And so our shared days as students ended. Will admitted to assaulting Brother James, but he was merciless in asserting the details of how and why he had done so, offering the broken weapon in evidence and bidding the monks bare my back to show the mark James had inflicted upon me. He went out of his way, too, to describe the antipathy James had held for us since our arrival at the Abbey and offered detailed accounts of several encounters we had had with the man, to our cost each time.
Being a student and one of the transgressors by association, I was forbidden to witness Will’s arraignment, confined under the guard of two senior brethren outside the tribunal chamber until I was hauled in briefly to show my injuries. But Brother Duncan was there in his capacity of armarius, and it was he who described the proceedings to me later. The judging panel, headed by Father Abbot himself, believed Will’s tale unanimously, and Brother James was confined to his cell on bread and water for three months, an unheard-of punishment. On the matter of Will’s infraction, however, there was no recourse. He had struck down one of the community in blatant contravention of the law, unwritten though it was, and had created a precedent. Moreover, he had openly admitted during the hearing that, similarly provoked, he would do the same again, though more thoroughly and effectively next time.
But then, in acknowledgment of the troubled faces of the men who must unwillingly condemn him, William Wallace did something that confounded me when I heard about it, something so noble and so honourable in one so young that it strengthened me years afterwards when I began to hear, and to disbelieve, tales of the alleged atrocities being tallied against his name and fame: he took pity on his judges and absolved them of any guilt they might be feeling, assuring them all that he had long since decided that his time of usefulness to the Abbey community had reached an end. His dearest wish now was to become a forester on his uncle Malcolm’s estates, he told them, because that was what he truly believed God had intended for him and he was impatient to begin. He thanked them for the opportunities they had given him to learn to read and write and converse in Latin and French, as well as for the training they had offered him, perhaps unwittingly, in the paths that he would follow thenceforth, by according him the freedom of the Abbey’s lands in which to hunt and learn the lore of his future craft. And then he requested their permission to quit his formal studies immediately and to return to Elderslie.
The tribunal heard him out in silence—gratefully, I like to think—and then they permitted him to withdraw from his studies and return home with no disgrace attached to his name.
Listening to Brother Duncan’s recital of the events, I was moved to tears by the way he summed the matter up: “Your cousin Will is a fine young man,” he said, with no trace of harshness on his normally forbidding face. “And I believe God has moulded him to be what he is with some great purpose in His mind. We may never know that purpose, but I have no fears that William Wallace will ever let anything stand in his way to achieving it.”
5
Ewan accompanied Will back to Elderslie, his own tasks in Paisley completed. He left the farm, which had flourished under his stewardship for years now, functioning smoothly under the guidance of a tenant called Murdoch, who had done the actual farming and supervised the labourers over those years, quickly earning the ungrudging trust of both Ewan and Sir Malcolm. The abrupt departure of my two friends, however, meant that everything familiar in my life had changed; they had taken the entire contents of the workshop with them, leaving only an empty stone shell. They had left me my bow and a supply of arrows, and even a brace of targets, but I knew, even as I collected those to take them with me back to the Abbey, that I would probably never use them again. The Abbey cloisters would be my permanent home from then on, and although I had enjoyed my archery greatly, I knew that without Will and Ewan to keep me interested and active, I would soon abandon it. Librarians and priests have no need of weapons, even for recreation.
Somewhat to my surprise, I adapted effortlessly to life as a fulltime member of the close-knit Abbey community. My work in the library continued to absorb me, as it had since the beginning, and the time I now had to myself in the evening hours was soon taken up by my studies for the priesthood. It came as a welcome discovery, too, that Brother Duncan and Father Peter intended to continue using me as their go-between with Sir Malcolm, for it meant that for at least one day out of every fourteen I was dispatched to Elderslie to deliver information to my uncle and to bring back his reports to them. Thus I was able to keep myself informed of Will’s activities, even if I did not see him on every visit.