“But I sinned, Will. I sinned grievously. I broke a man’s head.”
“Aye, I’ve heard. And he would have broken yours had you not struck first. You regret it, I can see that. You are full of remorse, and that’s good. So take your remorse and confess it to Father Peter when you get back to Paisley. Tell him everything that happened. He’ll shrive you pure as the driven snow. Come here.”
He pulled me into his embrace—though cautiously, with a mind to his injuries—and then he reached out again to Mirren, drawing her close to both of us.
“Wife,” he said quietly, lapsing back into Scots with his forehead touching both of ours, “you havena yet known the joys of communing wi’ my cousin Jamie here, but ye ha’e heard me talk of him many times. This is a man I love as I do myself, and nigh as much as I do you—though, thanks be to God, for far different reasons.” He smothered a laugh with a grunt as his wife twisted in his arm and rapped him sharply in the ribs, but she was smiling as she did so, and he pulled her close again. “You two are my closest kin,” he said. “My nearest and dearest, and so I will need you to be close wi’ each other, supporting one another when I canna be here. I love you both.” He hugged us close again, then straightened up and released me.
“Now, Cuz, get ye to your bed, and we’ll try no’ to wake ye when we leave. And get those vows taken this time. I might need a priest in the forest one o’ these days.”
3
Will was right about Father Peter’s reaction to my confession. I went to him the day I arrived back at the Abbey and I told him everything I could recall about the events surrounding Will’s meeting with Bek and the beating he had sustained afterwards. He listened in grim-faced silence, nodding only occasionally as I said something or other that appeared to fit with his own perceptions, and when I had finished he went straight into the rite of absolution without even delivering the normal warning against laxity. The penance he assessed me was a very light one, too, considering what I had believed to be the gravity of my sin, and when I voiced my surprise at it he waved his hand impatiently, giving thanks to God instead that I had not forgotten my boyhood lessons with the quarterstaff. Then, when he asked me if I had anything else that concerned me, I told him that I expected the English to come looking for me.
He laughed at that, much as Will had the previous night. “They would never dream of searching for you within the Abbey precincts,” he said, “but while you are awaiting their arrival—for I know you will, no matter what I tell you—you should apply yourself to your studies and try hard to forget about the entire incident. Wait and work and watch,” he said. “But work harder than anything else, because work will make the time fly quickly.”
And so I worked hard, and the ensuing week passed quietly, albeit with agonizing slowness, without any English searchers coming to hunt me. The next week passed the same way, and by the end of the third week I found myself forgetting to listen for their clattering arrival. Then Christmas came and went without disruption. Because of King John’s royal activities in the aftermath of his coronation, and King Edward of England’s less than enthusiastic reactions to them, the ordination ceremony that would see me elevated to the priesthood was postponed yet again, this time until Eastertide of the new year.
On the last day of the year, Edward’s ever-tenuous patience snapped. He repudiated all the promises he had made to the Scots Crown and realm during the interregnum. Two days after that, King John in return pronounced the recent Treaty of Birgham null and void and declared that all promises made to England during the same period, involving the marriage of the Maid of Norway to Edward’s son, Prince Edward of Caernarvon, were no longer binding.
To the Scots folk in general, none of that meant anything that they could understand, but they understood very clearly that the magnates—the Norman-Scots nobility and the ancient Celtic earl-doms—were fighting among themselves yet again and that the outcome would do nothing for the welfare of ordinary folk.
Then, in early February, in the ancient town of Scone, King John held his first parliament as monarch of the realm, and it went sufficiently well for him to demand, a fortnight later, that four of his most powerful liegemen, two from north and two from south of the River Forth, should pay formal, public homage to him at the close of Easter, swearing allegiance to his Crown and cause. The two northerners were Donald MacAngus, a Celtic chieftain from the western Highlands, and John, the Earl of Caithness, in the far north. Both were powerful men in their own territories, but their names were practically unknown south of the Forth. The names of the two southerners, on the other hand, rang resonantly with local significance to us. They were young Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, who had not yet turned nineteen, and Sir William Douglas, an arrogant autocrat who ruled his territories with an iron hand and was known to brook no interference from anyone. Douglas was notoriously his own man, and all who knew of Balliol’s summons were waiting to see how he would respond to the demands of the new monarch.