The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  “Then it would have been four months ago. Late May.”

  “And where have you been since then?”

  “In the forest, near Selkirk village.”

  “Did Mirren go with you?”

  “Aye, she had to. Too many people knew who we were. It would no’ have been safe for her to stay. Besides, she wouldna leave Will.”

  “A rough life for a woman, that, living in the forest, under open skies.”

  “Not at all. They live in a cave, those two, and it’s better than many a house I’ve seen. It’s dry, warm, spacious, and well lit, comfortably furnished, and well hidden. It even has separate bedchambers and a clean pool.”

  “A pool? You mean for bathing?”

  “Aye, though it’s chilly, even in high summer. It’s spring fed. Pure, crystal water.”

  “Do they live alone there?”

  “Aye, except for me and half a hundred others. We have an entire community there.”

  “Hmm. So why does Will want to leave?”

  Ewan shrugged. “Who can say? He doesna talk about it much, but I think he’s had enough of the outlaw life, and I think he would like to bring Mirren home to meet her new family here in Elderslie and visit her aunt and cousins in Paisley.”

  “Then he should do so,” I said, “as soon as he can.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  I have not had to resort to writing a commentary for many years, perhaps not since the day I left my beloved Abbey library in Paisley; real commentary requires time and leisure to reflect upon abstractions, and everyday life leaves ordinary men and priests little time for such luxuries. But commentary is a natural outgrowth of the translator’s art, and I learned to use it soon after I gained full membership in Brother Duncan’s library fraternity. In those days, left to my solitary work and encouraged to trust my instincts, I would add a notation whenever I encountered some anomaly in an ancient text on which I had been set to work. Sometimes I would merely note the oddity of a word or character, but once I grew more confident in my own judgment, I would write down my observations, and less frequently the opinions I drew from those observations, on whatever I had found anomalous in the document. Compiling such commentaries was, I found, enjoyable, and they were certainly invaluable later, when I would return to a document that I had not, perhaps, examined in months, to find my own notations carefully attached to the manuscript, usually by a tiny blob of wax at one edge.

  This passage, then, is a commentary, an observation set aside from, but necessary to the understanding of, this chronicle of my cousin’s life. And yet it troubles me that I should find it necessary to add it at all. My studies for the priesthood intensified during those same months, spurred by a mystifying display of interest in me and my progress by the revered and powerful Bishop of Glasgow, and my superiors decided that I would be ready for ordination by Christmas that year. The time flew by, and almost without our noticing, the trees fell bare and winter’s onset grew steadily more threatening from day to day.

  The death of the Maid of Norway, which had dealt the trivial blow of delaying my ordination, turned out to have far more important repercussions. It took eleven days for word to reach the mainland, and it came first to the attention of Bishop Fraser of St. Andrews on the eastern coast. A week after that, Robert Bruce was on the march to claim what he perceived to be his indisputable right to Scotland’s Crown, headed for Perth by way of Stirling and summoning all his supporters to join him, once again beating John Balliol to the initiative. The Earls of Mar and Athol called out the men of their earldoms in support of Bruce, and for a time it looked yet again as though the entire country might be plunged into civil war, for the full might of the House of Comyn, the most powerful family in Scotland, under the Lords of Badenoch and Buchan, stood aligned with Balliol’s claim and would not stand idly by while Bruce usurped the throne.

  Bishop Fraser, though, had anticipated what would happen when the evil tidings of the Maid’s death became public knowledge, and he reacted even more quickly than Robert Bruce. Within days, he sent messengers riding south at the utmost speed with a letter, composed by him and his cousin Sir John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, appealing directly to Edward Plantagenet, advising the monarch of the death of his great-niece and voicing the writers’ own fears of unrest in the aftermath. In order to avoid civil war and to protect the welfare of the realm of Scotland, the Bishop entreated the English King to use his good offices to ensure the legal settlement of the Scots Crown upon the brows of the best qualified of the various claimants. And thus began the events now known as the Grand Cause—the search for Scotland’s true king.

  I cannot think of a single soul among my acquaintances of my own age—and few of those remain alive today—who is not familiar with the events of the Cause. It dominated all our lives for two decades, and thus it seems inconceivable to me that I should now have to set down the details of it here when my main intent is to chronicle the life of my cousin Will. Yet I know I live already in a land full of people who have never known the fear and uncertainty, the daily terrors and hopelessness, that haunted their parents and their grandparents in those now far-off times. The Scots folk today remember nothing of the Grand Cause, apart from dreary, scarce believable old tales told by their elders, who were already forgetful in the telling, insulated from their own memories of horror by the peace and order that had finally come to them through the efforts of King Robert.

  From that general and, I fear, irreversible ignorance has sprung the widespread disregard for truth that first spurred me to these writings: the invention, through whispered innuendo and defiantly blatant lies, of a flawless and endlessly admirable, patriotic champion; a hero, near mythical within a few brief years of his spurious creation, called William Wallace—The Wallace.

  Thus I am forced, if some future reader is to understand my tale, to deal to some extent, at least, with recent history, if for no other reason than to identify the people and events that were to shape my unfortunate cousin’s destiny.

  Edward, of course, agreed to Bishop Fraser’s request immediately, and sent an English army up to Scotland’s border to oversee the peace while his deputies, Antony Bek and John de Vescy, sought out both Bruce and Balliol to inform them that, at the request of the Guardians, the English King had undertaken to adjudicate in the matter of the succession to the Scots Crown.

  The hostilities ceased at once. Neither Bruce nor Balliol could claim legitimacy in contesting such a development, for the Guardians had acted authoritatively in accordance with their duty, and Edward of England, who had already successfully negotiated similar disputes in Sicily and Gascony, brought to the proceedings a reputation for probity and integrity. Assuming correctly that neither of the disputing nobles would defy him, Edward convened a great court at Norham, one of his border castles, and for the next two years a cumbersome diplomatic dance ensued.

  In the years since then, in view of the revealed monstrosity of Edward’s ambition, Bishop Fraser and John of Badenoch have been reviled for making that first approach to Edward, but as a man of God and only incidentally a man of Bruce during the ensuing conflicts, I believe that they have been unjustly maligned. Both men were Balliol adherents, and unashamedly anti-Bruce, but that has little bearing upon what happened later. When Fraser and Badenoch wrote to Edward in the last days of September 1290, they did so out of genuine concern for the good of Scotland’s realm. No one, in those days, had the slightest suspicion of the canker that was already growing within the English King’s breast.

  That was soon to change. Eleanor of Castile, the Queen of England, fell sick in mid-November and was dead before month’s end. Edward was devastated, cut adrift from the solid anchorage she had always provided for him. He was fifty-two years old and he had been married to Eleanor since he was sixteen, and in all of their thirty-six years as man and wife, they had been virtually inseparable, she his strongest bulwark and his most able adviser.

  Edward vanished from public life that winter,
leaving the affairs of his kingdom inert in the hands of deputies and caretakers. All important matters of state were set aside while the King remained in solitude for months. And by the time he emerged from his selfimposed exile, Edward Plantagenet had become a different man—bitter, less tolerant, and more demanding of everyone around him. He had always been capable and ambitious, but now, lacking his beloved wife to constrain him, he was intransigent and implacable and he evinced a ruthless obstinacy that would brook no interference to his royal will; he had become the man who would soon abandon all the finer achievements of his earlier life and arrogantly proclaim himself Malleus Scottorum, the Hammer of the Scots.

  He began, in the spring of 1291, by formalizing his status as feudal overlord of Scotland. The matter had arisen before, and without great objection from the Scots magnates, most of whom owned lands and estates in England by Edward’s permission, but now Edward made it the sine qua non of his intercession in the matter of the Scots kingship. The Guardians and the magnates debated it half-heartedly but soon yielded in the face of Edward’s argument, which was that Scotland needed a judge and not an arbitrator. Edward had had extensive experience of both and he could demonstrate, with utter credibility, that arbitration was useless without the strength of authority to support it. By according Edward the full rights of feudal overlord, the Scots nobility would give him the full power to judge the Cause and to pronounce a victor. The solution appeared to be both logical and sensible, as, it must be said, did Edward himself at the time. And so the compromise—the tipping point—was reached.

  No doubt sensing that decades of strife and bloodshed lay ahead, Robert Bruce the Competitor, who was over eighty at that time, resigned his claim to the throne in favour of his son, Robert Bruce VI. His son’s wife, Lady Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, had died mere weeks before at the age of thirty-six—far too young to have died so suddenly. The earldom that she held, Carrick, was one of the oldest in the realm, and she had inherited it in her own right, as her father’s sole heir. She had been married young and widowed childless during the Crusade of 1270, and soon after that she had wed Robert Bruce VI, presenting him with an astonishing ten living, healthy children. Bruce had carried the honorary title of Earl of Carrick, purely as Marjorie’s consort. Upon her death, however, in accordance with Lady Marjorie’s wish, he became Earl of Carrick in fact.

  Only two days after his father passed to him the claim to the throne, the younger Bruce resigned his newly acquired earldom and invested the title and all its lands and holdings in his own son, Robert Bruce VII, who was then eighteen and living in England, in the household of King Edward. That development, with its realignment of claims and responsibilities, set all of southern Scotland abuzz.

  Before anything could come of it, however, the court of auditors declared the following week that John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, had best rights to the kingdom of Scots. And so, Edward chose the weakest of the contenders for the Scots throne as the man who would be King.

  No one quibbled at the verdict, for the auditors—a hundred of them in all, appointed from the nobility of Scotland and England—had been debating the question for two years. There were murmurs that the elder Bruce had resigned in favour of his son precisely because his own advanced age was being bruited as an impediment to his success; others said that the emplacement of the younger Bruce would ensure that if Balliol was chosen and then failed—and it was already being rumoured that he would—then the younger Bruce would be ready to step quickly into his place.

  By and large, though, the Scots were generally glad to have the matter resolved at last, and to have the realm’s affairs safely back in the hands of a legitimate king. In my own mind I believe that Balliol’s claim was probably stronger than Bruce’s, based as it was upon the law of primogeniture and the inheritance of the firstborn child, a system in which I believe. Balliol, as I knew from my own admittedly brief experience of him, was a forthright and likable man. He had few overt enemies and he was blessed with a pleasant, agreeable personality, combined with great charm and a marked ability to listen to others and actually hear what they were saying. Of course, he had detractors even then, mainly dour old warriors, all of them Bruce supporters, who muttered about his being incapable of dealing decisively enough with Edward of England. They shook their heads over what they saw as Balliol’s lack of backbone and his too-eager willingness to placate the English King, and they warned that he would never find, or show, the kind of courage that would be required to keep the ambitious Edward in his place. Bruce, the proud and unyieldingly arrogant old Competitor, would never have bent the knee to Edward or any other Englishman, they maintained, and said Balliol had been selected purely because Edward believed he could control him.

  Indeed, Edward used him from the outset as he would never have dared use the old and autocratic Robert Bruce. He manipulated the new King shamelessly and mercilessly to achieve his own ends, which proved to be the complete subjugation and absorption into England of the Scottish realm. Balliol, poor weak vessel that he was, never succeeded in asserting himself as anything other than Edward’s catspaw.

  He was crowned and enthroned at Scone on November 30th, and he took the title John, King of Scotland, thereby claiming kingship of the land rather than of the people and setting himself apart himself from every other monarch, all of whom had ruled the realm as Kings of Scots. The next day, he paid homage to King Edward of England as his feudal superior. His years in Purgatory had begun.

  Balliol, as all men ought to know, was deposed and forced to abdicate eventually by his own nobles, his name disgraced forever in the eyes of his countrymen. But one man, one defiant rebel, continued to name him King and to champion his cause, to the great grief of Edward, England, and the majority of the Scots magnates.

  That man was William Wallace.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1

  Will spent his own years in Purgatory, a period that began on Wednesday, November 19th. I have never forgotten that date, partly because, as a librarian, I had become obsessive about such things. More than that, though, the date became memorable because of a concatenation of unforeseeable events.

  Word of the auditors’ decision arrived from the south in the dead of night, in the middle of a torrential rainstorm that lasted through the dawn and threatened to flood the countryside for miles around, but the entire Abbey community awoke in darkness to the joyous tidings of the new King and happily ignored the foulness of the weather as they threw themselves into preparing for a solemn Mass to celebrate such a triumphal occasion. Mass was celebrated every morning in the Abbey, of course, but on certain occasions, such as liturgical feasts and festivals, holy days of obligation, and days of general rejoicing like this one, special efforts were expended to make the experience of the Mass more memorable. The Sacrifice was concelebrated by the senior members of the clergy in residence; the regalia worn by the celebrants was the finest that the Abbey possessed; and the instruments and vessels used in the ceremonials, from thuribles for the burning of incense, to candle holders, Crosses, and ciboria and chalices for holding the Communion bread and wine, were the most magnificent in our treasury. Even the congregation, the Abbey brethren themselves, dressed in their finest habits, and the sound of their massed voices in the incense-laden air always seemed to take on a new dignity on those occasions. And so Mass that morning, filled with the promise of an early coronation and a return to righteousness and order throughout the reunited land, was a wondrous affair.

  Those feelings of goodwill and renewed hope, unfortunately, barely survived the ending of the ceremony.

  I had left the Abbey church directly after Mass and run through the pouring rain to the library, where I was helping Brother Duncan with a study of several water-damaged documents from the oldest monastery on the island of Iona. They had been drenched during a catastrophic storm, when one wall of the ancient building collapsed and many priceless and irreplaceable documents were soaked almost beyond redemption. We had not been back at
work for long, I know, but we were already sufficiently engrossed in what we were doing that the clamour of excitement from outside took a long time to register. When it did, though, we knew that something unusual was unfolding nearby, and so we carefully set aside our work and made our way outside to the cloisters, where we found ourselves in a scene out of Chaos. I could make no sense of what was happening, for though there were people moving everywhere I looked, none of them appeared to be going anywhere, and all of them looked stunned or appalled and were chittering like frightened squirrels.

  Brother Duncan roared for silence, and within moments everyone was gazing wide-eyed at him. He looked around at the watching faces and spoke into the hushed stillness.

  “My thanks for your silence. Now, will someone please explain to me what is happening here? The reason for this uproar, so soon after Mass on a peaceful morning?”

  “Murder.”

  The single word, spoken in a dull, lifeless voice, provoked a concerted hiss of indrawn breath. The speaker was Brother Callum, one of the principal assistants in the Abbey kitchens. Duncan swung to face him.

  “Murder, Callum? Are you sure of that? Who was murdered?”

  Callum swallowed hard. “Women, on their way here to attend Mass this morning.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “I heard someone shouting it to somebody else, when I came out of the kitchens.”

  Duncan and I exchanged glances and then he raised his voice again. “Is there anyone here who can tell us more about this? Anything at all?”

  The faces staring back at him all remained blank and slightly panic stricken.

  “Very well,” Brother Duncan said. “Something is clearly afoot, but since no one here knows what, it might be safe to presume that we are granting too much significance to something that might not be as serious as it appears. I want all of you, therefore, to return to what you were doing. Those of you with tasks to perform, return to them. Those of you with none, retire to your cells and pray that what we have heard is no more than speculation and misunderstanding. God grant it be so.”