The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  He pointed his finger directly at me. “You need to go and find Lamberton,” he said. “Now. Tell him what I said and see what he has to say.”

  “Will you not come with me?”

  “I would, but I need to stay with my nephew. I’m his closest kin—next to his wife, of course—and I’m a priest, so they’ll let me sit with him a while. Besides, you know now what I think, so you don’t need me to be there to say the same thing all over again. Go you and talk to Lamberton, and then go with him to Rab Wishart. By the time the two o’ ye are finished there, I’ll be ready to help wi’ whatever might be needed next. Now away ye go.”

  I left Father David sitting there and went in search of William Lamberton, but I was informed that he was in conference with the bishop, who had issued strict orders that they were not to be disturbed for any reason other than an attack by the King of England in person. His Grace had been absent from his seat for nigh on four months, and I knew there was much for him to absorb, and even more for him to do, now that he was back in Glasgow again. And so instead of fretting and fulminating selfishly as I wanted to, I offered a silent penitential prayer and took myself off back to the cloisters, where I knew I could be alone to think through all the pros and contras of the crisis that Andrew’s death would trigger.

  It was well that I did, and I have no doubt my Master in Heaven was responsible for my decision to go there, for in the silence of the late afternoon of that single October day, uninterrupted for hours as darkness approached, I confronted the reality of what had happened and of what might happen next, and I came to terms with my own uncertainties, acquiring a new and more complete understanding of all that had been set at hazard in the foregoing few days. I reflected on the motivation that drove my cousin, and the wrongs that had become so commonplace in Scotland that they were ignored by almost everyone except my cousin.

  The awareness that I myself had been guilty, even unwittingly, of the same complacency shamed and humbled me, and so I did what I—what most priests—always do at such times. I knelt and prayed for guidance, there in the fading dusk within the cloisters, and as I prayed, the rain began to fall, making me aware that I had not even noticed the skies clouding over. The first sparse drops, icy on my tonsured scalp, quickly increased into an insistent downpour, and I pulled my cowl up over my head, resisting the urge to go in search of shelter before finishing my prayers. But God had already heard me and He answered my entreaties almost before I had finished them.

  “Father James? Jamie, is that you?”

  The voice was high-pitched, its tone urgent. I had difficulty placing it for a moment, but then I turned quickly, remembering, and looked to where a tiny man crouched by the wall, watching me nervously and clutching a crossbow almost as big as he was, holding it instinctively with one end of the bow tucked into his armpit and his arm extended down along the bowstring to protect it from the rain.

  “Big Andrew,” I said, and my pleasure must have shown itself in my voice, for he grinned and nodded eagerly, then beckoned me furtively to join him in the shadows.

  I stood up and moved to join him, wondering vaguely why he was being so secretive, though more than ten years of living in Selkirk Forest might well have explained it. Now, though, in the aftermath of Stirling, he was a hero, one of Wallace’s lieutenants with no need to skulk or hide from anyone in Scotland.

  “Where have you come from?”

  Instead of answering, he shook his head with that same disturbing air of clandestine urgency and beckoned me to a nearby corner where he crouched down, plainly anxious to avoid been seen. Mystified, and starting to grow apprehensive myself, I went to sit beside him, watching the way his eyes flickered from side to side.

  “In God’s holy name, Andrew,” I said, “what is wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothin’, wi’ you,” he hissed, baffling me completely.

  Andrew Miller was known as Big Andrew because, although the smallest of all Will’s followers in stature, he was one of the largest in terms of loyalty and commitment to Will’s cause. And now he crouched in front of me, brushing uselessly with his left forearm at the rainwater streaming from his thinning hair into his eyes, blinking and frowning.

  My heart was racing. “Is it Will? Is something wrong? Has he been wounded?”

  “No! No, no, no, it’s nothin’ like yon. He needs to see ye. Now!”

  “Then take me to him. Where is he?” I started to stand up, but he reached out and pulled me down again.

  “No,” he hissed. “I canna tak ye. He disna want me seen. Ye’re tae gang yer lane—an’ tell naebody.”

  “What?” I felt a sudden surge of irritation and allowed it to overwhelm me for a moment, perversely glad to have an opportunity to vent some of the anger and frustration that had been boiling up in me throughout the day. “For God’s sake, Andrew, he’s William Wallace! Am I to understand he’s suddenly gone into hiding from his own folk, afraid to show his face?”

  “Aye, somethin’ like that.”

  That unexpected answer sucked all the anger out of me and left me gaping. An unearthly weight, numinous and unsettling, seemed to press down on my shoulders. “I see,” I said, although in truth I did not. “Where will I find him, then?”

  “Crawford’s howff,” he said, renewing my confusion, since Crawford’s howff, or tavern, had been our favourite drinking spot when Will and I were students. The owner’s son, Alan, had been another of Will’s early followers.

  “You want me to go all the way to Paisley? Right now?”

  “Nah,” he said, waving a hand. “It’s here in Glesca now, near the Cross. The auld man moved here last year, for the docks and the shippin’ traffic. The sign’s the blue cock.”

  I had seen the sign of the Blue Cockerel many times in past years, in passing the Mercat Cross and the salt market, but it was a riverside dive, catering to seamen and the loose women who catered to them, and of course I had never been inside the place.

  “And I’ll find him there?”

  “No’ inside. There’s a kind o’ a shed at the back. He’ll be in there. Long John’ll be there, waitin’ for ye.”

  “And what about you? Where will you go now?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll just away, afore somebody sees me who kens me. My job was to find you. Awa ye go, then. Will said ye were to come right away.”

  “Just tell me why he doesn’t want to be seen—doesn’t even want you to be seen.”

  He looked at me, honestly bewildered. “I don’t know,” he said.

  I left him there and made my way swiftly, angrily, through rain that was now torrential, towards the public square known as Glasgow Cross, with its row of taverns and warehouses lining the docks along the river Clyde.

  The tall, gangling outlaw known as Long John of the Knives materialized from the shadows like a ghost as I strode towards the place called Crawford’s howff, and I veered towards him, raising my voice above the noise of the pouring rain.

  “John. Where is he?”

  He raised a long, thin hand and crooked a finger, then turned away and moved smoothly towards a squat, dark, windowless, and abandoned-looking building at the side of the Blue Cockerel tavern, where he stopped and waved me forward. I could hear shouts and raucous laughter coming from the tavern on my right, but there was no sign of life at all in the smaller building. The sound of the rain drumming heavily on its roof made it seem even more dismal than it was.

  I turned to Long John. “He’s in there, really? In the dark?” I had to shout to make myself heard.

  John shouted back, “He’s in there right enough, but he’s no’ in the dark. There’s a cellar, for storage. He’s down there. Just go through the trapdoor. I’ll wait out here and make sure you’ll no’ be bothered by unexpected company. He’s waitin’ for you.”

  And so indeed he was, waiting to wrap his enormous arms about me as I reached the bottom of the flight of steps that led down from the trapdoor. He hugged me tightly for a long time, not saying a word
until he pushed me out to arm’s length to look at me.

  “You’re soaked,” he said, needlessly. He had a tense, gaunt look about him, and his beard was longer and bushier than I had ever seen it. His eyes were clear and keen, but the grief in them was unmistakable. “Is it true? Is Andrew dying?”

  “I don’t know, Will, but he might be. Did he look sick in Haddington?”

  He shook his head, a deep frown stamped between his brows. “No. He was fine. Thin, and drawn and pale, but no more than you’d expect a wounded man to look.”

  “Aye,” I sighed and glanced around the room. “Have you any wine here?”

  “Of course. Here, sit down by the fire.”

  He went over to a table by one wall and busied himself with cups and jugs while I took one of the chairs that sat facing a fire blazing in a chimneyed brazier in one corner. The underground room was vast, far larger than the tavern above it, I judged. More than that, it was both high-ceilinged and bright, and surprisingly airy, for I realized I could smell none of the smoke from the fireplace.

  “Where does the smoke from the fireplace go?” If this cellar was secret, as Long John had suggested, then any smoke would attract curiosity.

  My cousin looked up from his pouring. “It goes up the howff’s chimney, cunningly,” he said, and grinned. “That’s one of the reasons Matt Crawford bought the place. This is one of the oldest buildings in Glasgow—so old that no one can remember who built it, or when, but they say there’s always been a tavern atop it. Once, long ago, when they set to digging out a cellar, they found a series of caves down here, leading inland from the riverbank, and so they set to work enlarging them and converting them to their own needs. Which suits Crawford fine. It’s safe, secure, and weatherproof, a perfect place for storing goods, and he trades regularly with the ships that come and go from here.”

  He came back to where I was sitting and handed me a cup of wine, holding the long-necked ewer in his other hand. “Here, try that. It’s from Germany, and it’s been here, waiting for us to drink it, these past five years and more.”

  I tasted the wine. It was wonderful, and I gulped deeply at it, then held out the cup to be refilled. He topped up my cup, then fetched his own and sat across from me, placing the jug at his feet.

  “Well,” he said, lifting his cup high. “Here’s to Andrew, and to a long life for him.”

  I nodded and we drank.

  “So,” Will asked, “what will we do, if he dies?”

  I stared into my cup. “We’ll do what we have to do,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “We’ll bury him, and mourn him, and in due time we’ll turn back to what we need to see to—the restoration of the realm. Now tell me, if you will, why it was so important to send Big Andrew to find me in such secrecy. I’ve never seen him so ill at ease. What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing!” Will was wide-eyed with innocence. “I said nothing but that he should find you and send you here.”

  “But he should not be seen himself. Why was that necessary?”

  Something flickered in my cousin’s eyes. I tilted my head to one side, examining him carefully, and decided that he was, in fact, red-faced beneath his beard.

  “What’s wrong, Cuz? Something is troubling you deeply. If I did not know you as well as I do, I might be tempted to think you’re afraid of something. So tell me what it is. I might be able to help.”

  “I think not, Jamie.” His voice was close to inaudible, forcing me to lean towards him. “I doubt anyone can help me in this case.”

  “In what case?”

  He lowered his head and gazed at his feet. I had never seen my cousin this way before, and I racked my brain, trying to think what could be upsetting him, but of all the thoughts that flitted through my mind, there was only one that settled, and it unsettled me.

  “Will?” I asked him, “Do you mean that no one can help you if Andrew dies?” Again, he would not respond. “What kind of plaint is that? No one can help any of us if he dies. We’ll all be bereft, every one of us. We’ll all talk of the waste of a young life, and about being deprived, and we’ll all rail at God, even me, even while we know His ways are incomprehensible to men. Andrew’s wife will be devastated, Will, deprived of his love and companionship after mere months of marriage, and knowing the babe she’s carrying will never know its father. How, then, can you believe that you will suffer any more than the rest of us?”

  He straightened up suddenly as though I had reached out and slapped him, his eyes flaring wide. “What do you mean?” He sounded as hurt as he appeared to be. “That’s not what I meant at all. I wasn’t talking about me. I wasn’t being personal. I was talking about the realm—about our cause! His death would mean the end of everything we’ve been fighting for.”

  Had anyone ever told me that I would one day hear my cousin say such a thing, I would have scoffed aloud. But here I was now, sitting across a fire from him, from William Wallace himself, listening to him admit that he doubted his ability to stand alone without the support of a man who, until a bare three months earlier, he had known only as a boy. The mere idea struck me as ludicrous, but I felt no urge to laugh at it, or even smile, for it was plain that the possibility was all too real for my cousin. I hunched down in my chair and eyed him squarely.

  “Why would you say such a thing, Will? Why would you even think it? Tell me, because I want to know.”

  “I say and think it because it is true. Andrew was the engineer of our success at Stirling. Without him, we would have lost that fight before it began.”

  “That sounds like nonsense to me, Cuz.”

  “Then clean your ears, Cousin!” His voice was as startling as a whiplash. “Pay attention and listen to me.”

  Slightly chastened, I set my empty cup on the floor and listened.

  He had always admired Andrew, Will told me, in spite of his briefly held suspicion that Andrew’s real intent after escaping from prison in Chester was to claim his heritage prematurely, while his father and uncle were yet alive in England, and to consolidate himself as primus inter pares in the ranks of the magnates. After meeting him again in Dundee, his suspicions had flown, to be replaced with whole-hearted admiration. In Will’s eyes, I soon discerned, Andrew Murray had everything that William Wallace lacked: he was high-born, not yet a knight but destined to be knighted in due course, and he was heir to two of the largest, wealthiest estates in all of Scotland. Well-bred and smoothly cultured, he was at ease among the nobility, dealing with them easily and casually as an equal to the grandest, and his immense wealth, or the promise of it, was sufficient to guarantee him their respect, no matter that they might dislike him in person or envy him his good fortune. In addition, he had earned the respect and admiration of his elders by absorbing the rules and disciplines of chivalry, including the techniques of modern warfare, not merely in theory but in their practical applications during training exercises throughout his young manhood. Beside the quick-witted and quick-thinking Andrew, Will confided to me that night, he had always felt himself to be awkward and clumsy, ill mannered and inept.

  I had never ever thought of him as being any of those things and I protested strongly. By that time, though, he had begun to enjoy the black mood that possessed him, and I listened, appalled, as he continued his litany of his imagined failings and shortcomings, opening himself gladly to the novelties of self-flagellation and too busy with his mea culpas to have time to heed my protests.

  He would have lost the fight at Stirling, he swore, had it not been for Andrew, for it was Andrew’s insistence upon choosing the ground for the Scots defences that had ensured the security, and the ultimate victory, of the Scottish army. Andrew it was who insisted on drawing up the Scots host on the slopes below the Abbey Craig, with the wooded hillside at their back and the slopes of the Ochil Hills ensuring that the English would not be able to outflank them. “Pick your ground with care,” Andrew had told him. “Fight where the English horse are useless.” And so they had drawn up their lines and wait
ed where the English would have to confront them without being able to outflank them. It was only when they saw the English advance proceed precisely as they had prayed it might in their fanciful imagining a week before that they decided to seize the opportunity presented to them by de Warrenne’s carelessness, and attack before the English could organize themselves properly.

  I held up my hand and waved it in front of him until he stopped and looked at me. “Whose decision was that?” I asked. “To charge the causeway by crossing the flats?” He blinked at me as though he had not understood the question, and so I repeated it. “Who called for the charge?”

  “Both of us.”

  “But who mentioned it first?”

  “I did, I think.”

  “Why? Why did you mention it?”

  “Because I could see it, in my mind. It was what we’d talked about before, that night before we reached Stirling. You were there, when we were saying how we would love to see the English make fools of themselves, though none of us believed for a moment that they ever would. And then, on a sudden, there they were, doing exactly what we had wished they’d do.”

  “And you pointed it out to Andrew?”

  “I did.”