Sometime around mid-morning, we heard the sounds of hooves and marching men approaching from behind us, and we turned to watch the Bishop and his mounted escort arriving from the south.
There were about thirty men in the party, all of them well mounted and armed from head to foot, except for the group surrounding Bishop Bek, all of whom were clerics and rode the smaller, gentler horses known as palfreys.
I had never seen the Warrior Bishop, but I recognized him immediately as the only sword-carrying cleric in the central group. He sat very straight on his tall horse and carried his head high, his expression solemn and disdainful, his grip on the reins firm and confident. I saw him glance sidelong at us as he rode by. He ignored me in my plain robe after a single look, but he took all the time he needed to examine Will from head to foot, and I imagined him wondering who this tall, imposing, finely dressed, and clean-shaven fellow was and why he was waiting at the entrance to his camp. Then he turned back to resume his conversation with the man beside him and rode through the gates. Behind him, his men-at-arms rode in silence, one of them carrying a banner with the Bishop’s escutcheon, three linked gold rings on an azure field, and none of them paid us the slightest attention.
At their rear, far less splendidly accoutred and travelling far more slowly, plodded a small detachment of weary-looking infantry, leading a ragtag, thoroughly cowed group of prisoners. Every man among the prisoners wore an iron collar, and they shuffled awkwardly along in single file and very close together, their arms tied behind their backs and their collars joined by a length of rope that was too short for the purpose it had to serve and so kept them off balance. Looking more closely at the armed squad as they approached, I decided that they were not, in fact, part of the Bishop’s entourage but had simply been overtaken by the riders. Will looked from them to me with one eyebrow raised, and I was sure he was thinking the same thing I was. The prisoners, fourteen of them and all men, were Scots; they had that dour, inward-looking air about them. I wondered idly what they had done to warrant arrest, acknowledging wryly to myself that it would not have been too difficult to achieve.
They were halted by a stentorian curse from the sergeant of the guard. He was having no Scotch filth entering the camp under his watch, he swore, not until someone with authority came out and ordered him to let these animals inside. He ranted and raved, standing nose to nose with the corporal in charge of the prisoners, who argued back just as defiantly. All the corporal wanted to do was get rid of the ugly Scotch goblins—they’d been hanging around his neck for days, he said, weighing him down. He wanted to shed them like a wet coat and go about his own affairs and he didn’t care what the gate sergeant thought. Eventually they reached an agreement, and the prisoners were herded into a circle around the trunk of the single large beech tree in the area, about twenty paces from where we sat, and their neck rope was retied securely to keep them there. And there they were to remain until someone inside the camp should decide what was to be done with them.
5
The gate sergeant had watched Will and me closely as the Bishop and his party approached, prepared to launch his guards at us should we attempt to interfere with the Bishop’s progress. Now that they were safely inside the camp, though, he was more than content to pretend we were invisible.
We waited in silence for another half-hour before Will went up to the fellow and reminded him that we were waiting to speak with Bishop Bek, this time citing his uncle, Sir Malcolm Wallace, as the source of the request. I told myself this was not quite a lie, for I knew that had the knight been alive, he would most assuredly have used his name and influence to solve the matter of this heinous crime.
The sergeant was manifestly unhappy at the inconvenience of having to listen, but the knight’s name and title were imposing enough that he sent one of his four scowling guards into the camp to carry Will’s message to the Bishop. And once again we settled down to wait.
The messenger arrived back in no time, accompanied by a sergeant. There was no mistaking this sergeant’s affiliation; he wore the livery depicted on Bek’s banner, a bright blue surcoat with the three linked gold rings of the Bishop’s crest emblazoned on the left breast, and he was flanked by two less brilliantly bedecked men-atarms wearing simple quartered patches of blue and yellow squares on their plain leather jerkins. He marched directly to where we sat and stood looking down at us, like the guardsman sergeant making no attempt to disguise the sneer on his face.
“Right,” he said after looking Will up and down and then shaking his head as if in wonder at the stupidity of the people he had to deal with. “Let’s move it, then. Come on! On your feet. I haven’t got time to be wasting, chasing after your idle Scotch arse, no matter what the Bishop thinks.”