Alan Crawford answered her. “There’s a score of us, milady. Twenty.” “Twenty! And have you no other place to go? Am I to have all of you in here all night?”
“No, Mirren, you’re not,” Ewan said, and everyone turned to look at him. “Will and I have four big leather tents in the back storeroom. They’ll hold six men apiece, so there’ll be room for everyone to sleep dry, and we’ll be out of your hair once we’ve learned how to put them up in the dark. Forbye, there’s plenty o’ firewood in the stack out there, and a good, deep fire pit that canna be seen frae a distance, so some of you—you, Shoomy, and a couple o’ others—can start building us a fire to cook on.” He clapped his hands together loudly. “Right then, all o’ ye, outside and gi’e Mistress Wallace room to think. Andrew and John, you come wi’ me. You too, Alan, and we’ll find those tents.”
As the crowd began to file out of the hut, Ewan raised his hand to catch my eye. “Jamie,” he said. “It might be a good idea for you to go up to the big house. Tell your auntie that we’re here and explain what’s going on, just in case she hears about it otherwise and grows afeared. I don’t think there’s much chance of Bek’s people looking for us this far away, but we’d be fools to take risks when there’s no need, so we’d better post some guards out by the road south. Tell your auntie we’ll be away in the morning by first light, lest we endanger her.”
“Aunt Margaret won’t care about the danger,” I said, and he looked me straight in the eye.
“Mayhap not. But would she thank us for being left homeless because we were careless? Bek would burn her place about her ears if he as much as suspected we might be here.”
Abashed, but knowing he was right, I went outside and called Big Andrew to me, telling him to select six men, including the four who had armed themselves, from among our recent prisoners. I explained to Andrew what was needed and left it to him to set out his guards while I sought out my aunt.
When I returned to the hut about an hour later, I brought several of Lady Margaret’s people with me, all of them bearing food and drink: cold fowl and mutton and half a haunch of venison, along with hard-boiled duck eggs, vegetables pickled in sour wine, a basket of recently picked pears, wedges of hard, sharp cheese, and heavy loaves of bread baked that same day. The men had been busy, and now there were four large leather tents erected in the clearing around the hut, and a leaping fire danced in the deep fire pit. Everyone was in good spirits, and I quickly learned the reason for that: Will was awake and alert and apparently none the worse for his long sleep, and Mirren was smiling again.
More thankful for both of those pieces of information than I would have believed possible a few hours earlier, I made my way directly to the hut and found Will propped up in his couch with his back against the wall, cradling Mirren in his arms. I stopped in surprise and, I admit, confusion, never having seen the two of them in anything resembling family intimacy, and I stood there in the doorway hovering on the point of leaving. Will laughed at my obvious dismay and called me inside to join them, where all I could think to do, after embracing him, was ask if he was hungry. Fortunately he was, and Mirren sprang up, and the business of feeding him quickly took care of my embarrassment.
When his hunger was satisfied, Will decided he wanted to join the crew around the fire pit, and he leaned on me as he hobbled painfully, bent forward, to the fire. Miraculously, I thought, his ribs appeared to be undamaged, for he could breathe deeply without a deal of pain, but his lip was split at one corner, both his eyes were blackened, and his left ear was swollen grotesquely, the result, he told me, of a kick that might have taken off his head had it landed properly. He lowered himself carefully to sit on one of the logs that ringed the fire pit.
Almost the first thing he did was ask to meet the former prisoners, and he greeted each one in person and asked him how he had come to be arrested by the English. All were equally confused at first about why they had been singled out for arrest and abduction, but it soon became evident, as one tale followed another, that there was a depressing sameness to their plaints. Each had come to understand that he had given offence to someone—not necessarily an Englishman and sometimes not even identified—or he had allegedly committed some transgression, usually unspecified, and had consequently been denounced for one petty crime or another, then arrested and removed from his home. Families had been dispossessed and homes confiscated.
When the last of them had finished his story, Will stood up carefully and spoke to all of them, pointing out that they would now be legally proscribed. They were twice guilty of outlawry, first by the fact of their arrest and removal from their dwelling places, and then by association with the fight and escape that had taken place that morning. None of them could return to their homes now, he told them, although he was quick to point out that they could not have gone home anyway once taken into custody by the English. In the eyes of the English they were now felons, no different from himself and his associates, and the fact that they had escaped from custody during, or as the result of, the murder of at least a dozen Englishmen compounded the seriousness of their plight.