The Forest Laird(192)

3

I was an invalid for more than a month and a half, although I was improving visibly after three weeks, despite a drastic loss of weight and muscle tone caused by a liquid diet and a complete lack of exercise. By the end of the fifth week, the bindings around my rib cage were less tight and I no longer had to be restrained while I slept, so I could breathe more deeply, though it still pained me to do so, and the thought of laughing or coughing chilled me. I was permitted to leave my bed in the seventh week, but it took me four full days to build up the strength to walk for fifty paces. After that, though, I grew stronger daily, and Brother Benedict soon removed the iron wiring from my jaw. Two days after that I could eat normally again.

A week later I was back in Glasgow, having made the journey by wagon and accompanied by Father Jacobus. Bishop Wishart made us both welcome and we found the entire cathedral community agog with the news of armed rebellion in the north and in the south.

Only then, after an interval of almost three full months, did I learn what had been taking place during my time recovering.

Wishart had heard the news of Miriam Braidfoot’s arrest from her parish priest, who was outraged by the arrest and confinement of one of his most devout and influential parishioners. When he then heard of her subsequent death in custody, he launched an official diocesan inquiry, in the course of which the investigators learned that Mistress Braidfoot’s daughter Mirren, or Marian, had somehow contrived to have herself killed by what was officially described as misadventure in precisely the same prison and on the same day as her mother. Sir Lionel Redvers, who had been responsible for the arrests of the women, was arraigned by the cathedral chapter, but he laughed at the summons and refused to attend the hearing. A week later he was ambushed and murdered one evening outside Lanark. He was accompanied by a round dozen mounted troopers, all of whom died with him, their weapons unbloodied and their bodies riddled with hard-shot arrows. Redvers himself had been dragged from his horse and decapitated. His body bore no other wounds. His head was never found.

The arrows, of course, indicated clearly that the outlaws of Selkirk Forest were responsible, and William Hazelrig assembled all his forces for a pre-emptive strike into the greenwood, calling for them to assemble on a given morning near the village of Lamington, and apparently seeing no irony in that choice of rallying points. Among the forces that assembled were a half-score of veteran archers whom none of the others knew. The newcomers were freshly arrived from Wales, they said, dispatched north as part of a new intake of Welsh bowmen recruited for the wars in Scotland.

The sheriff’s expedition reached the forest outskirts and searched the woods diligently for three days, finding nothing and no one, but during that last night, in the middle watch, the darkest part of the night, the outlying sentries died in silence, while the newly arrived archers set aside their bows and used daggers and stealth to surprise and kill the guards on duty inside the camp. The man guarding the entrance to the sheriff’s tent likely neither saw nor heard the arrow that killed him and threw him backward into the tent, and before Sheriff Hazelrig knew what was happening, he was clubbed senseless and abducted. Once free of the sleeping encampment, the archers were joined by the others who had approached in the darkness and who had spent the previous hour disposing of the outlying guards and preparing pitch-dipped fire arrows. When the word was given, a hailstorm of flaming missiles swept the English camp, setting fire to tents and sleeping men, and the ensuing slaughter was merciless. Very few of the English sheriff’s punitive expedition escaped alive.

William Hazelrig, King Edward’s sheriff of Lanark, was found dead the following day. His hands had been severed and his throat cut, and a parchment scroll was fastened to his chest with a deepdriven dagger. The scroll said simply: