He looked at me almost absently. “The mother, Meg Waddie, Mirren’s aunt. And her eldest daughter, Christine. I think the old woman might have died of fright. But the daughter was clubbed to death. When I find the man who did it, he will regret that his bitch mother ever whelped him. I will feed him his own balls, I swear, fresh cut from their sac. And I will find him, Jamie. Believe you me.”
I did. I believed him implicitly, appalled and fascinated by the look in his eyes.
“But work like this is no fit matter for priests, Jamie. You would please me more were you to look to the women, see to their comfort.” He jerked his head, flinging his soaked forelock away from his eyes. “I heard someone say they were taken to the nuns. Mirren is with them, wherever they are, and I left Ewan with her. He can help her with whatever needs to be done, and it will be good for everyone to have a priest to hand. I came out here to try to find out who did this, but there’s nothing here.”
“Oh yes, there is.” Now that my mind was functioning again, I was looking about me and seeing what was really there to be seen. “See those marks there?” I pointed to a series of three footprints that had clearly been made by three different feet, slightly to my left and leading to a rain-swollen streamlet. It was plain that the three men had each jumped across the water, planted a foot on the far bank, and used it to push off in a scramble to the top of the gently rising slope.
I crouched beside the footprints and touched the rows of small, deeply indented holes with my fingertips. “Look,” I said. “Hobnails. Who wears hobnailed boots?”
“Men at arms.” Will’s voice was strangely quiet. “Regulars. Supplied by a quartermaster.”
“And what does that tell us?”
“The whoresons were English. Almost certainly. As far as I know, none of the Scots magnates has the kind of wealth that pays for hobnails for their men … Which means that when we find which English baron has troops in the vicinity, we’ll know where to look for the culprits in this day’s madness.”
Duncan spoke for the first time. “Might not be a baron. I’ve heard of no baronial forces near here, not recently.”
Will growled in his throat. “Baron, earl, or plain damned knight, I care not. If there’s an English force within walking distance of Paisley, I want to talk to its commander, though it be Edward Plantagenet himself.” He looked at me. “How can we best find out?”
I glanced at Duncan. “At the Abbey, wouldn’t you say?”
3
Within half an hour of returning to the Abbey, we knew that an armed force of some two hundred men belonging to Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, had bypassed Paisley two days earlier and made camp less than six miles farther on, towards Glasgow, to await the arrival of Bek himself from Norham, where he had been in attendance upon King Edward. Bek had served as King Edward’s lieutenant in Scotland for two years, since the commencement of the prenuptial arrangements between the Maid and Edward of Caernarvon. Renowned for his fierce piety, his single-minded dedication to his master’s affairs, and his intolerance of anything that threatened either of those, he nevertheless had a reputation for even-handedness, and no one had yet accused him of anything dishonourable in his treatment of the Scots.
Will was sitting across the table from me, and I found him staring at me and nibbling at the inside of his cheek in what I knew to be an indication of deep thought. I knew, too, that he was not watching me but staring through me, his eyes and his thoughts focused on matters far beyond the room in which we sat.
“What think you, Will?” I asked. “What should we do?”
I watched his eyes readjust to where he was, and as they shifted and grew more intense, his face darkened into the scowl I had become too familiar with in the past hour, so that I thought: This isn’t my cousin Will. This is Wallace, the wild one.
He scratched at the stubble on his chin as he answered me. “What we should do and what we will do are two different things, Jamie. We will go and talk to Bishop Bek, but what we should do is follow those tracks to wherever they lead us and then spill the blood of every shifty-eyed whoreson we find at the end of the trail.” His voice emerged flat and emotionless, but I had known this man all my life and I knew the effort he was expending to keep his quivering fury concealed.
“What if Bek won’t talk to us?”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why would he not? I’ll go to him as my uncle’s messenger. He’ll listen to Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie, if not to plain Will Wallace.”
I didn’t doubt what he said, though I saw no benefit in pointing out to him that Bek might well know that Sir Malcolm was dead. “When will you go?”