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The Forest Laird(48)



We spoke about this, Will and I, when next we met, about three weeks after his first encounter with Mirren, and I asked him, naively I suppose, why he put up with the fellow instead of sending him packing. He glanced at me sidelong, and I immediately saw how his involvement with Mirren had already changed him. The Will I had known all my life would have purged the young woodsman from his life as soon as Graham began to be a nuisance. The Will eyeing me now, though, was another person; he flushed slowly, and admitted, sheepishly, that it was Mirren’s idea to keep young Graham close by. The woodsman had her uncle’s goodwill and his full approval to spend time with her, and Mirren was clever enough to know that she could benefit thereby, simply by including Will in their excursions whenever he could arrange to visit Paisley. And when Will could not be there, to keep up the appearance of both consistency and propriety, she invariably invited another from her coterie of admirers to join her and Graham on their evening walks. It worked, of course.

By being unfailingly pleasant and congenial with Graham, yet keeping support and moral guidance close to hand at all times in the form of a third, amorously interested presence, Mirren managed to avoid awkwardness or entanglement with any of the young men, and by the time her stay in Paisley was half over she had overcome all her uncle’s suspicions and won grudging acknowledgment from him that she was more than capable of protecting herself against the blandishments of the local swains. Waddie came to accept that there was nothing he could do to overcome his niece’s refusal to encourage Sandy Graham’s attentions, since it was obvious she did nothing to discourage them, either. Much as he was attracted to the idea of bringing Graham’s wealth into his own family, and by association into his own purview, he was realistic enough to accept that he was not the girl’s father and that the best way to promote his plans must be to gain her father’s support in favour of a union   between his daughter and the young woodsman.

I discovered that by merest happenstance, for Master Waddie came to the Abbey one day in search of assistance in composing and writing an important letter, and I was the one assigned to the task by Brother Duncan, since I had performed similar clerical services in the past for several of the town’s merchants. By the time Master Waddie’s letter began to take shape and I began to discern what was involved, I could hardly stop the work in progress. Besides, I judged the content harmless, apart from the sole consideration that its effect might have a bearing on the affairs of my closest friend. And so, in the spirit of the confessional, I resigned myself to keeping its content to myself. Will would never know of its existence, and I would use my knowledge of it only if such knowledge should ever be of benefit.

The letter was, of course, to Master Waddie’s goodbrother Hugh Braidfoot, and it extolled the shining virtues of a potential husband he had found for young Mirren, namely Master Alexander Graham. The letter was duly signed and sealed and sent off to Mirren’s home in Lamington, a few miles outside Lanark town. I no longer wondered about Will’s tolerance of the woodsman Graham.

In the meantime, to Will’s appalled disbelief, the summer weeks sped by and Mirren returned home to her family, leaving him close to despair at the thought of the empty year that yawned ahead of him before she would return to Paisley. He could talk for hours on end, and often did, about the wonders and the exploding complexities of their burgeoning love. Many times I listened to his outpourings almost in disbelief, confounded by the intensity and the passion in what he was telling me and by the mysterious changes the experience had provoked in him. He had kissed her once, he confessed to me in breathless bliss; just once, and fleetingly, seizing a moment when they were alone, and he swore that the taste and textures of it lingered on his lips and in his very vitals weeks later. Floundering with what that could mean, I found myself regretting, almost painfully, that I would never experience such strange and tempestuous sensations.

But then, as time swept onwards, a degree of sanity returned to my cousin’s world, and he became engrossed again in the work that he loved. I became his ex officio liaison with Mirren then, serving as postmaster for the bulky letters he inscribed to her almost daily and ensuring that they were forwarded to Lanark in the custody of the regular procession of brothers travelling on the Church’s affairs. Mirren, on her own behalf, had arranged to have her responses returned to me by the same route, though she was far less regular in her correspondence.

Beyond our little world of church and greenwood, much was happening, and none of it, it seemed at first, had anything to do with Will and Mirren. At the Abbey we learned that the magnates of the realm had been successful in their approach to England’s King and had enlisted his aid in assuring the succession to the Scots throne of the child heir Margaret, whom people were already calling the Maid of Norway. A treaty to that effect had been signed at Salisbury in January of the new year, 1289, and a conclusive part of the same agreement was to be added the following year. Under the terms of these twin treaties, which would become known collectively as the Treaty of Birgham, Margaret’s succession was guaranteed by her betrothal to Edward of Caernarvon, the English Prince of Wales. Wondrous news for all who cared, but Will Wallace was much more concerned with his own betrothal, a secret pact about which I had learned only very recently, when his frustration with the slowness of time boiled over.