting the burden of the young man’s earnest pledge, he heard his brother shout his name. Scanning the street below, he saw Edward. With him was Katherine. At the sight of the maid, Robert stood. Concern for his wife had been kept at bay through the turmoil of the siege, now it flooded him. Leaving Christopher on the walkway, he hastened down through the tower. ‘How is she?’ he called, going straight to Katherine. ‘How is my wife? Has the baby come?’

Katherine was breathing hard, but she managed to answer. ‘A girl, Sir Robert. Lady Isobel had a girl.’

A smile broke across Robert’s face at the words and he laughed, joy mixing headily with exhaustion. Edward was grinning too. But Katherine’s flushed face remained tight. She was shaking her head at his laughter, her eyes fearful. Robert’s mirth drained. ‘What is it?’

‘You need to go to her, sir.’

Robert stared at her grave face, then turned to his brother.

‘Go,’ Edward told him. ‘I’ll man the gates.’

Needing no further encouragement, Robert raced to where Hunter was tethered. Mounting, he galloped away, heading for the castle on the hill, its walls red in the afternoon sun.

Up through the streets he cantered, past groups of people cheering, past a slow-moving cart piled with the dead, past lines of men tossing water into the burning buildings near the castle. The flames that had engulfed the vintner’s were curling into the black sky.

The castle courtyard was relatively quiet, most of the men still down on the walls. Slinging his leg over the saddle, Robert jumped down, shouting at a passing foot soldier to take his horse. He jogged up the steps and into the gloomy interior of the keep, his armour feeling like lead. As he pounded the stairs to the rooms he and his wife had been given, he could hear a wailing cry.

Robert entered the chamber, struck by heat and a rank smell of blood. On the bed, surrounded by stained sheets, lay Isobel. A priest was crouched beside her, his cross in his hand. By the window the midwife clutched a bundle of cloth. It was the bundle that was making the cries. Robert went to his wife, throwing a hostile look at the priest, who rose and stepped back.

Isobel’s face was greasy. Sweat glistened in the hollow of her throat and between the bones of her chest. She had stayed thin through the pregnancy, only her stomach swelling. There was a wad of cloth balled between her legs, red at the centre, the stain spreading. Blood had covered her shift and her palms were sticky with it. Kneeling stiffly in his armour, Robert tugged off his mail gloves and took one of her bloody hands in his.

Isobel’s eyes fluttered open. The pupils drifted back and forth, before her gaze found his. She groaned his name.

‘I’m here,’ he murmured.

‘My father?’ Her eyes drifted, then came back to him.

‘They’ve gone,’ he said, touching her brow, which burned against his palm. ‘It is over.’

She licked the sweat from her lips. When she spoke again, her words were little more than breath. ‘I know you wanted my sister.’

Robert felt this as a blow. He shook his head to deny it, but she continued.

‘It doesn’t matter. You were a kind husband.’ As Robert kissed her palm, Isobel’s eyes narrowed, tears leaking from them.

Her breathing was shallow now. The red stain had covered most of the white cloth. Robert felt her fingers slacken in his. As the priest moved in, his murmuring prayers filling the silence, Robert bowed over the bed, his forehead touching his wife’s chest.

After a long moment, he pushed himself up weakly and went to the midwife. As he held out his arms, she silently handed his daughter to him. Robert cradled her tiny form close against the cold of his armour, her cries piercing the air. Standing in the window of the hot room, the sky outside bruised with smoke, a memory of his mother holding one of his sisters entered his mind. ‘Marjorie,’ Robert whispered. ‘I’ll name you Marjorie.’

40

A mile from the River Tweed, beyond the splintered remnants of Berwick’s gates, the rotten wood of which had proved of no consequence to the English army, a group of labourers was waiting to begin a day’s work. Below the town’s earth ramparts was a narrow fosse, littered with shards from the shattered palisade above. Men lined the banks of this trench, grasping picks and leaning on shovels, coughing and sniffing in the damp air. They were eager to begin, to work the chill from their muscles, but first there was a ceremony to be observed.

Between their rows moved King Edward, his cloak stiff with gold brocade. Taller than most of the watching labourers, he towered over the squat figure of Hugh de Cressingham, who was struggling to match his stride. Gluttony had trebled the royal clerk’s chins and his round face was as pale and shiny as melting tallow. The smell coming off him was like rancid meat and Edward lengthened his walk as the fat clerk waddled and puffed beside him. He had already decided that when he returned to England Cressingham would remain behind as his treasurer in Scotland. The man was an able official, but his presence was far from pleasing.

‘Here, my lord,’ panted Cressingham, ushering the king towards a barrow, placed just beyond the edge of the fosse. It was filled with a neat heap of dark soil. ‘Here we are.’

The air felt wet in Edward’s lungs and he marched quickly to the barrow, keen to return to his planning in the comfort of the castle, one of the few buildings left unscathed by the attack. Even now, smoke sharpened the air over the ruins of Berwick, the fires brightening the nights, visible for miles, until the April rains turned the blazes into columns of smoke that covered the town in choking clouds.

After the English host swept through the town’s defences, the slaughter had continued for two days. It was only after more than seven thousand inhabitants had perished that Edward ordered his men to cease the killing. Just a handful of prisoners were taken after the town’s capitulation, including the garrison’s commander, a fierce bull of a man named Sir William Douglas, who had raged and ranted at the massacre of Berwick’s citizens, damning Edward and his knights to hell even as he was dragged to the castle’s dungeon. Mass graves had been dug for the dead, but the deep pits hadn’t been enough to contain them. The rest had been carted down to the river and dumped. The surviving women and children had been allowed to leave with their lives. Nothing more. Lines of them had trailed through the broken gates, white-faced and silent. Watching from the castle battlements, Edward had felt little pity. The inhabitants of Berwick, who had taunted him and his knights from behind their rot-riddled palisade, had helped teach the rest of Scotland a valuable lesson. The Scots’ resolve would be that much weaker now they knew the price of rebellion. He would beat them down that much quicker. And, more than anything, Edward wanted a swift end to this campaign.

After the war in Wales, he had returned to England to find the Scots in alliance against him with King Philippe. Edward sent William de Valence and his brother, Edmund of Lancaster, with a contingent of knights to reinforce his presence in Gascony, then issued a military summons to his vassals. Despite their misgivings over another war, the barons, knights and infantry heeded his call to arms and more than twenty thousand met him at Newcastle, including longbowmen from conquered Wales. While the Scottish host advanced on Carlisle, leaving the eastern approach to their kingdom wide open, Edward forded the Tweed at the village of Coldstream and moved north, reaching Berwick before Easter. He was followed along the coast by forty-four galleys that sailed up from East Anglia, carrying supplies and stones for the siege engines. As Edward’s knights attacked the town’s ramparts, the galleys moved into the estuary to strike from the water. Despite some losses, including three ships that ran aground and were set alight by Douglas’s men, the English forced their way through.

Edward had few funds for this campaign, but what he lacked in coin he made up for in determination. In a way the Scots’ rebellion, coming so close on the heels of the Welsh insurgency, had proved an advantage. His war machine was well oiled and ready to move, and the victory in Wales and the taking of the Crown of Arthur had won him the renewed support of his men. Edward had never expected to subdue Scotland by force, unlike Wales or Ireland. Since he first set his sights on the kingdom, he had always hoped for an open door through which to reach his target. The first door: the marriage of his son to the infant Margaret had been slammed in his face with the girl’s untimely death; the second: his mastery over King John, had been closed by the Comyns when he wasn’t looking. Now, by sword and fire, he would break it down.

Beyond Berwick, in tantalising reach, lay the kingdom’s beating heart. Edward just needed to stretch out his hand and grasp it. He had no doubt that once the Scots were beaten and the symbol of their sovereignty was in his possession all resistance would end, as it had in Wales. Then, his hopes for a Britain united beneath his rule would be one step away from fulfilment and he would set his clerics to work revealing the Last Prophecy to the rest of his subjects so that they would know the scale of his greatness. The Scots weren’t the Welsh, hardened by decades of bitter fighting and struggle. One good push and this war would be over. Berwick was just the first foundation of Edward’s new kingdom north of the border, a foundation that would now be laid for all to see.