The Guardian (28 page)

“I have no idea,” I told him straightforwardly. “But I think I’m glad it did happen …”

He pushed away his platter and wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll tell you, then. What few folk ken is that Andrew and me have kent ane anither for years. Ten year at least. And at the start o’ that time we was close for a while. But then we grew up. Andrew went away to be a squire to some knight down near Edinburgh, to get ready for his ain knighthood, and my da, who was a wool merchant, apprenticed me to a trader in Inverness.”

“And now you’re a prominent merchant burgess. You’ve done well, in a mere ten years.”

He waved my comment aside. “I liked the work and I was good at it, an’ I wis lucky, forbye. I wed the trader’s dochter near five years ago, and her da died o’ an apoplexy the year after that, liftin’ a bale o’ hides. I took ower the place and we did weel. Until the English came.”

“How old were you back then, when you first met Andrew?”

“That was ten years ago. I’d hae been fourteen, thereabouts. The same age as him. Mayhap fifteen.”

“Still an unlikely pairing. And what brought you together in the first place?”

“Love.” He smiled mischievously. “No’ that kind o’ love, Faither. There’s nae need to be scandalized.”

I coughed and swallowed awkwardly, trying to pretend that I had not really been thinking anything untoward, but he ignored my reaction.

“I had a twin sister, Meg. She was older than me by an hour, and she and Andrew liked each other frae the first time they met. And once they had met, they kept on meeting, nigh on every day after that, and I aey had to be there wi’ them, to keep them …” He laughed. “I don’t know
what
I was supposed to keep them. Respectable, or chaste, I jalouse. But there was never any need, for friends was all they were—close and affectionate, but nae mair than that. But that’s how Andrew an’ me came to ken each ither. An’ then he met Meg’s other friend, a lass called Eleanor. That was the end o’ whatever o’ man-to-woman love might hae been atwixt him an’ Meg. But they a’ stayed friends, that was the strangest bit o’ it. Andrew finally was wed to Eleanor just ower a year ago, afore he got captured an’ sent to Chester.”

“Where is Meg now?”

He dipped his head to one side. “She’s deid.” He said it flatly, his voice devoid of emphasis.

“Ah. Forgive me for asking.”

“No need, Faither. She died last year, while Andrew was away in the south. She’d got wed, ye see, to a young blacksmith. Kenny MacFarlane was his name, an’ for a while they was happy. She soon got pregnant, which was nae surprise, but as the months went by she
swole up like a mare in foal, and Kenny started frettin’. Twins run in our family, ye see, and frae the size o’ Meg’s belly anybody could see that’s what she was carryin’.”

He lapsed into a silence, then cleared his throat fiercely. “Well, that winter came early and it was the worst we’d had in years. There was a bad snowstorm early in November, and the day after that, it froze hard and stayed like that for weeks. Meg collapsed early on in that cold spell, nigh on three weeks afore she was supposed to hae the bairns. Kenny had been frettin’ for months that somethin’ bad might happen, and so he had arranged for some midwives from Inverness, an old woman and her dochter, to come an’ stay wi’ them and see to the delivery. But the women werena due for another week, so everythin’ went wrong and Kenny was at his wits’ end. He made Meg as comfortable as he could an’ then went for to fetch the midwives. He left her wi’ his young brother Tam, who was just sixteen but was able to keep the fires burnin’ and see to it that she and the animals was well fed.”

He fell silent again, staring into nothingness, and finally, when I became convinced that he had forgotten I was there, I prompted him. “What happened then, Sandy?”

His eyes moved away from me, focusing on a point somewhere beyond my left shoulder. “Well,” he said, his voice flat. “Kenny met an English patrol on his way to Inverness. They tried to stop him, but he wouldna stop, and so they chased him. When they caught him, they accused him of stealin’ the horse he was riding. He still wouldna listen, for he was frantic, hell-bent on reachin’ the twa wifies in Inverness, and when he wouldna tell them his business they beat him senseless. And then they left him hanging, upside down and naked, from the rafters of a burnt-out cottage at the side of the road. He froze to death …”

I felt a coldness settle around my chest.

“A farmer found him sometime after that—a day or two, it might ha’ been—an’ cut him down,” he continued in that same flat voice. “But nobody knew who he was.”

I did not want to ask, but I had to. “And Meg?”

“The bairns came … Or one o’ them did, or tried to. Poor Tam was terrified out o’ his wits, demented wi’ her screamin’, an’ he ran back to the farm, twa miles up the glen in the storm, to get help.” He gazed at the tabletop. “When they got back to the smithy, Meg was dead, and so wis the unborn bairns. Young Tam disappeared soon after an’ hasna been seen since.”

I sat there, appalled. “How … how do you know what happened, Sandy?”

“What?” His brow knitted in a frown.

“You say he met an English patrol, and they accused him of stealing the horse, then beat him and left him for dead. How do you know that? How can you be sure Kenny didn’t simply fall among thieves?”

“Because I ken the men wha did it. I ken their names. Made a
point
o’ learnin’ them all. They boasted about it back in their barracks in Inverness, ye see, an’ they brought the horse back with them, to sell it. No’ a trace o’ shame in any o’ them. They crowed about what they had done, catching a Scotch horse thief and servin’ him the justice he deserved, leavin’ him hung up to live or die according to God’s will.”

“I see. And did you make a formal complaint against them?”

He looked at me as though I had spoken gibberish. “A complaint? To the English, about English sodgers? No, Faither, I didna complain. I had the men wha did it killed, is what I did. Ten of the whoresons an’ the sergeant who was wi’ them that day. I broke the sergeant’s neck mysel’, forbye I slit the throat o’ the whoreson who boasted o’ haein put the rope round Kenny’s neck. And if that was mortal sin, then I’m ready to burn in Hell for it, an’ I winna complain there, either.”

“Have you confessed that to a priest since then?”

He looked sidelong at me. “Aye, to you. But I havena been to confession, if that’s what you’re askin’. I’m no’ a hypocrite, nor a liar. For confession to be real, ye hae to feel regret—contrition’s the word, is it no’? Ye hae to feel contrition for what ye did. I don’t. I’d
dae it again this minute if I thought one o’ thae whoresons was still alive.”

He shrugged. “A month or so after that, Andrew Murray came home after escapin’ from England. Afore he went on to Auch he went to the provost’s house in Inverness, to find out where his wife was an’ what was happenin’ on the Black Isle. The provost’s an auld crony of Sir Andrew of Petty, the Auld Laird as he’s kenned here, and Andrew knew he’d get the truth frae him no matter how bad it was. I heard he was there and I went there an’ waited for him to come out. We went to a howff for a jug o’ ale, and I telt him what had happened to Meg, and what I had done. And then he said he was on his way here to throw the English out of Auch. He didna hae a soul to stand beside him then, but I never doubted he would do it. First they’d be out o’ Auch, he said, and then out o’ the Murray lands everywhere.

“We got drunk together that night, him and me, and we mourned Meg. And afore he left the next day, he asked me to go wi’ him an’ help him fight the English. I said I would but that I had affairs to settle first. And so I sent my ain wife awa to live wi’ her mother’s sister in Elgin while I was out wi’ Andrew. She wasna happy, but she went, and then I spent a week shuttin’ down my warehouses and raisin’ volunteers amang the other burgesses in Inverness. By the time I was ready to leave, we had near a hundred fightin’ men— every one o’ them well armed and angry and sick an’ tired o’ bein’ treated like dirt. I marched them here, and we’ve been workin’ an’ fightin’ together ever since.”

“One more question, if you’ll permit it, and then I’ll ask you no more. Why you, a successful merchant? You’ll pardon me, I hope, for saying so, but it’s a big leap, from warehouseman to warrior. I am having difficulty understanding why it would occur to Andrew de Moray that you could be a comrade-in-arms to him.”

“You have a point,” he said. “I wasna always a merchant, though. When Andrew first kent me, I was wild. Him an’ me fought a wheen o’ times, a couple o’ dunghill cocks crawin’ an’ flexin’ their wings,
and I won every time. That’s why my da set me to watchin’ ower him an’ Meg. He knew she wis safe as lang as I was there wi’ her. So Andrew kent me as a fighter, and a better one than him, man to man—or boy to boy. But even then, when we wis young, he’d never get angry when I’d beat him. He’d want me to teach him what I did instead, to show him how I did it. And so I would. But it wasna even that, no’ really. What made him decide to ask me to join up wi’ him was somethin’ that happened that mornin’ afore he left here to go back to Auch. It had been happenin’ for days, in fact, for I was in the middle o’ takkin’ stock in the warehouses when he arrived.

“There wis folk comin’ and goin’ a’ the time Andrew was there in the yard and I kept expectin’ him to get angry, for we’d had a lot to drink the night afore an’ I knew he must be feelin’ it as much as I was, and now we kept on gettin’ interrupted an’ couldna hear oursel’s think. But instead o’ that, he just sat there listenin’ to what my folk was sayin’ to me, leanin’ on his hand wi’ his elbow on the arm o’ his chair, no’ missin’ a bit o’ what was goin’ on. And then, at the end o’ one long talk I had wi’ a clever young loon frae Elgin, he looks at me and says, ‘You understood all that?’”

His face quirked into a grin. “An’ of course, when I said I did, he wanted me to teach him all about it, then and there—everythin’ I’d spent the last ten years learnin’, one step at a time frae dawn through dusk, maist days. An’ yon’s really why he wanted me to join him.”

I blinked at him. “You’ll have to pardon me, Sandy. I don’t understand.”

“He wanted me because I’m an
organizer
. I deal every day in a’ the stuff he kens nothin’ about an’ hasna the time to learn. You’re a priest, but you work for a bishop, do ye no’? And your bishop works for an archbishop, who likely works for a bigger archbishop—what are they called, the high-ups? Cardinals, aye, that’s them. And the cardinals work for the Pope, who’s the highest o’ them all. It’s the same in an army. Ilka high chief, ilka man in charge, whether they cry him general or commander, has a quartermaster—Andrew had a fancy Latin word for it, if I can remember it …
factotum
, that’s it. Every commander, he said, needs a good factotum to see to the
details o’ what needs to be done, somebody whose job it is to make sure a’ the people an’ their gear—weapons, armour, food and supplies, horses, wagons an’ kine an’ swine for slaughter—reach the right place at the right time. And he had nobody, he said. His father’s folk were a’ scattered, kicked out o’ Auch when the Auld Laird was sent to jail, but they were all too old anyway, and they had aey treated him like a bairn because his father wis their god. He needed someone he could trust, he said, someone he could rely on to stand behind him and tak care o’ a’ the details—someone that he knew was loyal to him an’ no’ afraid o’ crossing folk who needed to be crossed an’ put in their place.

“And so that’s what I am now, Faither James. I’m a factotum. I mak sure that men an’ supplies are in place and ready whenever and wherever Andrew wants them to be. An’ when I can, I fight. And now I’m thinkin’ we’ve been sittin’ here too long. Brendan an’ his lads will be waitin’ outside, so ye’d best be away, and I’ll get back to my work.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ANDREW DE MORAY

I
arrived in Andrew de Moray’s camp at dusk that same evening, which was a development I had not expected. It lay on the upper slopes of the rolling hillsides between the firth’s end and the northern tip of Loch Ness, not far from Inverness, and the chief’s sanctuary lay at its very centre, in a steep-sided ravine carved into the downslope on the far side of the ridge we had climbed to reach it. As my two guides led me down into it—they were really guards, but deferential and considerate—the brush-filled walls rose above us on either side, closing us in and creating an illusion of isolation even while, at the very least, there were upwards of half a thousand men camped all around us.

I could see the glow of firelight ahead of us as we descended the ravine, and as we drew closer the light from leaping flames reflected from the sides of several large tents. My guards steered me towards those tents until I could make out the forms of half a score of men seated on logs around a fire. Although I was still too far distant to be able to pick out individuals, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a council of some kind. One of my guards reached out to halt me in the shadows between two of the tents, while the other, who had told me his name was Fergus, stepped forward to talk to a man who was hovering watchfully, his attention focused tightly on the group around the fire.

This camp steward—for that was plainly what he was—turned to peer at me, his expression unreadable, and then he moved away and bent to whisper in the ear of one of the group seated by the fire. The man to whom he spoke, whose body radiated displeasure at being
interrupted, straightened and twisted around on the log that was his seat, peering back to where I stood in the shadows. I could see his face in the firelight, but it was clear that he could not see me well, for he leaned forward and squinted into the dimness. Then he rose to his feet and began to come towards me.

“Jamie!” he roared, silencing everyone around him. “Jamie Wallace. It
is
you!” He spoke to me in Scots, a great courtesy, since the language he normally spoke was the Gaelic. “Welcome to Moray! I swear I thought I must be hearing things when Angus said your name.” He threw his arms wide as I approached him and we embraced, watched by perhaps a hundred pairs of eyes. “You are welcome here, my friend,” he said more quietly. “It delights me to see your smiling face. I know there’s no need to ask if you are well, for I can see you are.” He cocked his head. “You’ve changed a bit about the mouth, though. It looks as though you might have been talking about politics with English soldiery,” he said admiringly, for the sake of his audience. “But I didn’t think priests were permitted to brawl like ordinary folk. Is that why you’re up here? Have you been exiled to the north, an excommunicated fugitive?”