The Guardian (66 page)

In this instance, he had parleyed with the English commander, eye to eye, and convinced him that, as the last surviving English governor of any castle in Scotland, he ran the risk of being flayed like the infamous Cressingham if he was taken. Roxburgh Castle was deemed impregnable, he pointed out, but he pointed out, too,
that it lacked its own well and depended upon an underground supply of river water that was about to be sealed off because Wallace himself had hired a local stonemason to dam and divert the river channel. He won his gamble, and within a day had taken possession of the ancient castle, freeing its sole prisoner, Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow.

My bishop was free again, and from the moment I learned of it I could hardly wait to finish the report I had been working on—the accounting of the Battle at Stirling Bridge. The preliminary work had all been completed, much of it while I was attending the assembly at Perth, and so I drove my team of scribes relentlessly to complete the project, and on the fourth day after having heard that Bishop Wishart was a free man again, I was satisfied that it was finished and I could return to Glasgow with a clear conscience. I left the work of producing copies in the capable hands of the Augustinian friars, bade my farewells to their holy abbot and his considerate almoner, and betook myself home to Glasgow in the last but one week of October.

The word had spread by then that Will had been raiding widely in the north of England, and the tales of his exploits were widespread, yet most of them were so lurid that I could take little pleasure from them: offensive and outrageous stories about the excesses of his raiders; about the terror his name now generated in the towns of Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland; and about the destruction and despoliation of priories, abbeys, and churches by his people throughout the northern counties. It was not the kind of information I enjoyed receiving about my cousin, even knowing his detestation of all things English, and I sought refuge from it by travelling south alone and on foot, avoiding human contact as much as I could.

Most of my favourite, personally loved places are intimately linked to my boyhood years, and the most important of those is Paisley, with its great abbey church. It makes little difference to me today that the church no longer exists. Edward Plantagenet ordered it burned down in 1307, six and thirty years ago in the first year of
King Robert’s reign, but the abbey church and its magnificent library were indelibly stamped into my most beloved memories long before that infamous date. But my daily loyalty had long since been transferred to the cathedral church in Glasgow. By the time of the Stirling fight in 1297, Glasgow Cathedral had been my home for years, and I always imagined that my footsteps grew lighter and more carefree as I approached it after any absence, no matter how brief.

On this occasion, that was particularly true, for it had been nigh on four months since last I saw my employer. He had sent me off to Selkirk Forest and thence to Moray slightly before mid-June, and already it was mid-October. Now that he was free again, and presumably in good health—for I was confident that I would have heard word had anything been amiss in that regard—I walked in a condition approaching euphoria, my sense of relief and happiness being close to overwhelming.

And so on the morning of Monday, the twenty-first day of October, having completed the thirty-mile journey south from Stirling in two days, I crossed the bridge over the River Clyde and made my way past the wharves and warehouses lining the riverside until I found myself at the Mercat Cross by the town’s salt market. Ahead of me, dominating the skyline, was the massive yet unfinished cathedral church that, along with the natural anchorage of the river channel, gave the small town of Glasgow its prominence.

Eight hundred years earlier, St. Mungo had established his small church by the side of the ford there, at the junction of the river Clyde and the smaller, swift-flowing stream known as the Molindinar Burn, in the knowledge that he would have no shortage of travellers ripe for conversion to Christianity. The ford was the southernmost one on the Clyde, which deepened rapidly as it flowed west to the Irish Sea from that point, and Mungo had fallen in love with the location’s natural, tranquil beauty, naming it
glas gui
, which meant “the dear, green place.” And it really was a beautiful place, only slightly marred in recent years by the commercial shipping activities of the trading fleet that plied regularly between there and Ireland
and less frequently taking the hazardous voyages between the more distant ports of France and Spain. In recognition of its growing importance, the town had been awarded the status of a royal burgh by King William the Lion, and now the burghers, and their town, were prospering. The cathedral had been decades in the building, and would take decades longer to complete, but the glory of God takes no notice of the passage of time.

I entered the cathedral nave almost perfunctorily, not expecting to see anyone I knew there. I genuflected in front of the main altar and then knelt there for a quarter of an hour, curbing my impatience by imposing a penance upon myself and praying for the souls of the unfortunate hundreds who had died at Stirling the month before. Only when I had completed the number of prayers I had decreed for myself did I rise, genuflect, and go outside again in search of my employer.

The residence known as the Bishop’s Palace lay at the rear of the cathedral precincts, and it was more of a defensive keep than a house, though no one had ever been able to explain why a bishop should require a castle keep. I made my way directly to the rear of the interior, where the cathedral chapter maintained a suite of offices for diocesan affairs, and I heard my employer before I ever saw him. The door to his inner office was open and his current secretary, whom I had known for years, was seated just outside it, flicking the tip of his nose with the end of a grey goose quill as he peered down at a document held open on his desktop by a quartet of granite pebbles. He looked up, hearing my approach, and his face broke into a smile, but as he started to stand I waved him back into place and silenced him with a finger to my lips, then walked right into the room beyond the open door.

There was a huge old piece of weathered wood in there, an ancient tree stump that sat upright on the stubs of its dried, sawn-off roots. Its bole, a good fifteen inches in diameter, stretched upwards to the height of a tall, helmed man, and its entire surface was scarred and chipped and scored and dented from years and years of being hacked by swords, or more accurately by
a
sword. It had been in
place when I first arrived there years earlier to take up my duties as a junior secretary, and I had asked about it on my first day because I thought it looked grotesque sitting there in the bishop’s official pontifical office—an unsightly excrescence on a magnificent, highly polished floor of flawlessly milled pinewood. It was the bishop’s aid to meditation, I was told, and my employer would belabour the ancient hardwood mightily as he wrestled with whatever problems were besetting him.

Now His Grace was at it again, and as he came into view I was reminded of my own situation of several months earlier when I had first regained my feet after a long period of being confined to bed. Even though Robert Wishart was no longer young, his shoulders were still broad and square, if slightly hunched, and his back was still wide, though now somewhat stooped. He was working hard, the blade of his sword whistling as he swung it vigorously. He must have sensed someone behind him, for he swung one more hard, chopping blow, then spun to crouch facing me, his blade extended towards me, clutched firmly in both hands. I saw his eyes flare with surprise, and then he straightened up abruptly and lowered his point.

“Jamie,” he said, as though he and I had spoken mere hours earlier. “I was beginning to think the Augustinians were going to keep you up there at Cambuskenneth.”

“No fear of that, my lord,” I said. “I had a task to finish there, and when it was done, I came home. The word of your deliverance from Roxburgh reached us just before I left, and so I wanted to be here to welcome you back to Glasgow.”

He looked careworn, which was not unusual, for he took his duties seriously and always had, and four months away from his seat would have done nothing for his peace of mind. His face, naturally swarthy and weathered, had always been gaunt and lined, but now his cheeks were sunken and the lines in his face were graven deep, emphasizing the hawk-like jut of his great, bony nose and the sharp glint of his eyes blazing out from beneath fierce, grizzled brows.

“They treated you well in Roxburgh, my lord?”

His eyes changed, and then he smiled the little smile I knew so well, the one that told me he had seen through my supposedly innocent question.

“For jailers, you mean? Aye, I suppose they did. They never maltreated me, if that’s what you are asking, but neither did they let me forget for a minute that I was a prisoner. They gave me clean clothes once a month—I was due another just when your cousin rescued me—and the food was edible. Not enjoyable, mind you, nor even plentiful, and there were times when it was barely adequate, but it was edible. The governor there, a man called Grey, had nothing much to say about anything other than warfare and the headaches of running a garrison. A boring man, he was, with little conversation and less humour. Fortunately, I seldom saw him. But I can see from your face you are concerned about me. Do I look that ill done by?”

“No, my lord,” I said, shaking my head. “No, you don’t … You’re merely thinner, I suppose.” I nodded towards the tree stump. “I haven’t seen you whacking that thing in years. Why now?”

He turned away and laid his sword on top of the table. “I felt in need of the exercise. I had little opportunity for anything of that kind in Roxburgh. They seldom let me out of my room.”

I nodded again towards the stump. “I remember that when you used to attack that thing most strongly, it usually meant you had a thorny problem on your mind. You would keep hacking off splinters of tree until you had resolved it.”

He smiled again, a small, lopsided grin. “You remember that, do you? I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. You miss but little.”

“I try not to miss anything, Your Grace. May I ask, then, what’s bothering you now?”

He pushed his lips out in a pout that I recognized as a sign that he was thinking hard, deciding whether to lie or be truthful, and then he brought up his hand and rubbed his nose hard with his open palm. “Damnation, Jamie,” he said. “You never were an easy one to hoodwink, but that’s why I valued you so much.”

He crossed to the table and sheathed his sword, then collected his
scapular from where he had thrown it over the back of his chair and shrugged into it, pulling it down over his head and then arranging it on his shoulders so that it hung comfortably, front and rear. His pectoral cross lay on the table, too, and he slipped its chain over his head, then hesitated in the act of turning back to face me, his eye fixed on the sheathed dagger attached to the sword belt on the tabletop. He reached out with both hands, drew the weapon, and spun on his heel, throwing the blade end over end at the old tree trunk, some eight paces from where he stood. It crossed the room in a whirling blur and struck the trunk hilt first, leaping straight up in the air and clattering to the floor.

“Shite!” His voice was harsh as he crossed to where the dagger lay and picked it up, staring down at it as he tested its edge against the ball of his thumb, and I knew, then and there, beyond a doubt, that he had bad news to break to me.

“What is wrong, my lord?”

“Murray,” he said.

I felt the surprise register on my face and in my voice as I responded, “Andrew?”

“Andrew, his father, and his uncle William. All of them together.”

“Forgive me, my lord, but I don’t understand,” I said. “Andrew is here and the others are imprisoned in England.”

“No, one of the others is in France.” He cut himself short and I could see that he was seething with barely suppressed anger. “Word’s been coming in since yesterday. Three separate messengers, the first of them last night and then two more this morning, one from Bristol and one from Westminster. The Bristol message, a brief letter written in haste by Murray of Bothwell himself, William the Rich, says that by the time anyone reads his words in Glasgow, he himself will be in France with Edward, and he does not expect to return to Scotland. No reason given for his being in France or for Edward’s decision to compel him to go there. No explanation of how, why, or when. Merely the word, sent privily in a letter carried by an itinerant friar who was five weeks on the road from there to here.”

“And the Westminster message?”

“Mere rumour, passed on to me by a friend in the Bishop of Westminster’s entourage, who had heard someone in authority—he didn’t name names—say that Andrew’s father, the Lord of Petty, is dead. Found dead, apparently, of natural causes—or so we are expected to believe—in London Tower. As I say, though, that is no more than rumour. We have no proof of any part of it.” He cocked his head to look at me. “When did you last see young Andrew, and how was he?”

The word of Andrew’s father’s death had stunned me, notwithstanding the qualifier that had been tendered with it, for it meant, among other things, that Andrew might now be Lord of Petty. “Two weeks ago, Your Grace … No, forgive me, it was closer to three, just before he left Stirling to return to Bothwell. He looked well, I thought. As well as could be expected, I mean, after having a sword thrust through his guts. He had lost weight and looked haggard, as you would expect of a wounded man, and he was in no fit condition to ride a horse—in fact, they took him to Bothwell in a carriage— but Will told me he was recovering more quickly than expected. And his condition could only have improved once he reached Bothwell and had access to proper care and rest.”

“Aye, and so it might have. Where was Will at that time?”

“On his way to the Borders. He had left Stirling the day before. What did you mean by ‘so it might have’?”

“Hmph!” The bishop’s grunt sounded disgusted. “I meant had he stayed in Bothwell as he was supposed to, it would have been good for him.”