The Forest Laird (7 page)

This was only the second time I had ever seen Ewan without his longbow and quiver—even when they were not hanging from his body, they were usually within his reach. But this was also the first time I had ever seen him around children other than myself and Will. It was obvious that the children, especially the girls, had been severely warned about their behaviour, but children are children, and I had seen the fearful glances they cast in Ewan’s direction. He had seen them too, of course, and carefully avoided making eye contact with either little girl and kept his face expressionless—insofar as that was possible—at all times.

The wide-eyed children often turned to stare at Will and me as Sir Malcolm told them, in a greatly simplified version, the story of what had befallen us in Ellerslie and later on the road. That we would join the family as adopted sons was not disputed, but there was more to be decided concerning our futures. Will and I could have happily blended into the family’s life, working on the farm to earn our keep, but Father Peter and Brother Duncan were firm in their opinion that we should be educated as befitted our stations as the sons of a landowner and the adopted sons of a belted knight. Father Peter suggested that we be sent to Paisley Abbey as students, where he and Brother Duncan could oversee our studies. Sir Malcolm glanced at Lady Margaret, who nodded, and then he thumped his fist upon the table and declared it should be so.

I was excited at the prospect of going to school in the Abbey. Even in the far west, in Kyle, we had heard tell of the great Cluniac Priory of Paisley that had been famed for a hundred years before being raised to the exalted status of an Abbey. It was one of the wonders of the realm, as grand as the famed sanctuaries at St. Andrews, Glasgow, York, and London.

Will, though, was far from happy with what was transpiring. I could see both misery and panic in his eyes as he tried to come up with a sound reason for objecting to the elders’ proposal. Paisley lay seven miles from Elderslie, a mere two-hour walk at a fast pace. But that time doubled if you had to return within the day, and we already knew that Will’s scholastic life as a student in Paisley would be too full to permit any such effort. He would not have four clear hours and more in any day—and that fact eclipsed any possibility of his being able to work with Ewan on his archery. Both of us knew that Ewan had made no such commitment to Will, but Will ignored that truth. He was determined to become a longbow archer, and he was determined that Ewan Scrymgeour would be his tutor and trainer.

The entire dilemma was resolved within moments, however, when Sir Malcolm brought up the matter of our lodging. We could live at the Abbey, he said, as part of the establishment, but having endured and hated the same regimen himself as a boy, he believed that complete immersion in the Abbey’s life might be unhealthy for us over the long term if we were not cut out by nature for the priesthood. Better, he suggested—ignoring the startled silence from the two clerics at the table—that we study at the Abbey school for the sake of our minds but remain lodged outside the precincts for the sake of our growth and independence.

Father Peter expressed his dismay at that, pointing out what he perceived to be obvious: the mere idea of our living unsupervised beyond the Abbey and its discipline was untenable, he said. We were too young to know our own minds, and that, to him, opened us and our immortal souls to great risk.

Sir Malcolm sat back in his chair and eyed his brother shrewdly. “It is not their souls I am concerned about, Peter, but their minds,” he growled. “You and your brethren should be able to see to their souls. My thought is to ensure their minds are left free to grow without being influenced by too much … sanctity.”

He raised a hand to forestall the other, whose eyes had gone wide with pious outrage. “I know, I know what you’re thinking and I’ve heard it before. There canna be such a thing as too much sanctity. But I am here to tell you that there can. I, too, studied at the Abbey. The years I spent there taught me many things, among them the basic truth that while some men and stripling boys may thrive on being surrounded all the time with clouds of incense and constant choruses of prayer and hymns, others will not. I was one who did not, and I thank God I had the will and strength of mind to come through it unscathed. But I could name you others who did not fare so well, men who, as young lads, lacked the temperament that you call vocation, yet lacked the strength forbye to overcome the guilt of being seen by themselves and others as unfit to hear the calling. To this day many of those who survive are blighted by their failure, condemned to live as half-formed beings, neither men nor priests. Unable to enjoy the companionship of women yet incapable of renouncing them, they live between the two worlds of normal humanity and sanctity. I will not risk that happening to my wards, and if you seek to argue with me you will leave my house, so pay attention to me. I am not proposing anything unfitting, merely that the boys live outside the Abbey while they study within it. As to their ability to do so without supervision, I take your meaning and I am not entirely witless.” He turned in his chair to look towards the rear of the room. “Master Scrymgeour, will you come forward?”

A quick frown came to Ewan’s face, but he moved towards the table obediently and stood behind Brother Duncan at the lower end, directly opposite Sir Malcolm.

“We are all in your debt, Master Scrymgeour, and I told you on the day that you arrived that I could easily find work for you here in my household should you wish to stay. It comes to me now that I have a more important task for you than I originally thought.”

Ewan was still frowning slightly.

“An uncle of ours died three years ago in Paisley, another Malcolm Wallace. He was my godfather and I was named for him. He was old and had outlived all his family, and so his farm and his lands passed down to me.” I saw Father Peter’s expression soften as he realized where this might be leading, and he sat back in his chair “It is a small farm,” Sir Malcolm continued, “though larger than some around it, and it has pleasant lands attached to it—a large apple orchard, a fine paddock, and several arable fields of good size, forbye the house itself and surrounding byres and pigpens. I have done nothing with it these three years, despite my best intentions, and I fear it is falling into disrepair.

“Now, I know you have said you are not a farmer, but your father was, and this place I speak of is far richer and more fertile than your father’s place that you described to me. If you have any feeling for the land at all, I think you might enjoy it. I wouldna set you to the plough, though, unless you chose to be a ploughman. You would be my overseer, your charge to see the farm well kept and well worked, without theft or shirking by the men I’d send you. The house is big enough to need a cook and a housekeeper, and large enough to accommodate you and my two new charges. By day you would be my factor. By night, you would tend and guard the boys, keeping them at their books and out of mischief. What say you?”

Ewan’s eyes had grown wider as he listened, and now the big archer hesitated, looking from Will to me to Sir Malcolm. “You would entrust me with this?”

“I would, for I believe you worthy of trust. I decided that when first we spoke in this very room, you and I. As well, these boys have seen much evil this past week, but they appear to see no evil in you. Were it otherwise, I wouldna have mentioned it.”

Ewan hesitated again, then nodded decisively. “Then I will do it. Gladly.”

3

I
loved the library at the Abbey from the moment I first saw it, despite the glowering look of displeasure from its warden, Brother Duncan, each time he thought I came too close to touching any of the treasures on display there. The occasion was our first day as students, and we were taken on a tour of the Abbey and its precincts by a visibly long-suffering monk called Brother James, who left us in no doubt of our menial status as newcomers and ignoramuses.

We had begun by visiting the Abbey church itself, primarily because it was empty of priests and worshippers at that time of day, after morning prayers and before nones, the afternoon prayer gathering that would fill the church again. And seeing it deserted, we experienced its humbling vastness, craning our necks as we peered up at the massively vaulted roof that was so far above us that its height defied belief. We stood abashed, side by side in front of the high altar, speechless with awe at the opulence of the shrine and the sheer scope of the sacred space surrounding us.

Brother James gave us little time to absorb its beauty, though. He hustled us away, impatiently identifying the various areas of the building, from nave to transept, sanctuary and choir, baptismal font to votive chapels to confessionals, telling us where we would be permitted to go and where we were forbidden to approach, let alone trespass, and he sneered at every turn, as though incredulous that anyone could be as ignorant as we were of such self-evident verities.

When we had finished in the church, he hurried us along the cloistered walkway outside to the corner of a vast quadrangle that lay beyond the Abbey proper, striding so quickly that we almost had to run to keep up with him. Meanwhile he spat out the names and functions of all the buildings that surrounded the quadrangle, all necessary to the maintenance of such a complex community: stables and dairy, cowsheds, pigsties and goat pens and sheep cotes and fowl yards and stone-built barns of fodder for all those creatures; wool manufactories with wheels for spinning yarn; charcoal pits; sawyers’ pits; a shoemaker and cobbler’s shop; a busy smithy filled with smoke and sparks and noise; a wheelwright’s shop; a harness maker’s barn for saddlery and trappings; pottery manufactories with potters’ wheels and kilns for baking pots and bricks; bakeries and a brewery; tanneries and a cooperage where new-made barrels were stacked up to the roof; dyeing vats and felting ponds stinking of sheep’s urine, and clothmakers’ galleries with different-sized looms and what seemed like miles of shelving laden with bolts of woven fabric. There were also carpentry shops and stonemasons’ yards; metal and glassmakers’ foundries; roofed threshing floors surrounded with bales of straw and mountains of hay; a stream-fed mill for grinding grain; storage houses for lumber, fine woods, grains, oats, barley, flour, hides, beer, and a hundred other things, and a long, low building in a far corner of the complex where the sole occupation of the brothers assigned there was the manufacture and preparation of fine vellum sheets for use in the scriptorium, the writing room attached to the library. And, of course, there were men everywhere, swarming like ants wherever I looked, and so I asked Brother James how many monks were in the community.

He stopped in mid-word, plainly astonished that I would dare to interrupt him, and an angry surge of red suffused his narrow face. “That is none of your affair,” he said venomously. “Suffice you should know there are enough to live and work together to keep the likes of you in more comfort than you merit.” And then he strode away, not waiting for us to follow. I looked at Will and saw the broad grin on his face, and I knew two things with certainty: I had made an enemy on my first day here, and Brother James had never had any idea of, nor interest in, the size of the community to which he belonged.

Hurrying to fall into place behind him again, I wondered how that could be so, and suddenly, even at that young age, I understood that such oblivion, for many men, must spring from a monkish and unchallenging existence. Brother James’s place within the Abbey’s ranks was finite, his duties clearly defined. He had no need for curiosity, no reason to explore his surroundings. By asking him a question that he could not answer, I had, in his mind, attempted to belittle him. I resolved to say not another word that day.

My resolution vanished as soon as we entered the library. I still remember the awe, verging upon sanctity, that swept over me as soon as I crossed the threshold. Though I often thought, afterwards, that
sanctity
should have been a strange descriptive after having so recently seen the majestic interior of the Abbey church, I never sought to change it, because the reverence I felt in those first few moments never faded, and it remains with me to this day. This, I knew instinctively, was a place of wonders and incalculable value, of power and mysticism, of great learning and knowledge, and of immense worth, inestimable beauty, and abiding peace and tranquility—grand words, I know, for a small boy, who knew none of them at that time and nothing at all about libraries.

I know I stood gape-mouthed, because Brother James hissed angrily and pushed me sharply forward into the soaring space that was filled with light, brilliant with stark-edged sunbeams and dancing dust motes. I knew the floor beneath my feet was of flagged stone like all the other floors, but somehow it felt softer, cushioning my soles from making any noise that would disturb the peace. Scattered throughout the central space were tables, some large, some small, some flat, and others sloped like pitched roofs, and all of them covered with books and parchments.

I saw three men in there at first, then four and then five, all of them hard at work. Two of them glided silently along the walls beneath high, pointed windows filled with thousands of tiny, diamond-shaped panes of clear, green-tinged glass, each man stooping to peer into deep, box-like shelves filled with rolled parchments and big leather-bound books. The other three sat hunched, with pens in their hands, each focused on the parchment sheet in front of him. Brother James cleared his throat loudly and all five men turned to us. One of the three writers rose from his seat and came swiftly towards us.

I heard Will quietly gasp, and then I recognized the sombre, scowling face of Brother Duncan.

“Brother Armarius,” our guide greeted him. “These two are new boys. Father Abbott instructed me to show them the Abbey and to bring them here last.” He did not attempt to name us, and I knew he could not have done so. To him, we were nameless nuisances, inflicted upon him as a penance for some unremembered sin.