The Forest Laird (26 page)

“Holy Mother of God!”

My lips continued to move, but nothing more emerged, and Will paid no attention anyway. He spoke almost to himself.

“They were taken unawares on their way to worship God, and they were ravaged by devils. Even the old wife, Mirren’s aunt. Two of them were killed on the spot, the others left for dead.”

“Which of them were killed?”

He looked at me almost absently. “The mother, Meg Waddie, Mirren’s aunt. And her eldest daughter, Christine. I think the old woman might have died of fright. But the daughter was clubbed to death. When I find the man who did it, he will regret that his bitch mother ever whelped him. I will feed him his own balls, I swear, fresh cut from their sac. And I will find him, Jamie. Believe you me.”

I did. I believed him implicitly, appalled and fascinated by the look in his eyes.

“But work like this is no fit matter for priests, Jamie. You would please me more were you to look to the women, see to their comfort.” He jerked his head, flinging his soaked forelock away from his eyes. “I heard someone say they were taken to the nuns. Mirren is with them, wherever they are, and I left Ewan with her. He can help her with whatever needs to be done, and it will be good for everyone to have a priest to hand. I came out here to try to find out who did this, but there’s nothing here.”

“Oh yes, there is.” Now that my mind was functioning again, I was looking about me and seeing what was really there to be seen. “See those marks there?” I pointed to a series of three footprints that had clearly been made by three different feet, slightly to my left and leading to a rain-swollen streamlet. It was plain that the three men had each jumped across the water, planted a foot on the far bank, and used it to push off in a scramble to the top of the gently rising slope.

I crouched beside the footprints and touched the rows of small, deeply indented holes with my fingertips. “Look,” I said. “Hobnails. Who wears hobnailed boots?”

“Men at arms.” Will’s voice was strangely quiet. “Regulars. Supplied by a quartermaster.”

“And what does that tell us?”

“The whoresons were English. Almost certainly. As far as I know, none of the Scots magnates has the kind of wealth that pays for hobnails for their men … Which means that when we find which English baron has troops in the vicinity, we’ll know where to look for the culprits in this day’s madness.”

Duncan spoke for the first time. “Might not be a baron. I’ve heard of no baronial forces near here, not recently.”

Will growled in his throat. “Baron, earl, or plain damned knight, I care not. If there’s an English force within walking distance of Paisley, I want to talk to its commander, though it be Edward Plantagenet himself.” He looked at me. “How can we best find out?”

I glanced at Duncan. “At the Abbey, wouldn’t you say?”

3

W
ithin half an hour of returning to the Abbey, we knew that an armed force of some two hundred men belonging to Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, had bypassed Paisley two days earlier and made camp less than six miles farther on, towards Glasgow, to await the arrival of Bek himself from Norham, where he had been in attendance upon King Edward. Bek had served as King Edward’s lieutenant in Scotland for two years, since the commencement of the prenuptial arrangements between the Maid and Edward of Caernarvon. Renowned for his fierce piety, his single-minded dedication to his master’s affairs, and his intolerance of anything that threatened either of those, he nevertheless had a reputation for even-handedness, and no one had yet accused him of anything dishonourable in his treatment of the Scots.

Will was sitting across the table from me, and I found him staring at me and nibbling at the inside of his cheek in what I knew to be an indication of deep thought. I knew, too, that he was not watching me but staring through me, his eyes and his thoughts focused on matters far beyond the room in which we sat.

“What think you, Will?” I asked. “What should we do?”

I watched his eyes readjust to where he was, and as they shifted and grew more intense, his face darkened into the scowl I had become too familiar with in the past hour, so that I thought:
This isn’t my cousin Will. This is Wallace, the wild one.

He scratched at the stubble on his chin as he answered me. “What we
should
do and what we
will
do are two different things, Jamie. We
will
go and talk to Bishop Bek, but what we
should
do is follow those tracks to wherever they lead us and then spill the blood of every shifty-eyed whoreson we find at the end of the trail.” His voice emerged flat and emotionless, but I had known this man all my life and I knew the effort he was expending to keep his quivering fury concealed.

“What if Bek won’t talk to us?”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why would he not? I’ll go to him as my uncle’s messenger. He’ll listen to Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie, if not to plain Will Wallace.”

I didn’t doubt what he said, though I saw no benefit in pointing out to him that Bek might well know that Sir Malcolm was dead. “When will you go?”

“This minute.”

“No point in that, Cuz. He’s not there, remember? He was in Norham yesterday, for the auditors’ decision, so even supposing he left immediately after that, he would barely have had time to get here.”

“The messengers got here last night.”

“Aye, but they were messengers, Will. They rode non-stop, in relays. Bek is a Bishop. He will travel at leisure and in dignity, so it will be at least tomorrow before he shows up.”

“Do we know where his army is encamped?”

Duncan shook his head. “Not precisely, though we can easily find out.”

“Find out, then, as quickly as you can,” Will growled. “I want to be there by dawn.”

I looked at him. “Why so early? Bek won’t be there at that hour.”

“No, but I’ll be waiting when he gets there.” He stood up. “In the meantime, I’m going to find Mirren, if only to wrap my arms around her and dry her tears. I’ll see you all later.”

“Wait.” I pushed away from the table. “I’ll walk with you, at least part of the way.”

Neither of us spoke again until we were beyond the Abbey gates, on our way into the town. I knew he was thinking about Mirren and I had no wish to interrupt him. The tragedy of what had happened to her aunt and her cousins would no doubt have appalled her, but from all I’d heard she was a strong young woman and would take no permanent ill of it. The violation of women, though everyone deplored it, was far from being unknown, after all, and most particularly so when the land was disputed by opposing armies. At such times, the unspoken right to plunder and to violate enemy women was regarded as a victorious soldier’s privilege, and everyone, women included, understood that to be so.

This particular act, however, had not been committed in war. God could not allow it to go unpunished, and I knew my cousin was determined that it would not.

“So, Cousin, what was it you wanted to say to me?” He spoke in Latin, a sure sign that he knew his question, and my answer to it, to be important.

A hundred thoughts sprang to my mind at once, but I forced myself to ignore all of them and respond quietly, also in Latin. “That you should proceed cautiously in this.”

“I should? And why is that?” Will spoke with his head down, his eyes on the pathway ahead of him. “What need have I of caution here, Jamie? Five good women have been attacked and ravaged without provocation. Two of them are dead, with more, perhaps, to follow, who can tell?”

It had stopped raining sometime in the past hour, and the early darkness of full winter obscured everything, save glints of moonlight reflected haphazardly from the puddles all around us, where beams had managed to penetrate the broken mass of clouds overhead. Will sidestepped towards me to avoid a large puddle. “Why should it be
I
who needs to be cautious? The evidence we have found indicates that the women’s attackers wore hobnailed boots, which indicates soldiers, clearly in the employ of some lord wealthy enough to equip his hirelings with such footwear, which means that in all likelihood these murderous animals are English. The only force of English soldiery in the district is commanded by Master Antony Bek, whose pride in his men and their accoutrements is sufficiently well known for him to be called the Warrior Bishop. And
I
have need of caution?

“Now I know I don’t have to tell you, Cousin, that as King Edward’s own lieutenant in Scotland, and as a prince of Christ’s Church, Bishop Bek should decry even the possibility of any man of his being involved in such a crime, and therefore I intend to go and speak with him, to bring the affair to his attention in person. Of course I see a need for respect in how I approach him, taking care to recognize his rank and to offend none of his dignity. That need I can see clearly, and I will attend to it. But you are warning me of a need for caution, and I see no such need.”

As I listened to him, marking the bitterness in his words, it occurred to me that this was the longest speech I had heard Will Wallace make in years. What did
not
occur to me, though—in fact I only thought of it long afterwards—was that he had spoken with authority, with the assuredness and conviction that comes only after months and years of performance. I completely missed the evident fact that my closest friend and dearest relative had become a leader in his own right, accustomed to speaking with conviction to men who listened to him closely.

And so, in my ignorance of what had happened to him in the previous two years, I continued talking to him as though he were still the lad I had known before.

“I’m not talking about—” But I fell silent, suddenly aware that he had already responded to what I
was
talking about, even before I had mentioned it.

He cocked his head in a well-remembered gesture and grinned at me. “Come on, then, spit it out. What’s on your mind?”

I sucked in my breath “Caution … the need for it, despite what you say. I want to come with you tomorrow. When you meet the Bishop.”

“There’s no need for that. Or do you think I’ll need your protection?”

“No, but I think it might not hurt to have a cleric there prepared to swear an oath to bear witness on your behalf. Even such a poor half-cleric as I am.”

He grunted in what might have been a laugh. “You are something of a neither-nor, aren’t you? Ewan told me that your ordination was postponed when the Maid died. But that was a long time ago. Will you ever see ordination?”

“Aye, within the month, in fact, in time for Christmas. And nothing will stop it this time.”

Will stopped in his tracks and grasped me by the upper arms, tilting his head to catch my face in the light of the moon. “You will be priested then? Truly? Then by the living God, I will be there to stand witness to it, unless God Himself sees fit to blast me before the day. I’ll be there, Jamie, as God is my judge.”

“Good, then, and I’ll be there with you, come morning, when you meet Bek, as God is my judge, too.”

4

S
ometime before noon, Bishop Antony Bek of Durham, or one of his close associates, committed what I have come to believe was the single most costly error of Edward Plantagenet’s entire reign as King of England, casting the die for the ruination of his ambitious plans for Scotland.

To this day I cannot say with certainty who was truly to blame for what happened that morning. Not even Will could swear afterwards to the truth of who said what and to whom, and he was much closer to the events than I was. That single incident, a visit to a bishop, made in good faith by a man of honour seeking redress for an indefensible transgression against the laws of God and man, might have had incalculably beneficial consequences for King Edward’s designs had it been handled otherwise. But it was not, and the injustice that took place instead became the catalyst that aroused William Wallace to anger and thereafter focused all of Scotland’s rage against the would-be usurpers. Bek’s unconscionable treatment of William Wallace that day threw the English into a struggle that would last for twenty-two years and end with their being driven from Scotland completely.

The day began badly and deteriorated steadily. Will and I presented ourselves at the Bishop’s encampment as planned, unarmed and alone—Will had ordered the others to remain at Paisley—soon after first light, after a two-hour walk through a black, wind-racked darkness that paled gradually into a grey and cloudy dawn. We spoke quietly with the acting sergeant of the guard, at what passed for the main entrance but was really nothing more than an opening in the high hedge that bordered the extensive pastureland Bek had chosen for his campsite.

The guard sergeant, a surly, slovenly looking type, was more interested in impressing his own four-man detachment than he was in listening to what Will had to say. He barely listened, preening for his men all the while, rocking back on his heels with his hands clasped around the buckle of the heavy sword belt at his waist and his face twisted in a sneer. As soon as Will had finished speaking, the lout waved us away with a curse. The Bishop was not yet in camp, he said, and not expected soon, so he wished a pestilence on us and told us to get out of his gateway, out of his sight.

Will showed no reaction to the man’s ill manners; he merely stepped a little closer as the sergeant turned away and requested, respectfully, that we be permitted to await the Bishop’s arrival off to one side, out of the way of the people coming and going to and from the camp. The guardsman swung around, starting to raise his fist, but then he stopped, doubtless noting the width of my cousin’s shoulders and the depth of his chest. His fist opened up and he flicked his hand, indicating a nearby log that had obviously been used as a seat by many people over many years. Will nodded his thanks mildly, and together we crossed to the log and sat down.

As I passed the gateway in the hedge, I took a look through it, and was surprised by how empty the place looked. There was nothing to indicate, at first glance, that this was a military encampment, other than the presence of the guards themselves. The space I could see directly beyond the gates, an empty stretch of sodden turf, perhaps thirty to forty paces deep, must have been used as a parade ground or marshalling area. Beyond the grass, though, almost invisible in the half light, I detected the distant tops of uniform rows of tents rising up from the morning mist behind a row of skeletal trees, and as the light grew stronger we began to hear shouted orders and the sounds of organized military activities back there.