The Guardian (49 page)

“I see,” I said. “And can you tell me how it would benefit the realm if, as you say, I were somehow able to join Father Thomas?”

The canon smiled. “I remember the way your eyes opened wide when I told you where he was—entrenched as a member of the Earl of Surrey’s household. You saw the possible advantages at once— the value of our having sympathetic eyes and ears in the enemy camp. The only thing missing now is the presence of an organizer who can take what he sees and hears and pass it along to us. Father Thomas can’t do that, at least not safely, and he is far too valuable to risk endangering him.”

“And I am not.”

“You said that, Father James, not I. Your value is equally great, but differently allocated. God’s ways can be obscure and known solely to Himself.”

And so it was that my mission took an entirely different turn, putting me, for the first time in my life, in the position of a spy.

Instead of returning to Stirling after my meeting with Canon Lamberton as I had been instructed, I took the time to write a long letter to Will and Andrew Murray, explaining what had emerged in the course of my discussions with the canon, and the opportunity that had arisen to give us access to confidential information inside the enemy camp. I closed with a promise that they would soon be hearing from me with information drawn directly from the horse’s mouth. There was an element of danger involved in setting down such information in a letter, of course, but every travelling priest carried letters with him wherever he went. That was a commonplace of clerical life. Information and the dissemination of it were the lifeblood of the religious world, and one undistinguished letter among so many others would attract no attention from anyone I had to fear—more so, I thought, if the courier delivering it had no knowledge of its importance. And so I enclosed my letter inside another, this one addressed to my recent benefactor, the abbot of Stirling Abbey, requesting that he pass on the enclosed missive as quickly as possible to “my cousin Will.” I entrusted the package to Canon Lamberton with a request that he send it to Stirling with the next courier heading that way.

With that safely taken care of, I travelled to Berwick with Father Thomas, who introduced me to Earl Warrenne’s clerical staff there as an old friend, Father Jacques de la Pierre, whom he had known when he was a seminarian in Paris. He explained that I hailed from the Basque region in the far south and that I spoke no English at all, in addition to which my French was so heavily accented that it was virtually indecipherable even to Frenchmen. I had been sent to him, he claimed, bearing messages from the Bishop of Paris, who was himself a Basque speaker and a close friend of Pope Boniface, and such was the tone of mysticism in which he spoke of those unspecified messages that everyone believed I had been sent because my way of speaking was something of a papal code in itself.

I enjoyed being reunited with Thomas, for our earlier friendship, though fairly brief, had been a close one, born of the necessary intimacy of hard times shared in far-off places as penniless, hardworking students, and our first meeting after a long gap of years was an occasion for sharing nostalgic memories. The pleasure lasted beyond the reminiscences, though, and we soon fell to talking easily about the ramifications of Canon Lamberton’s plan for us. I was surprised afterwards, I recall, by how easily I set aside my own misgivings and committed myself to a course that involved deceit on a grand scale. I—or we, since Thomas was included with me— had absolutely no reason to fear being caught, he assured me, because priests were anonymous and faceless, and nowhere more so than in a military camp, where we were tolerated as being there to serve as interlocutors between fighting men and their God. Beyond that we were ignored, as we were unnecessary to the successful prosecution of warfare.

All my friend’s assurances notwithstanding, though, I was thoroughly terrified during my first few days among the English, acutely aware that I was in the very belly of the beast. I had not known what to expect on first arriving there, but the reality had been both striking and disconcerting, because until that time I had never associated the word
alien
with any specific person or society. Yet
alien
was the word that came to me on my arrival in the English camp and stayed with me for a long time afterwards, because
everything
about the place was unfamiliar to me. Even the clothing people wore was different, influenced by Earl Warrenne himself, who was a stickler for deportment and decorum. Commanders could be distinguished from their subordinates at a single glance, set apart more by the quality and colours of their clothing than by any other visible sign of rank. But I noticed the general conduct of the camp’s inhabitants was different, too. Things like morale and confidence varied widely from unit to unit, and language differences could be so radical that the rank and file of units from different areas of England were often unable to speak to one another.

In those first days I was constantly waiting for someone to
address me in the Basque tongue and expose me as a fraud. No one ever did, and my fears faded rapidly once I found I was accepted without question and then—as Thomas had predicted—generally ignored.

Much of my new-found sense of well-being undeniably sprang from the fact that I felt safe again in a religious community, where the politics of God and His Church took precedence over all else and where the racial origins of the community members were of no real significance. All such human differences were nullified by the common language of Latin, so that French
curés
spoke easily with their German, Dutch, Spanish, or Danish counterparts.

Within two weeks of joining the chaplaincy of the Earl of Surrey’s camp, I had spoken with the earl himself, or rather been addressed by him, on three occasions, and on the third of those he was accompanied by Hugh de Cressingham, King Edward’s treasurer for Scotland, who had newly arrived from Newcastle. Earl Warrenne had come to speak to Father Thomas, of course; I was permitted to be present because I was a priest, known to be working closely with Father Thomas on business for King Edward and Pope Boniface, who were, at that time, engaged in secretive diplomatic negotiations having to do with the highly sensitive business of Church, state, and taxation.

Lord John greeted me with a curt yet courteous nod and thereafter ignored me—he had been told I spoke no English. He introduced Cressingham to Thomas before grasping my friend by the elbow and leading him aside by two paces to speak quietly into his ear. Cressingham stood watching them, content merely to wait, and I, knowing myself unobserved, made use of the opportunity to look closely, and I will admit critically, at the man who was so wholeheartedly detested by everyone in Scotland.

He was not an attractive man, in any sense of the word. Tall and grotesquely corpulent, he was cursed with a sallow, much-spotted complexion and pendulous, clean-shaven jowls that weighed down the lower half of his face and drew attention to the slackness of a loose, pendulous lower lip. He wore his hair to his shoulders
uncombed and tied with a white ribbon, the only spot of brightness that he wore. I paid particular attention to his clothing, for I had been told that he spent inordinate amounts of money on rich and sumptuous clothing, all of it black and all of it especially made to disguise his obesity and supposedly to render him less physically repulsive. The man seemed completely oblivious to the reality that it was not his corpulence that made him so widely detested. The hatred and disgust he inspired was due entirely to his offensive, repugnant personality and his rapacious, merciless dedication to bankrupting Scotland and everyone who lived therein.

As I stood observing him, I felt my skin crawling with an intense dislike akin to loathing. It was a sensation new to me at that time, and the recognition of it shocked me deeply, for my lifelong training had taught me to abhor such feelings towards my fellow men. Though I was to remember it many times over the years afterwards and seek to absolve myself of the guilt I felt because of it, I was never able to renounce it completely. Hugh de Cressingham was the most instantly despicable man I ever encountered. There was no single element of his being that offered a hint of redemption.

I heard my name, and I looked quickly towards Thomas, who was waiting for a response to whatever he had said.

“Forgive me, Father Thomas,” I replied, broadening my vowels ludicrously and slowing my speech in what Thomas had assured me was the speech pattern used by residents in what he called
le Pays basque
. “I was at home in the Pyrenees.”

He grunted in acceptance, then said, still in French, “I was saying that Lord John here is dispatching a delegation to Paisley Abbey to collect some valuable documents from the archives there, documents relating to King Edward’s status as Lord Protector of the Realm. He wants us to accompany them as far as Paisley, for safety’s sake, and then to carry additional dispatches onward, on his behalf, to Bishop Bek of Durham, who is presently believed to be in Glasgow.”

I shrugged, glancing at Earl Warrenne as though I were almost disinterested, and added, “So, we go?”

“Just so,” Thomas agreed. “We go.”

“Today?”

“No, tomorrow morning. Lord John’s people are copying the dispatches we are to carry, and they will have them ready for us by tonight.”

I shrugged again, taking great care to avoid looking again at the hulking figure of the Treacherer. Within a few moments the earl finished his business with Thomas and dismissed him with a wave of the hand before striding away, followed by Cressingham and leaving me with the distinct impression that his tolerance for the King’s treasurer was no greater than my own.

“So we are bound for Glasgow,” I said as soon as we were out of earshot. “What brought that about?”

“I have no idea. The man simply came striding by—have you noticed that he strides, by the way? He doesn’t simply walk, like other men. He strides.”

“I’ve noticed, yes. So he came striding by … and what?”

“He saw me, stopped in his tracks, and told me he was sending me north with this delegation bound for Paisley.”

“But I can’t go to Paisley,” I said. “Not if I’m to remain a Basque. I trained there, in the abbey, and my cousin Malcolm is still the librarian and archivist there. I’ll be recognized the minute I set foot in the place, and no doubt the others in your delegation would be very interested to learn that I’m a Scot after all.”

“Peace, Jamie. The man said we were to travel
as far
as Paisley with the others, and then we are to strike on past to Glasgow and Bek.”

“And what if Bek is not
in
Glasgow?”

“Then we’ll have to find him.”

“That could take weeks. And we haven’t got weeks to waste. We need to get to Stirling. That’s our first priority.”

“Then make a special plea in your prayers that he be elsewhere when we reach Glasgow, for if he is there, he might well answer Warrenne’s letter directly and send us straight back here with it. And if it turns out he is elsewhere, we’ll be able to send someone from Glasgow to find him, without going ourselves.”

We went about our business for the remainder of the day until it came time to take delivery of the dispatches for Bishop Bek. And the next morning we travelled north obediently.

We parted company with the other delegates before we reached Paisley, and we made our way directly to the cathedral in Glasgow. We had barely settled ourselves at the table in the room we had been shown to when, greatly to my surprise, for I knew that he must be busy beyond belief with diocesan affairs, with little time for unexpected guests, Canon Lamberton himself swept in. He welcomed us both warmly, expressing his own surprise to see us there when he had thought us safely lodged with Earl Warrenne. The first thought that had crossed his mind, of course, was that our illicit activities had been detected and we had been banished, but then he realized that had we been caught spying in the enemy camp we would have been hanged—after being tortured to find out what we had learned.

I quickly set his mind at ease and told him why we were there, that we had brought confidential dispatches from the earl himself to Bishop Bek, and he frowned, though whether from displeasure at our mission or at the mere mention of Bek’s name I could not tell. Bek was not in Glasgow, he told us, and he did not know where the man was.

“We have to find him, Canon,” I said. “Have you no slightest notion where he might be?”

“None at all. He barely spoke to me in all the time he was here. He could be back in England by now, for all I know. Though I doubt that. He has work to do on his master’s behalf, and he’ll be here until it’s done. You will simply have to wait here for him to return, or for someone to come along who can take you to him.”

“You know we can’t afford to simply sit around idly waiting, Canon. We should be in the English camp, doing what you sent us there to do.”

“You could leave the dispatches here for him and go back.”

“Someone might be curious why we did not wait and complete our task. If he has responses to anything, we’ll be expected to deliver them to the earl.”

“Hmm.” He had been holding a folded letter in his hand when he entered the room, and now he held it out to me wordlessly. I took it from him and held it towards the nearest light, peering at the inscription.

“This is my letter,” I said, surprised. “The one I asked you to send to Stirling. Why didn’t you send it?”

“I did. The priest who carried it collapsed and died within a few miles of here on the very day he left. Sadly, he was not found for more than a week, and then the discovery was accidental. It was the smell that was found, in truth, for the man himself was not known to be missing before his body was discovered. The wallet he was carrying was returned to me, since I had sent him out on his last journey.” He grimaced. “I was looking at it this very afternoon, wondering what to do with it—send it to you or await your return—when word came to me that you were here. Was it important, your letter to the abbot?”

“No.” I had been fingering the letter, squeezing it, and now I tore it open, exposing the other one inside it. “
This
was important, though. It’s to Will, explaining what I’ve been doing among the English—or what I was about to start doing.” I held it up now between finger and thumb, brandishing it gently as thoughts began to click into place in my mind. “Now I really have to find Bek—but not too soon.”