The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  As the monks dispersed, Duncan waved me to his side. “You and I will go and find out what’s going on. Let’s hope it’s not as bad as Callum reported.”

  It was as bad, and worse. We had to search diligently to find someone who could tell us anything, and even then the significance of what we heard was slow to sink home to us. The monk on duty at the main gate told us that a messenger had run up, staggering, a short time earlier, shouting his tidings to the winds in a voice filled with panic and outrage. Fortunately, Father Dominic, our Sub-abbot, had been present, doing penance by praying in the pouring rain, and he had spirited the man directly into the Abbey proper before he could upset any of the brethren.

  Duncan grasped my arm and pushed me firmly towards the Abbot’s quarters, where Dominic and the Father Abbot himself told us what little they knew.

  It seemed that a party of women from the town really had been attacked on their way to the Abbey early that morning. There had been five women in the group, Dominic told us. All of them had been sexually violated, two of them killed in the process; the three survivors had been badly beaten and were all unconscious. They had been taken to the nunnery just outside the Abbey precincts, where they had been placed under the care of a visiting Hospitaller knight from Rome, and no one was sure if any of them would live out the day. If any did regain consciousness, it remained to be seen whether they would be able—or willing—to identify their assailants. It was a stupefying crime, the like of which had never been known in Paisley, and no one was yet equipped to deal with it.

  Duncan, ever the pragmatist, immediately asked the question foremost in my own mind: Who were these women? No one, it seemed, knew at this point, though Dominic had already sent his deputy out to discover all he could. What was known was that they appeared to have been attacked on a public pathway, within shouting distance of the nearest houses, and subdued quickly before being herded off the road and into a copse. They had been found by a local blacksmith, who had gone for a pre-dawn walk in the rain to clear his ale-clogged head before going to work and stumbled upon the scene. He had not recognized any of the women, presumably because they had all been in bloodied disarray and he himself had been too badly shaken to look closely at them.

  The Abbot and Sub-abbot, being who they were, wanted to start prayers for the victims immediately, but my cousin Duncan was far more concerned with the how and why of this event than he was with anything else. He kept interrupting Father Abbot with questions. Who could have done such a thing? That was the primary question, and even as he asked it, I sensed the overwhelming implications, for it was instantly clear to me that no one in Paisley town would have dared to contemplate such a sin. The worst ne’er-dowells in the community were, at worst, opportunistic thieves and pickpockets, and thus it followed that the attackers were unlikely to be local men. The surprise, abduction, and violation of five women suggested a large and organized group of men.

  Duncan sucked air between his front teeth as he turned to me. “Soldiery,” he said, making no attempt to hide his disgust. There were soldiers everywhere that autumn, Scots and English both. “But whose? And how and where do we start to look for them?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. “Where the attack took place. It will be a quagmire, so there should be tracks.”

  “Aye, there will be,” Duncan answered, “but half the town of Paisley has likely traipsed through there by now, so it will be impossible to tell one set of tracks from another.”

  “Not if we follow them away far enough from wherever this thing happened. None of the townsfolk would go running after that many men alone, especially in weather like this, and especially not murderers. I think we’ll be able to follow the tracks far enough to isolate them, sooner or later, and see if perhaps there’s something identifiable about them.”

  He eyed me skeptically. “You don’t believe they would have scattered afterwards? That’s what I would have told them to do, had I been there.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not if they’re strangers, and not in this weather. Too much danger of someone getting lost and caught. They would have stuck together, made their way out as a group, avoiding being seen. That tells me we’ll find a trail, though only God Himself knows where it may lead us.”

  Duncan was gnawing at his lower lip, but then he jerked his head in agreement. “You could be right. Better fetch your foul-weather cloak, then. It’s nasty out there.”

  2

  The day was grey and leaden, almost dark, though it was not yet noon. The rain had grown heavier, and now the noise of it filled the air, drowning out everything else. I pulled the hood of my woollen foul-weather cloak down over my face and wrapped the rest of the garment as tightly about me as I could, fully aware that the carefully brushed-on coating of wax that covered its thickly felted surface would not stand up for long against this strong a downpour. Water puddled beneath our feet at every step, and none of it seemed to be draining away. Standing on the hard gravel of the Abbey’s forecourt, we were relatively safe from discomfort, but Duncan and I both knew that the moment we stepped off the gravel and into the grass, we would sink to the ankles. Not for the first time in my life, I wished for a solid pair of heavy boots, but monks and undistinguished priests wore simple sandals in all weather and all seasons, and so I was somewhat inured to painfully chilled feet.

  “Ready?” Duncan asked, and when I nodded he stepped out in front of me, his stride purposeful. I followed him closely, trying to ignore the icy wetness of the ankle-high grass.

  It took us less than ten minutes to reach the place where the attack had occurred, and as we had expected, it was a seething hive of people, most of whom had no reason to be there, other than simple curiosity and the human need to gawk. The ground had been churned to mud, as we had expected, and there was no hope of being able to make sense of what had happened there after the events of the early morning. We merely looked about us briefly and moved on, ignoring the throng and focusing instead on finding the tracks of the people who had passed this way earlier in the day.

  It was not difficult to find the route they had taken, but it was surprisingly difficult to escape from the depredations of the gawkers who had since added their own tracks to those left behind by the attackers. Many of them had struck out boldly to follow the original tracks and had stayed with them for a surprisingly long time, so that Duncan and I, following in turn, had no way of knowing whether we were following the footprints of the attackers or the amateur hunters who had preceded us. Small groups occasionally came straggling back towards us after giving up the hunt, and it was all I could do to maintain a semblance of civility towards them, but the last of them revealed that there was only one more group ahead of us, three men, none of whom they had recognized.

  We had emerged from behind a screen of head-high bushes to find ourselves in a small, open glade surrounded by waist-high undergrowth. I was walking with my head down, studying the ground at my feet, and I sensed rather than saw a flicker of movement very close to me. I raised my head in time to see a long, broad sword blade come hissing towards me and stop within a hand’s breadth of my face. I froze. Duncan, half a pace to my left, stopped, too, his hands flung up involuntarily against the threat, his eyes flaring.

  The man wielding the sword was tall and lean, his body solid beneath his sodden clothing. But my attention had already been caught by a second man, behind him.

  “Hold, Shoomy!” he shouted, and I recognized him instantly. As the man lowered his blade and stepped back, the other continued, “What are you two doing here?”

  “Will?” I asked, hearing the bleating disbelief in my voice. “Is that you?”

  The image of a hugely bedraggled rat came to me immediately, suggested by the sodden sleekness of his clothes, literally aflow with running water as they clung to his enormous frame. I was seeing him clean shaven for the first time, and the water streamed down his cheeks. I could see that he was bristling with fury, too, but my powers of perception
were addled at that moment and so I understood nothing.

  “Aye, Jamie, it’s me, right enough. You didn’t answer. What are you two doing out here?”

  As he spoke, a third man, short and slight as the first was tall, stepped out of the bushes, lowering his crossbow. I recognized him as Big Andrew Miller, though I had not seen him for years.

  “We’re looking for signs of who might have … have done this … this …” I began again. “Some women were attacked this morning, in Paisley, on their way to Mass. We set out to find some sign of who had done it, but we’ve had to come this far searching for clear tracks.”

  “Aye, and good luck. There are no clear tracks. Muck-filled holes, but no tracks that can be used, even were this accursed rain to stop this minute.”

  “You know about the women? But … Where have you come from, Will? What are you doing here?”

  The look he threw at me was one that I had never seen before, a mixture of scorn and intolerance. But he answered me civilly enough. “I was on my way home, bringing my wife to Elderslie to pay you all a visit. But when we came to Paisley early this morning, we found the place in an uproar.”

  “Aye, those women.”

  He glared at me. “What d’you mean, those women? D’you not know who they were?”

  He could not have asked me anything more mystifying, and I shook my head.

  “They were my women, Jamie! Mine!” His voice, the outrage in it, hit me almost palpably in the chest. “Mirren’s aunt and her four cousins. That’s who those women were.”

  “Holy Mother of God!”

  My lips continued to move, but nothing more emerged, and Will paid no attention anyway. He spoke almost to himself.

  “They were taken unawares on their way to worship God, and they were ravaged by devils. Even the old wife, Mirren’s aunt. Two of them were killed on the spot, the others left for dead.”

  “Which of them were killed?”

  He looked at me almost absently. “The mother, Meg Waddie, Mirren’s aunt. And her eldest daughter, Christine. I think the old woman might have died of fright. But the daughter was clubbed to death. When I find the man who did it, he will regret that his bitch mother ever whelped him. I will feed him his own balls, I swear, fresh cut from their sac. And I will find him, Jamie. Believe you me.”

  I did. I believed him implicitly, appalled and fascinated by the look in his eyes.

  “But work like this is no fit matter for priests, Jamie. You would please me more were you to look to the women, see to their comfort.” He jerked his head, flinging his soaked forelock away from his eyes. “I heard someone say they were taken to the nuns. Mirren is with them, wherever they are, and I left Ewan with her. He can help her with whatever needs to be done, and it will be good for everyone to have a priest to hand. I came out here to try to find out who did this, but there’s nothing here.”

  “Oh yes, there is.” Now that my mind was functioning again, I was looking about me and seeing what was really there to be seen. “See those marks there?” I pointed to a series of three footprints that had clearly been made by three different feet, slightly to my left and leading to a rain-swollen streamlet. It was plain that the three men had each jumped across the water, planted a foot on the far bank, and used it to push off in a scramble to the top of the gently rising slope.

  I crouched beside the footprints and touched the rows of small, deeply indented holes with my fingertips. “Look,” I said. “Hobnails. Who wears hobnailed boots?”

  “Men at arms.” Will’s voice was strangely quiet. “Regulars. Supplied by a quartermaster.”

  “And what does that tell us?”

  “The whoresons were English. Almost certainly. As far as I know, none of the Scots magnates has the kind of wealth that pays for hobnails for their men … Which means that when we find which English baron has troops in the vicinity, we’ll know where to look for the culprits in this day’s madness.”

  Duncan spoke for the first time. “Might not be a baron. I’ve heard of no baronial forces near here, not recently.”

  Will growled in his throat. “Baron, earl, or plain damned knight, I care not. If there’s an English force within walking distance of Paisley, I want to talk to its commander, though it be Edward Plantagenet himself.” He looked at me. “How can we best find out?”

  I glanced at Duncan. “At the Abbey, wouldn’t you say?”

  3

  Within half an hour of returning to the Abbey, we knew that an armed force of some two hundred men belonging to Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, had bypassed Paisley two days earlier and made camp less than six miles farther on, towards Glasgow, to await the arrival of Bek himself from Norham, where he had been in attendance upon King Edward. Bek had served as King Edward’s lieutenant in Scotland for two years, since the commencement of the prenuptial arrangements between the Maid and Edward of Caernarvon. Renowned for his fierce piety, his single-minded dedication to his master’s affairs, and his intolerance of anything that threatened either of those, he nevertheless had a reputation for even-handedness, and no one had yet accused him of anything dishonourable in his treatment of the Scots.

  Will was sitting across the table from me, and I found him staring at me and nibbling at the inside of his cheek in what I knew to be an indication of deep thought. I knew, too, that he was not watching me but staring through me, his eyes and his thoughts focused on matters far beyond the room in which we sat.

  “What think you, Will?” I asked. “What should we do?”

  I watched his eyes readjust to where he was, and as they shifted and grew more intense, his face darkened into the scowl I had become too familiar with in the past hour, so that I thought: This isn’t my cousin Will. This is Wallace, the wild one.

  He scratched at the stubble on his chin as he answered me. “What we should do and what we will do are two different things, Jamie. We will go and talk to Bishop Bek, but what we should do is follow those tracks to wherever they lead us and then spill the blood of every shifty-eyed whoreson we find at the end of the trail.” His voice emerged flat and emotionless, but I had known this man all my life and I knew the effort he was expending to keep his quivering fury concealed.

  “What if Bek won’t talk to us?”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why would he not? I’ll go to him as my uncle’s messenger. He’ll listen to Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie, if not to plain Will Wallace.”

  I didn’t doubt what he said, though I saw no benefit in pointing out to him that Bek might well know that Sir Malcolm was dead. “When will you go?”

  “This minute.”

  “No point in that, Cuz. He’s not there, remember? He was in Norham yesterday, for the auditors’ decision, so even supposing he left immediately after that, he would barely have had time to get here.”

  “The messengers got here last night.”

  “Aye, but they were messengers, Will. They rode non-stop, in relays. Bek is a Bishop. He will travel at leisure and in dignity, so it will be at least tomorrow before he shows up.”

  “Do we know where his army is encamped?”

  Duncan shook his head. “Not precisely, though we can easily find out.”

  “Find out, then, as quickly as you can,” Will growled. “I want to be there by dawn.”

  I looked at him. “Why so early? Bek won’t be there at that hour.”

  “No, but I’ll be waiting when he gets there.” He stood up. “In the meantime, I’m going to find Mirren, if only to wrap my arms around her and dry her tears. I’ll see you all later.”

  “Wait.” I pushed away from the table. “I’ll walk with you, at least part of the way.”

  Neither of us spoke again until we were beyond the Abbey gates, on our way into the town. I knew he was thinking about Mirren and I had no wish to interrupt him. The tragedy of what had happened to her aunt and her cousins would no doubt have appalled her, but from all I’d heard she was a strong young woman and would take no permanent ill of it. The vio
lation of women, though everyone deplored it, was far from being unknown, after all, and most particularly so when the land was disputed by opposing armies. At such times, the unspoken right to plunder and to violate enemy women was regarded as a victorious soldier’s privilege, and everyone, women included, understood that to be so.

  This particular act, however, had not been committed in war. God could not allow it to go unpunished, and I knew my cousin was determined that it would not.

  “So, Cousin, what was it you wanted to say to me?” He spoke in Latin, a sure sign that he knew his question, and my answer to it, to be important.

  A hundred thoughts sprang to my mind at once, but I forced myself to ignore all of them and respond quietly, also in Latin. “That you should proceed cautiously in this.”

  “I should? And why is that?” Will spoke with his head down, his eyes on the pathway ahead of him. “What need have I of caution here, Jamie? Five good women have been attacked and ravaged without provocation. Two of them are dead, with more, perhaps, to follow, who can tell?”

  It had stopped raining sometime in the past hour, and the early darkness of full winter obscured everything, save glints of moonlight reflected haphazardly from the puddles all around us, where beams had managed to penetrate the broken mass of clouds overhead. Will sidestepped towards me to avoid a large puddle. “Why should it be I who needs to be cautious? The evidence we have found indicates that the women’s attackers wore hobnailed boots, which indicates soldiers, clearly in the employ of some lord wealthy enough to equip his hirelings with such footwear, which means that in all likelihood these murderous animals are English. The only force of English soldiery in the district is commanded by Master Antony Bek, whose pride in his men and their accoutrements is sufficiently well known for him to be called the Warrior Bishop. And I have need of caution?