The Forest Laird (17 page)

“Nobody
told
me … I must have heard it somewhere.”

“Hmm. Then did you happen to hear what I should do now?”

“No, but I know … You should do as she bade you. Look for her in Paisley at her uncle’s house the next time you are free of an evening.”

3

T
he woodsman’s name was Graham, and he came from a village called Kilbarchan, some twelve miles from Elderslie, though he now lived in a bothy on the Bruce lands south of us. Will learned his name quickly, for Graham of Kilbarchan was forever underfoot—like dung on a new boot was how Will put it—whenever he went to Paisley to see Mirren, and he soon grew to loathe the sight of the man. A week elapsed before he could wind up the courage to go and look for her at the home of her uncle, Waddie the wool merchant. He found her without difficulty, for she had been expecting him and was watching for him, but there his true difficulties began.

Mirren’s uncle took his responsibilities seriously, and the safety and moral welfare of his sister’s only daughter while she was in his care was one of his main concerns that summer. The girl was beautiful, and wealthy by Paisley standards, so she attracted admirers and suitors as a blooming bank of flowers draws bees, and Ian Waddie had to deal with all of them.

Unfortunately for Will, he dealt equally with all of them save one, treating them uniformly with hostile disapproval. The sole exception was the young woodsman from Kilbarchan, who was the only son of Alexander Graham of Kilbarchan, another of Master Waddie’s prime suppliers of fine wool. This Graham had amassed sufficient wealth and property in a lifetime of hard work and sharp dealings to make his son appear as a supremely qualified suitor, despite the young man’s general fecklessness, and that impression was greatly enhanced by the father’s advanced age and rapidly failing health. Young Sandy would inherit everything, and for that reason alone, according to Mirren, Ian Waddie would have encouraged his suit even had the young man been a drunkard and a leper.

We spoke about this, Will and I, when next we met, about three weeks after his first encounter with Mirren, and I asked him, naively I suppose, why he put up with the fellow instead of sending him packing. He glanced at me sidelong, and I immediately saw how his involvement with Mirren had already changed him. The Will I had known all my life would have purged the young woodsman from his life as soon as Graham began to be a nuisance. The Will eyeing me now, though, was another person; he flushed slowly, and admitted, sheepishly, that it was Mirren’s idea to keep young Graham close by. The woodsman had her uncle’s goodwill and his full approval to spend time with her, and Mirren was clever enough to know that she could benefit thereby, simply by including Will in their excursions whenever he could arrange to visit Paisley. And when Will could not be there, to keep up the appearance of both consistency and propriety, she invariably invited another from her coterie of admirers to join her and Graham on their evening walks. It worked, of course.

By being unfailingly pleasant and congenial with Graham, yet keeping support and moral guidance close to hand at all times in the form of a third, amorously interested presence, Mirren managed to avoid awkwardness or entanglement with any of the young men, and by the time her stay in Paisley was half over she had overcome all her uncle’s suspicions and won grudging acknowledgment from him that she was more than capable of protecting herself against the blandishments of the local swains. Waddie came to accept that there was nothing he could do to overcome his niece’s refusal to encourage Sandy Graham’s attentions, since it was obvious she did nothing to discourage them, either. Much as he was attracted to the idea of bringing Graham’s wealth into his own family, and by association into his own purview, he was realistic enough to accept that he was not the girl’s father and that the best way to promote his plans must be to gain her father’s support in favour of a union between his daughter and the young woodsman.

I discovered that by merest happenstance, for Master Waddie came to the Abbey one day in search of assistance in composing and writing an important letter, and I was the one assigned to the task by Brother Duncan, since I had performed similar clerical services in the past for several of the town’s merchants. By the time Master Waddie’s letter began to take shape and I began to discern what was involved, I could hardly stop the work in progress. Besides, I judged the content harmless, apart from the sole consideration that its effect might have a bearing on the affairs of my closest friend. And so, in the spirit of the confessional, I resigned myself to keeping its content to myself. Will would never know of its existence, and I would use my knowledge of it only if such knowledge should ever be of benefit.

The letter was, of course, to Master Waddie’s goodbrother Hugh Braidfoot, and it extolled the shining virtues of a potential husband he had found for young Mirren, namely Master Alexander Graham. The letter was duly signed and sealed and sent off to Mirren’s home in Lamington, a few miles outside Lanark town. I no longer wondered about Will’s tolerance of the woodsman Graham.

In the meantime, to Will’s appalled disbelief, the summer weeks sped by and Mirren returned home to her family, leaving him close to despair at the thought of the empty year that yawned ahead of him before she would return to Paisley. He could talk for hours on end, and often did, about the wonders and the exploding complexities of their burgeoning love. Many times I listened to his outpourings almost in disbelief, confounded by the intensity and the passion in what he was telling me and by the mysterious changes the experience had provoked in him. He had kissed her once, he confessed to me in breathless bliss; just once, and fleetingly, seizing a moment when they were alone, and he swore that the taste and textures of it lingered on his lips and in his very vitals weeks later. Floundering with what that could mean, I found myself regretting, almost painfully, that I would never experience such strange and tempestuous sensations.

But then, as time swept onwards, a degree of sanity returned to my cousin’s world, and he became engrossed again in the work that he loved. I became his
ex officio
liaison with Mirren then, serving as postmaster for the bulky letters he inscribed to her almost daily and ensuring that they were forwarded to Lanark in the custody of the regular procession of brothers travelling on the Church’s affairs. Mirren, on her own behalf, had arranged to have her responses returned to me by the same route, though she was far less regular in her correspondence.

Beyond our little world of church and greenwood, much was happening, and none of it, it seemed at first, had anything to do with Will and Mirren. At the Abbey we learned that the magnates of the realm had been successful in their approach to England’s King and had enlisted his aid in assuring the succession to the Scots throne of the child heir Margaret, whom people were already calling the Maid of Norway. A treaty to that effect had been signed at Salisbury in January of the new year, 1289, and a conclusive part of the same agreement was to be added the following year. Under the terms of these twin treaties, which would become known collectively as the Treaty of Birgham, Margaret’s succession was guaranteed by her betrothal to Edward of Caernarvon, the English Prince of Wales. Wondrous news for all who cared, but Will Wallace was much more concerned with his own betrothal, a secret pact about which I had learned only very recently, when his frustration with the slowness of time boiled over.

Royal betrothals were, of course, affairs of state, and ordinary people knew little or nothing about them. We of the Abbey fraternity learned a little more as the proceedings developed, since the treaties were drafted by our religious and clerical brethren in various locations, and the word, privileged and close held as it was, spread quickly through our communities. In those early days everyone was happy with what was happening because it served multiple purposes, not the least of which was a settlement of the increasingly rancorous rivalry between the two noble Houses of Bruce and Balliol—including by extension the House of Comyn, inextricably linked with Balliol through blood and marriage—over their competing claims to the succession. Fostered by those feelings of goodwill, and unbelievable though it seems now from more than fifty years’ distance, no one in Scotland objected strongly to Edward Plantagenet’s claim to acknowledgment as feudal overlord of Scotland in return for his services as arbiter. That was perceived to be a matter of semantics rather than literal interpretation, for the feudal laws of the time attested to the
spirit
of that convention of overlordship—most of the Scots magnates had held lands in England for generations under feudal grants from English monarchs—and the Treaty of Birgham clearly stated that the realm of Scotland would remain “separate and divided from England according to its rightful boundaries, free in itself and without subjection.” No man in Scotland could even have imagined that Edward of England might soon insist upon the
letter
of that unwritten accord and claim the throne of Scotland for himself.

In the eyes of the Scots populace, the single noticeable thing to grow out of those preliminary agreements was an increasing presence of English soldiery and men-at-arms within the realm. It began quietly and with all the appearances of legitimacy; England’s King had declared his goodwill in the matter of the Scots succession and was involved with the magnates of the noble houses in ensuring their commitment to the Birgham agreement. To that end, and on his regal behalf, detachments of English soldiery soon began to move freely throughout the land, tending to King Edward’s affairs and safeguarding his interests, and in the beginning no one, including our little circle of family and friends, paid much attention to their comings and goings.

But within a half year of the Birgham agreement, disquieting stories of English misbehaviour began to circulate, and although many of those were discounted at the outset, the reports became more frequent. All of them described English abuses and transgressions against the common law and the Scots folk, quickly forming a pattern that could not be denied.

Will showed no interest as these reports came to us. I tried more than once to coax out his opinions on the matter, but only once did he respond, on a night after dinner, when Peter and Duncan had been in Elderslie with me. He had refused to be drawn into their debate around the table. Afterwards, though, when only he and I were left in front of the fire, he spoke eloquently, and the quiet fury underlying his words shook me to my core.

“What d’you want me to tell you, Jamie?” He spoke in Scots, not in Latin, and that alone told me something of the depth of his emotions. “That these stories are no’ true? That folk are just makin’ them up to cause trouble? That the English wouldna do such things? For the love o’ Christ, these are the people who cut off wee Jenny’s head and used two wee boys as women. And now they’re doing things folk dinna like … What did anybody expect, can ye tell me that? The only thing that surprises me about it is that it’s ta’en so long for folk to see it. The English treat the common folk like slaves, here for their pleasure, and they’ve done it frae the outset. They don’t think we’re human. What was it Peter said? They lord it over us because they believe, deep down in their bones, that we’re … what in the hell was it? A subservient people. Aye, that’s what he said. They see us as a secondary race inferior to anything that’s English. Shite. Don’t get me started on it, Jamie.”

“I thought you were already started.”

He flexed his shoulders. “Well, what did
you
expect? Are you surprised? You’ve been asking me for weeks what I think of all this, and I’ve been trying not to get involved because I know there’s nothing I can do about it.” He had switched back to Latin.

“So why are you talking about it now?”

“Because I can’t believe how blind people are.”

“Explain.”

“I don’t know if I can, but I shouldn’t need to. Like this nonsense about the Englishry only doing what they do because their local commanders are too lenient. Everybody’s tripping over themselves to make excuses for the poor soldiers, blaming it all on the attitudes of the officers. In God’s name, Jamie, are they all mad? They sound like it, whenever I listen to them. There’s not a single knight, not one petty commander among all the English forces in Scotland, who would dare attempt any of this rubbish unless he knew beyond a doubt that his masters, the barons and earls of England, up to and including their King, would approve of it. And there’s the nub of it. Whatever is happening here, from general disregard for the common law to the organized arrogance with which they swagger through our land, has the support of the English lords and barons. Nobody seems to believe it yet, but you mark my words, Jamie, they will, and by then it could be too late to change it.”

“Then why don’t you speak up?”

‘Me, speak up? Who would listen to me? I’m a forester, Jamie, a verderer. I have no voice that anyone would hear, let alone listen to.”

“Uncle Malcolm would listen.”

“Aye, he might, because I’m family and he likes me, but would he change his mind? That would mean thinking about doing something to change things … and that’s a daunting thought.”

“More people than you think are starting to grow angry, Will. There’s a great swell of discontent spreading everywhere in Scotland nowadays, I’m told.”

“Told by whom?” His eyes were suddenly wide with interest.

I shrugged. “Travellers, visiting priests.”

“Aye, well you know what I think of most priests. They’re great talkers, but they don’t often do much more that that. I put more faith in my opinion of visiting soldiery, and it’s plain to me what that opinion is. The English are here apurpose, and they won’t leave until they have achieved whatever is in their minds, and that means in the mind of their King, this Edward Plantagenet.”

“He is a noble and most Christian monarch, Will. A Crusader.”

He looked at me for long moments and then he hawked and spat into the dying fire. “He’s an Englishman, Jamie, so I mistrust him. If he’s so hotly bound on the welfare of our realm, why has he sent so many of his people here? What’s his intent? And what does he want of us? Today he claims the title overlord of Scotland. What will he claim tomorrow, when his troops are everywhere from Berwick to Elgin?”