The Guardian (11 page)

“And how far remains to Turnberry? I have enjoyed your companionship, Father, but our loving Saviour knows I’m ready to reach journey’s end this day, pleasant as it has been.”

“Six miles, I’d think, something like that. Less than two hours, at any rate.”

“Two hours to kill, then. So what will we talk about now?”

“You tell me,” he said pleasantly. “It should be my turn to talk, in fairness. What?” he asked me, frowning quickly. “What did I say?”

“You said almost nothing, Father. I’ve been talking. For hours.”

“I don’t understand,” he said as I felt my face break out in a wide smile.

“Nor should you,” I said. “How could you?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Father?”

“I’m talking about anything and everything, it seems,” I said, and
then laughed aloud. “Martin, you’ve cured me. I’m talking as easily and fluently as I did before my injuries, and I haven’t been aware of it until this very moment.”

‘What injuries?”

“My mouth, my face.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing, obviously, and for that I thank the Lord God. You have no difficulty understanding me?”

“Why should I?”

“Because—” I realized that I was being foolish. The young priest had never heard me speak before today, so he had nothing against which to judge my prowess. But I had, and I was exultant. I had no doubt I was taking greater care with my enunciation, but I was doing it with ease and confidence. “Because I did not always speak, or sound, the way I do today,” I finished. “But so long as you can understand me without difficulty, then I am content. You were about to take over the talking for this next part of our journey, so tell me about France and the university at Paris. I have never been in France but I’ve heard great things about Paris and its university.”

“Ah! Well,” he said, “if you’ve never been to France, that makes Paris difficult to describe, for there’s nothing here in Scotland, or in Ireland for that matter, that comes close to matching it.”

We conversed on that subject for some time, and I gently twitted Father Martin for his rhapsodic devotion to the beautiful city, to which, apparently, there was not another town in the entire world that could withstand comparison.

“I have a friend who was there for years,” I told him, “and he, too, speaks of it much as you do.”

“Oh? What’s his name? I may know him.”

“I have no do doubt you do. He’s a canon of Glasgow Cathedral.”

“Canon Lamberton! You are a friend of Canon Lamberton? Then you are fortunate indeed.” His tone, verging on reverential, left me in no doubt of his sincerity. “What an admirable man he is. You’ll be surprised to know I owe my current post to him. I met
him there, in Paris, several years ago. We came to know each other slightly, and for some reason he decided I might do well in Scotland. Not too long afterwards, he wrote to me saying he had prevailed upon his bishop to offer me a clerical position on the chapter staff in Glasgow.”

“Aha! And what, precisely, is your function on the staff there, apart from representing the adherents of St. Dominic?”

He treated me to the full glory of his engaging smile. “Well, Father James, to tell the truth, I’ve had no time for staff duty, for I’ve been filling in for you while you have been away. I arrived in Glasgow while you were in the south with your cousin, and when you were unable to return, the bishop set me to completing the assignments you had been working on before you left.”

“I see,” I said. “So you have replaced me …”

“Heaven forfend! No, Father.” He had the grace to look horrified. “No, no, don’t say that. Bishop Wishart has been champing at the bit like a warhorse, waiting for you to climb back into your saddle. He believes that you and I together might make a worthwhile team, if you could bring yourself to work with me, but I swear by all I believe in that the thought of my replacing you has never crossed his mind—or mine. He thinks too highly of your skills and talents.”

I confess his oath of truthfulness set my mind at ease, and I was now more curious about this young priest. Whatever his gifts might be, they must have been prodigious to earn the sponsorship he had won from William Lamberton in Paris. “So,” I asked him, “have you met my cousin?”

“I have, several times now. A fine, big man he is.”

“Is he with the bishop now?”

“No. He was, for a while, but about a week ago he took off back to his forest den.”

“That does not surprise me. Will always was a forester at heart. When did you first meet him?”

“About a month ago, when he returned from Perth.”

Once again the Irish priest confounded me, for the town of Perth
lay far to the north of Glasgow, in the waist of Scotland, close to the Abbey of Scone, which had housed the Stone of Destiny, the sacred stone upon which the Kings of Scotland had been crowned since time immemorial, until Edward had seized it and had it removed to England.

“Perth?” I repeated inanely, as though I had never heard the name before. “What was Will doing up there?”

That earned me another of Martin’s flashing grins. “Why, Father Jamie, you must be the only man in Scotland who would ask that question, for I swear everyone else knows the answer. You know the fellow Ormsby, William Ormsby?”

“That odious man of Edward’s, the fellow he appointed justiciar of Scotland last year, after dethroning King John. I have seldom met a man I disliked so heartily.”

“That’s the very man, instantly and eternally lovable. He established himself in Perth, making it the seat of his justiciary. His prime task was to administer English justice in Scotland and to see to it that all Scots who had not already done so would swear allegiance to Edward.”

I nodded, remembering the outrage that requirement had occasioned. “Swear it not, as they had before, to England’s king as Lord Paramount of Scotland, but to Edward Plantagenet the man. And worse,
in person
.”

“Ormsby was authorized to use any means at his disposal to achieve that objective,” the Ulsterman continued, “and he quickly made himself detested by everyone who encountered him.”

“Detested in Perth, you mean.”

“Aye, in Perth. He set himself up there because it was within easy reach of all that he wished to plunder. It took no time at all for him to make himself widely loathed.”

“In the north,” I insisted. “His infamy was not so widespread to the south. I heard of what he was doing, but I heard little to convince me he was the kind of devil you describe. Mind you, in those days I was spending much of my time carrying messages to and from Selkirk Forest, and that gave me enough to fret about without being
distracted by the outlandish behaviour of another of Edward’s malicious officeholders.”

“You were fortunate to be so well removed from him, then,” my companion said. “Those nearer to him felt the wrath of Hell about their ears.”

“Aye, including Will, it would appear.”

“Including Will, though only indirectly. What I heard was that, just as the fighting ended on the night your cousin overthrew the English garrison in Lanark, someone brought him word that another English force was close by, besieging Sir William Douglas in Sanquhar Castle. Wallace knew the castle was an easy march to the south, and since he apparently admired the Lord of Douglas and the timing seemed right to him, he led his men there, knowing they would feel invincible after their victory at Lanark. They surprised the English from the rear and rescued Douglas, who immediately placed himself under your cousin’s orders and declared himself to be a Wallace man. When they returned to Glasgow together, word of Ormsby’s most recent excesses had everyone agog with outrage, and a short time later they departed on horseback bound for Perth.

“Of course they were unexpected, and the raid was a complete success. Ormsby barely escaped being taken and had to flee, leaving all his possessions and his entire baggage train behind as booty for the raiders. Your cousin’s reputation grew greatly with that exploit.”

I was confused. “On horseback?” Will, I knew, was a fair horseman, trained by the stablemen on our uncle Malcolm’s estate in Elderslie, but his men were rough forest outlaws, bowmen, mostly, and all ordinary peasant folk, none of them wealthy enough ever to have thought about riding, let alone owning, a horse. “How was
that
accomplished? And who on earth could have paid for such an expedition?”

“Now there I cannot help you, Father. You’ll have to ask that of the bishop when we find him, for he’s the man with all the information you’re seeking. All I know is that Ormsby needed to be stopped, dramatically and publicly, and the Perth raid achieved that. But I have only the vaguest understanding of the politics involved. I know
they were as much religious as they were regal. Bishops and princes, Church and state all intermingled. Edward wants to make Scotland’s Church answerable to York Minster, just as he wants to see all Scotland under the heel of his tax collectors. And to defeat those aims, William Ormsby, justiciar of Scotland—the King of England’s hated functionary—was sent packing, ingloriously. But without your cousin there as leader, the raid would not have had anything near the same effect.

“The ordinary folk,” he went on, “have no trust in the magnates. They never have.”

I slowed my pace gaping at him.

“Why should they?” he continued. “How
could
they? The magnates—earls, barons, lords, or knights—have no time for
them
, the ordinary folk who live on their lands and keep them fed. The commoners are given no consideration at all, other than how they might be used and squeezed harder and farther to the benefit of their betters. It has been that way for hundreds of years—so much a way of life that no one has ever thought to question it. Until now. The people—the common folk—are growing aware of themselves and of the power that lies within them—power to say aye or nay, in one united voice, when they so wish.”

I was shaking my head even as I listened. “This is nonsense, Martin.”

“Is it? Is it nonsense that when most of the noblemen of Scotland are in English jails, your cousin Will’s name is on the lips of every man, woman, and child in Scotland? Is it nonsense that the people flock to him from everywhere, shouting his name and willing to risk their lives for him—ordinary men who would never have dreamt of taking up weapons in their own cause before he came along? Is it nonsense that this man, your own cousin, holds no knightly rank but yet commands an army? That has never happened within this realm since the Normans first came north from England, and believe you me, Father James, it is a development of great significance for every living being in this land, for it must mean that nothing can ever be the same again. The Scots folk have found a leader they can follow
willingly—William Wallace. One of their own kind, from their own ranks. And they are raising a collective voice in his support that no man has ever heard before.”

“That is …” I began.

“That is God’s own truth,” he said. Then he stopped suddenly, and held out a hand to stop me, too, as he gazed at something ahead of us. I peered into the distance and tried to make sense of what appeared to be a dead man lying in our path, some hundred and fifty paces away.

“Mother of God,” I whispered, my mouth suddenly gone dry. “What have we found?”

Father Martin’s arm stretched out to stop me as effectively as an iron bar. “Don’t move,” he breathed. “Stand absolutely still.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

LOAVES AND FISHES

“A
re you hungry, Father James?”

The words were jarring to my ear. Here we were, faced with a corpse, perhaps murdered, and my companion was speaking of being hungry. Appalled, I turned to look at him and felt my mouth drop open when I saw the smile on his face. He was not looking at me, though. His eyes were fixed on the body on the ground ahead of us. I looked back, just in time to see the “dead” man move, and at once felt light-headed with the relief of recognizing that I had been mistaken.

The man lay on his side more than a hundred paces from us, surrounded by rough tussocks of grass at the very edge of the riverbank we were following, and now I saw that he was fishing, peering fixedly down into the stream that flowed within a foot of his lowered face. His right arm was bared to the shoulder, its ample sleeve pulled high up to his neck, and his arm hung motionless, stretched down into the water beneath the bank. At the end of that arm—and I knew this as surely as I knew my own name—barely within reach of his stretched, caressing fingers, lay a fat-bellied trout, being lulled and cozened towards sudden death as its would-be killer prepared, with great patience, to snatch it up and throw it onto the grass at his back.

Martin spoke quietly. “I wonder if he has had any luck.”

“Pray the Lord he has,” I said reverently. “Allied to a kind and sharing nature.”

At that moment, the motionless form convulsed in a sudden heave and a spray of upflung water that caught the light of the afternoon sun and scattered like beads of glass. My eyes fastened upon
the silvery form of the large fish at the centre of the commotion as it soared through the air, scooped up and tossed to the grassy bank by its successful stalker. As soon as the creature landed, the fisherman pounced upon it and gripped it firmly in one hand while dealing it a solid rap on the head from a short cudgel that he had held prepared.

Martin gasped. “Sweet Jesus be praised—that’s his lordship!”

It was indeed. Within the space of two heartbeats, the unknown fisherman had been transformed. The head now bared to the sunshine bore the unmistakable square tonsure of holy orders, and the nondescript, brownish robe the fellow wore was revealed as one of the rich brown, green-edged cassocks that were the chosen garb—some said the episcopal livery—of our employer and superior in Christ, Robert Wishart, Lord Bishop of Glasgow.

I hurried forward to offer him my hand. The sprawling man, clutching a glistening fish in one strong hand and his cudgel in the other, looked up at me with surprise and dawning recognition on his face. He was utterly without dignity in that moment, his legs kicking beneath his cassock as he struggled to regain his balance and sit up without using his hands, and as I looked down at him, a voice warned me to pay heed and take care at the same time, or I would be crushed by what this most powerful and dangerous prelate in Scotland would bring about. Now, six and forty years later, I recall that never-again-heard voice as being oracular.