CHAPTER NINETEEN

1

In the general discussion surrounding the disappearance of Hugh Braidfoot, we learned later, someone in Lanark had let slip that the missing man was the same Braidfoot whose daughter Mirren had married the outlaw William Wallace. That story had very soon reached the ears of the sheriff, William Hazelrig.

Hazelrig had been singularly unsuccessful in putting down any of the local Scots outlaws or even interfering with their illegal activities, which consisted mainly of poaching venison, and because he had been unable to stop them—they insisted upon some imagined right to refuse to die of starvation—he was afraid people were laughing at him, and so he pounced on this new information as a means of salvaging his name. He anticipated that the dutiful daughter might at this difficult time be tempted to return to visit her ailing mother, and it seemed likely to him that she might even be accompanied on such a visit by her outlawed husband. And so he had dispatched Sir Lionel Redvers to take the mother into custody.

What Hazelrig had hoped to achieve by doing that was unclear to me at the time, and even now, decades afterwards, it still makes me shake my head in disbelief. Had he chosen to keep a discreet watch on the Braidfoot household, he would easily have taken Mirren when she arrived, and even had Will not been with her, he might thus have been able to lure him out of the forest on a mission of rescue. But by instead arresting the blameless Miriam Braidfoot, the sheriff was giving clear warning to Will and his wife to stay well away from Lanark if they valued their freedom. Had Sir Lionel Redvers’s little expedition passed by that crossroads even one-quarter of an hour earlier, we might never have encountered them, and much might have been different. We would have turned towards Lamington and discovered that the lady Miriam had been taken, and we would then have returned to Will in the forest, to initiate inquiries through Bishop Wishart. But Fate decided to abet Hazelrig’s efforts.

As soon as the English left, Ewan ran over to where I lay, expecting to find me gravely wounded because of the blood he could see on the side of my head, but he found me to be merely unconscious, with a strong pulse and breathing easily. He made me as comfortable as could be and set Andrew and Father Jacobus to watch over me while he and the other six archers hurried after Redvers’s departing force, to be within sight of them before the enemy had any chance to do anything further with Mirren and her mother. He had lost custody of Mirren, he would tell me long afterwards, but he was prepared to die before losing track of her altogether.

By the time Ewan arrived back, I had regained consciousness, though I could barely move against the pain of my broken ribs. It hurt even to breathe shallowly. Besides which the pain in my head was like a throbbing drum beat, and my vision had not yet returned to normal, so I still saw two of whatever I happened to be looking at. Despite all of that, though, I was fully compos mentis and I was pleased to see Ewan step into the light from our fire that night. It was to be the last pleasure I experienced for months, and it was snuffed the instant I saw the look on his face.

I was flat on my back, lying close to the fire, and for the first few moments he ignored me, speaking quietly to Andrew, and the tone of his voice told me he thought I was still unconscious. When he finally asked if my condition had improved at all, the little man nodded towards me. “See for yourself,” he said. “He’s been awake for more than an hour. But he can’t talk and he can’t move. His jaw’s broken, along with several other things. Nothing too serious, but he’s not going to be running around for a month or two.”

A moment later, Ewan was kneeling above me.

“How are you? Can you get up?”

“No.” I was as startled as he was to hear my voice emerge in a cracked, feathery whisper, but it was the first sound I had made since being injured and I could not believe how much pain and effort it had caused me to utter that single syllable. I tried to grit my teeth and regretted it immediately. Then, when my heartbeat had slowed down again and I thought I could control myself, I forced myself to speak gently, whispering, almost breathing the words as I asked, “What’s wrong?” It emerged, almost inaudibly, as Oss ong?

He had been peering at me with concern, but now he scowled. “What’s wrong with what? With your face? You’ve been worked over with heavy boots. I’m surprised you can even open your eyes, let alone whisper.”

I closed my eyes and the pain started to dissipate immediately, but I forced myself to look at him again, seeing the agony in him, and mouthed, “Where’s Mirren?”

I saw panic grow and blossom in his eyes as he struggled to put into words what should never have needed to be said. Finally, though, he found his voice, and for the next half-hour I lay and listened, appalled, to what he had to say.

“Everything’s gone to Hell, Jamie,” he began. “In the space o’ an hour, it a’ went bad … We went after the English, to keep an eye on whatever they might do wi’ Mirren, but we hadna been going for a quarter of an hour before one o’ Robertson’s bowmen found the body of wee Willie lying at the side of the road. It was an accident that he found it—he had moved off the road into the underbrush wi’ everybody else when word came back from the man in front that somebody was comin’, and he almost knelt on the wee boy before he saw him. There were no wounds on the body. Nothin’ to show what had killed him. He was just dead, and somebody had thrown him aside, into the bushes …”

I felt my heart threatening to burst, but I could neither move nor make a sound. But Ewan was far from finished.

“That was the start of it,” Ewan continued. “But once it had started, there was no stoppin’ it. I couldn’t even take time to bury the poor child, for fear I’d lose track o’ Mirren, so we set him aside and left him there until we could come back. When we reached Lanark, I left Robertson and his men to wait for me in the woods, and I went into the town to see what I could find out about the women. I went to the archers’ company attached to the garrison and spoke to the man in charge there. It was safe enough. None o’ the garrison archers would ha’e been out on the road that day.

“He was a Welshman, and I told him who I was, and that I’d served in Edward’s campaigns in England and France in the days before Edward became the King. His name was Gareth Owens, and we got along, and I fed him drink in a tavern later that night, then picked his brains on the sheriff and that knight called Redvers. I asked him what had happened to the women prisoners brought in that morning …”

There was roaring in my ears, and my head was still filled with images of the beautiful, laughing child who had been Will’s firstborn, but I could still hear Ewan talking, and later, when the pain and emptiness in my soul had receded for a while, I had no difficulty remembering what he had told me.

Owens had looked at him strangely when he asked about the women, and to disarm the fellow Ewan had chuckled lewdly and said he had seen them being brought in. Something in the look of the younger one, he told the man, had made him think she was a toothsome piece, even heavily pregnant as she was. She had roused his curiosity as well as his lust, and now he wanted to know if she would be held for long, or if he would be wasting his time lingering in town in hopes of seeing her when she was freed.

Owens sat staring at Ewan for long moments, as though trying to decide whether or not to believe what he had said, but then he twisted right around in his seat and called to a man sitting a few tables behind him.

“Sit ye down,” he said when the newcomer reached their table. “This man is Ewan Scrymgeour, one of us, though half Scotch, and an archer for years with Edward when he was still prince. Ewan, this is Dyllan. He is from south Wales and has never handled a bow in his life, and thanks be to God for that. The only thing this one is fit to handle is a ring of keys, but he handles those very well, don’t you, boyo? Dyllan is head jailer here, so he’s the one you need to talk with.” Ewan nodded a greeting at Dyllan, who was tall and cadaverously thin, with deep-set eyes over heavy, dark pouches. “Drink some beer with us, Dyllan. Ewan has some questions for you and talking is thirsty work.”

He waved an arm to one of the tavern wenches, signalling her to bring more beer, and when he turned back he found Dyllan staring at Ewan’s face.

“What happened to you?”

Ewan sniffed. “War club. A mace. At Lewes, against de Montfort and the barons. I was a boy, my bones still soft. Lucky, I was told.”

“Jesus,” the jailer said in a hushed voice, but then he fell silent as their fresh beer was brought to the table, and when the serving woman left he raised his pot in a silent salute and drank deeply, then belched appreciatively and sat back.

“What is it you want to know?” he asked. “Gareth’s not a man to waste another’s time, and if he says you’re good, then you’re good to me, so ask away.”

Ewan hesitated, seeking the best way to frame his question, but before he could speak at all, Gareth interjected. “There was two women taken in today, into your place. One of them was young, Ewan says, and comely. What can ye tell us about ’er?”

Dyllan was looking at Ewan strangely. “You find that attractive, her being big and ready to whelp any minute?”

Ewan made himself grin. “No, but when she does whelp she’ll be over it soon and ready to go again. Who is she, d’ you know?”

The jailer shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m only the jailer. They don’t tell me things like that. My job’s to keep ’em penned up. I don’t need to know who they are. But I know the one you’re askin’ after’s mad. She’s crazed and out of ’er mind, she is. The other one was ’er mother.”

“Was?” Ewan told me afterwards how difficult it had been for him to keep his face from betraying him. “Y’ mean she’s dead?”

“Aye. She were dead when they brung ’er in. Didn’t find out, though, till we tried to lift ’er out o’ the wagon she was in. She were gettin’ cold by then.”

“Then it’s no wonder the daughter’s mad with grief.”

The jailer shrugged. “Aye, mayhap. But that aren’t all. I tell you, I was glad to get out o’ that place at the end o’ my shift t’day. That’s the wust day I c’n recall in there, and I’ve seen some bad uns.”

“Ah,” said Ewan. “Then let’s not talk about it. All I really want to know is, when will she get out?”

“When will she what?”

Gareth spoke up again. “’E wants to know whether ’e should stay ’ere for a few days, looking to meet up with ’er when she gets out, or whether he’d best be on his way and forget it.”

“Oh …” Dyllan’s headshake was slow and ponderous. “No. Best move on, friend. She won’t be coming out again, that one. And even if she did, she wouldn’t be no use to you. She were screamin’ about some snapper, some little ’un what ’ad got lost. I never saw no youngster there, but she was screamin’ mad, cryin’ is name and howlin’, throwin’ ’erself around. And then she found out the other woman was dead, and that made her worse. Went proper mad then, she did, and flew at big Simon, tryin’ to scratch his eyes out. Wrong thing to do, that was. Big Simon’s not too clever, and ’e’s got a nasty temper. Smacked her in the head with his ring of keys, he did, and then kicked ’er in the belly when she went down. ’E only kicked her the once, but that was enough. It shut ’er up for a while, but then she started pukin’ an’ bleedin’ all over the place.”

Ewan grunted. He told me it took all of his strength not to reach out and choke the jailer, but he knew he had to remain calm. “What happened then?”

“Well, she was ’avin’ ’er baby. All we could do was watch till it were done.”

He made himself grimace. “She had her baby?”

“Aye, but it was dead when it come out.” The jailer shook his head in what might have been regret, then picked up his beer and took another long drink. “Jesus,” he said, “I’ve never seen so much blood.”

Ewan ground his teeth together fiercely and asked quietly, “And what about the woman? Did she live?”

“Oh aye. At least, she was alive when I left. I threw ’er the blankets off the old woman’s litter, but she wouldn’t move off the floor, so I just covered ’er up and left ’er there.”

“On the floor. You left her there …”

“Aye.”

“And what happened to the baby?”

“It were dead.”

“I know it was dead, Dyllan. I asked what happened to it.”

Dyllan looked down into his pot of ale, and then he said, in a very quiet voice, “Simon fed it to the pigs with the rest of the mess.”

Ewan drew a great breath and stood up from the table, gripping his left thumb in his right fist to keep himself from lashing out. “Well, then,” he said calmly, “no point in waiting around to see her. I doubt she’ll look as good again as she did this day.” He forced himself to nod to the jailer and then looked at Gareth Owens.

“I’ll be on my way, then. Mayhap our paths will cross again someday.” He reached into his scrip and laid a silver coin on the table. “The drinks are on me until this runs out. I thank you for your time and kindness.”

Gareth stared down at the silver coin and then grinned widely. “We’ll drink to your good health, Archer, and you’re welcome back here any time.”

2

By the time Ewan finished, his face was streaked with tracks where the tears had scoured runnels through the dirt and road dust caked on his sunken cheeks, and I was racked in agony from the sobs that wrenched me and which I was powerless to resist. I could not find a single word to say that would serve any purpose other than to break the silence between us. I have no memory of how long we remained there, immersed in our grief, but it seemed to me afterwards that it must have been a long time. Finally, though, Ewan raised his head and looked at me, scrubbing fiercely at his eyes with the sleeve of his rough tunic.

He bent over me then, bringing his ear close to my mouth and being extremely careful not to touch me in any way.

“Talk to me. Can you do that, if I stay like this?”

“I don’t know,” I wheezed, unable to move my jaw. “I’ll try.”

“What do we do now, Jamie?” I said nothing, and he added, “We have to do something. We can’t do nothing. But what do we do? We have to tell Will, and how will we do that? This will kill him, kill him.”

“No.” I could barely get the small word out, and Ewan stooped quickly again to place his ear close to my lips. I breathed slowly, then tried again, hearing my own words mangled by my inability to move my broken jaw. “No. He won’t die …” That emerged as “Ee owned eye,” but Ewan jerked away and looked at me and I knew he had understood. I took several steady breaths before I tried again, articulating each word as slowly and clearly as I could. “You’ll have to tell him, Ewan. I can’t. I can’t talk.”

He nodded, and then he asked, “What’ll we do with you now? I can’t take you back in that shape. You’d die on the road. You might die anyway, if you can’t eat anything.”

“Yakobus,” I whispered. “There are monks in Lanark. Yakobus will ge’ me there … ’morrow … An’ they’ll ge’ me to G’asgow …”

Ewan prepared to stand up, but I hissed at him. “No!”

“What?” He bent to my lips again.

“Can’t go … can’t go back wi’out knowing … Back to Lanark, about Mirren … Can’t tell Will he’s lost his children and not know how his wife is. You have to go back and make sure she … she’s well.”

“Jesus, Jamie, how can she be well? She’s lost her bairns and her mother.”

“Not her life, though … Not her life, pray God. Find out, Ewan.”

This time his headshake was decisive. “All right. We will. We’ll make a bier for you tonight, from bits of the wagon, then we’ll leave first thing in the morning and we’ll take you with us. There’s eight of us, not counting Jacobus, so we can take turns carrying you in teams of four. It’s only three miles. We’ll leave you with the monks and I’ll go back into Lanark. When I know how Mirren is, I’ll go and tell Will. You’ll get to Glasgow in the meantime, as soon as you can travel, and get your friend Wishart started on setting Mirren free. There must be something he can do, otherwise what’s the point of being a bishop?”

And so it was. Under Ewan’s guidance, several of Robertson’s bowmen spent time that evening making a carrying frame for me out of two floorboards from the wrecked wagon. With cross pieces made from wheel spokes and the whole thing tied together with pieces cut from the harness reins, it was ungainly but light and well suited to its purpose.

I barely slept at all that night, unable to find comfort or relief from the pain of my ribs and head, but the following morning, strapped tightly into immobility in my new bed, I fell asleep on the road before I had been carried for half a mile and slept like a dead man, undisturbed by stops or bearer changes, until they woke me up in the humble monastery outside the walls of Lanark. Ewan was bending over me, looking very serious and telling me something that appeared to be important, but my head was swimming and the pain was unbearable and I must have passed out again. I remember waking up again some time after that, to find an aged monk holding a cup to my lips and forcing me to drink some foul-smelling brew, and then I remember nothing for several days until I awoke to find Father Jacobus sitting close by my side, peering intently into my face.

Startled to see his face so near my own, I blinked myself awake and tried to sit up, but that was an unwise thing to do, since I had forgotten about my injured ribs and I almost passed out again from the pain of trying to move against my restraints.

When I recovered from my near swoon and was able to catch my breath again, I discovered, with a flaring surge of horror, that I was utterly mute, incapable of even opening my mouth.

Jacobus leaned towards me. “You can’t speak,” he said. “Your jaw is wired shut. I have never seen the like of it. Can you hear me? Blink if you can.” I blinked eagerly and he held up a hand. “Are you really here this time?” He interpreted my confusion correctly, for he nodded quickly and held up his hand again.

“I thought you were here yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that. But you weren’t, because you couldn’t remember me having been here when I came back next time. Yesterday I would have sworn on oath that you were fully here. Do you remember me being here yesterday? If you do, blink once. If you do not, blink twice.”

I blinked twice and he frowned, then reached into the depths beneath his scapular and pulled out a folded letter, holding it up so that I could see my own name written on the front of it.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked me.

I blinked twice, with exaggerated slowness, and he sighed and leaned in closer, speaking more to himself than to me. “Yet again then, I must try. You appear to be wide awake, alert and aware of me, but I thought the same thing before, and here you are, with no memory of any of it.”

He sighed again. “Father James Wallace. Do you recognize that name?”

I blinked once.

“Is it your name?” Blink.

“Do you know where you are?” That stopped me, for I did not know how to respond. I thought I knew where I was, in a tiny monastery near Lanark, but suddenly I was unsure. Jacobus was watching me and must have divined what I was thinking, because he went on, “Do you remember speaking of the monks of Lanark?” I blinked, and he nodded. “Well, that is where you are. You have been here for five days, and have been in the care of Brother Dominic of Ormiston. Brother Dominic spent his life as a Knight Hospitaller. He was crippled early in the siege of Acre and is one of the few survivors of that catastrophe. He was shipped back to England, but his family is Scots, and so he came to Lanark and became hospitaller to the brethren here, using his medical and surgical skills for the good of the community. It was he who encased your body in restraints and wired your mouth shut to ensure that the break in your jawbone will heal cleanly, and he has been treating you with medicines from the Holy Land, medicines he calls opiates, to keep you free from pain. Sadly, those same medicines also cause you to forget everything that happens. Dominic believes, though, that it is better to have you slightly confused and free of pain than it would be to have you bright-minded and in constant agony. And so he feeds his opiates to you in the honeyed milk that is the only food you can consume. He says, in fact, that as long you are confined to bed and unable to move, honeyed milk is all the food your body needs. Thanks be to God that your ability to suck is unimpaired, for were it not, you would surely starve to death in the midst of plenty.” He broke off, looking perplexed, then asked, “Does none of what I am saying sound familiar? I have told you all of this three times already.”

I gazed straight at him and blinked twice. No, none of this is familiar. He shook his head in bemused disbelief, then looked away.

“Brother Dominic says it will take months for your injuries to heal, and weeks, at least, before you will be fit to travel to Glasgow. He told me that if all goes well, you should be able to sit up without restraints within the month, but you will be feeble and weak at first and will have to learn to walk again and to eat solid food again, as though you were an infant. And that reminds me of what else I must ask you. Remember, one blink for yes, two for no.”

Blink.

“Do you know who I am?” Blink.

“Do you know a man called Ewan Scrymgeour?” Blink.

“Is he a friend of yours?” Blink.

“Do you remember sending Ewan Scrymgeour to gather information?” Blink.

“Can you remember where you sent him?” Blink.

“Was it Lanark?” Blink.

“Do you remember what it was that you instructed him to find out?” Blink.

“Aye … Well, that’s good. Because Ewan’s not here now. He came back, three days ago, but you were too sick to talk with him, drifting in and out of awareness, and he had no time to wait for you to wake up properly. It was more important, he said, for him to reach Will in the forest before anyone else could. And so he dictated a message to me, for you to read when you grew well enough, and left it in my care. Since you cannot move, would you like me to read the letter to you?”

Blink.

“Very well, then. I must tell you that the words are Ewan’s own, exactly as he spoke them. He explained to me very clearly that he wanted me to transcribe his words verbatim. That was difficult, for he was speaking in the vulgate, and all my training has been in the formal Latin of the Church. Nevertheless, I have managed, I believe, to capture his words exactly.” The elderly priest sat up straighter and carefully unfolded the single sheet of parchment he was holding. Then he moved away, holding it at arm’s length and tilted towards the small window that was the room’s sole source of light, and when he was satisfied that he could see sufficiently well he coughed to clear his throat. “Can you hear me clearly?”

He paused, as though waiting for an answer, and then he came quickly back to my bed and peered down at me with a contrite look that might have made me laugh under other circumstances. “Forgive me, Father James,” he said. “I forgot you cannot speak. Could you hear me clearly?” I blinked once, and he moved away to the window again, clearing his throat nervously for a second time before he began to read.

“Jamie,” he began reading, his tone declamatory. “They tell me you will live and probably come out of this with no permanent damage. I’m glad of that. I am sorry I can’t stay here to wait for you, and I know you know that already. My place is in Selkirk, with Will, since you can’t be there, and I am sick with the thought of what I have to tell him. I am sick of it all, Jamie; sick to my soul of the pettiness and cruelty of men who should be better than they are; sick of the greed and the ambition of men who are called noble but who disgrace the very name of manhood.

“I went back to Lanark, as you bade me, knowing you were right and that I needed to go back. Gareth Owens was not there when I arrived, but some of his men recognized me from the previous night and made me welcome enough. I asked them about Mirren, but no one there could tell me anything. They were archers and none of them had been there when we met Redvers, so most of them knew nothing about what had happened. So then I went looking for the jailer after that, the one called Dyllan, but he was off duty and had gone into Lanark for the market day.

“Soon after that I found myself out by the swine sties, searching the muck for any signs I could find of a dead baby, though I knew myself mad for even looking. The pigs were snorting and wallowing in their filth and I wanted to take my bow and kill every one of them. But they were just being pigs, doing what God intended pigs to do. It was the swine who fed such food to them who deserved to die for what they had done.

“Gareth arrived back late in the afternoon, and he had been drinking, so I plied him with more ale and followed up on the story of Mirren, telling him I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her losing the baby. I called it a brat. He was looking at me strangely, I saw, but there was no anger in him. And then he poured me more ale, and put an arm around my shoulder. He told me that hours later, after I had left, he still remembered the way I looked when I asked Dyllan about leaving her lying on the floor in all that blood, and he had felt ashamed. He and Dyllan were both very drunk by then, he said, having used up the entire shilling I had left them, but that only added to the shame he felt, and so he had convinced Dyllan to go back to the cell to look in on her, and they had found her dead in a corner of the cell, in the middle of a big pool of blood.

“The animal called Simon, the jailer on duty who had knocked her down and kicked her, grew angry when Dyllan challenged him for an explanation. The bitch had gone mad, he said, screaming and howling for some brat she’d lost, crying out his name, Willie, and throwing herself at the cell door, trying to break it down. He had finally lost patience with her noise and gone back into the cell, where he had knocked her down again, after which she had obviously learned her lesson, since she hadn’t made another sound.

“So there you have it, and that’s the message I am going now to deliver to Will. His family is gone, wiped out at the whim of exactly the kind of man he refuses to follow or recognize. His son is dead, at less than a year and a half. His second child is dead, murdered and still-born, its sex unknown, its body fed to pigs. His wife’s mother is dead, for the crime of having given her daughter to Will Wallace. And now his wife, too, is dead, murdered by a witless, shambling monster.

“That the monster is dead changes nothing and affords no satisfaction, but I cut off his head myself and fed it to the pigs that night, before I left Lanark castle.

“I have to say that Gareth Owens surprised me. I heard the following day that he took a report of what had happened to the sheriff, the next morning: two women arrested and then abused and murdered in the sheriff’s cells with no official supervision between their being admitted and Gareth’s own complaint. Redvers was arrested immediately, but nothing will come of it. English law decrees that no English knight may be accused of a crime by anyone of less than knightly blood. Hazelrig could charge him with dereliction and irresponsibility, but he would have nothing to gain by doing so, and the charges, if seen as frivolous, might return to haunt him someday.

“This is the kind of incident that Scotland’s people are fighting against, this wanton disregard for the lives, freedom, and rights of anyone not of noble birth. This is the kind of excess that breeds revolt, and Will Wallace will have much to say about it, once his first grief has turned to the need for vengeance. And when that happens, I would not like to be in Hazelrig’s shoes.

“I’ll say adieu and hope we’ll meet again someday, Jamie. Get better soon, and get yourself back to Glasgow and to Wishart, though I fear the news of this will be familiar to the Bishop before you can reach him. Be well.”

3

I was an invalid for more than a month and a half, although I was improving visibly after three weeks, despite a drastic loss of weight and muscle tone caused by a liquid diet and a complete lack of exercise. By the end of the fifth week, the bindings around my rib cage were less tight and I no longer had to be restrained while I slept, so I could breathe more deeply, though it still pained me to do so, and the thought of laughing or coughing chilled me. I was permitted to leave my bed in the seventh week, but it took me four full days to build up the strength to walk for fifty paces. After that, though, I grew stronger daily, and Brother Benedict soon removed the iron wiring from my jaw. Two days after that I could eat normally again.

A week later I was back in Glasgow, having made the journey by wagon and accompanied by Father Jacobus. Bishop Wishart made us both welcome and we found the entire cathedral community agog with the news of armed rebellion in the north and in the south.

Only then, after an interval of almost three full months, did I learn what had been taking place during my time recovering.

Wishart had heard the news of Miriam Braidfoot’s arrest from her parish priest, who was outraged by the arrest and confinement of one of his most devout and influential parishioners. When he then heard of her subsequent death in custody, he launched an official diocesan inquiry, in the course of which the investigators learned that Mistress Braidfoot’s daughter Mirren, or Marian, had somehow contrived to have herself killed by what was officially described as misadventure in precisely the same prison and on the same day as her mother. Sir Lionel Redvers, who had been responsible for the arrests of the women, was arraigned by the cathedral chapter, but he laughed at the summons and refused to attend the hearing. A week later he was ambushed and murdered one evening outside Lanark. He was accompanied by a round dozen mounted troopers, all of whom died with him, their weapons unbloodied and their bodies riddled with hard-shot arrows. Redvers himself had been dragged from his horse and decapitated. His body bore no other wounds. His head was never found.

The arrows, of course, indicated clearly that the outlaws of Selkirk Forest were responsible, and William Hazelrig assembled all his forces for a pre-emptive strike into the greenwood, calling for them to assemble on a given morning near the village of Lamington, and apparently seeing no irony in that choice of rallying points. Among the forces that assembled were a half-score of veteran archers whom none of the others knew. The newcomers were freshly arrived from Wales, they said, dispatched north as part of a new intake of Welsh bowmen recruited for the wars in Scotland.

The sheriff’s expedition reached the forest outskirts and searched the woods diligently for three days, finding nothing and no one, but during that last night, in the middle watch, the darkest part of the night, the outlying sentries died in silence, while the newly arrived archers set aside their bows and used daggers and stealth to surprise and kill the guards on duty inside the camp. The man guarding the entrance to the sheriff’s tent likely neither saw nor heard the arrow that killed him and threw him backward into the tent, and before Sheriff Hazelrig knew what was happening, he was clubbed senseless and abducted. Once free of the sleeping encampment, the archers were joined by the others who had approached in the darkness and who had spent the previous hour disposing of the outlying guards and preparing pitch-dipped fire arrows. When the word was given, a hailstorm of flaming missiles swept the English camp, setting fire to tents and sleeping men, and the ensuing slaughter was merciless. Very few of the English sheriff’s punitive expedition escaped alive.

William Hazelrig, King Edward’s sheriff of Lanark, was found dead the following day. His hands had been severed and his throat cut, and a parchment scroll was fastened to his chest with a deepdriven dagger. The scroll said simply:

 

In Memoriam

Marian Wallace

Requiescat in pace

 

The news of Wallace’s vengeance sent shock waves rippling across the whole south of Scotland, and for two weeks no English force of any description moved anywhere, least of all into Selkirk Forest.

By the end of that second week, Robert Wishart himself was in Selkirk Forest, haranguing Will. Andrew Murray had raised all of Scotland north of the Forth in rebellion, and the English up there were in total disarray. Wishart reminded Will, forcibly, that Murray, too, came of a knightly family but that his opinion of the magnates and their divided, self-centred, and ever-fluctuating loyalties was precisely the same as Will’s. Murray’s army was an army of the common folk, the Scots people who provided the solid backing underlying the community of the realm. Now was the time, Wishart said, for Will to join Murray, to throw in his lot with the northerner and march with his own people from the south to unite the whole of Scotland under their joint leadership. They knew each other. They admired and respected each other. And they were friends, sharing a detestation of all that kept Scotland from being what it should be, a strong, free land.

Wishart was an eloquent persuader, a fact that I knew well. He was also a bishop and a lord of the Church who ought not to have been fomenting rebellion. But above and beyond all else, Robert Wishart was a patriot who believed in his heart of hearts that Scotland had a destiny that could be fulfilled only if it rid itself of English occupation, certainly, but also of the English loyalties and English obligations evinced by its most powerful lords in their tenacious adherence to feudal allegiances that had lost all relevance. I now believe that Bishop Wishart was a man born before his time in that respect, a man of keen insight who foresaw the inevitable death of the feudal system that once governed all of Christendom but has fallen into ruin these past two hundred years.

My main belief about Robert Wishart, though, is that through his patriotism and his enthusiasm, his manipulative ways and his iron, stubborn, single-minded wilfulness, he brought about the end of the cousin I had known and loved. Perhaps I am being too harsh, too judgmental, but that is what I now believe. When Robert Wishart left to return to Glasgow on that occasion, he left a different man behind him than the William Wallace I had known.

The man who followed him out from the greenwood shortly afterwards, emerging, as some Englishman has written, like a bear from his forest den, was the William Wallace all men know today, Edward Plantagenet’s scowling, giant, merciless nemesis, and all England, along with much of Scotland, would regret his awakening. The laughing archer I had known was gone forever, obliterated in the destruction of his beloved Mirren and their children. The implacable avenger who came out of Selkirk Forest finally had set aside his long yew bow forever and taken up the massive sword his friend Shoomy had brought him in earlier, better days. I found it strange, thereafter, that the enormous sword, elaborately beautiful and lethal and taller than an ordinary man, should so completely usurp the place held for so long in Will’s life by his great yew bow, but as he himself pointed out afterwards, the bow lacked the close immediacy of a hand-held blade, and the sword he swung with his enormous archer’s muscles enabled him to smile more closely, face to face with every enemy he met.

As Will Wallace, he had promised his wife he would not fight against England and would look to his family’s safety first and above all. But he had failed her, he believed, losing her through his own carelessness and despite his knowledge of the dangers of being anywhere near the English. Now, he swore, he would not fail her memory, and his revenge would be without precedent and without equal; nor would he rest until all Scotland was scoured clean of the reek of English occupation. And so he marched to meet his destiny, and all the folk of Scotland flocked to follow him, to Stirling Bridge.

He never spoke Mirren’s name again.