The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Front Quote

  Prologue

  The Roll of Honor and Infamy

  Map of Scotland and Northern England

  Part One: The Hammer Rises

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Two: The Ax Descends

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Bannockburn Map: Day One

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Bannockburn Map: Day Two

  Chapter 32

  Part Three: The Heart Returns

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Sources and Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Glen Craney

  An Excerpt from The Yanks Are Starving

  Copyright

  * * *

  Wine is strong,

  The King is stronger,

  Women are strongest,

  But Truth conquers all.

  –– lintel inscription

  Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland

  * * *

  Prologue

  Norfolk, England

  February, 1358

  WILLIAM DOUGLAS PACED BEHIND THE frozen earthworks that guarded Castle Rising, an old royal mint so grim and neglected that it made London Tower seem hospitable. As the Earl of Mar and patriarch of his clan of Lanarkshire warriors, he had survived English assaults on the bloody fields of Neville’s Cross and Poitiers, but never had his fortitude so lagged as it did now. Drafted by King David to serve as a ransom surety for the onerous Treaty of Berwick, he was homesick for Scotland, having been away for over half a year. He stole a glance over his shoulder at the East Anglian peat beds that lay north across the low broads. If he and his squire could break free of their warden, they might reach the Borders and hide in the tangled briars of Ettrick Forest, just as King Robert’s mossers had done half a century ago.

  He asked himself again: Why would the She-Wolf demand to meet him?

  Did the brooding harridan seek to be entertained by his humiliation in defeat? No fellow Scot would shame him for wishing to shun the task at hand, for inside that ice-corniced mausoleum prowled the most dangerous and reviled woman in all the Isles. Isabella of France, the hoary old queen mother of England, had been at various turns in her infamous existence an insatiable adulteress, a regicide and usurper of the throne, a changeling who wore armor into battle and perverted nature by making love like a man, a sorceress who had beguiled her own son by slithering into his bed at night, a necromancer who held séances with her beheaded—

  The gate portcullis cranked up, and a detail of English pikemen in hobnailed boots marched from the tower and across the ice-glazed boards.

  The Scot earl sighed heavily, his last chance to avoid the ordeal now dashed. Led with his squire through an occulted archway, he searched the scratchings on the rampart stones for signs of Isabella’s witchery. In her youth, the queen mother had gained a reputation for being a meddlesome princess in her father Philip’s royal court in Paris, where she was said to have become privy to the heretical depravities of the Knights Templar. Bartered off to England as a marital bargaining chip in the conflict over Aquitaine, she had made good use of the cunning assassination methods perfected by those crusader monks. Her feckless husband, Edward Caernervon, had duly earned his toll paid to Hell, but only a woman who consorted with demons could have arranged so heinous a death for a deposed king. When Isabella’s first-born, Edward the Third, became old enough to climb atop the throne, he banished her from London, and she raged at the filial ingratitude by conjuring down the Black Death upon the Isles. Most believed that she had managed to survive these past twenty-seven years in this outpost only because she had long ago sold her soul to the Devil.

  A forearm came roughly to the earl’s chest, halting him. The sergeant of the guard opened a door and prodded the earl and his squire into an austere room lit dimly by a solitary candle. The earl heard the lock latch behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the dusty gloom, he spied a silver cross with fleur-de-lis flanges crowning a small altar at the far wall. That corner of the room shimmered with movement. A bent hag, shrouded in the brown habit of a religious, arose with difficulty from a kneeler in the slant shadows and shuffled toward him.

  The earl reached into his coin pouch and offered her a farthing, as was one’s obligation when encountering a Poor Clare devoted to poverty. “Forgive us, cailleach, for interrupting your prayers. Would you inform the Queen Mother that William of Douglas awaits her summons?”

  The nun kept staring over his shoulder at his squire.

  He feared she was senile. “Good woman, did you not hear me?”

  She snatched the coin from his fingers and, holding it under the candle’s penumbra, traced a long nail over its raised profile.

  He cursed under his breath, suspecting that he had been led to the wrong chamber in a prank to entertain the garrison. “I am Douglas of––”

  “I know who you are.” The nun turned her evil eye again on his squire, who remained a step behind him. “Who is this man?”

  “My second.”

  She returned the farthing. “I have scandals enough attached to my name. If Parliament were to learn that I accepted charity from a Scotsman, I would be led to the block on the next morn.”

  The earl retreated a step, abashed at having mistaken the She-Wolf for a doted anchorite. He surrendered a grudging bow to the shriveled womb that had given birth to his country’s sworn enemy. “I beg your forgiveness.”

  Isabella smiled wanly as she took their wet cloaks and hung them on pegs. “You will have to wait your turn. There is a long line of men who seek God’s intercession for my absolution.” She extended a tremulous hand to invite them toward the cold hearth. “I would offer you wine worthy of your palate, but circumstances have denied me such provisions.”

  Easing his guard, the earl considered the possibility that this frail woman might not be a bewitching harpy after all, but a victim of England’s cruel imagination. He inspected her sparse quarters and wondered if she had accepted this living martyrdom to draw off the ire of the fickle English and deflect their challenges to her son’s legitimacy. Yet she was still a Plantagenet by marriage, attached to the rapacious brood that was bent on crushing his country’s independence, and he could not mask his hatred fueled by half a century of war. “We Scots are accustomed to being denied provisions. We have England to thank for that.”

  She nodded wistfully. “And yet, I can remember a time when your forefathers dined uninvited at many a table in Northumbria and Yorkshire.” She studied his features. “You are kinsman to James Douglas.”

  He braced for the
opprobrium that the admission always elicited here in England. “My father, many years younger, was his half-brother.”

  “Your uncle was the most troublesome of the many trespassers who harried our northern shires.” She squinted to peer over his shoulder again. “His skin was dark for a Scotsman, like that of your squire.”

  Born in the year of his famous uncle’s death, the earl had often heard the Good Sir James’s unusual coloring compared to that of a Castilian. “Aye, hence they called him the Black Douglas.”

  She waved off that explanation. “His dark countenance was not why he earned that wicked sobriquet. There is much you do not know about him.”

  He bristled at the suggestion that she was better informed about his clan’s heritage. “May I inquire, madam, as to the purpose of this audience?”

  Lifting the clotted candle from the altar, Isabella drifted unsteadily toward the fireplace and stooped wincing to a knee. She held the precarious flame under a pile of green wood until it took the spark. “I am told that the Canterbury scribes are filling their chronicles with calumny about your uncle.”

  Perplexed by her concern, the earl, long inured to the Plantagenet industry of lies, shrugged with bitter resignation. “If paid handsomely enough, those monks would defame St. Peter himself.”

  Isabella stirred the fire, stalling for time as if debating his trustworthiness. “I am the last mortal still drawing breath who knew James Douglas. I wish to have my say on his deeds before I die.”

  The earl was incensed to discover that he had journeyed three days to this outback in the midst of winter merely to suffer a lecture on Westminster’s version of Scot history. “I suppose you would have us believe that he ran from a match of arms against one of your tourney hotheads.”

  Her wrinkled mouth pursed with faint amusement. “Lord Douglas feared no man. … But there was one woman who daunted him severely.”

  A snort of disbelief puffed the air near the door. The earl turned and glared at his squire, chastising him for the indiscretion.

  Smiling at their skepticism, Isabella arose from her knees with the earl’s assistance. She wrangled a chair nearer the fire and, gathering a shawl around her ankles as she sat down, taunted the two men with a challenge. “If you Scots are as stout of heart as you always boast, surely you will not shrink from an old widow’s tale.”

  The earl was intrigued by her claim of distant acquaintance with the Good Sir James. He agreed to hear her out, for in truth he had no choice, given the exigencies of his diplomatic commission. When Isabella motioned for him to bring up stools aside her, he complied, but his squire insisted on standing in the shadows behind him, as his duty required.

  The queen mother stared for nearly a minute at the crackling hearth, as if scrying a vision in the flames. Then, rousing from this trance, she smeared the tip of the poker with charcoal and sketched a crude map of the Isles on the flagstone near her feet. “Long before you were born, your King Alexander died without siring an heir.”

  Alarmed, the earl glanced behind him, wondering if his squire also detected that her voice now sounded altered and otherworldly. Was the woman using her conjury to bring forth a spirit from beyond the veil?

  Isabella tapped the floor with the poker to reclaim their attention. Gaining it, she scratched a mark on the southeastern region of her map to indicate the location of a port city at the eastern crease where Scotland and England met. “Four years before this century turned, your throne fell empty, and the clans commenced scrapping for it like charnel dogs over a carcass. All the while, the Leopard of England stalked the Borders, sniffing blood and champing to pounce when the Lion of Caledonia fell lame from self-inflicted wounds.”

  Beguiled by the strangeness of her bardic inflections, the earl and his squire edged closer to better hear her.

  “But one runt of a lad, inspired by a headstrong maiden from Fife, would not sit prey for an easy clawing.” Isabella stabbed the crackling log as if gutting a combatant, forcing the two Scots to shield their eyes from the flying embers. Her shuddering voice, taut with the emotion of memory, fell to a near whisper. “Nay, the stars had destined Jamie Douglas to stalk the stalker.”

  The Roll of Honor and Infamy

  The Scots

  James Douglas: son of Wil Douglas

  Wil Douglas: a rebel leader, nicknamed “the Hardi”

  Eleanor Douglas: second wife of William Douglas

  Isabelle “Belle” MacDuff: daughter of Ian MacDuff

  Ian MacDuff: Earl of Fife and chieftain of Clan MacDuff

  Robert Bruce: grandson of the Competitor

  Robert Bruce the Competitor: grandfather of Robert

  Gibbie Duncan: childhood friend of James Douglas

  Elizabeth de Burgh: daughter of the earl of Ulster

  William Lamberton: Bishop of St. Andrews

  Edward Bruce: brother of Robert

  Thomas Bruce: brother of Robert

  Nigel Bruce: brother of Robert

  Mary Campbell: sister of Robert Bruce

  Christian Seton: sister of Robert Bruce

  Red Comyn: patriarch of the Clan Comyn

  John “Cam” Comyn: Lord of Badendoch, son of Red

  John “Tabhann” Comyn: Lord of Buchan, nephew of Red

  Idonea Comyn: widow of Red’s eldest brother

  Thomas Dickson: servant of William Douglas

  Christiana of the Isles: leader of Clan Gamoran

  Angus Og MacDonald: Lord of the Isles

  Dewar of Glendochart: Culdee patriarch

  Ned Sween: a Culdee monk

  Murdoch, McKie, and McClurg: sons of the Galloway crone

  Thomas Randolph: nephew of Robert Bruce

  Sim Ledhouse: an officer serving James Douglas

  William Sinclair: a Scot Templar

  The English

  Edward I: King of England, nicknamed “Longshanks”

  Edward Caernervon: son of Longshanks, becomes Edward II

  Edward III: son of Isabella of France

  Gilbert de Clare: Earl of Gloucester, kinsman to the Bruces

  Robert Clifford: a Borders officer

  Aymer de Valence: Earl of Pembroke

  Robert Neville: a knight called “The Peacock of the North”

  Henry de Bohun: a knight in the service of Edward II

  Thomas Lancaster: Earl of Lancaster, a rival of Edward II

  Hugh Despenser: second favourite of Edward II

  Roger Mortimer: Isabella of France’s paramour

  The French

  Philip IV: King of France, called “the Fair”

  Isabella of France: daughter of Philip IV

  Piers Gaveston: Caernervon’s Gascon favourite

  Giles d’Argentin: a knight

  Abbot of Lagny: a Dominican inquisitor

  Peter d'Aumont: a Knight Templar

  Jeanne de Rouen: a Cistercienne

  PART ONE

  The Hammer Rises

  1296—1307 A.D.

  Dishonor was offered,

  They refused;

  Blood was on the hair,

  And from the harp

  A sigh of sorrow.

  — a Celtic lament

  I

  SOOTED BY PILLAGE SMOKE BLOWN inland across the North Sea, hundreds of Scots—including women, children, and feeble old men—dangled kicking and gagging from gallows that had been hastily erected below the burning spires of Berwick.

  That morning, a shock force of English knights had launched the spring campaign of 1296 by cutting a swath of destruction into Scotland’s largest port. Now, hours into the butchery, Yorkshire and Northumbrian routiers rampaged down the city's narrow wynds, stripping and rolling strangled inhabitants into the Tweed to clear the execution ropes for more victims. The river’s blood-slicked currents swept this flotsam of misery and death toward the estuary on the coast, where the corpses eddied with the frenzied salmon driven harbor side by the poisonous spillage from torched merchant ships. Trapped in the motte tower at the center
of the conflagration, a half-starved garrison of two hundred Scot knights could only watch from the ramparts and shout promises of vengeance at the English murderers below them.

  On a distant hill overlooking the flaming walls, fourteen-year-old James Douglas collapsed to his knees and retched.

  His two gray mastiff pups, Cull and Chullan, nipped at his heels as if to protest this shameful reaction to his first glimpse of war. Scoffing at rumors of widespread killings, he had convinced his best friend, Gibbie Duncan, to join him on the three-day run here from Douglasdale. But now he saw with his own eyes that the reports of a massacre were true. These English devils were burning and looting all that stood in their path east of the Selkirk Forest.

  He fought for breath, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and ran to catch up with Gibbie. A premature birth had left him sickly and slight from the start, but nature had compensated him with fierce agate eyes and straight black hair that he kept shorn short in the fashion of the Romans who had built the ancient stone wall south of his Lanarkshire home. He had heard the gossiped whispers: that his veins ran with the blood of a distant centurion and that his skin had darkened to the shade of lightly tanned leather when his mother, dying in childbirth, had screamed a pagan pact to bargain his survival.

  Rushing ahead, Gibbie, a year younger but a head taller than him, dropped to his knees on the brow of the next hill and inched his eyes above the broom. Running a hand through his wild flaxen hair, he hissed through the gap where his front teeth should have been, and then pointed toward a column of mounted knights making fast for Berwick. “That’s the English king!”

  James staggered up the steep sandstone spur, refusing to believe it. “Edward Plantagenet wouldn’t muddy his boots this far north.”

  Gibbie gnawed on a root tuber and spat his opinion of his friend’s skepticism. “You think I don’t know the royal pennon?”

  James finally caught up. He crouched atop the perch, blinking away the sting of the smoke. When his eyes had cleared, he looked down into the valley and saw that the lead rider of the armed column had freakishly long legs and wild white hair flowing to his shoulders. Gibbie was right—the English king had arrived from York. But it was another sight that tested his unsettled belly again. The Plantagenet herald carried a standard with a fire-breathing monster reared on its hinds. Every Scot lad had been taught what the raising of the dragon meant: Berwick’s defenders would be dealt with as traitors to the crown. His heart raced at the fearsome sight. These English knights who served King Edward the First rode chargers twice the size of Highland ponies and wore silver armour so resplendent that the old Roman road up from Sunderland now resembled a glittering snake. They seemed spawned from biblical giants of another race—and their Goliath was being hailed across Christendom with an ominous new title: