The Guardian (54 page)

Earl Warrenne sat silent for a while then, stroking his nose absently with a long, bony finger, but he finally sat up and gripped the arms of his chair, then bent forward and turned to peer at his companions on that side of the table. “Does anyone have anything to say?” he asked.

His grandson Henry Percy leaned over to whisper in his ear. The older man’s eyes grew wider as he listened.

“Quite right,” he said, nodding. “Quite right.” He raised a hand to the captain of his guards, who had been watching, hawk-like, from just inside the entrance flaps, and then raised his voice to address not just the five Scots but the people lining the walls. “Would everyone go outside, if it please you. We need to speak privily here.”

On our way out of the tent I pulled Thomas close. “I need to talk to Lindsay, the one whose father Warrenne knew. He speaks French, so introduce him to me in French, and then go on and speak to the Steward. They all think you’re an Englishman, so they’ll probably be unwilling to speak with you, but that’s good, because it will keep the guards’ eyes on you and them and away from me.”

He did not even look at me but changed direction immediately and walked to where the Scots emissaries stood isolated from everyone else, under the vigilant eyes of a dozen guards who kept their distance but were evidently ready to move quickly if need be.
He nodded courteously to the Steward and the two mormaers, who eyed him suspiciously, but he was soon chatting easily with Lindsay and asking him, in English, if he spoke French. I stood close by him, saying nothing, and Lindsay looked curiously at both of us before nodding and saying that he did. Thomas smiled then and indicated me, and I took the conversation from there, smiling uncertainly and bowing and bobbing and generally playing the fawning, bumbling fool until I was sure no one was watching us.

“We don’t have much time before they call us back inside again. What are you people doing here, Sir Alec?”

“I’ll ask you the same question.”

“I’m spying, for Lamberton of Glasgow. I’m sending out dispatches to Will every day, but because of the foul weather I’ve had nothing substantial to report yet—other than the obvious information, of course.”

“What obvious information? Battle plans?”

“Nothing that grand, I’m afraid. If Surrey has battle plans, he hasn’t yet decided to share them with his troop commanders. I’ve no doubt he will, once he is safely ensconced in Stirling Castle, with dry clothing on his back and a roof over his head and the leisure to think ahead and make plans. And as soon as he does, I’ll send the word on to Will. In the meantime, I’ve been able to send him details on the numbers and disposition of the English army, but the really important information is that de Warrenne has almost ten thousand infantry with him, counting the contingent under Cressingham. He has more than fifteen hundred heavy horse, three hundred of them knights, a few minor barons among them, and the rest well-equipped men-at-arms. And he has more than a thousand Welsh archers, to boot. But they have no siege engines, which means they have no plans to besiege anyone.”

“Why should they?” Lindsay was frowning. “We hold no positions worth besieging.”

“That’s not important, Sir Alexander. What’s important is that we
know
they have no siege engines. And we
know
how many men they have, and how they are composed—the numbers and types of weaponry.
That’s more information than most commanders ever discover about the forces opposing them, so Will and Andrew should be able to put it to good use.” I shrugged. “That’s why I am here,” I said. “So why are
you
here?”

Lindsay’s eyes swept around, looking for possible eavesdroppers. “For the same reason you are. In search of information, and hoping to postpone a battle.”

“Postpone it until when?”

“Until Wallace is better prepared. As it stands now, he has numbers, but they are all afoot, and that leaves him short of strength overall. He has nowhere near enough archers and no horse.”

“And why is James Stewart here? That seems—”

“He’s here in hopes of discovering when the English intend to attack, for at this time no one can even guess at their intentions. He is also here to lend his authority to what we are trying to achieve.”

“What, undermining Wallace?”

“No! Supporting him, and encouraging others to join us. Lennox stands with us, but Malise is undecided, as are many others. Most of them are dithering, afraid to commit themselves to either side too soon, and so they withhold their support for the rising, unable to see that by so doing, they are endangering the realm. The Steward will speak more of that when we return.”

“So he has no intention of stealing away any of Wallace’s people, and you are truly here to help our cause?”

The look he threw me, of scandalized astonishment, convinced me of his truthfulness even before he said, “You doubt us?”

“I wondered. But no longer. So what is the Steward planning?”

As I spoke, however, a blast from a trumpet turned every head, and the captain of Earl Warrenne’s guard came striding to summon the Scots party back inside. Lindsay nodded tersely and said, “You’ll find that out now,” before moving back to take his place with the others in his group.

Thomas joined me wordlessly, an unspoken question in his eyes, and I nodded to him, indicating that I was satisfied as I fell in beside him, following Lord Stewart and the others back into the pavilion.

The English party were still seated as we had left them, but the expressions on their faces seemed different to me.

Once again, de Warrenne wasted no time. “We have discussed your idea and are prepared to support it. How long will you require to complete what needs to be done?”

Lord James made a moue and spread his hands apart. “That depends upon you, my lord earl. How long can you give us? It goes without saying that the more time we have, the more we might hope to achieve, but we are dealing with small numbers here, and the need for secrecy dictates an equal need for haste. Three days? That seems to me to be a sufficiency.”

“Too long. Two days is all you have, today being gone by now. You will have tomorrow and Tuesday. No more than that. We will rest here tonight and be in Stirling Castle comfortably by noonday tomorrow, and my troops will spend the afternoon and the following day preparing to fight on Wednesday. That will be”—he glanced around, as though waiting for someone to assist him—“the eleventh of September, a date the Wallace upstart will rue for the remainder of his brief life.

“So.” His face held no expression, and even from the side view I could tell that his eyes were as flat and empty as his tone had indicated. “Two clear days. Can you achieve your aims within that time? I ask merely out of courtesy, because in truth it makes little difference to me whether you can or not. My mind is set on it. We will make an end of Wallace and his rabble come Wednesday morning, and be back in the castle by mid-afternoon.”

Lord James inclined his head. “That will work well for us, my lord earl. We will return with the fruits of our labour before you commit your vanguard to the attack. And now we must away, for I would like to gain the Scottish camp before nightfall, to let the word of our arrival spread before we start our work.” He rose from his seat, and the others in his party rose with him.

Earl Warrenne turned suddenly to look at Thomas, a questioning look on his face, and when Thomas nodded, he turned back to the Stewards. “We are about to celebrate Mass, Lord James. Will you
not stay and pray with us? The ears of our Lord are always attentive to devout prayers.”

“Forgive me, but I think not, your lordship. I attended Mass this morning before break of day. Besides, it will take us a good two hours to ride to where we need to be this night, and I have no desire to ride in there in darkness.”

De Warrenne sniffed. “Aye,” he growled. “Nor would I, in your shoes. But tell me this, if you will, because your actions make little sense to me from one particular point of view. Why would you people act against your own? We expect it of you, but it strikes me as being unnatural, notwithstanding our expectations. You are all Scots, all of a kind, and even though the leaders of this rabble are outlaws, they, too, are Scots nonetheless, resisting us in the name of their realm. And so I have to wonder why you would offer aid to us instead of to them.”

The Steward faced Surrey squarely, his jaw jutting pugnaciously. “Out of fear,” he said tersely, surprising me yet again. “Not fear of Wallace or de Moray, or even of their folk, but fear of
losing
those folk, of seeing them slaughtered needlessly and tragically. Because Wallace and de Moray, despite the petty victories they may have won, are tyros—they are untested and unbloodied in the realistic ways of war. They are too young, both of them, untrained and lacking in experience, and they have no older, wiser heads advising them. The successes they have won before this point were all accidental, small in themselves and predicated upon the unpreparedness of the men they fought. These two are upstarts, and like all upstarts, they are dangerous to those around them. They are overconfident, overweening, and overreaching themselves. And as surely as the sun rises each day, they will lead everyone foolish enough to follow them into perdition. They will throw good, honest men, deluded but sincere—and they have
thousands
of them following their lead—into certain death in battle against your veterans, against your banks of archers, your companies of mounted knights and men-at-arms, and your formations of armed and armoured footmen. It will be murder on
a catastrophic scale, and it will destroy this realm’s ability to recover its strength for a generation.”

He stopped, still rigidly erect, his shoulders back and his head high as he glared at John de Warrenne as though defying him to disagree. “That is why Wallace and his accomplice de Moray have to be stopped. That is why we have come to you like this. And every man we can convince to quit his side and sue for amnesty will make this seeming senselessness worthwhile.”

He then inhaled deeply, saluted the group at the table with a clenched fist raised to his left breast, and spun around and marched out, followed by the others in his party.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE FORDS OF DRIP

O
n Wednesday, the eleventh day of September, as de Warrenne had promised, the English launched their attack on the forces of William Wallace and Andrew Murray.

I saw the entire battle from the English side, which is something very few of my compatriots can claim. I celebrated early-morning Mass for the soldiers, then found a vantage point high on the walls above the castle gates, from which I watched them march away, in high spirits, chanting the rough marching songs of their individual divisions as they went. It was soon after dawn, before the new day’s sun had crested the horizon, and the skies were cloudless. The English soldiers’ morale was high, their confidence absolute, and I found myself muttering prayers for my friends in the valley below as I watched the enemy ranks twisting and rippling sinuously as they followed the narrow winding track downward from the castle gates to the causeway that stretched north towards the old wooden Stirling Bridge.

I had thought it odd to have seen no signs of the Earl of Surrey that morning—he seldom missed early Mass—but when Thomas questioned one of his household attendants, we learned that the earl had been awake for more than half the night and had not yet risen. The information was delivered with a broad wink and one finger laid along the speaker’s nose, from which I inferred that his lordship had been the worse for drink when he went to bed, and I thought that strange, too, for the earl, unlike most of his ilk, was an abstemious man, not normally given to excess of any kind. But then I thought that his situation the previous night might well have been less
fraught than I had at first assumed. Certainly there was a battle to be fought the next morning, but in the eyes of Surrey and his commanders—indeed in the eyes of his entire army—that battle was already won, since the rabble of untrained peasantry following the outlawed Scots leaders could not possibly compete with a disciplined English army—an army commanded, moreover, by the very man who had crushed the royal Scottish army and its noble but ineffectual leaders at Dunbar the previous year. And thus the wine drunk that night might have been in celebration of the next day’s assured victory.

It is a fact, witnessed by many including myself, that when Hugh de Cressingham, enormous in black plate armour and mounted on a massive horse, gave the order to the assembled host to proceed that morning, no one questioned his right to do so. He was co-commander of the army, with full power in the absence of the earl, and so the procession moved out obediently in orderly alternating formations of four hundred infantry marching in fours, followed by sixty cavalry riding two abreast. Less than a half-hour after the first columns had set out, though, Earl Warrenne emerged from his quarters in a state of undress and in a towering rage. He had given no orders to proceed, he said, and Cressingham had had no right to usurp his authority as commander of the army. He screamed at his subordinates with a malevolence I had never seen in him before, and heralds were sent at the gallop to stop the advance and order everyone, including Cressingham, to return to the castle immediately. By the time the heralds were able to catch up to the front ranks and present their orders, the sun had already cleared the low hills on the horizon and the leading infantry column had crossed the old bridge. A deal of confusion and much milling about followed thereafter, as the advance formations had to be turned around to reverse their course on the narrow strip of the causeway, no easy feat to accomplish. The exercise was completed, though, and without attracting any unwelcome attention from the Scots, whose closest formations were visible less than a mile from the north end of the bridge.

It was mid-morning by the time the army was re-formed outside the castle gates, ready to march again, and Thomas and I were still perched on our wall above all the activity, waiting, along with everyone else, for Earl Warrenne to issue his own word to advance. He had summoned Cressingham inside to talk to him privily as soon as the treasurer returned, and that conversation had been brief and, everyone assumed, less than comfortable for Cressingham, who had emerged white faced with anger at the end of it and had not spoken a word since to anyone. The earl had then summoned his senior troop commanders, both horse and foot, to an assembly within the castle yard while the army completed its regrouping, and when they finally re-emerged, all of them radiating confidence and eagerness, someone called out the ancient British war cry that had greeted Caesar’s legions when they first landed in England:
hip-hip-hiphurrah
!