The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of Scotland's Black Douglas (11 page)

James fought to escape his captors. “You won’t take him!”

Clifford throttled his neck. “Do you know where William
Wallace hides?” When James shook his head, Clifford threw him to the ground and
ordered his troopers, “Release the old man. Take the lad instead.”

“No!” Wil Douglas shouted.

James tried to rush to his father, but he was held back.

Laughing, Clifford slapped Wil to his knees. “He’s a damn
nuisance to you, Douglas. Why not be rid of him?”

Glaring a warning at James to remain silent, Wil pleaded
with Clifford, “Take me. That is the law.”

Clifford strode before his bemused troopers. “The outlaw
quotes us the law!”

“These Scots breed like rats,” a sergeant warned. “If we don’t
root out the whole brood, the young ones will come back to bite us. Let me
string up the whelp.”

Clifford stared at James for a dangerous moment—and kicked
him aside. “This one doesn’t even have babe teeth yet. He won’t nip at us. We
hung his better half at Berwick.”

The sergeant didn’t look convinced by that prediction. “I’ve
seen rats maul a hound in these parts.”

Clifford waved off the warning as he mounted again. “Leave
the culls to breed. Soon enough, they’ll all be runts like him.”

James crawled to his father. “I’m sorry!”

On his knees, Wil grasped
his son’s head with bloodied hands and whispered to his ear, “Your stepmother
is with child.” He pressed so hard in desperation to impart the importance of
what he would next say that James nearly screamed from the pain. Looking deep
into his son’s frantic eyes, Wil ordered him, “Remember, you are a Douglas. You
bend to none but God and your conscience.”

James fought back his tears, determined to honor his vow
made over Gibbie’s body at Berwick, never to let the English see him weaken
again.

As her husband was dragged away, Eleanor was prodded toward
the burning tower, so near to the flames that she was forced to shield her face
from the searing heat.

“You and the lad may stay with these walls,” Clifford told
her. “Or what remains of them after they’ve cooled. Henceforth, all rents from
this domain will be paid to me.”

“Winter will soon be on us!” Eleanor cried, falling to her
knees to beg. “How will we find food?”

Clifford laughed over his shoulder. “You heathens are an
enterprising tribe. You always seem to manage.”

T
HE WINTER OF 1298 BROUGHT
down the worst storm in memory from the Highlands, piling snow high against Castle Douglas. Robert Clifford had burned the hunting groves for fuel that fall, scaring off all wildlife except a few grouse, and the granaries had long since been emptied. Eleanor Douglas, too weak to nurse, had sent her new babe, Archibald, off to live with her husband’s kin in the north. And without even a crib of fodder left, many of the villagers had been forced to abandon Lanarkshire to beg for food on the streets of Carlisle or Stirling.

Wasted to the bone, James trudged back through the vast
drifts toward the desolate tower and its crumbling roof, which now sheltered only
a small section of the floor. Earlier that morning, leaving his stepmother
wheezing aside the cold hearth and old Dickson nearly frozen at his post near
the door, he had plodded outside, barely able to stand, hoping to snare
anything that moved. Returning now empty-handed, he kicked open the iced door and
staggered inside the fireless keep. He found Bishop Lamberton helping his
stepmother sip from a gourd of cold gruel.

Seeing him, Eleanor struggled to her feet and drew a painful
breath. “Jamie, ready the horse.”

James was so dizzy that he had to find the wall for support.
Recovering his balance, he muttered the same promise he had made a hundred
times. “Father will return soon.”

Eleanor shook her head to negate that hope. “The bishop here
has generously agreed to take you in.”

Lamberton reached into his belt pouch and brought forth a
slither of rabbit jerky. “Come, lad. It’s for the best.”

James shunted aside the offer, undone by his stepmother’s
loss of faith in his ability to care for her. “You’d have me give up our home?”

“I’d have you live!” Eleanor cried. “I’d have us all live!
There is nothing left for you here.”

Anxious to depart before the English patrols arrived, the bishop gathered up some of James’s ratty clothes strewn across the floor and packed them in his knapsack. “I need a notary, lad. I’m told you’re adept with the script.”

James resisted his attempt to lead him away. “I
want to go fight with Wallace!”

Lamberton monitored the flapping oilcloth on the window for
sounds of the dogs barking outside. “You must cast that nonsense from your
head.”

“He was good enough for my father!”

“And for me, once,” Lamberton lamented, his voice trailing
off in despair. “But we were all betrayed by our hearts.”

James turned on his stepmother, trying to find some sign of
fight left in her. Four months had passed with no word from his father or
Belle, true. Yet Eleanor had been the one who had firmed his father’s conviction
when he doubted the wisdom of joining Wallace. She had even sent Hugh, her own
eldest son by her first marriage, to take up with the rebel army. Now, she
turned away from him, the last reserve of her resolve spent.

After a tense silence, Lamberton surrendered a revelation,
one that Eleanor had apparently known for days. “Steady yourself, lad. … There
is droch news from Falkirk.”

“Wallace?”

“Defeated in battle.”

James refused to believe the claim, until—

“Hugh!” Eleanor broke into tears of grief. “His body … found mutilated.”

Informed of his stepbrother’s death, James glared at her in accusation. How long had she known of Wallace’s defeat? She had tried to take the place of his deceased mother, Elizabeth Stewart, but he had never been able to forgive her for her English origins. Now, despite her losses, he turned a cold shoulder on her and, though fearing the answer, asked the bishop, “Wallace … is he dead, as well?”

Lamberton shook his head. “It was a near-run scrape. I
begged him to take to the forest and wait for better ground. A prideful belief
in his own invincibility blinded him. He formed up in the open fields against
the English knights.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the Selkirk, with what remains of his force. The North
is open for plunder. My own lands in Kirkliston are aflame.”

“Wallace will fight again!”

Eleanor reached for his hand to calm him. “Jamie … Ian MacDuff was also killed in the retreat.”

James stared at the bishop, trying to make sense of what
that
welcome news might bode for his
future. Then, suddenly roused from his torpor, he shook the snow from his
cloak, determined to start out again and find Belle.

Eleanor blocked his path to the door. “I know you having
feelings for the MacDuff lass. But her brother will now lead the clan, and he
is no friend to us. The Comyns are in league with the MacDuffs. You must forget
her. She’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”

His vision tunneled from hunger and confusion. His
expectation of Wallace’s victory and of marrying Belle during the peace that
would follow was all that had kept him going. Inconsolable, he slid to his
haunches.

Lamberton brought him back to his feet. “Come, lad. Serve as
my scribe and learn the ways of statesmen. You may one day find the knowledge
useful.”

L
AMBERTON LED
J
AMES ON HORSE
down the old Roman road that skirted the royal hunting park south of Stirling Castle, the legendary keep that guarded the main passage to the northern provinces. Clifford had set a toll station on the King’s Table, a circular plateau at the base of the crag where the great Arthur had once gathered his Grail knights, and English soldiers were hassling a long line of weary Scots, forcing them to pay an exorbitant tax to suffer the indignity of crossing Stirling Bridge and pass a macabre gallery of heads severed from those defenders butchered at Falkirk.

The bishop slowed their approach, and when the guards were
distracted with abusing the waiting Scots ahead, he reined off the road into a
thicket.

Aghast at the trespass,
James resisted. “They’ll hang us for poaching.”

Lamberton signaled for
him to follow on the quick, so James reluctantly obeyed. They gained the cover
of the trees, and the bishop cocked his ear to make certain their detour had
been accomplished without detection. The snowdrifts off the pike were too
difficult for the horses to navigate, so the cleric dismounted and walked his mount
along a frozen creek, the only path through this remnant of the ancient
Caledonian Forest. Assured at last that they had not been followed, he
revealed at last, “We are not going to St. Andrews.”

James held back, angered at being deceived. “The Hell you
say!”

The bishop tromped on
through the snow. “A galley awaits us in Argyll.”

“The Isles? Why did you lie to me?”

“Let this be your first lesson. Reveal your plans to no one,
not even your closest comrade. The English have ways of forcing one to betray
his loyalty.”

“I’ll not hide atop the peaks like some vagabond!”

“We sail from the Isles
for Paris on the fortnight. France is our only hope to stop Longshanks.”

“What if the English discover you’ve left the country?”

“By law, I answer only to
the Church. But I do not intend to test the immunity afforded me as a diplomat.
We will sail from the west, out of reach of their ships in the Channel. And
there is a landmark on our route that I wish you to see.”

D
URING THEIR WEEKLONG JOURNEY UP
the west coast, James found the bishop to be a mysterious, elusive man with many pagan quirks. Lamberton neither honored the Sabbath nor offered prayers in the traditional offices of a cleric, but rode with the wary gaze of a soldier, scouting each ridge and zigzagging between copses for cover. One morning, passing a Benedictine abbey near Turnberry, the cleric shot a wicked eye at its crooked Roman cross, denying it the traditional signing. Yet the most queer of all his rituals was a penchant for stopping under ancient oaks and pronouncing Gaelic blessings.

They had engaged in only desultory conversation until,
reaching the Glen of Kilmartin at approaching dusk, they came upon a low
bogland bordered by the purple hills and flooding waters of Loch Crinan. A
giant fist of gray rock broke through a valley that had been turned into a
glade by the melted snow. In the fields around this strange crag, peat
harvesters had unearthed a dozen granite dolmens, all set in a circle.

Spying the imposing mount, the bishop lashed into a gallop as if greeting an old friend. He dismounted at the foot of the crag and waddled up a winding path, signaling for James to follow. Heaving from the exertion, the bishop finally staggered to the summit and dropped himself on a boulder. After regaining his breath, he ordered his new charge, “Tell me what you see.”

Gazing into the west, James shielded his eyes from the low
sun. He could just make out the white foam of the Irish Sea through the mists.
“I see the end of Scotland.”

“Nay, you see the
beginning
of Scotland.”

Perplexed by that suggestion, James looked down at his feet
and saw that he was standing on an oblong slab the breadth of a shield. On its
face, streaked with deep fissures channeled by rainwater, had been carved a
drawing of a wild boar next to a worn footprint a knuckle in depth.

Lamberton raised his hands over the crag as if offering a
benediction. “A thousand years ago, our first kings were inaugurated here. A
great race of men brought the Stone of Destiny from Ireland to this very spot.”

James leapt off the sacred rock, afraid that he had just
committed a sacrilege. “How did a bunch of sorry Irishmen get their hands on
the Stone?”

“The Sons of Light were not Irish by birth,” the bishop
explained. “They came from the East and taught the mysteries of civilization to
many nations before settling in Ulster. They knew from their study of the stars
that a great flood would soon inundate the world.”

“Drunken Ulstermen,” James scoffed.

The bishop smiled knowingly. “Drunk with wisdom. The Sons
divined by second sight that only those dolmens down in that vale down there
would survive the coming deluge. When the Druids arrived here from the
mainland, many years later, they heard the stones whispering the prophecy.”

James ran a hand across the wrinkled rock, trying to imagine
the Stone of Destiny resting on its base. “You’ve heard the Stone speak?” When
the bishop did not answer him, he became more intrigued. He knelt and pressed
his palm into the ancient footstep. “This is why you brought me here? To see a
pile of old slags?”

“Your education is now my duty. If you wish to help me save
Scotland, you must know what is truly at stake. William Wallace is a good man,
but he has no understanding of the shrouded reason we must fight this war.”