3
I was sitting back in comfort in Will and Mirren’s hut, marvelling at the astonishing relationship that existed between the two men I admired most in the world. It had always been thus, ever since the three of us had met as boys in Paisley.
That evening, though, listening to the easy banter the two of them traded, I was unusually aware of Mirren, knowing without ever looking at her that she was watching me closely, with that secretive, inscrutable half smile that I imagined on her lips every time I thought of her when she was not around. Now, as Will and Andrew waxed enthusiastic about something, some element of training or of fighting that was less than interesting to me, she rose quietly and made her way to the small stone sink Will had installed next to a built-in cooking stove close to the window. Moved by some prompting that I did not even pause to think about, I followed her, and she cocked her head to look at me as I approached.
“What?” she asked. “You look as though you have a question to ask me.”
She was correct, but suddenly I felt awkward, almost abashed by her perceptiveness, and instead of saying what I had intended to say, I shrugged. “You like him, don’t you?” I asked, adding, needlessly, “Andrew.”
She smiled and began to stack the platters from which we had eaten earlier. “Of course I like him. Why should I not?”
I shrugged again. “You didn’t like me when first we met. What is so different about him?”
She looked at me and laughed quietly, and my breast filled up with the familiar, comfortable warmth of the respect and esteem that I had always had for her. “Jamie Wallace,” she said teasingly, and I heard the fondness in her voice. “If I didna ken ye were a priest, I’d think ye were jealous o’ the man. But why should I no’ like him? My goodman loves him like a brother … and you do, too, forbye. With two such as you on his side, how could I be foolish enough to dislike him?” She tilted her head to one side, looking at me with sudden seriousness through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong, Jamie? Ye have a strange look about you.”
I shook my head again, but she was not about to be dismissed that easily. She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice. “Tell me.”
I squirmed, and she reached out and plucked at my bearded chin, jerking it up so that I had to meet her eye. “Tell me,” she said again.
“I think he’s here to take Will to war,” I said.
“No. He’s here to try to tak’ Will to war. I have nae doubt o’ that, but he’ll ha’e nae joy there. Will winna go. He tell’t me that again last night, just afore you two arrived. He’ll play the general, he says, but he’ll no’ fight himsel’. He swore.”
I found myself unable to look her in the eye, for Andrew Murray had been right: Will had said he would follow a worthwhile leader if Scotland could produce one. I turned and moved away to join the other two again, leaving her to her household tasks.
From then on I sat and listened closely as Will Wallace and Andrew Murray drew up their dreams and schemes for Scotland’s future. Will’s championship of nameless, faceless folk did not surprise me at all, for he had lived his life among them and was deeply solicitous of their welfare. That he came of a knightly family was true, but he himself had had no training in the ways of chivalry and he had never considered any possibility of being raised to knighthood someday. I found it amazing, though, that Andrew Murray should be voicing such ideas, let alone championing them so enthusiastically, for his makeup contained nothing that anyone could describe as common stock. Nevertheless, he appeared to accept, willingly, that aligning himself at the head of his fellow Scots, in defence of their common interests, must entail the forfeiture of his vast English holdings and the revenues that flowed from them, and he dismissed the loss as insignificant.
He stayed with us for three days, and I spent every moment I could find listening to their conversations. I was fascinated by the way their minds worked in concert. Every idea advanced by one or the other of them—and they appeared to feed off each other voraciously—generated a cascade of others, the way a smith’s hammer scatters sparks from a glowing iron bar. I listened admiringly as they discussed strategy and tactics in grand, sweeping terms, comparing possibilities of attack and manoeuvre in order to wring every advantage possible from the land itself in fighting and beating the English forces whose own disciplined formations might be—and would be, had these two anything to do with it—hampered and disadvantaged on mountainous or boggy Scots terrain.
I listened open mouthed as my cousin expounded on current political and philosophical theories that I had not even known he knew about and with which I would never have guessed he might be familiar; yet there he was, stating strongly held and obviously long considered opinions on free will and the morality of restitution and atonement, citing Edward of England’s lack of contrition for his deliberate intent to usurp the throne of Scotland after undermining and destroying its rightful occupant. I sat awestruck as he demonstrated, using flawless logic, that the King of England’s behaviour was unconscionable and indefensible and that he was therefore morally unfit to function as a truly Christian king. I knew whence those ideas had come, for I had often heard them voiced by William Lamberton, who had absorbed them in his turn from John Duns during his visits with the scholar in Paris, but I had never suspected that Lamberton and Will had been spending the amount of time together that Will’s grasp of his subject indicated.