CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1

At 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.

“Sheriff Hazelrig has made it his overriding objective to bring about my end. He quadrupled the price on my head about a month ago, in the hopes of tempting someone to betray me, and hard on the heels of that, he offered a bounty of a silver mark for each and every Selkirk outlaw brought to justice or into King Edward’s Peace. That means dead or alive. It is a death sentence passed upon any man who is accused of being one of us, Jamie, irrespective of whether he is or not. The accusation is sufficient to cause death because there is no need to bring the man in alive. Any dead outlaw has clearly been brought to justice, and will surely never disturb the King’s Peace in the future.” He watched me, and when he saw my eyes narrow, he nodded. “Aye, it is iniquitous, no one will dispute that. But it is an iniquity sponsored and abetted by the King of England’s High Sheriff in Lanark, so who is to gainsay it?”

I shook my head, not quite in disbelief, but because I somehow hoped the truth would prove deniable. “But … what did you do to cause him to quadruple the price on your head?”

“And to pass a sentence of death on all my followers at the same time? Well, what would you think I did? I know you believe I did something, because I heard it clearly in your voice when you asked the question. I did nothing, Jamie. Nothing at all.”

“You must have attracted his attention somehow, perhaps without realizing it.”

“Nothing, Jamie. I said and did nothing. And be careful what you say next because your disbelief is starting to irk me. Hear me clearly. We have been inactive here for several months, committing no robberies and staging no raids since the English pulled in their horns back in November. I did nothing to attract the sheriff’s notice, and none of my men did, either. He simply decided to make a public example of us, probably goaded by that fat slug Cressingham, or possibly by his own superior, de Warenne of Surrey.”

“I see. So what is happening now?”

He sniffed deeply and looked away into the trees. “We have patrols out, in strength. They are moving quickly and constantly, keeping careful watch because we don’t know where Hazelrig’s soldiers will strike next. The local folk are in terror of being taken out and hanged, and so we keep our people spread out and moving, constantly in touch with one another and ready to attack at the first sign of hostility.”

“You’re ready to fight.”

“Of course we’re ready to fight. Would you have it otherwise?”

“Will you fight? What about your oath?”

“What about it? My oath is unbroken and I have no intention of fighting. But I can’t leave my people, Jamie.”

“Aye, and besides, it would be folly to go to Lamington with the sheriff of Lanark on the watch for you.”

“Pah! Folly nothing. He wouldn’t know me if I walked up and spoke to him face to face. That part of it is not an issue. I simply need to stay here for the time being, with my people. I agree with you that Mirren’s place is with her mother. No arguments from me on that, and I feel as guilty as sin because of it. But I can’t take her there, and until now I have not had anyone who could, at least not without risk of attracting attention. But now I have the right man. You can escort her to her mother’s place on your way back to Glasgow. She’ll be safe with you, and I’ll send an escort with you. A small group. Men I trust. Four or five.”

“Four or five men and a woman and child?”

“Aye, and a priest. What’s wrong with that?”

“Priests don’t travel with heavily armed men, Will, unless they are liveried men-at-arms. And the same applies to pregnant women with small children in tow. Besides, I doubt that Mirren will go without you.”

“She has to. She has no choice. She needs to be with her mother, and I need her to be there as well. I need to know she’s safely out of the forest until this nonsense with Hazelrig is over. Will you see to that for me, Jamie?”

I slumped against the tree. “I suppose I will. It seems to me there is a deal of needing going on here, one way and another, but aye, I’ll see her safely to her mother’s, so be it she agrees to go.”

“Good man. As for the escort, you can be sure I’ll pick them carefully. They’ll be discreet. No one will ever know they’re with you, unless you fall into danger. But they’ll never be far away from you, wherever you are.”

He rose to his feet and towered above me, then reached out a hand to me and pulled me effortlessly to my feet before jerking me forward into an enormous hug.

3

We were a small, subdued group as our two wagons set out from Selkirk Forest towards Lanark and Glasgow, our quietness attributable mainly to the strain surrounding the parting between Will and Mirren and, of course, young Willie. It was a parting neither one wanted, but circumstances had combined to make it necessary.

We were soon out of the largely trackless forest and on the high road to Lanark. Perched on the driver’s bench of the first and larger of our two wagons was Alan Crawford of Nithsdale, who would serve as senior driver and cook, responsible for the thousand and one daily details of our journey. Beside him sat Ewan Scrymgeour, who had come to regard Mirren as his own daughter. Big Andrew, his crossbow safely stowed out of sight behind him, and looking like a small boy perched on the driver’s bench of the second wagon, would serve as Alan’s assistant. Also with us was Father Jacobus, the elder of the two over-cloistered priests I had brought with me when first I came to live in the greenwood. He had grown visibly younger, more vibrantly alive, as the result of his life among the forest folk, nourished and greatly strengthened from ministering to their daily needs and thriving on the joy of it. Robertson the archer and five of his best men were ranged outward ahead of us, out of our sight but screening us from interference from the front and both sides.

The initial awkwardness of the post-parting silence passed more quickly and more easily than I had expected, due beyond a doubt to Mirren’s determination to make the best of the situation, and so by the end of the first day’s travel, the mood among the group was easier and more relaxed. It was a short day, too, for we were pulled off the road in a sheltered spot well before the sun began to sink. The March weather was consistent—inhospitably foul, cold, and damp—and the sun seemed to be setting earlier each day, instead of later.

Our cooking fire was small and almost completely concealed in a wide, deep-dug pit, and Alan prepared a remarkable meal of stewed goat, with vegetables and meat that he had brought with him, serving it with dried broad white beans he had braised in a deliciously salty sauce that set my mouth to tingling. We sat around the fire for no more than an hour after dinner that night, though, for despite knowing that Robertson and his bowmen were out there guarding us, we knew, too, that we were in unknown country and our firelight would be visible for miles. Just as I was about to retire to my evening prayers, one of Robertson’s men stepped out of the surrounding shadows, carrying a brace of fine hares, gutted and tied by the hind legs, that he handed to Alan before slipping away into the darkness again. I knew what we would dine on the following night.

We made better distance on the second day, having been up before dawn and on the road by daybreak, well muffled against the steady, cutting wind, and by three of the afternoon we had travelled more than twenty miles at a steady, ground-eating pace, avoiding the small town of Peebles by detouring a few miles to the south of it. Robertson’s people had already found our next camping spot, about five miles beyond that, and one of them waited for us by the roadside and then led us off into the woods, where we found the roofless ruins of an otherwise solidly built and surprisingly spacious house. We pitched our tents within its walls and slept soundly that night, sheltered from the wind that howled outside. We were, by my reckoning, within fifteen miles of Lanark.

On the morning of the third day, we awoke to a torrential downpour that had already flooded the low-lying areas around us and showed no signs of abating. Ewan and Alan, as the joint commanders of our little group, stepped outside the shelter of the walls into the greyness of the reluctantly breaking day to try to gauge the wisdom of breaking camp. They came back inside moments later to consult with me and Mirren about whether or not we wished to brave the weather and continue immediately towards Lamington, because they themselves were divided in their opinions.

I looked to Mirren, prepared to abide by her decision, but on this occasion Mirren, normally so straightforward and decisive, could not make up her mind about what she wanted to do. Leaving immediately meant in all likelihood that we might reach Lamington and her mother more quickly, but that was far from certain in the face of such outlandish weather, because according to Ewan and Alan the ground was a sodden quagmire and the wagons might be difficult to handle on steep and muddy surfaces. The alternative, to wait and see, would mean we might lose time initially, but when the weather finally broke and the wind and rain abated, the going would be firmer underfoot and conditions would certainly be both drier and warmer beneath the leather canopies of the wagons. Dryness and warmth for both herself and her young son was, I could see, the more appealing prospect in Mirren’s eyes, but I could also see that, precisely because it was so personally justifiable, she was loath to make that decision on her own. And so when she shrugged and turned to me, I smiled at her and made the choice to wait out the storm.

I have wondered a thousand times, over the years, if I might have changed anything by choosing differently that morning, but always my faith in God’s all-seeing wisdom convinces me—alas, never for long and never completely—that His will was carried out as He wished it to be.

We stayed in the camp for most of the morning, and for the last hour of that time the wind and the rain gradually died down and then stopped. We had already begun to break camp by then, and were having enormous difficulty in dismantling and stowing our leather tents, for their weight had been tripled by the amount of water they had absorbed. By the time we finally had the wagons loaded and were preparing to pull out, back onto the road again, the clouds were breaking up and clearing quickly, and bright sunlight was lancing down through the gaps here and there in spectacular glowing rays.

No one spoke much as we settled into the journey, but as the miles fell slowly behind us and the sun’s warmth dried our wet clothes, a semblance of good humour re-emerged and soon there was a steady flow of banter passing between the two wagons. At one point I twisted in my seat on the driver’s bench beside Big Andrew, to respond to a jibe from Ewan in the other wagon, and suddenly found myself racked by an intensely painful cramp in my left foot. My entire leg seized up and I writhed so violently against the pain of it that I lost my balance and fell sideways, barely managing to grasp the side of the bench in time to prevent myself pitching headfirst to the ground. Ewan, in the other wagon, saw me jerk and fall sideways, and for a few stupefied moments he thought I had been felled by an arrow.

The ensuing alarm was short lived, though, and turned quickly to laughter when it became clear that I had simply suffered a cramp. Alan muttered something about priests spending too much time on their knees and their backsides, and wondered aloud why it should be strange that their muscles complained of inactivity by twisting into cramps. I remember feeling rather shamefaced as I massaged the feeling back into my leg, and then I hopped down and walked beside the wagons, hobbling for the first few minutes but soon striding easily. I felt euphoric for a short time after that, wanting to run in my exuberance, in sheer celebration of being me and of being alive and of being away, for a brief time at least, from the responsibilities of my priestly life.

Striding out in front, I was a good hundred yards ahead of the wagons as I came to the brow of a little hill, no more than a slight rise in the road. As I breasted it, I saw one of Robertson’s archers jogging along the road towards me. I was not alarmed, for the archers were seldom far beyond our sight, but there was something about the way he was coming that brought me to a halt, looking around me and then at the road behind him. He was moving quickly but furtively, keeping close to the bushes that lined the road as he approached. He saw me watching him and raised a hand in greeting, but he did not slacken his pace.

When he reached me he stopped and bent over, panting for breath with his hands gripping his knees.

“Englishry, Father Jamie,” he gasped. “Robertson sent me back to warn you. He says there’s nothin’ tae be upset ower, but he thocht ye’d like to ken they’re doon there, at the crossroads at the bottom o’ this road. Ye canna see it frae here, but that’s where they are. There’s a knight in charge, on the biggest horse ye’ve ever seen, but we couldna recognize his crest or colours, an’ he has a couple o’ mounted men-at-arms wi’ him, forbye about ten archers. They’re up to somethin’, but we couldna tell what. Watchin’ for somebody or mayhap just waitin’ to see who gaes by. But Robertson jalouses they’ll stop ye and ask ye what your business is, just because they’re English.”

I thanked him, and he turned away and vanished into the dense growth lining the road. This was not unexpected, and we had planned for it and knew our story. I walked back towards the approaching wagons.

“What?” Alan asked as I pulled myself up on to the stirrup step beside him. Mirren was sitting beside him, between him and Ewan, and all three were looking at me expectantly. I smiled at Mirren and waved vaguely in the direction we were heading.

“One of the archers just warned me that there are English ahead of us, at a crossroads at the bottom of the next slope. A knight, he says, with a couple of mounted men-at-arms and half a score of archers.”

“Aye, I know the place. What are they doing, did he say?”

“No. He didn’t know. But he and Robertson think they’re up to something. Nothing to do with us, though, since nobody knew we’d be coming this way. But he thinks they’ll challenge us.”

“Of course they’ll challenge us. Since they decided to take over the ownership of Scotland they challenge everything. A knight, you said?”

“Aye, fully armed and probably English, for nobody recognized his crest or colours.” I looked at Mirren. “So remember, stay calm and don’t say anything different to what we planned. The tricky part will be to pretend we didn’t know they were there, so don’t be peering about for them. If they suspect we knew they were there, they’ll start suspecting other things as well—like how did we know? Who warned us? And why?”

She nodded at me, her face calm and peaceful, and I smiled back and dropped to the ground, making my way to the other wagon and pulling myself up to sit beside Big Andrew and Father Jacobus.

4

They kept themselves well hidden, for we saw no sign of them at all as we descended the long slope, even though we knew they were watching us. We reached the bottom of the descent, and the road flattened out just at the entrance to an open glade surrounding the junction of the two roads that crossed there. The glade was filled with shoulder-high saplings of birch and alder, new growth after a fire had swept through there a handful of years earlier, and from the height of the driver’s bench, overlooking the saplings, I found I could see clearly in all directions across the burned area to the start of the forest proper again, without moving my head obviously. Nothing was stirring, anywhere I looked, but then from the corner of my eye I saw the lower branches of a big evergreen on the forest’s edge pushed aside, and three mounted men emerged and rode directly towards us.

There was no debate over which of the three was the leader, for his appearance spoke loudly for itself. He was dressed in plate armour, which established his identity beyond question as being English. No Scots knight could afford such expensive armour, any more than he could afford a horse large enough and strong enough to bear his weight were he dressed in such a manner. Horse and armour here were emphatically and defiantly Norman-English, flaunting the wealth, puissance, and arrogance of their owner. The colours and livery were unknown to me, the knight’s shield and surcoat and his horse’s skirts all similarly quartered in red and silver, with alternating diagonal bars in the top right and bottom left quarters and three red swans on a silver field in each of the others. The crest on the knight’s enormous silvered helm was a red bird, too—I presumed it to be a swan—flanked on each side by curving spirals of red and silver. A very fine and intimidating picture the man made, trotting towards us, and we stopped to await his arrival.

He reined in directly ahead of us, blocking the road as he raised the visor of his helmet to see us as clearly as he could. His face was hard to discern within the shadowed opening, but I saw a red-veined nose above a bushy red moustache, and then his voice came rasping towards us.

“Who are you people and what are you up to? No damned good, I’ll wager. State your names and your business and give me one good reason why I shouldn’t take the lot of you into custody.”

I stood up, and when he turned his glowering gaze on me I forced myself to smile and addressed him in my best English, since I was convinced that, like most of his ilk, he would be barely literate at best, with no knowledge at all of Latin, which he would sneer at as clerkish nonsense.

“I can give you an excellent reason, Sir Knight. We are engaged upon the affairs of Holy Church. I am Father James and I am a member of the secretarial staff of Lord Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow and senior prelate of the realm of Scotland. My associate here, Father Jacobus, has been with me on a mission to the south on behalf of His Lordship and we are now returning to Glasgow to conclude our business.” I indicated Ewan on the other wagon. “The bald man there is the Bishop’s uncle, Ewan Scrymgeour, brother to His Lordship’s mother, and the young woman with him is his daughter Margaret, who is in mourning for her recently dead husband, killed by bandits near the border with England. We are taking her to be with her mother until she has the baby. The others are all employed by Master Scrymgeour. I have letters of safe conduct from the Bishop, should you wish to read them.”

That was sheer bravado on my part and I knew the risk I was taking, for the only documents I had in my possession were two brief sets of notes given to me by Bishop Wishart before I left Glasgow. But I could sense both truculence and outright hostility in the choleric-looking Englishman, and so I decided to try to allay his suspicions by gambling heavily on his being illiterate, knowing that if I was wrong, we might all die here.

The fellow glowered at me for a moment from within the cavern of his helmet, his heavy eyebrows drawing into one thick, unbroken line, then grunted and held out a peremptory hand. “Show me.”

My stomach contracted in a spasm, but I maintained my outward composure and dug into my scrip for the two folded pieces of parchment. I handed them, unopened, to the knight.

“May I be permitted to ask your name, sir?”

The knight had removed one of his gauntlets and now held it clamped beneath an elbow as he strove to unfold and open the first letter. He grunted an interrogative sound, then growled, “Redvers. Sir Lionel Redvers of Suffolk. Now let’s see here …”

Having finally unfolded the parchment, he held it up and peered at it closely, and I felt the tension drain out of me. Had he been able to read, he would already have seen that what he held was no letter of safe conduct, but a list of brief instructions on what I was to do at various stages of my journey from Glasgow. He said nothing, though, and sat staring at the parchment as though memorizing its contents. Finally he sat up straighter—no easy feat, dressed as he was in full armour—refolded the letter, and returned it to me.

“So be it,” he growled. “But you can’t leave yet. We are awaiting a marching party here, and until they come no one can pass beyond this point. Where are you headed now? You’ll never get to Glasgow before dark.”

“No, sir. We had intended to stop at the inn in Lanark town.”

Someone shouted in the distance behind him, and the Englishman spun his horse to look back. “They’re coming,” he said to no one in particular, then looked back at me. “Stay here until we are gone, and then you may follow us. Lanark is no more than three miles from here.”

He swung away, pulling his visor closed with a sweep of his hand, then set spurs to his horse and charged off, followed by his two companions. I turned back to Ewan and found him watching me, a strange expression on his face.

“Uncle to the Bishop, you said?”

“Aye. It seemed a fitting description at the time, and it worked. No English knight, no matter how much he detests the Scots, is going to risk giving serious offence to a senior churchman—particularly by interfering with his family.”

“You took a risk.”

I grinned at him, feeling much better now. “Not as big as the risk I took in showing him that letter of safe conduct from the Bishop,” and I explained how I’d banked on the man being illiterate and too vain to admit it.

No one spoke, and Ewan stared at me steadily. “I pray you, in future, don’t be so quick to gamble with my life.” He shrugged very gently. “I have no great fear of losing it, but I take much comfort from the belief, foolish though you might make it appear, that the disposition of it rests in my own hands.”

“And yet it worked, and we have been rewarded handsomely. We can now follow the English all the way to Lanark without being bothered further.”

“And we would, were we not due to turn left at the crossroads. Lamington is a mile in that direction.”

“Ah! I did not know that. I knew it was near Lanark, but I have never been there. So it’s over that way?”

“Aye, it is. Listen, did you not say there were supposed to be a half score of archers with those three? Did you see any signs of them?”

I grinned at him. “No more than I did of Robertson or his men. Archers are hard to see, Ewan. Had you forgotten?”

He threw me a look of pure disgust, then paused, his head cocked. “Well, whoever these people are, they’re coming now.”

We were less than thirty paces from the point where the two roads crossed, and it was plain from what Redvers had said that the column they were waiting for would cross directly in front of us. We moved forward slowly until we were right beside where the column would pass, and as we moved, the noise of the group approaching from our left grew steadily louder until the front ranks came into view. They were all footmen, uniformly dressed in chain-mail shirts, plain steel helmets, and leather jerkins with a small patch over the left breast, showing a red swan on a white field, and they were walking in the semblance of a march. They came towards us four abreast on the narrow road, and we fell silent as they approached.

Throughout my life, I have been troubled from time to time by terrifying dreams that I have never shared with anyone, whether from shame or fear I cannot truly say. In all of them I am being threatened or pursued by someone or something that is determined to kill me. The details of these dreams are never clear when I finally wake up, shivering, but the overwhelming sense of doom and terror they engender remain with me long afterwards. In all of them, my pursuer is always unimpaired and merciless, but I am always hindered by an inability to run fast enough, to shout loudly enough for help, or to hide quickly enough. In the moments following the appearance of the front ranks of that English column, I somehow fell into that dream state while wide awake. It happened with stunning speed; I simply found myself witnessing a situation that seethed up like milk in an overheated pot and boiled over, beyond my control.

I was watching the approaching soldiery idly, hearing the shuffling tread of their feet and the occasional clink or rattle of a piece of weaponry, and then I saw the English knight, Redvers, approaching again, riding at a lumbering trot from the rear of the marching column. As I turned to look at him directly, I noticed that four of the marching men were carrying a litter of some kind, slipping and sliding and generally making heavy going of it at one spot where the roadway was still muddy and puddled from the morning storm. They were no more than thirty paces from me when one of them lost his footing in the thick mud and almost lost his hold on the litter pole, and it was his muffled cry of alarm, a curse, really, that caught my attention. Mine was not the only notice drawn to him, though, and that is when everything around me seemed to speed up rapidly, leaving me too befuddled to do anything other than watch what happened.

I heard Mirren’s voice shouting, “Mother!” and from the corner of my eye I saw her fling herself down from the bench of the wagon and run towards the soldiers. Little Willie bounced in his strapped shawl on her back, his normal daytime roost, while she clutched her skirts above her knees in one hand and waved frantically with the other. I was still blinking and wondering what she was doing when I heard the English knight shout, “Take that woman! Hold her!” and then he was spurring his horse directly towards her, closing the distance between them more rapidly than I could adjust to what I was seeing.

Mirren paid him no attention in her dash towards the litter, and she and the huge warhorse collided directly in front of me with a sound that appalled me. The animal struck her with its shoulder and sent her flying, mother and child spinning like an ungainly top until she crashed to the ground, and only then could I collect myself sufficiently to move. I shouted something, too late either to warn or to protest, and began running to where she and the baby lay in a welter of women’s clothing, and as I ran I saw blood trickling from her nose and mouth. Little Willie was screaming, eyes screwed shut and mouth wide open, though I could scarcely hear him over the other noises. Men everywhere were shouting now, but I paid none of them any attention. I threw myself to the ground on my knees beside Mirren, and as I bent forward to cover her and the boy, someone kicked me in the head.

I know I was kicked only because I was told about it afterwards, for the blow broke my jawbone and knocked me senseless. I was kicked elsewhere, too, thoroughly and methodically, for when I regained awareness I was bruised all over and had several broken bones. I ought to have been killed, I suppose, but my priestly apparel may have saved my life.

Ewan and Andrew managed to escape. As archers, they both knew they needed distance between them and the enemy, and so as soon as Ewan saw what was happening—and he saw it far sooner than I did—he seized his bow case and quiver, called out to Andrew, then leapt down from the wagon and ran, using the vehicle’s bulk to shield him from English arrows.

There were no English arrows, though, because Robertson and his five men had already stalked and killed the ten bowmen Redvers had brought with him, so as soon as the two marksmen had gained sufficient distance to allow them to shoot clearly, they turned back towards the enemy and set about killing Englishmen. Redvers the knight attempted to send his footmen against them, but from less than a hundred paces Ewan’s arrows and Andrew’s crossbow bolts could punch right through their inferior chain mail, so they retreated, having no stomach for a frontal assault across open ground against marksmen now being reinforced by others as Robertson and his men came running from the woods and joined the fight. Only Redvers himself and his two mounted men-at-arms were strongly enough armoured to face the Scots fire, and in attempting to close with them, they proved that only Redvers was immune to the Scots arrows. Ewan, with his great bow of yew, brought down both men-at-arms with armour-piercing bodkins, and a direct hit on Redvers’s breastplate from twenty paces, though the missile glanced off and away, almost unhorsed the knight, who lost his sword while fighting to stay in the saddle and then turned and lumbered away to rejoin his men.

Moments later, the rearguard of Redvers’s column came charging to the rescue of their lord and master. They were crossbowmen, a dozen strong, and they had, it appeared, been lounging far behind the rear of the column, bored and distracted by having had nothing to occupy them since the beginning of their sweep. They might have been effective when they finally arrived, Ewan said, had Redvers known how to deploy them, but they were at a disadvantage from the outset, with Ewan and three of Robertson’s men armed with yew longbows harassing them with accurate, long-range fire before they could come close enough to organize themselves into any kind of useful formation. Four of the twelve went down in the opening exchange, and the remaining eight were sufficiently rattled by the unexpected accuracy of the Scots’ shooting to start falling back immediately. None of them, clearly, had any wish to die beside their first four comrades. They withdrew behind the wagons Ewan and Andrew had abandoned. They then had the advantage over Ewan’s group, who could not move forward without risk.

It was now a situation in which neither side could hope to make progress, and in a very short time, the English reorganized themselves, set up defensive formations, and made ready to leave, watched by the eight Scots archers who had bested them at odds of five to one.

Even in defeat, though, the English won, for Ewan saw two of them snatch Mirren up from where she lay beside me and throw her unceremoniously across the back of a horse belonging to one of Redvers’s two dead companions. He could have shot them dead from where he stood, but they would simply have been replaced by others, and he was afraid of hitting Mirren, the boy, or me by mischance. Besides, as he told me later, he only had two arrows left in his quiver.

They loaded her and her son hurriedly into the larger of our two wagons, and then they led the wagon to the litter and quickly loaded Mirren’s mother onto it as well. Keeping an eye on the distant Scots, they smashed the smaller wagon’s wheels and killed its team of horses. They then moved out and away, taking the road to Lanark and leaving their dead behind them, though no one had any doubt that they would return in strength within the hour to bury their own and hang any Scot foolish enough to be within reach.

Throughout it all, I lay unconscious in the junction of the crossroads, bleeding from my ears.