The Forest Laird: A Tale of William Wallace

by Jack Whyte

  The Bishop raised a hand and beckoned his companion forward.

  “Father William,” he said, “I present to you two at least, and probably three, of William Wallace’s closest friends and supporters. Father James here, of whom you have heard me speak, is another Wallace, William’s cousin and close friend since early childhood. The hairless one is Ewan Scrymgeour, an archer but much more than simply that. Ewan is the man who inspired Will Wallace and taught him how to use the long yew bow. Thus, in many ways this man is directly responsible for our having travelled to be here today. About the third man you will have just heard.” He waved a hand then to include all three of us. “And may I present to you, in turn, Father William Lamberton, newly returned from France and installed this last week as chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral.”

  The man on the mule had nudged his mount forward and now smiled at us, and I studied him closely, for William Lamberton was very well known to me by repute. He was much younger than I had expected, though, and I judged him now to be no more than two or three years older than myself, which surprised me greatly, considering what he had already accomplished. I liked his smile. It was open and easy, showing both humour and intelligence, and his eyes were bright and wide. He sat erect in the mule’s saddle and I judged him to be tall, perhaps taller than I was, with wide, straight shoulders emphasized by the robe he wore, which was the plain grey habit of a monk.

  As soon as the greetings were over, His Grace asked us to take him directly to Will, and he was not happy when I told him that Will would be away until at least the following day. He muttered something about having ridden for more than two days to get here, and I could see from his face that he really wanted to shout and complain, but there was nothing he or we could do about the misfortune of his timing, and so he set his jaw, bit down hard on his disappointment, and decided to make the best of the situation. He asked me about my mission in the forest, and about the small communities that Jacobus, Declan, and I tended among us, and he even managed to sound interested in my response, but he frowned with quick impatience when he detected something in my gaze.

  “You find it amusing, Father James, that I should be frustrated in my failure to find your cousin here when I have travelled so far to speak with him?”

  I heard a cold acerbity in his tone that was new to me. Something inside me flared with alarm, and in one moment of frightening clarity I sensed danger and a need for great caution. And then sanity returned and I remembered that here was a man who had learned, from hard and often brutal experience, to trust few men and to share his thoughts but sparingly even with those. This was a man, I knew, who had no friends, as other people thought of friends; a man to whom most people lied, in hopes of pleasing him and winning favour; and above all a man who detested hypocrisy and could smell a liar and a flatterer from another room.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “No, Your Grace, I do not. I regret your frustration deeply and I know that had Will been aware you were coming, nothing could have taken him away from here. But I was smiling, inwardly I thought, at how you managed, after such a bitter and unexpected disappointment, to feign an interest in me and my activities so quickly, and to do it convincingly. I found it admirable, and typical. If that offends you, then I regret that, too.”

  Robert Wishart hesitated, glaring at me with those ferocious eyes of his, so formidable beneath his shaggy, unkempt brows, and then he made the loud, harrumphing sound that I had come to recognize over the years as the announcement of a change of mind. One corner of his mouth twitched upward, and he turned his head to look at the man Lamberton.

  “He is not merely impertinent, as you can see, he verges on the impious,” he growled to the chancellor, but then he reached out and dug his fingers deeply but not cruelly into the muscles of my shoulder. “It might have made me smile, too, lad, had I but thought of it, for it’s a sad prospect, after endless days of riding, to contemplate long hours of talking about nothing more exciting than the misadventures of my three most junior priests. Walk with me now.” He tossed the reins of his horse to Alec, who caught them easily and returned a bob of his head in acknowledgment. “I will accept the listening to your report as a penance, though, for my hubris in expecting that your cousin would be waiting to welcome me when I arrived.” He began to walk, slightly stooped, his hands clasped loosely at the small of his back and his bare head bowed and tilted towards me, the better to hear what I would say. “Tell me, then, about your three new parishes …”

  3

  “Will it disturb you if I share your fire?”

  The sound of his voice startled me because it was very close and I had been unaware of his approach. I know I jumped, because Father William reared back and brought up his hands quickly to pacify me. I laughed, slightly embarrassed, as I waved him forward.

  “Of course not, Father. You startled me, but I was dreaming when I should have been paying more attention.”

  He smiled then, moving to sit on an upended log close by me. His eyes sparkled with humour and sympathy in the reflected light of the flames.

  “To what should you have been paying attention, sitting alone by a cheerful fire in a guarded camp at this time of night? Plainly you had other matters on your mind. Would you prefer that I leave you with them?”

  “No, not at all. I shall be glad of your company.” I glanced over in the direction from which he had approached and saw nothing moving. “Is His Grace asleep, then?”

  He chuckled. “Aye, these good two hours, which is a blessing approaching the miraculous. And it will do him good. He is no longer young and he sleeps too little nowadays—too little and too seldom. There is always someone waiting close by him with matters demanding his attention. I went to bed when he did, but I lay awake until now. I was hoping to walk myself into tiredness, until I saw you sitting here, staring into the fire.”

  “And nodding.”

  He cocked his head, unsmiling now. “No, you were not nodding. You were deep in thought.”

  I nodded then. “Very perceptive of you.” I wondered for a moment if I was being too familiar with him, considering who and what he was, the chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral, but then I remembered who and what he was in truth: a young priest, not too long since ordained and only slightly older than I was. “I was concerned—I am concerned. You met Mistress Wallace tonight, so you will have seen that she is with child. She is expected to be delivered of it within the week, but tonight, after Lady Mirren had retired, I saw the midwife emerge from her hut and huddle in conversation with several of the other women. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but they all looked ill at ease—almost afraid, I thought. I sought to ask them if anything was amiss, but as I started towards them they saw me and exchanged what I took to be warning glances among themselves, and then they all sped away.”

  Lamberton was frowning slightly. “You suspect there might be something wrong with Mistress Wallace?”

  “No, Father, not really. But I have a reluctant and fearful respect for the way things tend to go wrong at the worst, most inconvenient times, and I should hate it if anything untoward occurred while Will was not here to know of it.”

  “Aye. I know what you mean. Believe me, though, the best thing you can do is leave such things to God. All your fretting and concerns will influence nothing when the time comes for the infant to be born. I know, because I have been present at a birth—delivered the child, in fact—and I had no other option that day than to adapt to what had been thrust upon me.”

  He saw the astonishment in my eyes and laughed aloud. “Upon my word as a canon of Glasgow, Father, I swear to you it’s true.” He held up his hands as though he had washed but not yet dried them. “I delivered a child with these two hands, alone and unassisted. It happened in France, not one full year ago, on a journey from Paris to a nearby village called Versailles. I was on my way to visit a monastery there, riding in grand estate in a coach owned by Maitre René St. Cyr, a prominent goldsmith of Paris—goldsmith by appointmen
t to King Philip, in fact. Maitre St. Cyr’s wife shared the coach with me, along with her maidservant, Yvette. Madame St. Cyr was enceinte, as they say over there—with child—and was on her way to stay with her mother and sisters in Versailles until her confinement was completed the following month. Her husband’s affairs had unexpectedly obliged him to remain in Paris, and when he found out that I would be travelling to Versailles on foot at that very time—it is little more than ten miles from Paris—he insisted that I should take his place in the carriage and accompany his young wife to her mother’s home.

  “Such was the intent with which we set out, on what would normally be a journey of but a few hours, but the route, although otherwise an excellent road, runs through heavy forest, and deep within the woods we were overtaken by a violent storm and met disaster when a large tree, struck by lightning, fell right atop our carriage, smashing two wheels and throwing the vehicle over on its side. The trauma of the incident triggered something within the goldsmith’s wife, for she went into labour then and there, even though she was supposedly a full month short of her term.”

  “And you were there?” I was horrified, and I tried to picture what must have happened.

  “There?” Again he snorted with half-smothered laughter, shaking his head at the recollection. “Yes, Father, I was there. Right there, by the grace of God, conveniently in the overturned carriage where it all took place, and apart from Madame St. Cyr herself, I was the only person conscious and able to assist with the birth. The maidservant was unconscious, the driver and his footman had been killed by the falling tree, and the full weight of the tree’s trunk lay across the carriage door and window, preventing me from climbing out. And so I stayed, and with God’s own help I delivered a baby boy who lives and thrives today in Versailles and is named Guillaume, in honour of his godfather, who also baptized him.”

  He smiled at me. “None of us knows, when we join the priesthood, Father James, that the major disadvantage of our priestly life will be that we are invariably and perennially useless when it comes to involvement in the matters of women.” He laughed again, enjoying my wide-eyed discomfiture immensely. “I fear I have scandalized you, but let me reassure you of one thing.” He sobered slightly. “I can tell that you were raised as I was, in the company of men and monks and priests, in terror of the sins of carnality and the wiles of scheming women. That is true, is it not?”

  I nodded.

  “Therefore, on hearing what I have just told you, your mind must have filled with ill-imagined visions of that same carnality, with me among them in my priestly robes. Am I correct?”

  Again I nodded, unable to speak.

  “Aye, well, nothing could be further from the truth, I swear to you. No slightest trace, not the merest tinge of carnality entered my mind—I was too afraid to think of anything other than what I must do to save the lives of that woman and her child, and the other woman, too. I was so unworldly, I did not even know what was happening with the child until the woman slapped me and told me what I had to do. And from that moment on, I behaved as though I were in a dream. There was nothing remotely sexual or sinful in what ensued. The world inside that shattered carriage was a seething cauldron of pain and fear and blood and anguish—and the terrifying awareness that one careless move by me could cost at least one life and possibly more. And yet, in the midst of all that horror, all the fear, instead of death and tragedy I saw the mystery of God’s creation being enacted right in front of me, and I received a newborn child into my hands, covered in blood and watery fluids and howling in protest at being thrust into this sinful world …”

  He fell silent, gazing into the fire for a while, but then he straightened. “I can say to you honestly, Father James, there is nothing to be gained by fretting over the time or circumstances of a birth. God has decreed that it will take place, and He alone will decide when and where it does, and how it proceeds. What hope, then, does a mere man, any man, have of influencing any tittle of what will be?”

  He saw me still gazing at him slack-mouthed, and he grinned. “What I am telling you, my friend in Christ, is that with women, as with everything else, you merely need to have faith and place your trust in God. I swear, Father, sinful as it may be, I sometimes find it helpful to think of women as another species altogether. They resemble men in no way at all, and men will never come to understand them. It matters not if they be nuns or one’s own closest kin or honest wives or bawds—they all have an infallible propensity to make all of us men feel, and appear, and be as ineffectual as mewling babes in arms.”

  The obvious truth of what he had said left me floundering, until he saved me by changing the subject.

  “Tell me about your cousin.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. I have a hunger to know all there is to know about this man, for I believe he is remarkable. I have heard the Bishop speak of him many times, but always using both his names, naming him William Wallace. And I have met others who have met Wallace, but no one who speaks of him the way you do, as plain Will. You, Father James, are the one who has been closest to him throughout his life, so I would like to know what you know about him, as a cousin and a friend.”

  “Well,” I began, “he is more like a brother than a cousin, to be truthful. From around the time of my eighth birthday, for the next eight years until Will was eighteen, we lived together, most of the time with Ewan the archer, and shared everything we did every day. We learned to use a quarterstaff together, and though I was never good enough or strong enough to beat him, there was a time when I could hold my own against him, for a while at least, until he wore me down …”

  I talked incessantly for an hour or more, aware that he replenished the fire twice while I was regaling him with all my favourite recollections of Will and the boyhood we had shared. When eventually I fell silent, he was still sitting across the fire from me, smiling at me.

  “You love the man. That is plain to see. And I find it heartening because it speaks to his humanity.”

  “There’s much about our Will to love,” I answered. “Yet I know there is no lack of folk who would disagree with me. He can be wild, I’ll grant, and that is all some ever seem to see in him. And when he’s crossed—particularly in things he believes to be right and necessary—he can be hard, and even violent if he perceives that violence is called for. In addition to that, he has no love for Englishmen—indeed he hates them, for good and sufficient reason in his own eyes and, truth to tell, in the eyes of others. But with his friends and loved ones he is the gentlest of creatures.”

  “You have the same reasons for hating the English that he has, Father, but you do not hate them.”

  His inflection made a question of the statement. “No, I do not, but neither do I love them greatly. I am a priest, though. Turning the other cheek is part of my life. Will, on the other hand, is a warrior and an avenger.”

  “Hmm … Think you he will return tomorrow, this warrior cousin of yours?”

  “He won’t stay away longer than he needs to, not with Mirren so close to her time. May I ask you a question now?”

  “Of course. What would you like to know?”

  “Tell me a little about France, if you will, about your time there, what you learned. Is it exotic?” I knew that within two years of his early ordination, Lamberton had been selected by a cadre of Scotland’s senior bishops to attend university in Paris.

  “Well, goodness, where to begin? It is beautiful, heavily forested, and it has unimaginably long, straight roads that run without a bend for score upon score of miles, joining together far-flung cities. The roads were all built by the Romans, of course, as were the great roads of England. But the French have more of them, and better, because the Romans were in Gaul for hundreds of years longer than they were in Britain. Here in Scotland, of course, we had little to attract the Romans, and so although we have some of their roads, we have no great ones.

  “Is France exotic?” He thought on that for a moment and
then shook his head decisively. “No, not, I think, in the way you mean. It is not strikingly foreign, in the way that Africa and Greece are foreign, visibly and tangibly. France is much like England, in fact, but not quite so green and not quite so wet all the time.”

  “What did you learn there?”

  “Much that you might expect. I studied canon law with some of the finest teachers in the world. But much, too, that I had not anticipated. That sprang from being exposed to brilliant and inquiring minds.”

  “Such as whose?”

  He pursed his lips and looked at me as though he was considering a choice of options. “There is a man called John Duns. They call him Duns the Scot. Have you heard of him?”

  “I have heard the name—Duns Scotus is what they call him here. He is a Franciscan, is he not? He is earning a reputation for himself as a free and unique thinker.”

  Lamberton nodded. “That’s the same man. He has been resident at Oxford now for more than a decade, beginning as a very young student, and is now a teacher of philosophy and theology. He is surprisingly young, considering his accomplishments.”

  That made me smile, as it echoed what I had been thinking about Lamberton himself a short time earlier. “No, I’m serious,” he went on. “The man is no more than three or four years older than I am and already he is revered. His ideas are … I am tempted to use the word exciting, even though it is not a word normally applied to theology or philosophy. Nevertheless, his opinions are vibrant, and some of them have set the world of scholarship reeling, without scandalizing the orthodox majority—a signal accomplishment.”