The Forest Laird: A Tale of William Wallace

by Jack Whyte

  “But I sinned, Will. I sinned grievously. I broke a man’s head.”

  “Aye, I’ve heard. And he would have broken yours had you not struck first. You regret it, I can see that. You are full of remorse, and that’s good. So take your remorse and confess it to Father Peter when you get back to Paisley. Tell him everything that happened. He’ll shrive you pure as the driven snow. Come here.”

  He pulled me into his embrace—though cautiously, with a mind to his injuries—and then he reached out again to Mirren, drawing her close to both of us.

  “Wife,” he said quietly, lapsing back into Scots with his forehead touching both of ours, “you havena yet known the joys of communing wi’ my cousin Jamie here, but ye ha’e heard me talk of him many times. This is a man I love as I do myself, and nigh as much as I do you—though, thanks be to God, for far different reasons.” He smothered a laugh with a grunt as his wife twisted in his arm and rapped him sharply in the ribs, but she was smiling as she did so, and he pulled her close again. “You two are my closest kin,” he said. “My nearest and dearest, and so I will need you to be close wi’ each other, supporting one another when I canna be here. I love you both.” He hugged us close again, then straightened up and released me.

  “Now, Cuz, get ye to your bed, and we’ll try no’ to wake ye when we leave. And get those vows taken this time. I might need a priest in the forest one o’ these days.”

  3

  Will was right about Father Peter’s reaction to my confession. I went to him the day I arrived back at the Abbey and I told him everything I could recall about the events surrounding Will’s meeting with Bek and the beating he had sustained afterwards. He listened in grim-faced silence, nodding only occasionally as I said something or other that appeared to fit with his own perceptions, and when I had finished he went straight into the rite of absolution without even delivering the normal warning against laxity. The penance he assessed me was a very light one, too, considering what I had believed to be the gravity of my sin, and when I voiced my surprise at it he waved his hand impatiently, giving thanks to God instead that I had not forgotten my boyhood lessons with the quarterstaff. Then, when he asked me if I had anything else that concerned me, I told him that I expected the English to come looking for me.

  He laughed at that, much as Will had the previous night. “They would never dream of searching for you within the Abbey precincts,” he said, “but while you are awaiting their arrival—for I know you will, no matter what I tell you—you should apply yourself to your studies and try hard to forget about the entire incident. Wait and work and watch,” he said. “But work harder than anything else, because work will make the time fly quickly.”

  And so I worked hard, and the ensuing week passed quietly, albeit with agonizing slowness, without any English searchers coming to hunt me. The next week passed the same way, and by the end of the third week I found myself forgetting to listen for their clattering arrival. Then Christmas came and went without disruption. Because of King John’s royal activities in the aftermath of his coronation, and King Edward of England’s less than enthusiastic reactions to them, the ordination ceremony that would see me elevated to the priesthood was postponed yet again, this time until Eastertide of the new year.

  On the last day of the year, Edward’s ever-tenuous patience snapped. He repudiated all the promises he had made to the Scots Crown and realm during the interregnum. Two days after that, King John in return pronounced the recent Treaty of Birgham null and void and declared that all promises made to England during the same period, involving the marriage of the Maid of Norway to Edward’s son, Prince Edward of Caernarvon, were no longer binding.

  To the Scots folk in general, none of that meant anything that they could understand, but they understood very clearly that the magnates—the Norman-Scots nobility and the ancient Celtic earl-doms—were fighting among themselves yet again and that the outcome would do nothing for the welfare of ordinary folk.

  Then, in early February, in the ancient town of Scone, King John held his first parliament as monarch of the realm, and it went sufficiently well for him to demand, a fortnight later, that four of his most powerful liegemen, two from north and two from south of the River Forth, should pay formal, public homage to him at the close of Easter, swearing allegiance to his Crown and cause. The two northerners were Donald MacAngus, a Celtic chieftain from the western Highlands, and John, the Earl of Caithness, in the far north. Both were powerful men in their own territories, but their names were practically unknown south of the Forth. The names of the two southerners, on the other hand, rang resonantly with local significance to us. They were young Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, who had not yet turned nineteen, and Sir William Douglas, an arrogant autocrat who ruled his territories with an iron hand and was known to brook no interference from anyone. Douglas was notoriously his own man, and all who knew of Balliol’s summons were waiting to see how he would respond to the demands of the new monarch.

  I must have been one of very few who cared nothing for how Douglas and Balliol regarded each other, for I had matters of my own to attend to that late winter and early spring. I was almost entirely lost in preparing for my elevation to the priesthood, for I was to be ordained at Easter. Bishop Wishart, who would officiate at the ceremonies, had assured me in person that my ordination would take place at last, even if politics were to take precedence again and he were forced to arrange the matter privately at an ordinary Mass, without pomp or panoply.

  My aunt Margaret fell sick early in February of that year, too, and we knew from the outset that there was little chance she would recover. It was clear to all of us that she welcomed the idea of death; she had simply lost the will to live and she looked forward to being reunited in Heaven with her beloved husband. Sir Malcolm’s death almost two years earlier had taken a heavy toll upon her, and not even her youngest daughter’s wedding or the prospect of new grandchildren could sway her from her need to be with him again.

  The other matter that drew at least some of my attention over that year-end period between 1292 and 1293, of course, was the welfare of my cousin and his wife, now living in the wilds of Selkirk Forest. I seldom heard from them, although I did receive a message at least once each month from some stranger passing through Paisley, and from these I deduced that all was well with the Wallaces in the fastness of the greenwood; they appeared to be content with the life they were leading there, and I gathered that they lacked for little. From time to time memories of Will—his smile, a gesture, a remembered opinion—would pop into my mind, and I would find myself smiling at the recollection of one shared occasion or another. What I remembered most often, however, was one of the last things he had said to me, when he told me to finish studying and become a priest, because he might one day need one in his forest haunts. I would think of that and smile too, never for an instant believing that it might be realized.

  4

  There came a day when I found myself lying prostrate at the foot of the altar steps in the Abbey church, dressed all in white and listening to Bishop Wishart asking the attending brotherhood if any one of them knew of any good and proper reason why I should not be raised to the priesthood. Face down as I was on the thick bed of fresh rushes strewn in front of the altar, I could not look up, for the ritual in which we were engaged demanded immobility of me, but even had it not, I would not have dared to raise my head, for one of the men gazing down at me from above was Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, who had last set eyes on me at his camp, the morning he had met with Will. I felt sure he must recognize me eventually, and so I kept my face down, waiting for his cry of condemnation.

  The silence around me stretched and seemed to shiver, but the anticipated challenge did not come, and eventually, incredulously, I heard Bishop Wishart begin to intone the Litany of the Saints. The massed voices of the congregants broke over me in the first responses, and I knew that God had sheltered me. I allowed myself to breathe again and sagged with relief.

  I had spe
nt most of the previous day in isolation, preparing for the rites I was now undergoing, and had then passed the entire night in prayer, surrounded by my closest brethren as they stood vigil with me. Bek had arrived sometime in the evening, making an unexpected, diplomatic visit to the Abbey on his way to St. Andrews. He had not expected Wishart of Glasgow to be in residence, but when he discovered the veteran Bishop’s presence, and the reason for it, he was most affable, I learned afterwards, and insisted upon attending the ordination ceremonies and assisting His Grace of Glasgow with the ritual. The two prelates had never liked each other from first meeting, when Bek of Durham first set foot in Scotland; their mutual antagonism was based solidly upon their opposed priorities, for each of them was dedicated solely to the welfare and security of his own realm.

  The litany ended and Bishop Wishart raised me to my feet with his own hands, then blessed me and laid his hands on my head, calling upon the Holy Spirit to imbue me with the grace to conduct my duties thenceforth with dignitas and rectitude.

  Bishop Bek stepped forward in his turn to bless me by laying his hands upon my head, and I stood frozen in wide-eyed terror, my heart almost bursting with fear. But he barely glanced at me, his eyes raised to the high altar as he laid his hands on my newly tonsured scalp, and I realized, incredulously, that I was safe and that he would never dream of associating the white-robed, purified novice in front of him with the filthy, grey-clad cleric he had cast out of his camp the day he had thrashed the upstart Scot who had so offended him. I stood slightly dazed and alone after that, in front of God’s high altar, while Bishop Wishart anointed my head and hands with holy oils, then dressed me in the vestments of priesthood, the blessed stole and the heavy, cloak-like chasuble. I took the chalice from him for the first time, feeling the weight of the wine and water it contained as I gazed at the flat, square paten of stiffened cloth that covered it and held the bread of the host. Then, as the sounds of the offertory bells died away, Bishop Wishart seated himself in his chair in front of the altar, and I stepped forward, holding a lighted candle, my offering, as a newly ordained priest, of light and purity to him. He took it from my hands and rose again, and together we proceeded with the Mass until, in unison with him, I uttered the sacred words of consecration for the first time and transformed the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.

  Thereafter, with the bright tang of the sacred Blood still tingling beneath my tongue, I bowed my head while the Bishop laid hands on me yet again and uttered the words that endowed me with the power to forgive men’s sins and impose penance upon them: “Receive ye the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”

  After waiting and studying for so long, I was now, with those words, a consecrated priest, and my heart swelled in my chest with joy and with love for my fellow men as Bishop Wishart finally turned me to face and be greeted and welcomed by the fellowship of the assembled congregation. And there, among the applauding crowd, the first two faces I saw clearly belonged to Will Wallace and Ewan Scrymgeour.

  The shock hit me in the chest like a hammer blow, and I turned instinctively to look at Bek, fearing that he, too, must have seen Will, but he was still smiling his frosty, condescending little smile, politely tapping the fingers of one hand into the cupped palm of the other and looking nowhere near the massed monkish ranks in the pews.

  And only then did I realize that there was even less reason for Bek to recognize my friend in this setting than there was for him to recognize me. He had met Will but once—the clean-shaven, fresh-faced Will that I myself had barely recognized at that time, now that I thought back to it. The Will Wallace in the pews today was another man altogether, heavily bearded and darkly tanned—his face, I suspected, artificially stained with walnut juice for the express purpose of altering his appearance—and he was dressed as a resident Abbey monk, wearing a full habit and standing comfortably in the front ranks of the brotherhood, among Brother Duncan and his librarians. He saw me looking and grinned at me, his teeth flashing white in the darkness of his face. Knowing him safe then, and feeling a surge of admiration at his daring, I grinned back at him and moved my eyes to include Ewan in my welcome. As he and I locked eyes, he raised his right thumb to me in a gesture of support I had known well as a boy but had not seen since.

  More than half an hour of blessings, good wishes, and salutations passed before I could finally embrace my two friends, and when I did I could barely see them for the sudden tears that blinded me.

  “Are you mad?” I asked Will, the emotion making my voice sound husky. “You take your lives in your hands coming here. Especially with Bek present. What if he had recognized you?”

  My cousin shrugged. “Then it would have been a different kind of morning. Besides, he wasn’t supposed to be here. You didn’t invite him, did you?”

  “No, Cuz, I did not. But the fact that he came here anyway is an example of how easily our finest plans may come undone. I am glad to see both of you here today, but you took an awful risk.”

  That earned me another shrug of those massive shoulders. “I took an oath to see you priested. D’you not recall?”

  “Aye, I do. But that was before you were outlawed.”

  “An oath’s an oath, even to an outlaw.”

  “True, but I believe God would have held you guilty of no sin had you been prudent and stayed safely away.”

  Ewan spoke up. “Remember who you’re talkin’ to, Jamie. When did you ever know this one to be prudent, or to do the sensible thing?”

  I kept my face straight and nodded seriously. “True enough,” I said. “I’m always hoping he will change his ways, though. I suppose the most I can hope for on a day like this is that he will keep his head down.” I turned my eyes back to Will. “And how is your lady wife? I trust you left her in good health?”

  “I did, and she sent you her cousinly love. She is well and thriving in the freedom of the greenwood, and she told me to tell you that you will be welcome any time you wish to come and visit us. So when will that be, now that you are priested at last?”

  “I have no idea—but I hope it may be soon. Master Wishart’s the one controlling that, though, for now that I’m ordained he must see to it that I am kept busy learning my new tasks. For the remainder of my life, I will be learning how to be a priest. I know I’ll be leaving the Abbey, and that will grieve me, but His Grace has plans for me in Glasgow. He has said he wants me to be his amanuensis, and I suspect that will keep me constantly engaged for the next few years. But now that you are here, how long will you stay?”

  Will slapped his flat belly with an open palm. “Another hour or so, no more. We will eat with you and be gone. We came to see you priested, Cuz, and now you are. There is nothing else to hold us here, and we have much to do when we return to Selkirk. So come and embrace us again, and we’ll leave you to your cleric friends, by whom you are well regarded.”

  I walked with them to the gates after we ate, and on the way we came within two paces of Antony Bek, who nodded to us as we passed, then returned to his discussion with the men around him.

  “Learn a lesson from Bek,” Will said to me at the gates. “People see what they expect to see, rather than what is truly there to be seen. Be good, young Jamie, and when ye’ve become a seasoned priest, come and see us in the forest.”

  I promised I would, and my two oldest friends strode away, and then I went back into the Abbey to begin my new life as a priest.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1

  The remainder of that year, 1293, may have been uneventful for most of the realm of Scotland, but for me it was a hectic period, spent adapting to the practical reality of living daily as a priest. My new principal and superior, Bishop Wishart, was then the senior prelate of Scotland, and he went out of his way, from the outset of our relationship, to ensure that I became familiar with, and stood prepared to deal with, all the political developments that affected our lives, not only within the
realm but even more dramatically in the closely associated circles of the Church in England as well as Scotland. It was an exhaustive field of activity, particularly in the early days, and he plunged me into it directly after my ordination, going so far as to provide me with a well-lit office cubicle so that I could study more effectively and apply myself to the tasks he set me without being interrupted.

  Callow, inexperienced, and newly minted as I was, I knew nonetheless that I was being accorded extraordinary treatment for a tyro, and I braced myself to raise the matter with the Bishop, to discover why he should be at such pains before I even had a chance to prove myself to him.

  But it was he himself who raised the matter. Soon after I had moved to Glasgow, exchanging my home in the Abbey for the new and ornate but yet unfinished cathedral there, he told me he had seen a talent in me years earlier, an ability that had impressed him sufficiently to ensure that he would keep a close eye on me thereafter. I must have looked truly perplexed.

  “I don’t understand you, my lord,” I said. “Forgive me, but what are you talking about?”

  “Your gift for reading people,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. I’ve never seen the like of it in one so young.”

  I laughed aloud, at a loss for words.

  “Don’t laugh, Father James,” he said testily. “If I wished to be amusing I could find more beguiling topics with which to entertain you. You have a gift, God-sent. A talent, lodged deep within you and thrusting itself forward despite your own wishes. God has granted you a rare capacity to look at men and see through all the artifices they present to mask them from the world. You do it without even being aware of it, and you see straight to the heart of whomever you are dealing with at any time. That, Father, is a capability so rare as to be priceless to a man like me, who has to treat from day to day with people whose main concern is to conceal their own true motives.”