The Forest Laird (48 page)

When he saw we were bereft of words, he chuckled. “Are you not glad you asked me that? Can you imagine what it must be like to own such wealth? No, of course you can’t. I can’t, and I’m a cathedral canon.” He sat up quickly and placed his hand over his lips, peering around as if looking for eavesdroppers. “Did I say that? Well, I’ll deny it if I’m accused of it. But quite seriously, you must be aware that such wealth brings with it great political influence. Sir Andrew served for years as the justiciar of the north and he is married to one of the Comyns of Buchan. The House of Comyn is the most powerful family in Scottish society, as I know you are well aware. But it is one thing to be
connected
to the Comyns. It is quite another to be connected as de Moray is. Sir Andrew’s second wife, young Andrew’s stepmother, is Euphemia Comyn, the niece of King John Balliol himself. She is also the sister of John Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, one of the most politically influential men in Scotland. So there you have our mutual friend’s connections: Balliol, Buchan, Comyn, and de Moray. And, of course, the Church. The young man does not lack for influence.”

“What mean you, the Church? What influence has he there?”

“The name de Moray is well known within the Church in Scotland, and has been for years. There was an Andrew Moray who was Bishop of Moray early in this century. He was the man responsible for the transfer of the seat of the bishopric to Elgin about sixty years ago, if my memory is accurate. He built the town’s cathedral. A man well thought of by his peers in his own time, and his memory is revered today.”

“I dare say it is,” Will said, slightly awestruck, as was I. “Pity that the family has no friends or relatives here in the south. That way, we might have known more about them.”

Lamberton raised an eyebrow. “Did I give you that impression? Then I must ask you to forgive me, or to pour me some more of this excellent ale.” I replenished his mug, raising a lively head on it that he blew off before sipping reflectively and nodding his approval. “Let’s see,” he mused. “The south. Are you familiar with a place called Bothwell?”

“Aye, in Strathclyde,” I said. “I’ve been there. It’s but a hamlet.”

“No, it is the seat in Scotland of Sir Andrew de Moray’s brother, Sir William Moray. Sir William is almost as wealthy as his younger brother Andrew—in fact he’s known as
le riche
because he’s so rich. He has another younger brother, too, who is also in holy orders. Father David de Moray is rector of Bothwell church. He is also a canon of Moray.

“William
le riche
is currently pouring his fortune into the construction of a castle there, to be known as Bothwell Castle, overlooking the River Clyde, and in the manner of the truly rich, he has spent huge sums importing the latest knowledge of scientific fortress construction from all over Christendom. He is reportedly determined that his castle will set a new standard for all of Britain and the world.”

“He sounds like a braggart fool,” Will muttered. “You said this Bothwell place is his seat in Scotland. Does that mean he has seats elsewhere?”

“Heavens, yes. He owns extensive lands at Lilleford in England, near Lincoln.”

“Ah, I should have known. Another Scots magnate dependent upon Edward’s largesse. The bane of this poor land.”

“No, I think not, in this instance … at least, I am not sure. But I seem to remember Andrew telling me that the Lilleford lands have been in William
le riche
’s ownership for generations. And of course the lands will one day belong to him.”

“
Andrew?
They will be
his
?”

“Yes. Sir William has no heirs. So young Andrew will inherit all his uncle’s wealth, along with his father’s.”

“Good God! Pardon me, Fathers both. But is there anyone Andrew is
not
connected to?”

“Aye, certainly. He has no connection to the House of Bruce. He is, however, connected to the Douglases of Clydesdale. Sir William Douglas is a distant cousin of his, I believe.”

Will merely looked at me and shook his head at that, then said no more, and Lamberton moved on to talk about what I was beginning to believe was his favourite topic: the burgesses of Scotland and how they were beginning to make themselves recognized as owning a voice to be listened to. Although I had heard all this explained before, the essence of it continued to elude me. I can only suppose that my slowness to appreciate its import was tied in to the generally limited scope of my vision at that time, living as I was in the greenwood and ministering daily to the needs of a small and very local congregation.

Will, however, took to the new ideas Lamberton was presenting to him much as dry grass will take to an igniting spark. And marvelling at the briefness of the time it took Will to progress from polite interest to raging ardour, I saw, suddenly, why both my companions were so excited about this new idea, and I finally understood why it was so important, and inevitable, that Bishop Wishart, through this younger, vibrant intermediary, should bring this message directly to William Wallace.

In the eyes of Robert Wishart, William Wallace was a bellwether, whether he knew it or not. He was a flock leader, and his peers would follow him naturally, without being exhorted by him or anyone else. Will had always stood alone and had never been afraid to be different from those around him. And in the entrenched scorn he held for the Scots magnates, William Wallace had been saying for years that the system under which we lived was broken.

As I thought those precise words, I felt myself shiver with a rush of gooseflesh, remembering that it was William Lamberton, not William Wallace, whom I had heard use that expression the night before, and that the two men had not yet met when Lamberton said it. Now they were together, talking about that mutually recognized notion, and I knew that God Himself had brought them together for a purpose. Will, in his own quiet, unassuming way, had been living in political despair and disillusionment, bereft of any hope of repairing whatever it was that had broken down in the system that controlled the affairs of men. The nobility had been rendered impotent by time and change, incapable any longer of stimulating or inspiring the realm and its people, and the Church appeared to have been equally impaired. But now, miraculously, here was the Church itself, championing the emergence of a new social order, a new estate that was strong and virile and puissant, the voices and wealth of the burgesses of the combined burghs of the entire realm. Small wonder that Will Wallace embraced the notion like a breath of springtime air; and small wonder that he and his new companion completely forgot about my presence.

From that evening until the two churchmen left to return to Glasgow three days later, they talked incessantly of politics and probabilities, and for the most part, I was content to leave them to it, happy to see my cousin walking again with that spring in his gait that I remembered from our boyhood.

5

T
he year that followed, the first year of little William’s life, was the happiest I ever knew, for as Will and Mirren settled into their new life, so, too, did I in mine, and the child became almost as much a part of my life as he was of theirs. I quickly came to love him and to dote on him as though he were my own son, and as his mother learned to trust me with him, I came to know the delights of the milky, sweet smell of his skin just after feeding, and learned to clean and tend him at both ends, changing his swaddling and generally luxuriating in the miracle that he was.

Surprisingly, too, the transition from bandit leader to simple forest dweller was far easier for Will than we had all anticipated. From the moment of the boy’s birth, Will let it be known among his people that he no longer sought to lead men, or to fight. He made no secret of the fact that he considered nothing more important than his family, and that all he wished to do was live with them, undisturbed, and provide for them in the best way he could. And unsurprisingly, his people accepted his wishes.

Looking back, I can see that the change was greatly helped by the fact that, for a period of months, from mid-July until October of that year, there was almost no outlawed activity within the greenwood. Troop movements continued, of course, mostly from south to north as English soldiery continued to advance into the realm, but the numbers of men on the move were invariably too large, and their composition too powerful, to draw any kind of interference from the forest outlaws. Furthermore, any pickings that might have been gleaned from robbing passing baggage trains were rendered unattractive, not so much by the difficulty of winning them as by the certainty of grief thereafter as large numbers of English were loosed into the woods to punish anyone they could find and recover the stolen property by any means available.

Will moved quickly to change his role as it was perceived by the people around him. He rapidly established himself as verderer for the thriving community that had grown up around his original encampment in the forest, and he did it simply by convening a gathering of all the local folk and talking to them seriously about the need for conservation and the careful husbandry of the wild forest animals, to avoid depleting the health and numbers of the deer herds. He undertook to become the warden of the forest marches for the outlawed folk, exactly as he had been for his uncle Malcolm in Elderslie, gathering tallies of the local herds and their territories, marking their patterns and their breeding numbers, and culling them for food without being wasteful. He then selected six men, each of whom had had some degree of training as either verderers or foresters, to work with him in organizing new coppices and cultivating arable plots in suitably isolated areas of the forest.

That done, he casually appointed three of his former lieutenants as joint commanders of the local forces and publicly relinquished his duties to them. Long John of the Knives, Robertson the archer, and Big Andrew Miller, the wiry little fighter with the ever-present crossbow, quietly took over the responsibilities that had gradually become Will’s over the preceding few years. The transformation was well on its way to being achieved.

By October of that year, relations between Scotland and England had deteriorated almost beyond redemption. Edward Plantagenet had not relented for a moment in his quest to have the Scottish castles passed into his jurisdiction as overlord of Scotland, and King John, backed by his council of the strongest and most powerful earls and barons in his realm, had been equally intransigent in his refusal to cede a single stronghold, despite the increasingly bellicose English threats of reprisals aimed at enforcing their King’s documented rights in that matter. It mattered nothing to Edward and his barons that the “legal” statutes they brandished had been prepared by English lawyers upon the self-important instructions of England’s King; or that the rights of overlordship to which they referred so pompously were the self-assumed rights of that same English King; or that the application of such rights in Scotland, the sovereign realm of another, legally anointed monarch, was illegal. Such minor details had no relevance at all in the matter of Edward Longshanks’s drive to subsume Scotland as he had Wales mere decades earlier. That became abundantly self-evident as September came to an end amid rattling drums and the braying of recruiters’ horns in England.

But Longshanks had overplayed his hand this time. The collective awareness of his determination drove the Scots nobility to unite, at last, behind their own King at a parliament of the realm—the eighth and last of King John’s reign—held in Edinburgh that October. They were unanimous in their formal refusal to give up a single Scottish castle to the English.

Barely a week later, the delegates King John had sent to France on his behalf months earlier signed a treaty of alliance with Philip IV and the realm of France. It was a treaty of mutual support and assistance in all things military, commercial, and diplomatic, designed to bring the two realms together in mutual amity and interests. To mark the grandeur and historic significance of the treaty, the parties agreed that Prince Edward Balliol, King John’s eldest son, would marry the Princess Jeanne de Valois, whose father was Charles Capet, Count de Valois, brother to King Philip IV and titular Emperor of Constantinople. The treaty would have to go before the Scots parliament to be ratified, and until it had done so nothing could yet be certain, but no one doubted that the ratification would occur.

Edward Longshanks, of course, was incensed. And when that happened, someone—or someplace—invariably was made to suffer.

The news of his rage had barely been spread when more word arrived from the south, unconfirmed but barely questioned, since it merely added flesh to the stories that had been filtering up from England since September. Edward, according to these reports, was assembling an enormous army in northern England, at Newcastle on the River Tyne. No one doubted the tidings, for that was the historic gathering point for any army planning to march north into Scotland.

Yuletide came and went, as did the start of the New Year, 1296. That winter was a cold and brutal one for soldiers under tents, for it was windy and sleety and sustainedly miserable, never quite cold enough for snow or freezing temperatures but never warming up sufficiently to dry out sodden clothing and footwear. But since the soldiers enduring the misery and freezing in their rusting armour were Englishmen preparing to invade us, no one felt any sympathy for their plight, and those who thought of it at all might reasonably have wished for the weather to deteriorate even further.

In the meantime, little William was the delight of his parents and admirers, including his priestly godfather. His long, black tresses had vanished soon after his birth to be replaced by a thicker, more substantial growth, tinged this time with a fiery chestnut red that emphasized his deep blue eyes and drew involuntary gasps of delight from every woman encountering him for the first time. Added to that, his ready grin, infectious in its appeal and challenging in its bright-eyed directness, attracted everyone who encountered it, men and women both, cajoling them to come and play with him and pay no attention to the tiresome details of what was transpiring in the unseen world beyond the iron-hinged doors of solid oaken planks that kept him and his family safe.