The French knight was still speaking. “I— Look at me. Look in my eyes … I, Gervais de Blais, am your overseer, my arrogant young friend, charged with that duty by King Edward himself. Why else do you think I have been with you since you first arrived? For love of you? No, you show me little to love. The King set me to watch you from the outset, to see how you would conduct yourself within his royal home. You are a stranger, unknown to him, and he wished to see you through the eyes of someone he trusts. Therefore I am required to report to him with my findings. Do you expect me to lie for you? To deceive the man who raised me to knighthood by telling him what a fine fellow you are?”
He drew himself up to his full height, unsmiling, and for the first time Comyn’s face flushed. The young Gael’s bristling stiffness left him, and his shoulders slumped.
“I beg your pardon,” he said quietly.
“Granted. But what of Master Bruce? He is the one you have offended more than me.”
Comyn turned his eyes to meet Rob’s and dipped his head briefly. His mouth opened but nothing came out. Rob did not mind. His own anger was gone, and it was plain to see that Comyn’s had, too. He nodded in return. “So be it,” he murmured.
“Good. Then shall we begin again?” De Blais’s voice was gentle now, yet it was to Robert Clifford that he looked for concurrence. The young Englishman nodded and smiled faintly. “Excellent,” the Gascon said. “So, let me think.”
He turned his back on all of them and looked about the courtyard, his right hand cradling his left wrist behind him. “Here is what happens next. Master Bruce will take you two to your quarters in the Squires’ Tower. There are others there already, most of them of an age with you, so you will not lack for company. Take note of who they are, Master Comyn, for they represent the cream of this realm, the next generation of the ducal and baronial families of England. All of you will reach manhood within a year or two of one another, which is why you are all here. Edward Plantagenet is a prudent King who has no time for, or patience with, surprises within his realm. To that end he studies all of you, being a believer in the philosophical tenet that the ways of manhood are set deep in childhood. Get to know the others, then, while you are here. But be back here, in amity, to meet with me in one hour from now, and we will start again from there. Am I understood? So be it. I will see you all in one hour.”
Rob led the other two towards the squires’ quarters in silence that none of them sought to break. He was remembering the tone of the King’s voice when he had made his double-meaning comment about their friendship beneath his roof. There had been a new, hard quality in Edward’s voice that Rob had never heard the King direct towards him. He had heard Edward’s wrath expressed before, many times, for the monarch had a notoriously short temper, but the King had never used such a tone with him in all the time Rob had known him, and it bothered him deeply, the more so since Edward, on this occasion, had not been even slightly angry. And now he remembered the word de Blais had used, nuance. The Edward who had spoken to him that afternoon was a different man than the King Rob had grown to love and admire these past few years. And though he could hear the difference in his mind now, he found himself unable to understand what it was that troubled him about it. It had been but one sentence, but Rob had not doubted for one moment that it held a veiled threat. It made him realize that there were hidden, dangerous depths to the English King that he had never suspected, and it made him wonder about how dark and unpredictable those depths might be.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LAIRDS OF LOCHMABEN
At the age of sixteen Rob Bruce was long familiar with the awe-striking sensation that gripped him every time he caught sight of his grandfather’s fortress of Lochmaben after a long absence—a sense of wonder mixed with the fear-tinged, reverential awe he felt for his formidable grandfather, the master of the place.
Robert Bruce of Annandale, at something more than seventy years of age, was one of the last great feudal lords of Scotland and England, with the royal blood of both countries in his veins. Rob knew him as a daunting, brooding, black-garbed presence with a sharp-boned face that might have been chiselled from stone. Greybearded and grim, the Bruce patriarch had always been an intimidating apparition to his grandson, a stern presence with bristling, bushy eyebrows above glaring eyes deep-set on either side of a hard-edged beak of a nose. But the most sinister aspect of the forbidding old man, in the boy’s eyes, was the pair of large, gristly ears that thrust, parchment thin, from his wild grey hair like translucent bat wings. In Rob’s earliest memories, the Lord of Annandale had always been aloof, achingly unknowable to the child who had watched him since infancy with fearful eyes, waiting for the frown of disapproval that would announce the old man’s awareness of his presence. The frightening old patriarch and the ominous, ancient fortress were as one in Rob’s mind, and together they affected him as nothing else could.