The Forest Laird(98)

“We will start at the beginning, Father James. You didn’t think I knew, did you?” Seeing the wide-eyed look on my face, he pressed onward. “You didn’t think I’d see it, the straightforward sense of it. That only Will Wallace could be the leader of the Greens. But think for a moment, if you will. How could I not know, knowing you? Your very silence would have told me, even had I not known all along. I have known you now for … how long, nigh on twenty years? Sixteen at least, and in all that time, the single person you have talked about, other than your fellows here and at the Abbey, has been your cousin Will, the outlawed verderer who dared to cross the English. And then along comes this group of thieves calling themselves the Greens, whose leader, an archer, is unknown, and all of a sudden you forget the name and even the existence of your cousin Will. Am I that big a fool, lad?”

I grimaced. “I was afraid that if I said anything, my lord, you might have to act upon it.”

He gawped at me, perplexed. “Act upon it and do what?”

“I know not, my lord … Report his name to the authorities?”

“Which authorities? And had I done so, what would that have achieved? He is an outlaw already, destined to hang if taken.

Knowing his name would make no difference to the Englishmen’s incompetence. It would not affect their inability to catch him. But did you truly think I would divulge his identity?”

I half shrugged. “I thought you might have seen it as your duty, my lord.”

“My duty is to my King and his realm, to my monarch and my country.” The statement was delivered in a tone that left me in no doubt of the old man’s sincerity. “To this point the Greens have done nothing that openly defies or attacks either one of those. Their crimes, if crimes in fact they be, have all been carried out against the English, whose presence in this land I deem an abomination.”

I opened my mouth to respond but he cut me off with a short chop of his hand. “Abomination, I said, and I meant it. And we brought it upon ourselves. We have been dancing wi’ the Devil for too long, Father James, and now I fear we’ll have to pay a high price for our dalliance. We invited the Plantagenet to come here, and he came. I fear he will not leave as eagerly when we ask him to retire.”

He rose abruptly from his chair and crossed to the open window, where he stood staring down into the courtyard below, one hand holding the window’s metal edge, the other hooked by the thumb into the white rope girdle at his waist. The thrush I had heard in the distance was no longer singing.

“I blame myself,” he said quietly, speaking into the emptiness in front of him, so that I had to listen hard to hear the words that drifted back over his shoulder. “It came to me that this might happen, but I put the thought aside and allowed myself to be gulled by the man’s reputation as the foremost knight in Christendom, the arbiter of justice and confidant of kings and popes.” He turned to look back at me, and rested his shoulders against the wall beside the window. “He was all of those things once, and widely honoured for it. But of late he has kept himself at home, nursing a growing hunger to increase his lands and his power.”

He seated himself with an aging man’s care for his comfort and appearance, arranging his clothes carefully before he spoke again. “He engineered the war against the Welsh, you know.” The hesitation that followed was barely noticeable. “You did know that, I hope.”

I nodded.

“Aye, but he did it consummately, with great skill. The Welsh fell to him like lambs to a rabid wolf. And now I fear he plans the same fate for Scotland.”

Hearing him say that so matter-of-factly startled me out of my silence.

“But King John will never put up with that.”

His back straightened again and he stared at me for a moment, expressionless. “I forget, sometimes, how young you are,” he said eventually, “because you seldom show your inexperience. But then when you do, your youth leaps out at me. You are almost right, though. King John will attempt to prevent it. There is no doubt of that. But the damage that’s already done is irreparable, and he will fail. It is already too late to counteract that. England’s King is no man’s fool and he has worn his crown for many years. He has also shown himself to be ten times the man John Balliol is.”

He reached up and removed the crimson skullcap of his office, something I had never seen him do before, and then he fell silent, kneading the silken fabric between his fingers as he stared at it with narrowed eyes, and suddenly the crimson cap disappeared within his large, clenched fist.

“Balliol looks like a king, I’ll grant you that. He has all that’s necessary there—the bearing, the appearance and the posture and the gait. On top of that, he is affable and amiable, amusing and engaging, with great charm. And he has a regal air of dignitas about him, too. But he is weak, for all that. He is too compliant, too accommodating and too much at pains to be ingratiating. He lacks the iron, the savagery a true king must own, though he use it but seldom. Our King wants people to like him, and that is a fatal flaw in any leader, be he king or bandit chief.