The Forest Laird (55 page)

Will and Andrew changed all that, although the doing of it all was far less simple than that plainly written statement suggests. For the first time, though, between the pair of them they raised an army of the common Scots folk led by men whose sole qualification for leadership was their ability as warriors and leaders. None of these new commanders were high born or titled or otherwise privileged, and none had anything to influence their conduct other than a will to defeat the English invaders. That, in turn, resulted in their having an unprecedented awareness of, and a dedication to, the welfare of the men who followed them and shared their dreams of victory.

I know people today, less than thirty years later, who would dispute that loudly, pointing as evidence to the large number of magnates and high-born lords present at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. But that was later, and their support had materialized with painful slowness during the first long months of the “rebellious” activities of Wallace and Murray. Only when it had become undeniable that the entire populace of Scotland had come out in support of the two rebel leaders, and that no one could hope to stand against them, did the situation change, and then it changed radically, with a sudden and total shift of support among the nobility. In the beginning, though, in the months after I sat there and listened to them talk, there were only Wallace and Murray, two disdained and widely disparaged voices crying, like the Baptist, in the wilderness.

The two men had not yet settled their differences by the time Andrew Murray left to return to the north, but they had arrived at an agreement. Will himself would not appear as a leader in the fighting. His oath to remain with his family precluded that. But otherwise he warranted that he would commit his full support, using his name, his influence, and his outlawed followers to raise the standard of resistance and rebellion in the south, should Andrew Murray ask it of him in the months ahead.

And the months ahead were active months, since John de Warenne, the English Earl of Surrey whom Edward had appointed military governor of Scotland, seemed determined to pacify the whole country within the first few months of his tenure, sending out large bodies of English troops to patrol the entire land and stamp out any signs of rebellion before they could begin to flourish. Towards that goal, he also set out to reinforce and amplify the English garrisons in various strongholds throughout the land, and Lanark, the jurisdiction of the young sheriff I had met in Glasgow, was one such place. Spurred no doubt by his officious superior, William Hazelrig let it be known that he would not tolerate outlawry, in any sense, in his lands.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1

A
t about the same time that Will and Andrew Murray were debating so earnestly with each other in Selkirk Forest, King Edward’s new treasurer for Scotland, Hugh Cressingham, began to assert his noxious presence more and more visibly. He treated Scotland as a conquered fiefdom, levying taxes here, there, and everywhere in order to pay for England’s foreign wars, and fomenting widespread anger and frustration with his highhanded arrogance. Encouraged perhaps by the overt signs of a widespread English military presence that would back him should the need ever arise, and recognizing that the international trade in wool was the economic engine that had made Scotland prosperous over the past hundred years, he imposed crippling taxes on the gathering, processing, and exporting of wool and thereby came nigh to killing the entire industry within his first year in office. Nurturing Scots trade was of no importance to him, but he smiled with satisfaction as he shipped off enormous sums of Scots money to fill his master’s coffers.

Mirren’s father was one of the Scots merchants most direly affected by these outrageous taxes, because they obliterated his commercial enterprises almost overnight. Hugh Braidfoot had become a prosperous wool trader and broker and a wealthy, respected burgess of Lanark, where his enterprises were headquartered, but his eastern operations, all of them involving the warehousing of wool and its transportation from the eastern Scottish ports to the countries across the North Sea, were vulnerable to Cressingham’s most punitive taxes, and Braidfoot was rendered close to penury within months of the treasurer’s arrival in Scotland.

However, Braidfoot was neither fool nor craven. He determined to fight what he saw as this Englishman’s fiduciary madness, and he set off for Berwick to confront the treasurer, making no secret of his purpose or of his anger and frustration. His intent was to present his case to Cressingham in person and to sue for some kind of reasonable accommodation, some compromise, that would permit him to remain active in his business affairs while continuing to generate taxable revenue in the years ahead.

According to Cressingham and his staff, however, Master Braidfoot never arrived in Berwick, and an extensive search of the town and its environs failed to find anyone who had witnessed him entering the town, though many witnesses elsewhere attested to that having been his destination, and swore to have heard him say he had important business with Cressingham. Hugh Braidfoot vanished without trace on that journey, never to be seen or heard from again, and all his holdings became forfeit to the English administration for non-payment of taxes.

Word of this iniquity was brought to us eventually in Glasgow by a monk from Jedburgh Abbey who had been sent specifically to inform Bishop Wishart of the merchant’s death and the storm of controversy that it had stirred up in and around Berwick. He arrived with his tidings in the middle of March, by which time Braidfoot had been missing for more than a month. The Bishop, not knowing if word of these events would have penetrated Selkirk Forest, dispatched me immediately to take the news to Will and Mirren. I rode my horse hard to get there before either of my friends heard the tidings from any other source, but by the time I arrived the word had flown ahead of me.

Will saw at once that I was disappointed at having brought the news too late and tried to put me at my ease, but I could not be at ease until I had seen Mirren, to gauge with my own eyes how great a toll this occurrence had demanded of her, and to offer her any solace and comfort that I could, as former chaplain to her and her people. She had loved her father deeply, I knew, and would be in great need of support and sympathy, for he had earned her love throughout her life, constantly affording her his encouragement in everything she did.

In the end, it was Mirren who ended up consoling me in my misery over having come so late, offering to pray with me before I ever got around to making the suggestion, and generally making me feel more at ease about her peace of mind.

Already within months of completing her term, she was blithely certain that this time she was carrying a daughter, describing the child to me as a sweet little pippin who would act as a natural braking force upon her ebullient and irrepressible son, whom she was preparing for bed as we spoke. She had even named the child already, she told me, having dreamed of seeing her as a fully grown young woman, beautiful, elegant, and self-possessed. Her daughter would be called Eleanor, in honour of Mirren’s own heroine, the long-dead but greatly revered Duchess of Aquitaine, and Mirren’s mind was made up on the matter. Eleanor Wallace would be as strong a woman as the one after whom she would be named. I listened to her speaking of the child who would be, and I saw how steadfastly she held her own loss at bay, and my heart swelled up with pride and affection for her. Will truly had chosen a pearl beyond price, as the scriptures described.

In the meantime, she said, she was preparing to go home to visit her mother in Lamington, but several matters involving Will had to be settled first, so they had not yet been able to set a departure date.

I knew that Mirren’s mother had never recovered from the wasting illness that had stricken her during the year when Mirren and Will first met. For a long time, everyone had thought she was going to die, but Miriam Braidfoot had surprised everyone with her tenacity. That had been in 1289, and for the ensuing eight years, Mirren’s mother had been confined to her home and, much of that time, to her bed. But she had lived happily enough, sustained by the love of her husband and the friends who surrounded her. Now, though, with her husband’s disappearance and probable death, no one could tell what would happen to the old lady, and Mirren fretted constantly over not being able to rush to her mother’s bedside.

Puzzled by what she had said about Will’s having “matters” to settle, I was about to ask her what was going on, but we were interrupted by the arrival of several women who had come to collect Mirren, and within moments I found myself alone in the darkening little hut. I rebuilt the fire and then wandered outside into the chilly March half light to look for Will.

Later that night, sitting beside Will at dinner, I watched as the crowd hummed around him like bees swarming about a displaced queen, affording me no opportunity at all to ask him about any of the matters that were on my mind. Bemused, I watched the press of people suck every vestige of attention and awareness out of him, and the experience left me dazed. Each time I saw him nowadays, I realized that my cousin had changed since the time before, becoming more and more of a public figure all the time, a leader and a commander of men even though, to me at least, he appeared to make no effort to ingratiate himself with anyone.

I went to bed that night comparing my memories of the shy and diffident but quietly confident Will Wallace with whom I had grown up to the William Wallace I had watched that night, a towering, confident figure filled with gravitas and authority, dispensing advice and encouragement to people, some of whom I knew he had never set eyes on before. And of all the things that niggled at my awareness, the most illogical appeared to be the one that should not have surprised me at all: this new dimension of respect and deference that surrounded him had not come into being until Will swore his oath to protect his family and avoid risking his life in pointless fighting against vested interests and insuperable odds. In avoiding violence and pursuing detachment, my cousin had assumed a mantle he had never thought, nor sought, to wear, and in so doing had become a new kind of champion in the eyes of the common folk.

2

I
saw no signs of Will when I went looking for him after breaking my fast the following morning, but I knew he was nearby, and eventually I found him labouring in the saw pit in the woods beyond the encampment’s southern edge. He was stripped naked, save for a breechclout about his waist, and dripping from the effort of sawing a long, thick plank from a massive oak timber positioned above him over the pit. The fall of sawdust had coated his body, clinging to his sweat-soaked skin and body hair and giving him the look of a great blond bear, and with the enormous muscles of his back, shoulders, and chest engorged by the heavy work, he appeared to be truly gigantic. He saw me coming and he must have read what I was thinking on my face, for he barked a great, booming laugh and heaved himself up and out, beckoning me to follow him as he jogged away towards the nearby stream the men had aptly named the Sawpit Burn. There was a linn a short distance upstream, a waterfall about ten feet high with a large swimming hole scooped from the gravel bed beneath it, and he threw himself into it from the bank, tucking his legs up and shouting in sheer exhilaration as he went, and as the splash died down the surface of the pool was transformed to a golden turbulence by the sawdust released from his body. He surfaced quickly, shook his head violently, then ducked it beneath the surface again, scrubbing at his scalp with both hands before straightening up and flicking his long hair back out of his eyes.

“Hah!” he roared. “That’s better. Give me your hand.”

I reached out and helped him pull himself up the side of the bank, and as he towelled himself roughly I settled myself on a mossy patch with my back against a tree. It was a beautiful late-summer morning, and the sun had barely risen above the horizon. When he was dry, he tied the towel around his waist, then slapped his palms against his bare chest.

“Garments,” he said. “I left them over by the pit, clear of the sawdust. When I am decently clothed again, you and I will be ready for a drink.” He hesitated, head cocked. “At least I will be ready. You have that … devout look about you, Cuz, that
priestly
look.”

“Are you cold?”

“No, not at all. But I am almost naked, so I wish to dress.”

“And so you may, in a moment, but right now I want to talk to you without being interrupted, and I promise I won’t tell anyone you were almost naked when we spoke.”

In response he smiled and threw himself down beside me on the bank, then knocked me off balance with a straight-armed push. “Speak, then, but tell me first, will you be speaking as Father James or as my cousin Jamie?”

“Can I not be both at once?”

“I don’t know. Can you?” He waited for a moment, as though expecting an answer, then grinned slightly. “Never mind. Go ahead. You have my attention.”

I took the time to adjust my robe.

“Your wife tells me you can’t take her to comfort her mother until several
matters
are settled. What kind of matters, I wonder, can be more important than the loss of a beloved father? And no matter what they are, how important can they possibly be, Will, that you would permit them to keep you here when it’s clear Mirren wants to go home to her grieving mother, to share her own grief for her father?”

He sat staring straight faced at me, no trace of raillery in his eyes now, but he made no attempt to speak.

“What, have you no answer? It’s a simple enough question. What is keeping you here when it is so important—to your wife and to her family—for you to travel to Lamington?”

Still he made no move to answer me, and I found myself suddenly impatient.

“Why would you even want to stay here at a time like this, Will? To dispense advice to your followers, the way you did last night at supper? Do you not think your wife deserves an equal or even greater share of your concern than strangers do?”

“It is not that simple.”

“No, it
is
that simple, Will. It’s
simple
. There’s nothing complex about it. You should be taking Mirren home, right now, to be with her mother in her time of bereavement. I fail to see how anything can be more important than that.”

“Right!” His voice was hard edged. “I heard you. But just because you fail to see something, Father, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Do you think I am doing this lightly, without cause? I
can’t
leave here now. Soon, perhaps, I hope so. But not now.”

“Why not?” I pushed.

“Because we’re in crisis.”

“Grave crisis, I assume, though there’s never any other kind. Crisis over what?”

He looked at me, his jaw set pugnaciously. “Over the price on my head and the bounty placed on any of my men taken, dead or alive.”

I felt as though something had writhed and then flattened in my guts.

“That’s new. Not the price on your head, we all know about that, but this bounty is new. We’ve heard nothing about it.”

His eyebrows rose mockingly. “In Glasgow, you mean, at the cathedral? How would you hear of it at all? It’s a local matter, locally imposed and locally enforced.”

“Who set this bounty?”

“A man called Hazelrig. Edward’s new enforcer. His title is Sheriff of Lanark.”

“Sir William Hazelrig? That can’t be. I’ve met him. He impressed me as a pleasant fellow. Except, of course, that he told me how quickly he would kill you if you ever crossed his path. Apart from that, though, I think you would have liked him.”

My cousin was staring at me, both eyebrows raised sufficiently to wrinkle his brow. “You have
met
this man?”

“Yes. I met him in Glasgow at the Bishop’s house. He came up with Cressingham when he came to make himself known to the Scots Bishops soon after his appointment.”

“And you liked him. Did you like Cressingham, too?”

“I disliked him intensely. The man reminds me of a carrion eater. But I enjoyed Hazelrig. I found him amusing and very pleasant.”

“It makes me very glad to know that, Cuz, because your pleasant and amusing acquaintance has hanged two of my men without trial, and ten more who were not my men but were accused of being so. No arguments, no opportunity to deny anything or say anything in their defence. Simply accusation and execution, plain and simple, neat and tidy, and unmistakably English. Oh yes, he’s a very pleasant fellow.” He held up one hand and dipped his head at the same time as though to ask, “What more can I say?” But he remained quiet for long moments before he spoke again.