The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce (76 page)

There were sixteen knights in attendance, with a scattering of senior sergeants from the siege-engine division, and they listened attentively to Bruce’s plan to surprise the Douglas household the next morning. As soon as it was light enough for movement, the Carrick contingent would surround the castle, throwing a ring of bowmen into place where they could scour the battlements with arrows should the need arise. The mounted English men-at-arms would be held in reserve but assembled in plain sight before the gates, their threatening siege engines in readiness, their implicit double menace a highly visible deterrent against resistance. Then, with the risks of resistance clearly demonstrated, Bruce himself would ride out to parley with the castle’s castellan and make his best efforts to persuade her to surrender. If she refused, then they would attack the castle, which could not hold out for long against the English catapults, and the surrounding Carrick men, backed by the mounted English, were a guarantee that no one inside could escape.

There was no argument of any kind; everyone knew why they were there and understood the situation, and Bruce, watching closely, could see no sign of disgruntlement among the English knights. Only when everything had been agreed upon did he ask about Benstead’s whereabouts, and Guiscard told him that the cleric and his assistant, Father Robert Burlington, had been unexpectedly summoned early that morning to attend upon the prior of the nearby Monastery of St. Gildas. No reason for the summons had been given, and Guiscard, apparently happy to be rid of the odious priest, had asked no questions.

When the two English priests arrived back shortly after noon, Bruce saw them passing in the distance, but made no attempt to acknowledge them. Benstead seemed to be glaring at him, but he paid the fellow no attention. He gave the man no further thought at all until later that afternoon, when he was talking with his uncle on the inner fringe of the Scots camp. The drizzling rain that had been threatening all day had begun to fall, and Bruce was about to return
to his tent for his cloak when Nicol raised a hand and murmured, “I think someone’s lookin’ for you.”

Bruce turned to see an English man-at-arms, wearing a corporal’s insignia, coming towards him.

“Forgive me, Lord Carrick,” said the man after he saluted, “but I couldn’t find you. They told me you were somewhere else.”

“Well, you’ve found me. To what end?”

“You are to attend a gathering in Sir Christopher’s pavilion, my lord. A command meeting. I think it might have started already.”

“A
command
meeting?” Bruce made no attempt to hide the disbelief in his voice, and he bit down hard upon his anger. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll come. Who sent you, by the way?”

“The priest, sir. Father Benstead.”

“Thank you, Corporal. Go about your business.” He turned to Nicol, one eyebrow raised high as the corporal stalked away. “You were right,” he said softly. “It seems I am being summoned. Well, well.” He raised a hand, seeing that Nicol was set to go with him. “No, Nicol, I’ll collect my cloak and go alone.”

When he entered the pavilion, still racking his brains for what could possibly have justified the extraordinary summons, he stopped no more than a few paces in, seeing Benstead there watching and obviously waiting for him.

“Ah, young Master Bruce, there you are, and late as usual. Come in, come in. You know everyone … ”

Bruce gawked about him like an idiot, swaying from side to side and ducking and raising his head exaggeratedly as he swung this way and that to peer into the shadowed corners of the great tent. Apparently satisfied at last that the corners were all unoccupied, he then turned to gaze keenly, with eyes narrowed to slits, at the men assembled in the semicircle of folding chairs around the pavilion’s open central space.

“Master Bruce?” Benstead said. “In God’s name what ails you, sir? Are you unwell?”

The question, and the alarm in the voice that posed it, brought an end to Bruce’s strange behaviour. He turned and looked frankly at his questioner.

“Unwell?” His voice was strong and calm and filled with assured self-confidence. “No, if it please you, I am very well. I simply thought to see this fellow you were talking to, somewhere behind me. But he’s not there.”

“
What
fellow?” There was no missing the querulous asperity in Benstead’s voice now.

Bruce straightened his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height. “The young
Master Bruce
you were speaking to. Where did he go?”

Some of the seated knights traded uneasy glances. The cleric, seated at the table, continued to frown in annoyance.

“Where did
who
go?”

Bruce threw the edges of his rain-wet cloak back over his shoulders, peering down with lowered chin and draping the folds to his satisfaction before he reached to his waist and unbuckled and removed the belt that hung there, supporting a plain, sheathed dagger on one side and a well-worn leather purse on the other. He hefted the thing in both hands, for it was heavy, and walked forward to the desk, where the now disconcerted cleric sat watching him.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Benstead flushed. “It’s … ehh … it’s a sword belt.”

“No, not so.” Bruce’s voice was mild. “No sword belt, this. Notice the gold on it, if you will.” He hefted the belt again. “The weight and worth of it, I mean. See the crest of Carrick on each of the fifteen lozenges. This is an earl’s belt, and it is mine.” His voice hardened, not by much but sufficiently to add an edge to his next words. “Bear that in mind from this moment on, Benstead. If you ever address me in future by any title less than my lord of Carrick or my lord earl, I will have you lashed to a wagon wheel and flogged until your bones are bare. The right and privilege of doing both lie well within my power and pleasure.”

The stillness in the pavilion seemed unnatural, and no one, including Benstead, so much as stirred. This was a new Robert Bruce they were witnessing; a stone-faced Robert Bruce whose existence no one there had suspected until that moment. And no man there cared to be the first to try to test him. Benstead sat ashen, his bulbous eyes wide with dawning horror.

“Is that clear to you now,
Master
Benstead? You will address me as befits my station and with keen regard to your own. You are a clerk—an ignoble functionary raised above your proper station solely because you are a younger brother to a better man, who holds a post and title given him by King Edward.” He gazed at the loathsome man with a stare that made his eyes glitter like ice. “Hear me clearly.
I
will decide if and when I wish you to speak to me in future, and I find no temptation to have you do so any time soon.” He lowered his voice to an intimate, conversational level. “You have seen fit his day to usurp my authority as commander of this expedition by summoning this meeting. More than that, you had the gall to summon me like a lackey to attend it. I could have you hanged for that, you fool. Or do you doubt that?”

Benstead appeared to shudder and then raised his head in a gesture of defiance. “I am here on the order of my superiors, and what I have done I have done at their command.”

“Your
superiors
? This is Carrick, you blockhead, and I command here in my own earldom!” He stopped, willing himself to say no more, and when he spoke again he sounded weary and disgusted. “You are not a pleasing man, Master Benstead, and I am not alone in finding you offensive. And
offensive
does not even
begin
to describe my feelings towards you. You are a toady and a lickspittle, grovelling to everyone you think superior to you, while to those unfortunate enough to have you think of them as inferiors, you are a ruthless, abusive, and unrelenting bully. Look about you as you move throughout this encampment today and from now on. You will see few friendly faces, and fewer yet with any sympathy for you in your new estate. And make you no mistake, Master Benstead, your estate
is
new now. Your days of lording it around here are over. You
will perform your allotted task in recording the conduct of this excursion we are on, but you will take no further part in anything having to do with its conduct and you will
never
again think to cross me and expect to live afterwards. Do I make myself clear?”

“But … but you can’t do that! I am here at King Edward’s direct command.”

“And so am I, you stupid man. Which of us, think you, will have the louder voice in the King’s ear?”

He allowed the silence to lengthen beyond comfort before he added, “I am waiting for your acknowledgment of what I have said, Benstead. Did you understand what I said to you?”

Benstead opened his mouth and made as if to speak, but nothing emerged.

“Well, did you? And have a care to that angry look in your eye before you answer.”

Bruce’s face remained cold and flinty as Benstead squirmed. Finally, though, the cleric nodded, his voice emerging as a strangled squeak.

“I … I heard you, Lord Carrick—
hear
you.”

“Excellent. Then let us be rid of you for a while.” He looked to where Benstead’s deputy, Burlington, sat head down, his eyes fixed on the table in front of him. “We have nothing to discuss here, since we settled everything this morning while you were absent. But Father Burlington will record what we do say and present you with his documents when we are done. From them you may compile your own report and then you will bring it to me to read before you send it off. Now get out of my sight.”

When the man had gone and the flaps of the tent closed again, Bruce reattached his sword belt, meanwhile looking from face to face among the others, though taking care to keep his eyes away from the priest Burlington. They all stared back at him, two of them approvingly, four blankly, and the remaining half dozen with quiet hostility that might, Bruce mused, have stemmed from resentment of his youth, or from what they thought of as his high-handed arrogance, or merely from the fact that he was a Scots earl asserting
seniority over a group of Englishmen. He was slightly surprised to discover that he did not care. They all loathed Benstead, he knew, but he wondered whether any of them might take the cleric’s side against him later, for political reasons. And he discovered that he did not care about that, either.

“Does any of you wish to question what I did?”

The only answer came from Sir Roger Appleton, the man whom Bruce had come to like best of all the English knights attached to the expedition. Appleton spread his hands. “I thought it was excellently done,” he said, then grinned. “The only thing I failed to see was why you didn’t come out and simply tell the fellow what you really thought of him.”

If he had expected the others to laugh at his sally he must have been disappointed, for there was no lessening in the general air of disapproval.

Bruce nodded, firmly. “Well then, shall we get on with this, even though it be a waste of time? We’re all here now, so let me verify that we are still in agreement on what tomorrow holds.” He looked at Sir Christopher Guiscard, who commanded the English forces sent to join Bruce from Berwick. “Sir Christopher. If you would be good enough to outline the plan we agreed upon earlier, we can make short work of this. I must presume that Master Benstead intended to alter what we had decided, but I cannot begin to guess at how he might have done so, though I doubt it could have been for the better. The man is a priest with not an ounce of military training or knowledge. I doubt he could erect a tent, let alone direct an action.”

Guiscard was one of the few who had not shown hostility to Bruce since this began, and now he smiled lopsidedly, though Bruce could see no humour in his eyes. “His plan was to seize some children from one of the villages nearby and threaten to hang them in front of the castle, one at a time, until Lady Douglas surrendered.”

“Christ Jesus! Is the fellow insane? He discussed this with you?”

Again the half smile flickered at the corner of Guiscard’s mouth. “He … mentioned it. No more. Master Benstead is not a man to
discuss much with anyone. He thinks, he decides, and he acts, rightly or wrongly. As when he misjudged your … youth, my lord of Carrick.”

The tiny hesitation had been barely noticeable, but Bruce grinned wryly. “I fear Master Benstead misjudged far more than that, Sir Christopher. He misjudged how far he could push his scant officialdom.” He glanced around the gathering. “So, are we agreed there will be no butchering of children come tomorrow?”

“It might have worked,” Sir Roger Turcott muttered. “Not that we’d really have hanged them, of course. But the threat of it might have been enough to move the woman.”

“Hmm. Have you heard much of Sir William Douglas, Sir Roger?”

Turcott stirred, stretching his legs. “Aye. The man’s a traitorous, untrustworthy lout from what I hear. A wild animal, ungovernable and uncontrollable by anyone.”

“Aye, well, the woman we are threatening to frighten here is his wife, and she is English. He abducted her from the castle of Lord Alan de la Zouche and kept her forcibly confined. And then she married him willingly and refused to be ransomed. She has been with him ever since, equalling him in everything. Does that suggest she’ll be paralyzed by compassion at the threat of seeing a peasant child hanged?”

Turcott shrugged sullenly. “I but said it might have worked. Might have … I knew nothing of the woman involved.”

Bruce nodded. “No more do I, but I know enough to know she won’t be easily cowed.” He looked again at Guiscard. “Well, Sir Christopher, what think you?”

Guiscard sniffed and sat straight up in his chair. “I think we should proceed as planned. You, my lord earl, will handle the niceties of the negotiation, as one Scot to another.” He stopped, smiling again. “Not quite, though. Apart from being born here, I believe you are no more Scots than I am. And her ladyship is English, you said. Still, she is married to a Scot, and a rebellious one at that, so she should be open to discussion, at least. Your Carrick bowmen will be
in place and prepared to sweep the walls clean should her ladyship decide to fight. Our hundred mounted men-at-arms will back you up—an added show of strength. Should the lady prove stubborn, we will attack the place with our engines and bring it down about their ears. Should she decide to be wise, however, we will take her and her people into custody and march them back to Berwick, and burn the castle once they are all out.”