Bruce nodded, reluctantly. John Balliol had defended the Kingdom and suffered for it – since then, of course, he had haunted the French court and the papal skirts defending nothing at all, so Duns’ sophistry worked well enough.
Yet Bruce was English enough to see that the crown of this kingdom was not the same as any other. Kings in Scotland, he had long since discovered, differed from those anywhere else because they had long admitted that God alone did not have the final say in who ruled. The reality for a King of Scots was that his right to rule had long since been removed from God and handed, via the noble community of the realm, to the Kingdom’s every burgher and minor landowner – aye, and even the cottars and drovers who lived there; it was a wise claimant who made his peace with that.
Not King of Scotland, but King of Scots and there was a wealth of subtle meaning in the difference.
Wishart saw Bruce acquiesce, slapped his meaty hands together and beamed. John Duns was clever, Hal thought, but his kenspeckled words were not enough to convince the Comyn Earl of Buchan, or the Comyn Lord of Badenoch, whose kin John Balliol was. The Lord of Badenoch had his own claim to the kingship and, even if everyone else allowed that John Balliol was too much empty cote to be endured, it was unlikely the Comyn would step aside for Bruce.
Hal did not even have to voice it, for Lamberton did and the arguments swirled like the greasy, tainted smoke of the tallow until Bruce held up one hand and silenced them all.
‘Red John Comyn is a problem,’ he declared, ‘which we must address soon. Sooner still is the one called Wallace.’
He looked round the room of shadowed faces.
‘He must be persuaded to quit the realm,’ Bruce said. ‘For his own safety and because nothing can proceed while he rants and ravages in the name of King John Balliol. That rebellion is ended, my lords, and will never be resurrected; the next time this kingdom wars against the invader will be under my banner. A royal one, lords – and against Edward the son, not the father.’
‘If what you say is true,’ Lamberton with a wry, fox smile, ‘that might see you with grey hairs of your own. Is Longshanks not in the finest of health, with a new young queen and two wee bairns tumbling like cubs?’
‘Besides,’ Wishart added mournfully, ‘Wallace is unlikely to be moved by the argument that he stands in the way of your advancement, my lord Robert. Nor has he been much concerned over his own safety in the past.’
‘Leave Wallace and Red John Comyn to me,’ Bruce declared grimly and then shot a twisted smile at John Duns. ‘God and time will take care of King Edward.’
‘Affectio Commodi,’ he added and John Duns acknowledged it with a tilt of his head.
Affectio Commodi, the Duns doctrine of morality, where happiness is assigned to ‘affection for the advantage’ and true morality to affectio iustito, an affection to justice.
Hal remembered the times the wee dominie his father had hired ‘to pit poalish on the boy’ had lectured on that, hands behind his back and eyes shut. Hal had struggled with it then and was more than relieved when the wee priest had given up and gone off to find more fertile pastures.
Justice or advantage. Hal did not need to look at Bruce to see the choice made and had it confirmed later, when he and Kirkpatrick, obedient to the summons, went to the Bruce’s quarters.
In contrast to the roomful of plots, this blazed with light from fat beeswax candles and sconces, the flagged floor liberal with fresh rushes. Herbal posies were stuffed into wall crevices and looped round the crucifix which glared malevolently from the rough wall at the men who lolled carelessly beneath it.
They were young men, faces full of impudence and freckles, half-dressed in fine linen shirts, rich-dyed tunics and coloured hose, lounging in a welter of discarded jerkins and cloaks, baldrics, sheaths and ox-blood boots of Cordovan leather with fashionable high heels. A couple of gazehounds nosed the rushes, searching between jug and goblet for the remains of roast meats and chewed fruit.
One of these languid men was Edward Bruce, a warped portrait of his brother, big shouldered, large chested and with the same face, only as if it had been squeezed from forehead and chin. It made his eyes slitted and his grin wider – unlike his brother, he grinned all the time.
Hal saw Kirkpatrick stiffen a little and felt a slight, sudden stab of justified satisfaction; for years Kirkpatrick had been the only retainer Bruce had closeted with him, a shadowy ferreter of secrets – aye, and worse – at Bruce’s beck and call. This was the reward for it – supplanted by those Bruce needed more.
Let him taste the bitter fruit of it, as I have, Hal thought savagely. My father dead, my home burned by my own kin after the battle at Roslin Glen, good friends dead in the mud of Stirling and Falkirk. Little reward for the middling folk who had ended up in the Bruce camp.
And Isabel. Her loss burned most of all. Gone back to the Earl of Buchan on the promise that her lover and his home would not be harmed. For six years Hal and she had kept to the bargain, though there was not a day he did not think of her and wondered if she still thought of him.
And for what? Buchan had found a way to burn Herdmanston to ruin anyway and would, Hal knew, seek a way to kill him. He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap – his father’s bleak warning echoed down the years.
Now all that was left was shackled to the fortunes of Bruce. Kirkpatrick shared the chains of it, Hal saw, though he had not considered the man an unwilling supplicant until recently, when this fresh mesnie had grown around the new Lord of Annandale and Carrick.
Not great lords, either, but an earl’s bachelor knights, fashionable, preened and coiffed. They stared at Hal and Kirkpatrick as if two aged wolves had stepped into the room, a mixture of sneer at what they considered to be old men out of touch with the new reality, the coming man that was Bruce, and envy that their lord and master treated so closely with such a pair.
Bruce showed the truth of it when he did not bother to announce Hal or Kirkpatrick and indicated that they should draw apart. Into the shadows, Hal saw with a sharp, bitter smile, where we belong.
‘Wallace,’ Bruce said in a voice so low it was more crouched than a sniffing rat. Neither Hal nor Kirkpatrick replied and Bruce, his eyes baleful in the dim, raked both their faces with an unsmiling gaze.
‘Find him. Tell him he has my love – but he must quit Scotland before it is too late for him. If nothing else, he will end up making the name of his captors odious in Scotland, for they will be Scots men, mark me. That is part of Edward’s scheme.’
Kirkpatrick, his eyes like faint lights in the cave of his face, nodded briefly and Hal jerked his head at the distant murmur and laughter at someone’s poor attempts to play and sing in the Langue D’Oc of a troubadour.
‘Finding him will be hard,’ he said, more harshly than he had intended. ‘He is a hunted man and unlikely to caw the craic, cheek for jowl, with any as declares they are friends.’
Bruce smiled. There had been a time when this would have been as incoherent as a dog’s bark, but time and exposure had improved his ear.
‘You speak their way,’ he said to Hal in elegant French, ‘and understand a decent tongue besides, so you can walk in both camps easily enough. Better yet – you have dealt with Wallace before this and the man knows you. Trusts you even. In case he does not, Kirkpatrick knows what to do when men come at you from the shadows.’
‘A comforting thought,’ Kirkpatrick answered in equally good French, though his burr added a vicious twist to the wry delivery. He jerked his head backwards at the coterie of quietly murmuring knights.
‘Why not ask Crawford there? Is he not kin to Wallace?’
Bruce merely looked at him until Kirkpatrick dropped his eyes. Only the auld dugs would do for this, he thought. At least it means he trusts us, as he does no others.
Hal