He swung away, pulling his visor closed with a sweep of his hand, then set spurs to his horse and charged off, followed by his two companions. I turned back to Ewan and found him watching me, a strange expression on his face.
“Uncle to the Bishop, you said?”
“Aye. It seemed a fitting description at the time, and it worked. No English knight, no matter how much he detests the Scots, is going to risk giving serious offence to a senior churchman—particularly by interfering with his family.”
“You took a risk.”
I grinned at him, feeling much better now. “Not as big as the risk I took in showing him that letter of safe conduct from the Bishop,” and I explained how I’d banked on the man being illiterate and too vain to admit it.
No one spoke, and Ewan stared at me steadily. “I pray you, in future, don’t be so quick to gamble with my life.” He shrugged very gently. “I have no great fear of losing it, but I take much comfort from the belief, foolish though you might make it appear, that the disposition of it rests in my own hands.”
“And yet it worked, and we have been rewarded handsomely. We can now follow the English all the way to Lanark without being bothered further.”
“And we would, were we not due to turn left at the crossroads. Lamington is a mile in that direction.”
“Ah! I did not know that. I knew it was near Lanark, but I have never been there. So it’s over that way?”
“Aye, it is. Listen, did you not say there were supposed to be a half score of archers with those three? Did you see any signs of them?”
I grinned at him. “No more than I did of Robertson or his men. Archers are hard to see, Ewan. Had you forgotten?”
He threw me a look of pure disgust, then paused, his head cocked. “Well, whoever these people are, they’re coming now.”
We were less than thirty paces from the point where the two roads crossed, and it was plain from what Redvers had said that the column they were waiting for would cross directly in front of us. We moved forward slowly until we were right beside where the column would pass, and as we moved, the noise of the group approaching from our left grew steadily louder until the front ranks came into view. They were all footmen, uniformly dressed in chain-mail shirts, plain steel helmets, and leather jerkins with a small patch over the left breast, showing a red swan on a white field, and they were walking in the semblance of a march. They came towards us four abreast on the narrow road, and we fell silent as they approached.
Throughout my life, I have been troubled from time to time by terrifying dreams that I have never shared with anyone, whether from shame or fear I cannot truly say. In all of them I am being threatened or pursued by someone or something that is determined to kill me. The details of these dreams are never clear when I finally wake up, shivering, but the overwhelming sense of doom and terror they engender remain with me long afterwards. In all of them, my pursuer is always unimpaired and merciless, but I am always hindered by an inability to run fast enough, to shout loudly enough for help, or to hide quickly enough. In the moments following the appearance of the front ranks of that English column, I somehow fell into that dream state while wide awake. It happened with stunning speed; I simply found myself witnessing a situation that seethed up like milk in an overheated pot and boiled over, beyond my control.
I was watching the approaching soldiery idly, hearing the shuffling tread of their feet and the occasional clink or rattle of a piece of weaponry, and then I saw the English knight, Redvers, approaching again, riding at a lumbering trot from the rear of the marching column. As I turned to look at him directly, I noticed that four of the marching men were carrying a litter of some kind, slipping and sliding and generally making heavy going of it at one spot where the roadway was still muddy and puddled from the morning storm. They were no more than thirty paces from me when one of them lost his footing in the thick mud and almost lost his hold on the litter pole, and it was his muffled cry of alarm, a curse, really, that caught my attention. Mine was not the only notice drawn to him, though, and that is when everything around me seemed to speed up rapidly, leaving me too befuddled to do anything other than watch what happened.
I heard Mirren’s voice shouting, “Mother!” and from the corner of my eye I saw her fling herself down from the bench of the wagon and run towards the soldiers. Little Willie bounced in his strapped shawl on her back, his normal daytime roost, while she clutched her skirts above her knees in one hand and waved frantically with the other. I was still blinking and wondering what she was doing when I heard the English knight shout, “Take that woman! Hold her!” and then he was spurring his horse directly towards her, closing the distance between them more rapidly than I could adjust to what I was seeing.