The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “Sadly, though, the Steward was not amused. ‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘You will ride with Sir William Douglas and fifteen of his men, accompanied by a score more of my own Stewarts, all well armed and mounted on strong beasts. But we must move quickly.’

  “Will stood up at that point and turned his back on Lord James to face me, and his expression was grim. ‘Tell me, if you will, my lord bishop, what is so urgent, so far north, that it demands this kind of speed?’”

  The bishop raised his hands in the air, as though to bless an absent congregation. “That, at least, I could tell him,” he said. “I told him about William Ormsby and his mandate to extract an oath of personal loyalty and fealty to Edward. Will already knew the bare facts, but I explained how Ormsby was levying fines, in the form of seizure and forfeiture of goods and specie, as penalty for lateness in signing the oath. And how those who did not sign found the penalty was death and forfeiture of all possessions. Accountable to no one but Edward himself, I told him, Ormsby was playing God, hanging and jailing folk and spreading terror far and wide with his burning zealotry for England’s ungodly cause. It was high time he was stopped, I said, for the good of the realm.”

  I was fascinated, because this was all new to me. I had heard bits and pieces of talk about the upheavals caused by the man Ormsby, but most of it had been rumour and hearsay, and before this moment I had heard nothing of any real substance about the justiciar’s activities near Perth. Now, I felt myself growing angry after the fact.

  “So how did Will react to that?” I asked.

  His lordship grimaced. “He agreed with me that something needed to be done,” he said. “He called Ormsby an unholy monster, and I confess I was glad to hear him say it, for to me that meant he was starting to see the need for what we were asking of him. But then the Steward spoke up again, just when I had least need of it. ‘We have it on good authority,’ says he, ‘that the fellow has devastated the whole region around Perth, seizing livestock, coinage, goods of various kinds—anything of value on which he can lay his hands—claiming that all of it is owed in taxes to England, and that he is acting on behalf of the treasurer himself, Cressingham. The word we have is that the plunder he has amassed will be shipped south to Cressingham in Berwick, and thence to England within the fortnight.’”

  “That must have captured Will’s attention,” I said.

  “Oh, it did. Right away he asked if we knew what route the wagons would take.”

  “And did you?”

  “No, but Lord James and I had talked about it at some length, just before that. There were five possible routes they could take, and three of those were open tracks over rough terrain, making the odds against waylaying them unacceptable. Besides, with the value of what they were transporting, we knew they would take great care to keep their movements secret and unpredictable, and the wagons would be heavily protected. That meant that the only way we could be sure of capturing the prize was to catch them in Perth before they could leave.” He hesitated.

  “And I presume he agreed with you, my lord?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, he didn’t. He heard what we were saying, he said, but why did we have to send him? Why not Douglas, or Bruce, with horsemen ready to ride?”

  “Forgive me, my lord, but his question seems logical.”

  “Logical to you, perhaps, but not logical in any political sense— and politics was what we had to deal with there. The Steward spoke up again and explained that Perth is in the heart of Comyn country and no Bruce would be welcome there, especially when all the Comyn lords were locked up in English jails and Bruce was known to be beloved of England’s King.”

  “But Bruce was there, was he not, my lord? Did that statement anger him?”

  “No, he took no note of it. Besides, it was the truth. But he responded as though his name had not been mentioned. ‘Wallace is right,’ he said. ‘He is an archer, best suited to standing erect among his peers and killing armoured men efficiently from great distances. Why send him all the way up there alone, and mounted on a horse?’

  “That answer was mine to make, and no one else’s.” The bishop looked at me as though expecting me to contradict him, but I remained silent. “And so I jumped in with it before Lord James could say a word. ‘Because we need his name,’ I said, and both Bruce and Will stared at me in surprise. I said, ‘We need William Wallace to be seen right there in Perth, taking the fight to Ormsby and delivering a public judgment and a punishment on behalf of all the folk of Scotland.’”

  He stared at me for several moments, once again awaiting a reaction that did not occur, then grunted and wiped the palms of his hands down the length of his face. “You really are more like his twin than his cousin,” he said mildly. “That was about the same reaction I got from Will.”

  “What?” I said. “You mean he disagreed?”

  “No, more ignored me altogether. His thoughts had already jumped ahead. ‘What about the treasure?’ he asked me instead. ‘Will we return it to its owners?’” The bishop shrugged. “What could I have said to him then? Would we return the treasure to its owners? It was not a question I had expected, Jamie—though I see now I should have—and so I had no answer ready for him. None that would have pleased him, anyway. As God is my witness, I had not even thought, at that point, about what we might do with it if we ever recaptured it, for finding it, let alone taking it, was the longest of long shots. But Will was looking me straight in the eye and I had no choice but to give him an answer. ‘We can’t,’ I told him. ‘Not right away. We will, eventually, when we have time and opportunity, but in the meantime we will have to hold it in trust for the people.’

  “‘Hah!’ he roared in that great voice of his, leaping to his feet and putting the fear of God into all of us. ‘In trust! And who will we trust to make sure it is kept safe? Who will we trust to keep it and hold it in good faith without dipping a single, greedy, needy finger into it? Who will stand forth in such sterling, imperishable honesty? Tell me that, my lords.’

  “‘We will,’ I told him, though not with any great amount of confidence in the face of his doubt. I explained that the Church would safeguard the treasure in Glasgow, under lock and key in the cathedral vaults, under my own care. That quieted him, I’m glad to say. ‘But we cannot simply return it, Will,’ I pointed out again. ‘Not easily, at least. No records have been kept of what it contains, because there has been no intent of returning any of it to its owners. That means it would take even longer to redistribute, even were we sure of who owned what. But by seizing it ourselves we will stop it from being shipped away to England, to swell Edward’s coffers for his war in France.’”

  I nodded. “A very reasonable, logical response, my lord,” I said. “And how did Will react to it?”

  My employer spoke through a smile. “I remember he grunted again,” he said. “He was in a grunting frame of mind that day. ‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘the Earl of Carrick is right—you don’t need me for that. Anyone can capture loaded wagons. And as for my name, I think you’re wrong there, too. You don’t need it, or me, because nobody up in that part of the world knows me. But if you think it’s really necessary, then pick some big, rough fellow and have everyone call him Will Wallace while he’s there in Perth. He’ll serve your purpose up there just as well as I would.’

  “Then and there I had to cut Lord James dead, for I could see he was angry, and it was plain to me that he was about to say something that would do none of us any good, so I waved him off, and he froze in astonishment.” He chuckled. “It might well have been the first time in James Stewart’s life that anyone had dared to silence him. ‘Pardon me, my Lord High Steward,’ says I, before he can even close his mouth, ‘but I need to speak to this.’

  “Of course, as you can imagine, after that everyone was waiting to hear what I had to say. ‘Will Wallace,’ I said in Scots—for we had been talking Latin to that point—‘you and I hae known each other for a lang time now. In a’ thae years, have I e
ver asked you for aught that made you uncomfortable, or caused you any real concern?’

  “‘No, Bishop,’ says he, ‘you never have.’

  “‘Then I willna start now,’ says I. ‘I need you to go to Perth, Will. Scotland needs you to go to Perth.’ I saw him start to glower again and held up my hand. ‘Wait now, before you say anything. I swear to you, I wouldna ask this if I didna believe it was necessary. Your name has ta’en on a new significance to folk since your foray into Lanark. And you were gey well kent afore that, for a’ the reasons ye’re well aware o’. Ye’ve become a leader now, and folk dinna think o’ ye as plain Will Wallace these days. Ye’re William Wallace now, whether ye like it or no’, and ye’ll be William Wallace frae now on. And the word out there is that ye’ve laid down your bow and picked up a sword—the biggest sword in a’ the land.’ I could see the sword at his back, propped hilt-upright where he’d left it in a corner by the fire. ‘And there it sits,’ says I, pointing at it. ‘The very blade. There’s no’ another like it that I know of in Scotland. And for that reason if nae other, folk everywhere are talkin’ about it now, and talkin’ about you as the man who wields it in their cause.’ He didn’t like that, I could see, for he’s not the kind of man who cares for flattery, but flattery was the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. ‘Dinna look so fierce, man,’ I told him. ‘I’m no’ tryin’ to fash you. I speak but the plain truth, and in that same spirit o’ truth I am telling you that Scotland—this country an’ its folk—needs a leader like you here in the south. There are others in the far west and the northeast, young Andrew Murray foremost amang them, but there’s only you, Wallace, in these parts. And these parts, a’ the way up frae Berwick on the border, to Perth and Scone and includin’ Stirlin’ and Edinburgh, are the parts bein’ hardest hit by Cressingham’s tax collectors and that godless creature Ormsby.’ I could not tell what he was thinking and so I charged on as though I was running in a race. ‘And so I’m asking you,’ I said, ‘as your bishop, as your auld friend, and as your troubled countryman, to lend your name and your repute to stopping Ormsby while he is yet in Perth. Will ye do it?’”

  The bishop sniffed. “I swear to you, Jamie,” he said, “that was the longest silence I’ve ever had to endure, but I didn’t dare to break it. It was so quiet I could hear a knot of resin spluttering in a burning log in the grate. And all the while Will stood frowning into space, seeing nothing but what was in his mind. And just as I was beginning to grow desperate, he looked at each one of us in turn, from Bruce to the Steward and finally to me, and then he stepped to the fireplace, picked up his sword one-handed, and brought it close to his eyes, peering at the cross formed by the junction of hilt and quillons. Then he lowered the point to the floor and swung around to face us. ‘I’ll go,’ he growled to me. ‘When will we leave?’

  “I swear, Father James, I felt at that moment as though something had burst inside me. The relief I felt was so overwhelming that I was afraid I might fall down. I looked to the Steward for confirmation, and when he nodded I said, ‘Daybreak tomorrow. Douglas is making the arrangements as we speak, and he’ll be glad to know you’re joining him.’ They would make a mounted party of fifty, I told him—two and a half score. Seventeen Douglas men-at-arms under le Hardi himself, and a score and a half of Stewarts under Sir John.

  “‘Who will command overall?’ he asked.

  “‘You will,’ I said. ‘This will be your raid.’

  “He was to move quickly and in secrecy, I explained, insofar as secrecy was possible, keeping to the open country and avoiding contact with anyone else. Some of my own priests had mapped out a route that would allow them to travel north unnoticed by the English. ‘But if they should see you,’ I told him, ‘don’t stop to fight. Press on and make for Perth, and if you can, bring Ormsby’s plundered treasure back here with you.’ The weather had broken, so we were hoping for fifteen to twenty miles a day, putting them in Perth within the week.

  “‘I’ll send my men back, then, to the forest?’ he asked me.

  “‘Aye,’ I told him. ‘They’ll be better off there than here.’

  “‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll see to it.’”

  “And so Will rode to Perth,” I said. “Thank you, my lord, for taking the time to tell me that tale. It means much to me, and now I understand why I did not understand before. But … they failed to capture Ormsby.”

  The bishop shook his head. “That was no failure. He was forewarned of their arrival and escaped ahead of them. But capturing Ormsby was never in the plans. It was his plunder we were after— taxes, according to England, but plunder by any honest man’s description.”

  “And how was he forewarned?”

  “I’m told Will and Douglas’s men met a force of mounted English archers unexpectedly, close to Perth itself, and in the skirmish some of them escaped into Perth and raised the alarm. Ormsby surrounded himself with a bodyguard and fled.”

  “And Will made no attempt to catch him?”

  His lordship shrugged. “I doubt Will even knew which way he went. He had more important matters on his hands at that time: capturing the baggage train and making sure the English garrison was isolated and disarmed.”

  “How big was the garrison?”

  “A hundred men, give or take a half score, according to your cousin.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “Will gave them into the keeping of Sir William Douglas, who stripped them of every weapon and piece of armour they wore and marched them back south under close guard until they reached England, where he ordered his lieutenants to strip them again, naked this time, and set them free to make their way home.”

  “To fight us again, in the future …”

  The bishop looked at me askance. “What would you have done differently, Father? That is the way of warfare. We could not imprison them, and God knows we could not murder them. We had no choice but to release them.”

  I nodded reluctantly, aware that he was right. “And what did Will do, after he relinquished the prisoners to Lord Douglas?”

  “He spent some time among the burgesses of Perth, letting himself be known and seen as I had instructed him, and then he rode back here, directly.”

  He met my gaze squarely and I nodded. “As you had instructed him … So William Wallace is your agent nowadays.”

  I almost expected him to grow angry at that, but he answered without raising his voice. “No,” he said. “You know better than to say that. William Wallace is not the kind of man that any other man may safely or conveniently use to his own ends.” He stopped and smiled. “And I have just realized I was wrong in what I told your cousin that day. He may be forever William Wallace, but most folk speak of him simply as Wallace now, as though that were his single given name. He has become an agent of destiny—of history, if you like. He has outgrown ordinary folk like you and me, I think, and my master in Heaven has taken him under His guard. I now believe, with all my heart, that your cousin Will belongs, in the truest, grandest sense, to this land of ours, this Scotland.”

  It was the first time I had ever heard my cousin spoken of as a man who was larger than life and greater than the common run of men. That comment from Bishop Wishart was my first glimpse of what God had in mind for my cousin William Wallace; the first hint of the fame and fortune that would raise him up to glory, for a time at least, in the eyes of all who fought with him and all who knew him.

  “You look gravely concerned, Father,” the bishop said. “What are you thinking?”

  “About Will, my lord, is all,” I said. “I feel great need to see him. To ask for his forgiveness.”

  “His forgiveness?” That idea brought a furrow to his lordship’s brow. “For what do you need forgiveness?”

  “For Mirren’s death. She was in my care when she was taken.” “That may be.” The tiny frown was still in place. “But there was not a thing you could have done to change anything that happened that day, Father James. It was the will of God, else it
would not have come to pass, and for any mere man to feel guilt in such case is to come close to hubris.”

  “I know that, Your Grace,” I replied, hearing the misery in my own voice. “At least, my head and my heart know it, but a part of me feels guilty nonetheless.” I waited for the acknowledgment I knew would come, and when he nodded I lapsed into silence, feeling, above all, helpless. But there was one aspect of my life, at least, in which I felt I could still make a useful contribution. “May I presume, my lord, that you will continue to have a need for my secretarial services?”

  “Your secretarial services?” His jaw dropped. “Good God, man,” he said in plain Scots, “I hae a glut o’ secretaries. A chapter full o’ them! I canna turn around wi’out trippin’ ower one. Why would I need anither? No, Jamie, I hae nae need of you for that, and I’m surprised you think I would.”

  I was hoping that my face did not reflect the extent to which his answer had shaken me.

  “No, Father James,” he continued in his usual churchly Latin, “I need you for your mind and your insights. For your long head and your gift for reading men and seeing what lies beneath their smiles and posturings. And to that end I have been sitting here awaiting you these three days, impatient to put you to work.”

  If his first words had almost overwhelmed me with something akin to terror, my reaction to this last swung me almost as hard in the opposite direction. “To work on what, my lord?” I asked, making every effort to sound calm.

  “On whom, not what. Young Bruce, the Earl of Carrick, first and foremost.”

  “The Earl of Carrick? But not an hour ago you said you believe him to be his own man. I took that to mean you now approve of him.”

  “Aye, and so it did, when I said it.” He had switched back into Scots, as he usually did in order to deprecate himself and his opinions in front of others. “So it did. But I jalouse I might yet change my mind once I’ve heard your take on the chiel. I hae been wrong a wheen o’ times afore now, bishop though I be, an’ so I hae nae great expectations o’ bein’ right a’ the time.”