He had, as he had wished, become one of my uncle’s foresters, and the faithful Ewan Scrymgeour had chosen to join him. Both of them were carefree now, busily involved in a brief but intense apprenticeship under old Erik Strongarm, my uncle’s senior forester. By the year’s end they would be responsible for the care and maintenance of the surrounding woodlands. They would cull dead and dying trees, keep the forest free from the buildup of flammable undergrowth, and from time to time they would inspect the activities of the charcoal burners, whose vast smouldering turfcovered pits produced the charred, hard-burning fuel essential to the estate’s smithies. They would also be charged with the welfare of the wildlife on Sir Malcolm’s lands—the deer, wild swine, and other game, including fowl, that thrived in the woods and in the open glades and pastures among the trees—and with the safety of the cattle and domestic swine in the various pastures and paddocks close by the main farm, protecting all of them from theft and depredation.
Ewan had worn the green garments of a forest dweller when first I met him years before, and now he wore them again. But so, I discovered, did Will. The first time I saw him thus, garbed from head to foot in close-fitting, hooded green tunic and trews, I gaped, for he was bigger than ever. His arms and shoulders were enormous, larger, I thought, than those of any other man I had ever seen, and his thighs and legs were as solid and substantial as healthily growing oaks. At seventeen, he was now a man in all respects, save one that I knew nothing of, and I had never seen him happier.
He had grown quickly to accommodate the demands of his newly fashioned bow, itself a thing of beauty that glowed richly with love and care, coats of laboriously applied wax and tallow enhancing the different colours of its wood. It was tapered to perfection for his height and capped on both thumb-thick ends with ram horn tips, the horn boiled to the melting point and then moulded and slotted to anchor the loops of his bowstring. One glance at the thickness of its massive grip was all it took for me to know I could never begin to pull it. He carried it unstrung most of the time, in a protective case of bull’s hide, thickly waxed and waterproof, that hung from his shoulder opposite the bag of yard-long arrows, but he could free it, bend it and string it with hemp, nock an arrow, and be ready to shoot in mere moments when he needed it. It was the pride of his life, I could see. He told me he kept it unstrung and cased in the English fashion, to avoid any danger of the bow’s shaft shaping itself permanently to the arc of the string’s pull and thereby losing some of its power. All in all, my cousin had turned into an imposing man, and the dark growth now fuzzing his cheeks and chin would complete the transformation very soon.
I was not quite correct in that respect, though. Will’s transformation to manhood was effected by another element altogether, one which had little or nothing to do with the density of his beard. But my error was understandable: I was a cloistered boy, barely sixteen, and studying for the priesthood. I had no idea of the natural forces that can transform the merest boy into a man.
Her name was Mirren Braidfoot, and on a brilliant summer day in 1288 she came to Elderslie in a light, horse-drawn cart, accompanied by four other young women and a group of eager young men, all of those afoot. She was there to visit a cousin, a plump, plain girl called Jessie Brunton, whom both Will and I knew by sight. I witnessed the first meeting between him and Mirren, but apart from smirking to myself over his tongue-tied awkwardness, I missed the fateful significance of it, too grateful that it was Will, not I, who had to deal face to face with such a fetching stranger. Will was abashed, I knew, and that was unusual, for he had learned much about young women since leaving the Abbey, but I myself would have been struck mute by her smiling confidence had it been I who had to speak to her.
Standing beside Will, barely reaching the middle of his swelling upper arm and looking for all the world like a slight and tiny child—though she was anything but either one—the girl Mirren stood gazing up at him, watching his face with a deeply thoughtful look on her own. As I approached, the young woman stepped away from him to make room for me. I was aware of her bright blue eyes scanning me from head to foot, her lips smiling gently. But being me, I ignored her look and turned instead to Will, blissfully unaware that in the short time I had been watching elsewhere, William Wallace’s life, and all of Scotland’s destiny, had been changed forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
1
“Where first we find love, there also we encounter grief.”
I cannot remember who said that, but it springs into my mind unbidden whenever I think of Mirren Braidfoot and my cousin Will, and it never fails to grip me like a fist clenching around my heart. I am a priest, and although that in itself is no guarantee of chastity or lack of prurience, I have never known the love of a woman, either physical or emotional. I have known temptation, certainly, for that is the common burden of mankind, but I have always managed, somehow, through no strength of my own and most often by the power of fervent and sustained prayer, to avoid yielding to it.