The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  “Now I know I don’t have to tell you, Cousin, that as King Edward’s own lieutenant in Scotland, and as a prince of Christ’s Church, Bishop Bek should decry even the possibility of any man of his being involved in such a crime, and therefore I intend to go and speak with him, to bring the affair to his attention in person. Of course I see a need for respect in how I approach him, taking care to recognize his rank and to offend none of his dignity. That need I can see clearly, and I will attend to it. But you are warning me of a need for caution, and I see no such need.”

  As I listened to him, marking the bitterness in his words, it occurred to me that this was the longest speech I had heard Will Wallace make in years. What did not occur to me, though—in fact I only thought of it long afterwards—was that he had spoken with authority, with the assuredness and conviction that comes only after months and years of performance. I completely missed the evident fact that my closest friend and dearest relative had become a leader in his own right, accustomed to speaking with conviction to men who listened to him closely.

  And so, in my ignorance of what had happened to him in the previous two years, I continued talking to him as though he were still the lad I had known before.

  “I’m not talking about—” But I fell silent, suddenly aware that he had already responded to what I was talking about, even before I had mentioned it.

  He cocked his head in a well-remembered gesture and grinned at me. “Come on, then, spit it out. What’s on your mind?”

  I sucked in my breath “Caution … the need for it, despite what you say. I want to come with you tomorrow. When you meet the Bishop.”

  “There’s no need for that. Or do you think I’ll need your protection?”

  “No, but I think it might not hurt to have a cleric there prepared to swear an oath to bear witness on your behalf. Even such a poor half-cleric as I am.”

  He grunted in what might have been a laugh. “You are something of a neither-nor, aren’t you? Ewan told me that your ordination was postponed when the Maid died. But that was a long time ago. Will you ever see ordination?”

  “Aye, within the month, in fact, in time for Christmas. And nothing will stop it this time.”

  Will stopped in his tracks and grasped me by the upper arms, tilting his head to catch my face in the light of the moon. “You will be priested then? Truly? Then by the living God, I will be there to stand witness to it, unless God Himself sees fit to blast me before the day. I’ll be there, Jamie, as God is my judge.”

  “Good, then, and I’ll be there with you, come morning, when you meet Bek, as God is my judge, too.”

  4

  Sometime before noon, Bishop Antony Bek of Durham, or one of his close associates, committed what I have come to believe was the single most costly error of Edward Plantagenet’s entire reign as King of England, casting the die for the ruination of his ambitious plans for Scotland.

  To this day I cannot say with certainty who was truly to blame for what happened that morning. Not even Will could swear afterwards to the truth of who said what and to whom, and he was much closer to the events than I was. That single incident, a visit to a bishop, made in good faith by a man of honour seeking redress for an indefensible transgression against the laws of God and man, might have had incalculably beneficial consequences for King Edward’s designs had it been handled otherwise. But it was not, and the injustice that took place instead became the catalyst that aroused William Wallace to anger and thereafter focused all of Scotland’s rage against the would-be usurpers. Bek’s unconscionable treatment of William Wallace that day threw the English into a struggle that would last for twenty-two years and end with their being driven from Scotland completely.

  The day began badly and deteriorated steadily. Will and I presented ourselves at the Bishop’s encampment as planned, unarmed and alone—Will had ordered the others to remain at Paisley—soon after first light, after a two-hour walk through a black, wind-racked darkness that paled gradually into a grey and cloudy dawn. We spoke quietly with the acting sergeant of the guard, at what passed for the main entrance but was really nothing more than an opening in the high hedge that bordered the extensive pastureland Bek had chosen for his campsite.

  The guard sergeant, a surly, slovenly looking type, was more interested in impressing his own four-man detachment than he was in listening to what Will had to say. He barely listened, preening for his men all the while, rocking back on his heels with his hands clasped around the buckle of the heavy sword belt at his waist and his face twisted in a sneer. As soon as Will had finished speaking, the lout waved us away with a curse. The Bishop was not yet in camp, he said, and not expected soon, so he wished a pestilence on us and told us to get out of his gateway, out of his sight.

  Will showed no reaction to the man’s ill manners; he merely stepped a little closer as the sergeant turned away and requested, respectfully, that we be permitted to await the Bishop’s arrival off to one side, out of the way of the people coming and going to and from the camp. The guardsman swung around, starting to raise his fist, but then he stopped, doubtless noting the width of my cousin’s shoulders and the depth of his chest. His fist opened up and he flicked his hand, indicating a nearby log that had obviously been used as a seat by many people over many years. Will nodded his thanks mildly, and together we crossed to the log and sat down.

  As I passed the gateway in the hedge, I took a look through it, and was surprised by how empty the place looked. There was nothing to indicate, at first glance, that this was a military encampment, other than the presence of the guards themselves. The space I could see directly beyond the gates, an empty stretch of sodden turf, perhaps thirty to forty paces deep, must have been used as a parade ground or marshalling area. Beyond the grass, though, almost invisible in the half light, I detected the distant tops of uniform rows of tents rising up from the morning mist behind a row of skeletal trees, and as the light grew stronger we began to hear shouted orders and the sounds of organized military activities back there.

  Sometime around mid-morning, we heard the sounds of hooves and marching men approaching from behind us, and we turned to watch the Bishop and his mounted escort arriving from the south.

  There were about thirty men in the party, all of them well mounted and armed from head to foot, except for the group surrounding Bishop Bek, all of whom were clerics and rode the smaller, gentler horses known as palfreys.

  I had never seen the Warrior Bishop, but I recognized him immediately as the only sword-carrying cleric in the central group. He sat very straight on his tall horse and carried his head high, his expression solemn and disdainful, his grip on the reins firm and confident. I saw him glance sidelong at us as he rode by. He ignored me in my plain robe after a single look, but he took all the time he needed to examine Will from head to foot, and I imagined him wondering who this tall, imposing, finely dressed, and clean-shaven fellow was and why he was waiting at the entrance to his camp. Then he turned back to resume his conversation with the man beside him and rode through the gates. Behind him, his men-at-arms rode in silence, one of them carrying a banner with the Bishop’s escutcheon, three linked gold rings on an azure field, and none of them paid us the slightest attention.

  At their rear, far less splendidly accoutred and travelling far more slowly, plodded a small detachment of weary-looking infantry, leading a ragtag, thoroughly cowed group of prisoners. Every man among the prisoners wore an iron collar, and they shuffled awkwardly along in single file and very close together, their arms tied behind their backs and their collars joined by a length of rope that was too short for the purpose it had to serve and so kept them off balance. Looking more closely at the armed squad as they approached, I decided that they were not, in fact, part of the Bishop’s entourage but had simply been overtaken by the riders. Will looked from them to me with one eyebrow raised, and I was sure he was thinking the same thing I was. The prisoners, fourteen of them and all men, were Scots; they had that dour, inward-looking air abo
ut them. I wondered idly what they had done to warrant arrest, acknowledging wryly to myself that it would not have been too difficult to achieve.

  They were halted by a stentorian curse from the sergeant of the guard. He was having no Scotch filth entering the camp under his watch, he swore, not until someone with authority came out and ordered him to let these animals inside. He ranted and raved, standing nose to nose with the corporal in charge of the prisoners, who argued back just as defiantly. All the corporal wanted to do was get rid of the ugly Scotch goblins—they’d been hanging around his neck for days, he said, weighing him down. He wanted to shed them like a wet coat and go about his own affairs and he didn’t care what the gate sergeant thought. Eventually they reached an agreement, and the prisoners were herded into a circle around the trunk of the single large beech tree in the area, about twenty paces from where we sat, and their neck rope was retied securely to keep them there. And there they were to remain until someone inside the camp should decide what was to be done with them.

  5

  The gate sergeant had watched Will and me closely as the Bishop and his party approached, prepared to launch his guards at us should we attempt to interfere with the Bishop’s progress. Now that they were safely inside the camp, though, he was more than content to pretend we were invisible.

  We waited in silence for another half-hour before Will went up to the fellow and reminded him that we were waiting to speak with Bishop Bek, this time citing his uncle, Sir Malcolm Wallace, as the source of the request. I told myself this was not quite a lie, for I knew that had the knight been alive, he would most assuredly have used his name and influence to solve the matter of this heinous crime.

  The sergeant was manifestly unhappy at the inconvenience of having to listen, but the knight’s name and title were imposing enough that he sent one of his four scowling guards into the camp to carry Will’s message to the Bishop. And once again we settled down to wait.

  The messenger arrived back in no time, accompanied by a sergeant. There was no mistaking this sergeant’s affiliation; he wore the livery depicted on Bek’s banner, a bright blue surcoat with the three linked gold rings of the Bishop’s crest emblazoned on the left breast, and he was flanked by two less brilliantly bedecked men-atarms wearing simple quartered patches of blue and yellow squares on their plain leather jerkins. He marched directly to where we sat and stood looking down at us, like the guardsman sergeant making no attempt to disguise the sneer on his face.

  “Right,” he said after looking Will up and down and then shaking his head as if in wonder at the stupidity of the people he had to deal with. “Let’s move it, then. Come on! On your feet. I haven’t got time to be wasting, chasing after your idle Scotch arse, no matter what the Bishop thinks.”

  Will stood up, his meek and humble demeanour somehow de-emphasizing his great size, and the sergeant backed away from him instantly, signalling to the two spear carriers to flank Will on either side as though he were a prisoner. I stood up, too, assuming I was going with them, but as soon as I did the gate sergeant lunged angrily towards me, waving me back down to my seat on the log. He cursed me for a Scotch fool and made it abundantly clear that I was to stay where I was and wait, but the other sergeant, much to my surprise, ordered the fellow to shut his mouth. “They came together,” he growled, “so they’ll go in together. The priest might be an interpreter, who knows?”

  Bek’s pavilion-styled tent, fronted by a tall pole bearing his personal standard, was by far the largest of all, but there were many other, lesser pavilions similarly identified among the serried lines of troop tents laid out in neat formations. Men were everywhere, most of them either in organized drill groups or in work gangs being supervised by sergeants in the same white livery our guide wore. I saw few horses, but the strong aroma of dung told me large numbers were not too far away.

  The sergeant stopped us when we were less than two paces from the entrance to the Bishop’s tent. “Wait here,” he said. “You’ll be called in when the Bishop’s ready for you.”

  He marched away then, leaving us unguarded, side by side beneath the Prince Bishop’s banner.

  “What d’ you think?” Will muttered. “Should we run now, while we still can?”

  It was the first flash of humour I had seen in him since the previous day, and it made me feel better immediately, but before I could reply, the flap of the main tent opened and a priest in green liturgical robes beckoned us with cupped fingers.

  Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, was at prayer, and the vaulted, shadowy spaces inside the pavilion provided the illusion that the tent itself was a church. Mummery was the word that sprang to my mind, along with an image from the previous year, when I had watched a travelling troupe of mummers present a drama in Glasgow about the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus. The false sanctity and obvious insincerity of the spectacle had filled me with revulsion then, and I found the same feelings roiling in me now.

  Bek knelt alone at a prie-dieu, before a small, portable altar that bore a covered tabernacle and a silver chalice. His back was arrowstraight, his chin tilted slightly upward as he gazed towards the tabernacle, his fingers caressing the beads of a large and ornate rosary. It seemed to me that he had positioned himself very carefully, and for our benefit, before giving his acolyte the nod to admit us to his presence. He knelt for some time after our arrival, unmoving, ignoring us completely, but then he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and surged to his feet, removing the stole from his shoulders, folding it properly and kissing it before handing it to the priest who had admitted us. Only then did he glance at us quizzically, and then indicated, with a wave of his hand, that we should walk with him to another part of the tent, where he took up a position beside a glowing brazier and close to a padded armchair that was almost large enough to be a couch.

  He barely looked at me as he asked, “To which community are you attached?”

  I was keenly aware of the cool impersonality of his tone and the lack of honorific he accorded me, and the awareness gratified me. In his eyes, I was clearly less than nothing, a nameless, faceless priest whose drone-like existence was to be taken for granted and not remarked upon, but I was not a priest at all, and his arrogance had blinded him to that. He had glanced at my grey robe and seen only the garb of a lowly Benedictine cleric, and his own hubris had elevated me to the status of priesthood, never deigning to imagine that anyone less significant would have the temerity to enter his presence. I had anticipated his question, though, and the lie fell from my lips with the ring of truth.

  “Jedburgh, my lord. The Abbey there. But I am currently assigned to Selkirk parish.” Were Bek to seek me in Jedburgh in future, I reasoned, he might or might not launch a search for me when he failed to find me, but had I named Glasgow, inviting him to seek me there afterwards at the cathedral, it might have caused a deal of needless embarrassment to others, among them Bishop Wishart.

  He nodded absently and spoke to Will.

  “You are the nephew of a knight, I am told, sent here on his behalf to question me. Is that correct?” He raised an interdicting hand. “If it is, then you must surely have an answer to my next question. If this matter has sufficient import in your uncle’s eyes to merit intruding upon my privacy in order to bring it to my attention, why then would he offer me the discourtesy of not presenting it in person?”

  Will dipped his head in acknowledgment. “He is unable, my lord. He is grown old in recent years and is now unfit to travel.”

  I held my breath. If Bek knew who Will was, and knew of Sir Malcolm’s death, we were within moments of being arrested.

  The Bishop nodded. “Go on, then. Voice your complaint. What does this concern?”

  Will told him, delivering the only lie in his story right at the outset, when he claimed to be head verderer on his uncle’s lands who had taken his wife into Paisley to visit her family there. From that point onwards, he related events exactly as they had occurred. Bek sat down in his big chair shortly after Will beg
an talking, and rested his chin on his cupped hand, his face betraying nothing of his thoughts. When the tale was told, he sighed and sat up straighter, his gaze returning to Will.

  “So … Let me see if I understand what you are saying. Some women were molested in your town and you set out to find the miscreants. After weltering around in torrential rain for half a day and miles from anywhere, you found some muddy footprints—how many? three?—that may have been made by hobnailed boots. Am I correct? And based upon that … that startling observation, you deduced that these footprints had been made by soldiers. English soldiers, of course. After that, it must have been the work of mere moments to arrive at the conviction that those soldiers must be mine, since I appear to be the only English commander with troopers in this area, and that, by association, the responsibility for the carnage in Paisley yesterday must be mine, too. Correct?” He made no pretense of waiting for an answer. “Excellently reasoned, though the logic involved is unmistakably Scots. So how may we proceed from here? Shall I assemble my entire force on the parade ground and have them flogged? And how many of them would you like me to hang afterwards? Will you have time to wait for us to build a gibbet?”

  He stopped short, then added, “Who discovered these three footprints? To whom should I be expressing my gratitude for such a swift solution to these heinous crimes?”

  Will turned to look at me, his eyebrows raised high in shock at what he was hearing.

  “You?” Bek said, misinterpreting the look and gazing at me in disbelief. “You are responsible for this outrage? An ordained priest, accusing me of this atrocity? How dare you?” His voice remained level, but there was no mistaking the fury it contained. He turned to his acolyte, who had been standing in the background all this time. “Call de Vrecy and his guard. Now! Bring them here immediately.”

  The Bishop’s glare returned to me, and when he spoke again his voice dripped disgust and loathing. “You will leave this camp at once and under guard. You”—he pointed a quivering finger at Will—“you will stay here. You and I have much to talk about concerning the responsibilities of leadership and governing men.”