The Honor Due a King (2 page)

“Did he swear himself?”

“To Bruce? He did.” Hugh sighed, echoing my own disdain for the fickle traitor Mowbray. “Edward Bruce was dispatched to Bothwell where the constable there, FitzGilbert, was harboring a number of your knights and barons. Upon hearing that the Scots had triumphed, FitzGilbert handed over to the younger Bruce: the Earl of Hereford, Sir Ingram d’Umfraville, the Earl of Angus and some fifty other of your loyals. A number of notable persons were taken captive at Bannockburn, including Ralph de Monthermer.”

The number of those killed or taken prisoner was appalling. Bannockburn should not have been my undoing. It should have been my greatest triumph.
Should
have ...

“Pembroke?”
Surely he is dead, too?

“Headed toward Carlisle, much of his Welsh levy still intact.”

Fortunate bastard.

“They’ll want my kingdom for Hereford’s ransom alone,” I said.

“Fortunately not.” Far cleverer than he let on, Hugh gave a wan smile. He picked up the goblet, swirled it vigorously, pulled a deep draft, and set it down again.

“Why do you say that?”

“The Marcher lord, Sir Roger Mortimer, is at the castle gate. He brings terms from the Bruce – and the body of your nephew, Gilbert de Clare.”

Pain stabbed through my chest. Gasping, I turned my face up.

In the far corner of the ceiling, where the angle of sunlight could not fully reach, the silken threads of a cobweb glistened. There, an insect, entangled in the fibers, writhed. In moments, a large black spider had grasped the tiny creature by long, nimble legs and was wrapping it in a shroud of death.

“Gilbert’s body?” My mouth went dry. The words were hard to utter. “What will he want for it?”

On learning that Gilbert had fallen before the Bruce’s axe at the battle’s outset, it felt as though my heart had been torn from my chest, wrung dry of blood, and thrown to the dusty ground.

Confident, calm, Hugh planted his knuckles on the table and leaned his face toward mine.

“What Bruce wants,” he said, “are his women. Give him them – and he returns Hereford, the Great Seal and the Royal Shield. ’Tis all in your favor, my lord. If you wish, toss back the languishing Bishop Wishart and a handful of worthless low-blooded rebels for added measure. Easy.”

“Have Mortimer brought to the Great Hall ... in an hour.” A frayed thread hung from the corner of the tattered cushion on which I sat. I pinched it between my fingers and pulled, watching the cloth split open to reveal the crushed down within. “Stand beside me, Hugh. I shall have need of you.”

***

S
ir Roger Mortimer’s half-handed companion, John Maltravers, bore the stiff corpse of my beloved Gilbert on his shoulder and laid it at my feet. My heart sank ever lower.

Mortimer relayed the terms just as Hugh had stated them. Stripped of my pride, I agreed to them.

In the days that followed, with the remnants of my smote army, I slunk homeward to face the ruin of my hopes. My cousin Thomas, the Earl of Lancaster – who had refused my summons to join us at Bannockburn – jeered at me from the ramparts of Pontefract and later brought parliament down upon my hammered head, stirring my barons into a frenzy of condemnation. Then, to sully his own affairs, he wed the twelve-year old heiress of Lincoln and Salisbury in order to augment his already-overflowing money chests.

While Scotland entreated for peace, even as they plundered the north of England, the grim hand of famine struck. Rain poured from the skies in such a deluge that many of the crops could not be planted in springtime. Those that were sown rotted for lack of sunlight. Cattle and sheep fell to sickness. Pestilence and starvation ravaged the land.

The clerics, who had always despised me, preached that it was God’s wrath visited upon us for what we had done to Scotland. The populace went so far as to cry that it was the corruption in my own court that brought this blight upon my people, while the merchants bemoaned their resultant poverty.

I closed my ears to them. Why would God punish
us
while Bruce and his blood-hungry heathens burned and pillaged and beat on their chests?

If the Bruce thought he was going to get everything he ever wanted, he was sorely mistaken. First, I would deal with that insolent kinsman of mine, Lancaster. When that was done and circumstances were more in my favor, heaven help the false King of Scots.

Robert the Bruce – Melrose Abbey, 1314

T
he wide front doors of Melrose Abbey hung crookedly on their hinges, splintered where the main bar had once held them shut. The stained glass of the windows stood in jagged shards like lions’ teeth. The graveyard where we stood had been desecrated – all the sad result of vengeful English soldiers as they fled from Bannockburn.

“You’ve a face as long as your leg.” James Douglas hopped over a broken gravestone and faced the stabbing rain to survey the abbey.

He had been with me since before my crowning at Scone eight years ago and I swear he had not aged a day. Why were the years not so kind to me? Slight of build and soft-spoken, he was unimpressive at first glance; yet time and again I had seen him cut down foes far bigger than him in a single blow. His father, Sir William Douglas, had once held Berwick against the first Edward, Longshanks. The siege, however, turned into a massacre and the elder Douglas gave up the town to spare its remaining citizens. Ultimately, however, he forfeited his own life.

I pulled my cloak tight across my breast, even though I had been soaked since leaving Edinburgh in a cold, black October rain days ago.

James patted my shoulder with a gloved hand. “Faith. They’ll come.”

“How do you know?” I asked softly. Behind him, above the roof of the abbey, the three bald peaks of the Eildon Hills swam in the darkness of roiling storm clouds. “
How
do you know? I’ve heard men say you have an extra sense that tells you when the enemy is near. Do you truly? Can you tell the same for loved ones?”

He gave that faint, familiar grin of his to impart his steady confidence. “Because you sent Gil and Randolph to take care of it. That’s how I know. On their lives, they would never fail you.”

Nor would you, good James. I should know better than to doubt any of you, but it is the uncertainty of fate that troubles me now
–
things we mere men have no guidance over.

Months of haggling with England’s king, Edward of Caernarvon, had left me a pessimist. The wretch was still in denial, refusing to relinquish his alleged rights to Scotland, despite the pummeling he had taken. For now though, more than I wanted his blessing, I wanted Elizabeth – my wife, my queen – to come home to me.

The Earl of Hereford, captured at Bannockburn, was my pawn. To hand him back, I had demanded a hefty ransom that would rob his heirs for eternity. Then, to quell King Edward’s protests over the amount, I promised to give back the Great Seal and Royal Shield at no further recompense, but for the return of my womenfolk and Bishop Wishart.

So it was here at Melrose that we waited on the appointed day to receive them, whilst my nephew, Thomas Randolph, and my commander and old companion, Gil de la Haye, went to meet an English envoy at Jedburgh where the exchange was to occur. At border’s edge, Jedburgh was deemed too dangerous for me to go there. But staying behind, waiting ... ah now, that was more torturous than the threat of a fight.

My men – their weapons rattling as they shivered against the cold – huddled beneath the naked branches of a massive yew at the far end of the graveyard. Days of rain leaching into the earth had stirred up the faintly sweet, sickening smell of decomposing flesh. As the wind drove the rain in staggering walls, Neil Campbell leaned wearily against his horse, uttering prayers for the soul of Mary – his wife, my sister – who would not be among those to come home. When she and the others were dragged from sanctuary at St. Duthac’s shrine by the Earl of Ross in 1306 and handed over to Longshanks, who was king before his namesake Edward II, she was dangled from the walls of Roxburgh Castle in a wooden cage – left there to suffer through winter cold and heavy rain. Four long years later, they removed her and tucked her away in a Carmelite nunnery. But she never recovered from a sickness that settled in her lungs. When the negotiations with King Edward began, only then did we learn she had died over a year earlier. Neil, who for a short time had been radiant with hope, was now drowning in grief.

For hours we waited there, growing colder and hungrier, but no one would go inside the ruined buildings because I would not leave. So very cold I became in my drenched, padded leather and chain mail that my muscles cramped and the feeling drained from my fingers and toes.

They should have arrived by noon. It was now nearly sunset – or would be, if the sun could be seen at all. “Why are they not here yet?”

James paced over the soggy ground. “The Teviot is running deep. They may have had to travel further upstream to find a place to ford it.”

Likely they had, but that did little to quiet my mind. As I stood in the pouring rain, with the engorged River Tweed sloshing and gurgling at my back and the desecrated abbey before me, I knew I should have been full of blissful anticipation at the occasion, no matter the misery of the weather, but instead I felt only the oppressive gloom of the clouds.

“You’ll watch after my Marjorie? Make certain no harm comes to her? No dishonor? Swear it.”

“On my life, Robert. You know that.” James blew a cloud of steaming breath into the chilly air. “We should go inside and build a fire; dry off while we wait.”

“Eight years is long enough to wait,” I mumbled.

“So it is,” he said, “but it would be a great shame to have them come home to find you drowned in your boots. Come inside, Robert. The abbot is still in a terror over this shambles, but I warrant he’ll make the best of it to lodge his king.”

Without so much as a word from me, James put a hand on my back and guided me across the squelching earth, sidestepping the toppled stones, and up the broad steps of sandstone into Melrose Abbey.

A belligerent wind hammered its way through gaps and cracks, pushing gusts of rain across the floor. Although damp throughout, it was drier toward the chancel. As I drifted warily toward the altar, white-robed Cistercian monks scattered from the shadows of either transept and disappeared behind lofty columns. Rusted hinges groaned hauntingly.

“Fine welcome,” I murmured. With cramped hands, I wrung the tail of my cloak, then unfastened the golden clasp inlaid with an emerald at my shoulder – courtesy of King Edward – and snapped the water from it.

James glanced around. “They’re men of peace. They don’t like soldiers: English or Scottish. It’s not so much us they hate, but that we might invite battle to their doorstep just by being here.”

“I worry about that myself wherever I go. Bring Walter to me and go fetch the abbot. Invited or not, we’re staying here.”

Reluctantly, James ventured back out into the deluge. Alone, I stood in the middle of the nave, nothing but shadows surrounding me and the distant hushed footsteps of monks in other parts of the church, tending to their devotions and duties. I took four steps more toward the altar. Hushed echoes seemed to question my worthiness of being there.

Fitful drafts of wind blew out a torch on a column nearest to me. I pressed forward, step by step, in defiance of my tepid greeting, until I reached the altar. There, I dropped my cloak, went to my knees on the cold, wet stones and folded my hands in prayer. A
pater noster
tumbled from my lips in thoughtless fashion, but before saying my ‘Amen’, I gazed over my knuckles to the crucifix dangling askance above the altar.

“I ask not for great riches or further glory, My Lord. Only to see those whom I love come home.” I closed my eyes.

A simple request, and yet ... How could I dare to ask for what God might not deem fit to give me? Here, I was no king, but a man of many sins.

The rain on the roof pounded louder and louder until it sounded like an army marching above my head. I must have stayed like that for some time: my hands clenched together, the blood gone from my lower legs. A gentle hand touched my back, startling me; I reached for the knife at my belt in a soldier’s reflexes.

“You’re blanched, my lord. Shivering terribly.”

Old Ralph de Monthermer, the Englishman, stood at my shoulder. His hand trembled with palsy. How is it that he had survived Bannockburn so infirm? His skin showed the mottled spots of age, his reflexes were slow, he slept overmuch, and yet he never spoke of being old. In his heart, he was the same vigorous warrior who had fought beside my grandfather. A retainer of King Edward II’s now, we had taken him captive at Bannockburn. Recalling how he had saved my life many years ago at Windsor when Red Comyn betrayed me, I had deigned to spare him the usual dreadful prisoner’s existence.

I rose slowly to my feet, every joint and limb protesting. Remembering my cloak on the floor, I leaned over to pick it up. The backs of my legs tautened so fiercely I thought something might snap. A groan escaped my throat.

Forty now, my muscles had become stiffer. My sword arm wearied more quickly. The chill of winter and the heat of summer both gave me discomfort, when once I would have run shirtless through the winter snow or been mindless of the sweat pouring down my chest as I practiced at swords with my brother Edward.

But where vigor fades like fallen leaves, wisdom takes root and grows, courage is replaced by caution, and hope yields to doubt.

The day was nearly gone – and still they were not with me. Whatever made me believe that today would be any different than yesterday, or the many years before that?

“You could have gone on with Randolph, Ralph,” I said, my voice raspy with fatigue. “Been on your way home by now.”

He scratched beneath the neck of his mail coif so that it shifted and sat lopsided on his head. “But my lord, I have rather enjoyed being in your company. Do you treat all your prisoners so well?”

“Only my friends. I have never forgotten what you did for me. Longshanks would have staked my head on London Bridge had you not warned me in time.” My chin sank to my chest. Being in this place, it was as if the weight of all my wrongs were about to smother me. “I am so ... so sorry about ...”