The Hammer of the Scots Read Online Free

had suddenly risen from the board without any reason – and afterwards could not say why he had done so. Almost immediately part of the roof had collapsed, killing his opponent at the board.
    They both turned their faces to the shore and now his thoughts were going back to his attempts to recover his strength after that poison had entered his body. He remembered the throbbing pain of his lacerated arm and the agony of the knife which had cut away the gangrenous flesh and the looks on the faces of those about him which showed clearly that they believed they would leave him behind in the Holy Land.
    But he had survived. By God, he thought now, there had been so much to survive for. There was England which would be his. There were his wife and his children … his father and mother … the sacred family which he had been brought up to believe was the most important thing a man could possess. But there was something more important if that man was a king. He had known it for a long time. The blood of his ancestors was in him and sometimes in his dreams it was as if those great men of the past came to him. William the Conqueror, Henry the Lion of Justice, his great-grandfather Henry II – those men who had cared for England, who had made it great. It was as though they said to him, ‘It is your turn now. You have the qualities we need. You, Edward Plantagenet, with the blood of the Normans in your veins. England – our England – has suffered through the weakness of your forebears. Rufus, Stephen, Richard – that brave man who deserted his country for a dream of glory in the Holy Land – disastrous and devilish John, and lastly – oh, yes, we know you do not like this – Henry, the father whom you loved, and who all but destroyed his country because he was so busy loving his family and pleasing an extravagant wife, who was always begging for luxury and draining away the life blood of the nation’s trade. You know this, Edward. It is for you, who are one of us, to save England.’
    ‘I will,’ he murmured. ‘God help me, I will.’
    He had of late realised his great responsibilities. After the affair of the poisoned dagger, it occurred to him that he did wrong to place himself in danger. His father was ageing and though he, Edward, had two sons in the nursery, John and Henry were but babies. His strength had been impaired; he needed the temperate climate of his own country. He had seen that there was no hope of conquering the Saracen. Others before him had failed in that endeavour. Even the great Coeur de Lion had not succeeded in capturing Jerusalem.
    When an opportunity had arisen to come to terms with the great Sultan Bibars he had taken it. A truce … it was all he had achieved but that could mean a few years’ respite. All that blood, all that danger to achieve that! His arm was painful; it had affected his health, he believed. He ought to go home, for who knew what the barons would be plotting? They were always suspicious of his father and they hated his mother, whose extravagance Edward knew in his heart should be curbed. A nation’s wealth should not be spent on banquets and fine jewels, indulging an extravagant wife and bestowing gifts and pensions on her impecunious relations. Much as he loved his father he could see clearly his shortcomings as a king.
    So he had left the Holy Land and in Sicily the heart-rending news was brought to him. First the death of his eldest son John. Poor Eleanor had been stricken with grief. She had asked herself whether she had been wrong to go and leave her children, and could not stop contemplating what a bitter choice a wife had to make when it was a question of leaving her children to be with her husband.
    There had followed the news of his father’s death. That had prostrated him indeed. He shut himself away from everyone, even Eleanor, and brooded on the loss of the kind parent who had loved him so dearly. He remembered how in the days of his childhood they had played