The Forest Laird(133)

The man on the mule had nudged his mount forward and now smiled at us, and I studied him closely, for William Lamberton was very well known to me by repute. He was much younger than I had expected, though, and I judged him now to be no more than two or three years older than myself, which surprised me greatly, considering what he had already accomplished. I liked his smile. It was open and easy, showing both humour and intelligence, and his eyes were bright and wide. He sat erect in the mule’s saddle and I judged him to be tall, perhaps taller than I was, with wide, straight shoulders emphasized by the robe he wore, which was the plain grey habit of a monk.

As soon as the greetings were over, His Grace asked us to take him directly to Will, and he was not happy when I told him that Will would be away until at least the following day. He muttered something about having ridden for more than two days to get here, and I could see from his face that he really wanted to shout and complain, but there was nothing he or we could do about the misfortune of his timing, and so he set his jaw, bit down hard on his disappointment, and decided to make the best of the situation. He asked me about my mission in the forest, and about the small communities that Jacobus, Declan, and I tended among us, and he even managed to sound interested in my response, but he frowned with quick impatience when he detected something in my gaze.

“You find it amusing, Father James, that I should be frustrated in my failure to find your cousin here when I have travelled so far to speak with him?”

I heard a cold acerbity in his tone that was new to me. Something inside me flared with alarm, and in one moment of frightening clarity I sensed danger and a need for great caution. And then sanity returned and I remembered that here was a man who had learned, from hard and often brutal experience, to trust few men and to share his thoughts but sparingly even with those. This was a man, I knew, who had no friends, as other people thought of friends; a man to whom most people lied, in hopes of pleasing him and winning favour; and above all a man who detested hypocrisy and could smell a liar and a flatterer from another room.

I looked him straight in the eye. “No, Your Grace, I do not. I regret your frustration deeply and I know that had Will been aware you were coming, nothing could have taken him away from here. But I was smiling, inwardly I thought, at how you managed, after such a bitter and unexpected disappointment, to feign an interest in me and my activities so quickly, and to do it convincingly. I found it admirable, and typical. If that offends you, then I regret that, too.”

Robert Wishart hesitated, glaring at me with those ferocious eyes of his, so formidable beneath his shaggy, unkempt brows, and then he made the loud, harrumphing sound that I had come to recognize over the years as the announcement of a change of mind. One corner of his mouth twitched upward, and he turned his head to look at the man Lamberton.

“He is not merely impertinent, as you can see, he verges on the impious,” he growled to the chancellor, but then he reached out and dug his fingers deeply but not cruelly into the muscles of my shoulder. “It might have made me smile, too, lad, had I but thought of it, for it’s a sad prospect, after endless days of riding, to contemplate long hours of talking about nothing more exciting than the misadventures of my three most junior priests. Walk with me now.” He tossed the reins of his horse to Alec, who caught them easily and returned a bob of his head in acknowledgment. “I will accept the listening to your report as a penance, though, for my hubris in expecting that your cousin would be waiting to welcome me when I arrived.” He began to walk, slightly stooped, his hands clasped loosely at the small of his back and his bare head bowed and tilted towards me, the better to hear what I would say. “Tell me, then, about your three new parishes …”

3

“Will it disturb you if I share your fire?”

The sound of his voice startled me because it was very close and I had been unaware of his approach. I know I jumped, because Father William reared back and brought up his hands quickly to pacify me. I laughed, slightly embarrassed, as I waved him forward.

“Of course not, Father. You startled me, but I was dreaming when I should have been paying more attention.”

He smiled then, moving to sit on an upended log close by me. His eyes sparkled with humour and sympathy in the reflected light of the flames.

“To what should you have been paying attention, sitting alone by a cheerful fire in a guarded camp at this time of night? Plainly you had other matters on your mind. Would you prefer that I leave you with them?”

“No, not at all. I shall be glad of your company.” I glanced over in the direction from which he had approached and saw nothing moving. “Is His Grace asleep, then?”