The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (42 page)

After several minutes of this
idle riding across the moorland, Longshanks halted and slumped over his saddle.
He tried to speak, but his quivering lips could only dribble saliva.

Gloucester hurried to him. “Sire, you must rest.”

“Camp,” Longshanks managed to mutter.

Gloucester could not be certain if he had heard the king correctly.
These marshlands around him were so slogged from the recent rains that the
horses were in danger of sinking to their forelegs. There was not a dry patch
to set grappling irons for the tents. Fatigued, the troops crumpled to their
haunches in the muck, some even falling asleep. The baron looked to Caernervon
for assistance in the matter, but when the prince refused to dissuade his
father from the decision to set camp, Gloucester could only shrug with disgust
and motion the wagon masters to unload the provisions and luggage.

While the royal shelter was being raised, Longshanks sat in
the saddle gazing at the dunes with a bewildered look. The recession of the
afternoon’s tides had revealed a broad beach crowned by scruffy bluffs and
pimpled with a few abandoned huts. “What is the name of this place?”

“Burgh On The Sand, Sire,” Gloucester said.

Longshanks stared at the village as if it should hold a
place in his failing memory. Suddenly, his eyes bulged and he stiffened in
terror.
Burgh upon the sand.
Hadn’t that Scot witch prophesied he
would die at such a place? He tried to rein to a retreat, but his legs cramped
with spasms and his feet slid through his stirrups. “No! No! Jerusalem! It must
be Jerusalem!”

Spooked by his shout, the horse shot off into a wild run.

The soldiers finally corralled the charger and released the
jangled monarch from his saddle’s restraints. Six attendants were required to
carry him to a litter that had been raised off the wet ground by poles.
Gloucester and the physicians surrounded him and tried to make sense of his
incoherent screams.

The Dominican Lagny ordered all but Caernervon from the
king’s presence. “I must take his confession and perform the last rites.”

Informed that his death was imminent, Longshanks lapsed into
a spell of shaking so violent that his joints locked in an agonizing rigor. “My
son!”

The friar daubed penance oil on the king’s forehead and leaned to his ear, whispering, “Majesty, we must insure your soul’s salvation.”

“Eternal peace!” Longshanks cried. “The sacrament!”

Out of earshot of Gloucester, the inquisitor glanced with anticipation at Caernervon as he placed a quill in the king’s unsteady hand and whispered, “The Holy Father has issued an edict calling for the trial of all Templars. The last rites cannot be given until you sign the warrant for the arrest of those who hide in England.”

Longshanks slapped away the quill. “Scheming Frenchman!
You’ll not steal my kingdom for Philip!”

The inquisitor held back the unction oil in an act of
extortion. “Those who aid the Temple are condemned to Hell’s fires.”

Longshanks thrashed the monk aside and motioned his son
closer. “Promise me, damn you! Promise me you’ll not squander all I’ve gained!”

Caernervon grinned at him in a taunt. “I can’t hear you,
Father.”

“I’ll plague you from
the grave if you fail me on this! Boil my bones! Take them with the army to
Scotland. I want to be there when Bruce and Douglas are captured.” Swarms of
flies attacked the king’s striated face under the broiling midday sun, but he
could not raise his arm to chase them. He begged his son, “Give me shade.”

Caernervon waved his hand back and forth across his father’s eyes, merely increasing the heat’s torture. “Are you burning, Father? Where you now go, it will be a thousand times hotter.”

Longshanks bolted up and captured the prince’s throat. “That
Scot woman tricked me! Give her no—” He arched in convulsions and fell back.

Caernervon fought to escape the sharp-nailed fingers
twisting his collar. Even in death, his father was proving stronger than him.

At last, the prince peeled the rigored hand from his neck and staggered to his feet. He calmed his nerves and composed his disheveled hair while standing over the corpse and, for propriety’s sake, acting as if he were whispering a prayer over it. Then, he turned and strode toward the waiting royal entourage with the postured authority that he had practiced for so many years. Arriving in their fretful midst, he nodded with a firm chin and offered his hand to the councilors and barons for the requisite bows of homage.

Gloucester rushed to the king’s litter, unable to believe that the old man was truly dead. He lifted Longshanks’s limp head, feeling its neck for a pulse. Finding no sign of life, he pressed the king’s eyelids closed.

Caernervon came hovering over the earl with a vengeful
sneer. “Send word for Lord Gaveston to return from France at once.”

Gloucester looked up in
protest. “The king had the Gascon banished.”

“I am your king now!” Caernervon shouted. Just as abruptly, he turned ominously cold, imitating what he had witnessed his father do on many occasions with great effect. “Lord Gaveston will be joining my court and taking a wife. I should think your daughter might offer a suitable match.”

Gloucester signed his breast. “I pray for England.”

The Dominican bent to a knee before Caernervon and pawed for his hand to kiss the ring of King Edward II. “Sire, shall I attend to the funeral?”

Caernervon paused to enjoy the first time he had heard
himself addressed in the royal manner. Preening in the moment, he repulsed the
monk’s fawning hand and walked away. “Throw his bones in the nearest hole, for
all I care.”

A
WAKENED BY THE DAWN CRIES
of the Berwick fishermen on the
Tweed, Belle crawled onto her scabbed knees to offer up her morning prayer to
St. Bride. The days were growing longer now, which was both a blessing and a
curse. There would be more warmth from the sun, but also more stares and taunts
from the curiosity seekers who came from as far away as London and Salisbury to
gaze at her like a festival freak. She pulled herself up by the prongs of the
cage, which hung from a high beam and overlooked the river’s bend to the west.
Her only refuge from the harsh sea wind was an open-sided privy, built in a
corner and diabolically designed with a headboard so low that she could not
remain inside it long without great discomfort.

She saw the washerwomen and scullions coming down the path
from the town to use the pounding stones on the banks. Having vowed never to
let them find her in despair, she gathered strength and prepared for the same
ritual that she had performed every morning during the eight months of her
imprisonment. She coughed to loosen the phlegm from the cold in her lungs and,
looking toward Scotland, imagined James galloping across the Lothian meadows to
come for her. With the sea gulls cawing in accompaniment, she sang the ballad
she had learned as a child:

“Oh the summer time is coming
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And wild mountain thyme
Grows around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?”

The scrub hags tried to silence her with a volley of rocks,
but their attacks only inspired her to sing louder:

“And we’ll all go together
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?”

She sank to her knees, faint from even that slight exertion. This time, however, her tormentors did not dissipate as they usually did after her defiant serenades. Instead, the cage rattled and lurched from the impact of another round of missiles. She curled up in the corner, turning her back against the assault. She risked peering over her forearm and saw a black spider on a thread descending toward her nose. She tried to warn it away. “You best go back where you came from, if you know what’s good for you.” When the spider refused to heed her advice, she smiled. “Aye, you must be a cussed Scot like me. Crossed the river, did you? No English spinner would be caught in here.”

Remembering that Idonea Comyn once told her that all of God’s creatures carried messages from the spirits, she reached up and ran her finger across the ridged back of the spider. “What are you trying to tell me?”

At that moment, a ray of sun broke through the clouds and illumined three tiny dots of robin-blue on its spine.

The specks, she saw, formed an image that resembled the Douglas herald. She brightened with hope. “Is Jamie alive?”

The spider arched and retracted its legs, as if in confirmation—but a stone whistled through the prongs and sent the spider tumbling. She lunged to save her newfound friend, too late.

“Witch!” screamed a voice from the mob below. “You killed
him!”

She crawled to the far side of the cage to find the source of that condemnation. Across the bridge, a procession of English knights led a gurney laden with a coffin wrapped in gold cloth and emblazoned with the heraldry of a red shield and three rearing lions. The lone rider following the cart wore a crown. She squinted, trying to identify him—and her heart leapt with hope. She followed the progress of the procession as it reached the bridge and threaded along the river toward a flotilla of ships anchored in the harbor. Peasants walked behind the casket, sobbing and clamoring to touch it. When the gurney passed under the cage, Caernervon halted his caparisoned horse and looked up at her. She pulled to her feet to demonstrate that her prophecy that day in Lanercost—that she would survive Longshanks—had come to pass.

Caernervon announced to the gathering crowd: “I am compelled
by tradition to show mercy to all who look upon my father’s body before its
burial.” He gazed back up at Belle. “Renounce the rebels Bruce and Douglas,
woman, and this day I shall set you free.”

The mob hushed to hear her answer.

She gripped the bars, fearful that her weakened legs would
betray her. At that moment, she saw the spider climbing back to the cage on a
thread that dangled from the bottom plank. Tears filled her eyes. Her companion had not been crushed in the fall, after all. A strange lightness suddenly came over her, and she then
understood the spider’s message:
She was not alone.
Drawing a painful
breath, she sang the final stanza of her ballad:

“I will range through the wilds
And the deep land so dreary
and return with the spoils
to the bower o’ my dearie
Will ye go lassie go?”

Exhausted, she rested her head against the rails and reached through the
prongs to assist the struggling spider to her side.

Caernervon’s upper lip quivered as he stared up at her.
Could this pig-headed woman not see that he was now king? Within the week, he
would marry Isabella in Westminster with the full array of the kingdom’s
nobility in attendance. He could not let this Highland shrew defy him in front
of his new subjects, or it would be the talk of London. He pointed his finger
at her in threat and prepared to—

Belle turned away to ignore him.

Humiliated in his public act as monarch, Caernervon could not summon words sufficient to bring the Scotswoman to heel. He sat impotent in the saddle, burned by the judging stares of his subjects. Finally, he cursed to his officers, “God damn that woman! Let her rot up there, then.” He spat at her, but the wind drove his spittle back into his face. As the crowds rippled with derisive laughter, the new king angrily wiped his eyes and lashed his horse toward the ships that would carry the remains of his father to Westminster.

The transplanted English inhabitants of Berwick, embittered
by what fate had brought them to succeed Longshanks on the throne, gathered up
more rocks and renewed their assault on the cage.

Belle hovered over the spider to protect it. When the
procession had passed, she risked rising to her feet again, and saw a Latin epigraph
inscribed on the rear of the coffin being transported by the gurney:

Edward Primus
Scottorum Malleus
Pactum Serva

She sent the long-legged English devil to his tomb with a
scream, “Aye, you were the Hammer! But the Anvil has outlasted you!”

The mourning throngs rushed back at the cage and launched a
second volley of stones at her. Amid the debris raining down on the cage floor,
she found a small package tied with string. She shielded her discovery from the
onslaught and carefully unwrapped it.

A loaf of bread!

She dug her teeth into it and bit upon something hard.

A tiny cross of St. Bride and a rolled slither of parchment fell out. Baffled, she unfolded the ribbon of lambskin and found a message scribbled on it:

An ancient oak
at Methven blooms this spring.
Keep faith.

Dodging more rocks, she searched the mob for her benefactor,
but she saw only angry faces staring up at her. Beyond them, a hundred yards to
the south, a hooded woman hurried away along the river’s edge.

She studied the note again. The script was embossed with Latin flourishes, evidence that it had been written by a learned cleric. The “T” had been formed using the Saltire of St. Andrew. Below the words in a different ink had been sketched a pair of spurs. She brought the parchment to her nose.
That
rare lavender perfume she would never forget. She had encountered it once before, on the dance floor of Berwick’s great hall.