The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce (67 page)

Spring warmed the air and melted into summer before any word reached Writtle of the war in the north, and when it did start to trickle in, the details were more rumour than fact, patchy, piecemeal,
and incomplete. There had been a battle and a great victory, it seemed, at some place called Dummar, where hundreds of Scots knights and nobles had been captured and were being held for ransom. Bruce doubted the little he heard about it, mistrusting popular enthusiasm, though the place might have been Dunbar, he thought. There was a Scottish stronghold there, one of the strongest in the country, it was said, but even then, such an explanation made no sense to him, for no pitched battle could involve a fortress. A siege, yes, that was a different thing. But sieges were slow and complex affairs—campaigns rather than battles—and insufficient time had passed for the mounting of a successful siege.

Within the following week, though, tidings arrived of yet another confrontation, this one far more likely, involving an assault on Berwick, on the border. Berwick was the gateway to southern Scotland, a coastal town with a mercantile trade, extensive docks, and impregnable defences centred upon a strongly built castle. It was arguably Scotland’s strongest and most thriving burgh, the maritime centre where cargoes of wool were assembled from all of southern Scotland before being shipped off to the manufactories of the countries across the North Sea. The source of this report was the eyewitness testimony of a crew of seamen from the English ship
The Fair Lass
, who had been lying off Berwick on the thirtieth of March and had witnessed the English capture of the town. Later they had been caught in a storm in the North Sea and blown far off course. Their stricken vessel had struggled into the port of Maldon, less than ten miles from Writtle, for repairs.

Bruce heard the story from Thomas Beg, who had ridden into Maldon to trade a wagonload of grain for ropes and cordage and overheard the story being told in a tavern there. The next day Bruce himself rode to Maldon to discover what he could for himself.

He found
The Fair Lass
easily, high and dry and under repair by an army of shipwrights and carpenters, but her captain was not there and Bruce had to seek him in a nearby tavern, where the seaman was meeting with the man in charge of the repairs to his ship. Both men looked up impatiently when Bruce appeared beside their table, but a
single glance at his clothing served to stifle any protest they might have made, and when Bruce asked which of them was captain of
The Fair Lass
they exchanged glances and one stood up to leave, saying he would return later. The other, a thickset fellow in his thirties with a deeply weathered face, made no move to stand but nodded pleasantly enough to Bruce and indicated the chair the first man had vacated. Bruce nodded back, equally pleasantly, and sat down across from him as the tavern keeper came bustling over to look after the well-dressed newcomer. Bruce ordered ale for both of them, but the seaman waved a hand over his tankard to indicate that he needed no more. As the tavern keeper hurried away he cocked a bushy eyebrow at Bruce.

“How can I help you, sir? Or should I say my lord?”

Bruce’s mouth quirked. “Sir will do well enough for now. I’m here for information and prepared to pay for it.”

The cocked eyebrow levelled out. “Then you have questions. Ask away, but I can’t promise to be able to answer them, not having any notion of what you’re looking for … ”

Bruce waited until a foaming tankard was set in front of him by the officious tavern keeper. He flipped the man a silver coin he had been holding since he entered and then watched the fellow scuttle away before he lifted his flagon. “Is this worth drinking?”

The seaman shrugged. “It’s said to be the best in Maldon. But that’s not saying much.”

Bruce sipped, then drank, enjoying the cool bite of the ale. “Good enough,” he said, setting the mug down. “A man of mine was in town yesterday, in one of the taverns. He told me he had heard some member of your crew talking about King Edward’s attack on the Scots town of Berwick at the end of March. That’s all he heard, or all that he could trust, so I decided to come and find you for myself in the hope that you might tell me more.”

“Hmm. Why? Who are you?” He watched Bruce’s eyes and his eyebrow rose again. “You’ll pardon me, I hope, but there’s a war going on and I have no need, and no wish, to go spouting off opinions
that could be taken amiss. I’m a loyal English seafarer, not a soldier or a plotter.”

Bruce shrugged. “I am Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick. And you?”

“Samuel Cromwell, mariner, as you know … Carrick? That’s in Scotland, is it not? And I know the name of Bruce. Are you not a Scot yourself?”

“I am by birth, though outlawed by the King of Scots for holding loyal to King Edward. In all else I am English.”

The brown face remained impassive save for a tiny wrinkling of the skin about the eyes, and Bruce found himself warming to this cautious but forthright man.

“Then why are you not in Scotland with the King? He’d want his earls about him, I should think.”

“I would be, but he himself set me a task before he left for Scotland and I’ve been working on it ever since. I’ve been repossessing the Scots King’s English holdings in King Edward’s name.”

The inquisitive eyebrow flickered again. “Then what can I tell you, Lord Bruce?”

“Was the report my man heard true? Were you in Berwick when the attack occurred?”

“Not in it, but I was close offshore. Our army had been sighted to the south the day before and the entire town reacted. We were barely half-laden, with a cargo of wool for Norway. Everything went mad from the moment the first alarm went up and I lost more than half my loaders. They all ran to the walls to see the English army for themselves. If you know Berwick, you’ll know the quays are on the northeastern shore, inside the arc of the walls and supposedly out of sight—and reach of attack—from the south.”

“Supposedly, you say. Were the Scots afraid? Did you sense that?”

“No, they were … jubilant was the word that occurred to me at the time. They thought they were safe behind their walls. Me, I was angry. I’d been hoping to be laden early and to make the tide. Took me three hours longer than it ought to have to finish taking on cargo and I had to use some of my own crew to get it done. All to no end.
We missed the tide and I was stuck out in the shallows, a quarter of a mile offshore with the supply fleet that came up in support of our army.

“And what happened? What did you see?”

Cromwell inhaled deeply. “More than I wanted to. Our forces took the town before the day was out.”

“They stormed the walls in a single day?”

“They didn’t need to. They went around the side, to where the endmost walls along the shore were wooden palisades that hadn’t been maintained. The townspeople were up on the stone walls facing the main army, but the flanking forces went around unobserved to the weak point. They pulled a section down within an hour and that was that—it was all over. Our people fought their way inside from there and it was as though they had an open gate. Hell, it
was
an open gate. And once they were inside, the inhabitants gave up without a fight. Someone opened the main gates and let the army in.” His mouth twisted in a humourless grin. “For a place that was supposed to be untakeable, it didn’t last long.”

“Did you go back into the town?”

“Go back? Do I look mad? My ship is called
The Fair Lass
, not
The Fearless
. No, I stayed right where I was. The army went in under the red flag. I caught the morning tide and cleared the place as quickly as I could.” He shuddered and waved a hand as though to thrust the memory away.

“But your ship is English, and I presume your crew is, too, so what would you have to fear by going back?”

Cromwell looked around the room, but there was no one watching them or sitting close enough to hear. Nevertheless he hunched forward over the table and lowered his voice when he spoke again. “Understand this, my lord. My ship was laden, ready to go, and my crew was safe aboard. All I lacked was water under my keel, to carry me over the sandbars of the estuary. I wasn’t even tempted to return, and especially not after the screaming started.”

“What screaming?” Even as he asked the question Bruce knew he did not want to hear the answer. He knew full well what the
dreaded red flag meant—it was the signal to annihilate the enemy. “Tell me.”

“We were close inshore, remember, and the sound carried over the water. There was great slaughter done that night, throughout the night and into the dawn. They burned the town, all of it, even the Dutchmen’s Hall where the traders gathered. I saw that with my own eyes and it was no accidental fire. There was fighting there. Some people, perhaps the merchants themselves, had locked themselves inside before the sun set and were fighting back. We watched a large body of men attack the place and be turned back, and then the fire was set to burn out whoever was in there … ”

“And did they come out?”

“You tell me, for you know as much as I do now. None of us saw what happened at the end, once the sun went down. We heard the roar of the fires, and the screams, but we could see nothing from where we were.”

Bruce was unable to believe what he was hearing.

“How many—?” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Were you to guess … How many deaths think you there might have been?”

The seaman sighed. “Did you have people there?”

“No, thank God. But I know the town.”

“No, my lord, you knew it once. It was still burning when we sailed away. As to your question, with the red flag flying … ” His shake of the head was slow, ponderous. “Thousands, I would say, from what we heard that night. Perhaps the entire town. I simply don’t know, Lord Bruce. But I know I have nothing more to tell you. We left on the tide and we were glad to be gone.”

There was nothing more to say. Bruce thanked the man for his time and offered him a gold piece, but Cromwell shrugged it away. “I haven’t earned that,” he said flatly. “All I have done is speak of things that shouldn’t be mentioned. I’ve been to Berwick many times and knew the people there. They were as much like us as any other Englishman could be. It sickens me enough to think that English soldiery could act that way anywhere, but to do what they did, where they did? That makes me ashamed of my own folk.”

The eleventh of July marked Bruce’s twenty-second birthday, though the event went unacknowledged by everyone except Isabella, who presented him with a magnificent pair of riding boots, ordered months earlier from London to mark the occasion of his first birthday as her husband. He wore them daily thereafter because they were not only beautiful but practical, soft and supple despite their weight and substance, and perfectly suited to the way he walked, which could not always be said of riding boots.

Several more weeks elapsed with no word from Carlisle, though, and by that time Bruce had grown seriously worried about his father. The Lord of Annandale had never been a letter writer, but even so Bruce felt that Carlisle’s situation on the very border of the southwestern invasion route from Scotland should have merited a communication of some kind, if only a word to let his family in the south know that he was alive. He himself had intended to write to his father, but in the aftermath of returning to Writtle and finding Izzy pregnant he had let the matter slide, telling himself that Carlisle would have been relatively unaffected by the hostilities thanks to Edward’s pre-emptive strike into Scotland. Now, though, with so much time having elapsed in silence, he acknowledged guiltily to himself that he might have been less than perfectly filial in not contacting his father.

The end of July was approaching by the time he finally gave in to his uncertainties and decided to ride to Westminster in search of substantial news and information. Isabella was seven months into her carrying term by then, her tiny body made to look even smaller by the grotesque hugeness of the burden she was carrying inside her, and even though the road between Writtle and London was an excellent one and the weather appeared to hold no threats, Bruce and Allie both agreed, over Izzy’s outraged protests, that the potential hazards of a fifty-mile return journey in a poorly sprung coach were far too high to justify the risks. She finally relented and agreed to remain in Writtle when Bruce pointed out that the journey would be pointless for her even in the best of circumstances, since Edward himself was still in Scotland. Without his royal presence and with all
his glittering entourage accompanying the monarch on campaign, Westminster would be an empty shell, inhabited only by those senior ministers of the Crown whose duties kept them in place, running the kingdom in the King’s absence.

Two days later, Bruce and Thomas Beg arrived in Westminster to find the place surprisingly busy, though in a way that Bruce had never seen before. The precincts surrounding the main buildings were crowded with soldiers and their officers, and scores of saddled horses were drawn up in ordered ranks in the great courtyard within the main gates. Bruce had never seen horses in the inner yard before, but judging by the dried manure scattered all over the cobblestones, this had evidently become a commonplace with the King not in residence and the constant comings and goings of mounted personnel. The guards were still in place where they always were, though, and Bruce presented himself to the guard sergeant on duty, asking to be announced to Sir Robert FitzHugh. The sergeant nodded, apparently recognizing Bruce, and sent a guardsman to accompany him to where he could wait for FitzHugh to receive him. A short time later he was shown into an anteroom where a good half score of other people were already waiting.

Waiting turned out to be the operative word, because Bruce sat there in silence for two hours while others came and went, though none of them was sent for by the seneschal. He was thoroughly bored and out of sorts by the time the door opened and FitzHugh crossed directly to him with an outstretched, welcoming hand, apologizing for having kept him waiting for so long. He had been in conference, he said, but was now free, at least for the moment, to spend some time with Bruce. He waved in invitation, and Bruce followed him from the room, all impatience banished by the warmth of the old man’s welcome.