“Twenty miles south and southwest of your main camp. That’s Bruce country.”
“Aye. It is.” He glanced at me and nodded. “They would ne’er ha’e dared try such a thing when old Bruce the Competitor was alive, God rest his soul. The old man would ha’e gone to war over it. But now his son, the Lord o’Annandale, sits in England’s Carlisle Castle as its custodian, and his grandson, the Earl of Carrick, is in London, playing the popinjay at Edward’s court. So you’ll hear no complaints from the Bruces.”
“And why have these survivors come to you?”
“Because they have no other place to go, why else?”
“Do you know them? And if the answer to that is yes, then how do you know them, that they should come to you?”
“I don’t know them. They are just folk who had heard of us, that we were in the greenwood, and who came to us when they lost everything. I knew none of them before they came, and none of them knew me.”
“But if that’s so, if they had no connection to you, why were they harmed?”
“Come on now, Jamie, don’t vex me. We’re dealing with Englishmen here! Think you they need a reason to be as they are? To behave the way they do? Have you forgotten Ellerslie and what they did to us and our kin?”
“No, Will, I have not. But this is different—”
“How is it different? How can you sit there, knowing nothing about what is going on, and say it is different? Different to what? I’ll send you three wee boys who watched their parents being butchered like stirks. Three wee boys younger than we were, with ravaged arses sorer than ours were! Tell them how different this is, then watch how they walk, hobbling in pain and shame, and how they look around them at the men they meet, waiting to be jumped upon again. Different? The only difference I see is in the time. When they did it to us, we were children, weak and helpless. Now, by the living Christ, I am a man grown, and I will meet these English whoresons with a man’s strength and judgment.”
My mind had filled with the image of two other small boys, running in endless terror for days on end, and I held up my hand to stem his words.
Now he checked himself. “What?”
“I hear what you are saying. And I understand. I disagree, but that is neither here nor there. But tell me about the logic behind these attacks. How can you be sure they have anything to do with the robbery in April?” I watched the frown that came over his face. “From what you have said, or from what I think I’ve heard you say, none of these … reprisals has taken place anywhere near the scene of the April robbery. Is that correct?” I could see in his eyes that it was, and so I continued. “But you are convinced beyond doubt that whatever is going on has to do with what you did that day.” Once again, reading his face, I could see that I was right. “Yet where is the connection? Why would you not simply believe these are random raids, like the one that cost us our home in Ellerslie? Why are you so sure they are linked to the April theft?”
He frowned again, briefly, then sat up straighter and looked me in the eye. “Because they have to be. No other explanation makes sense. Besides, it fits the nature of the beast. Edward Plantagenet is not a passive enemy. We created havoc with that raid—absolute havoc that no one, he least of all, had dreamed of. We destroyed all of his carefully structured plans, smashed them to splinters just when he must have thought he had been supremely clever. Can you imagine how he must have raged when he heard of it? But the most infuriating goad of all must have been that he could not breathe a word about any of it. How could he complain about the theft of illegal funds, funds that should never have been brought into Scotland in the first place and should never have been smuggled across the border under the protection of Holy Church under any circumstances? He would have been condemned by everyone, publicly disgraced. Mind you, I am not saying that, in itself, would have deterred him. I’ve no doubt he would have been prepared to defy the whole world had his stratagem been successful. But once his funds were lost, he had no hope of winning anything but scorn, condemnation, and harsh judgment … perhaps even excommunication.”
As I listened to his words, the scope of what William Wallace had personally done to England’s King sank home to me as it had never done before. Until that moment, I had seen the events of that now distant day in April solely from a clerical perspective, assessing the damage done to the fabric of Holy Church by the actions of the renegade Archbishop of York. Other than the physical bulk of the royal specie we confiscated—and I had not seen so much as the image of his regal head on a single captured coin—there had been no visible trace of Edward of England present that day, and I had somehow lost sight of his overwhelming influence in the entire affair. It had never crossed my mind until that moment, listening to Will, that Edward Plantagenet, the implacable and remorseless conqueror of Ewan’s people in Wales, might come looking, in person, for vengeance against my cousin for having dared to defy him. It appalled me now to see how blind and wilfully stupid I had been, living in a fool’s paradise.