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
The 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.