The Renegade(33)

Rob hurried to obey, oblivious now to the seductive sunshine outside. This was always his favourite part of his lessons, when Ninian warmed to an incidental topic and his enthusiasm spilled over to engulf his student.

“At its most exalted level, manipulation entails a far more mysterious talent than simply using one’s hands. It involves the ability to use your will to shape, control, and mould people—to influence their behaviour and even their beliefs, bending them to your requirements and to your way of thinking. And that, Robert, means you are controlling their minds—their moods, their beliefs, their emotions. It is an ability few men possess. On a small scale we all attempt it every day, we try to manipulate the others in our lives, to make them do what we want them to do—let us leave this classroom and sit outside in the sunlight, for example—to make the lives of everyone about us useful to our own designs. I believe the need to do so is born in us.”

He spread the fingers of his right hand. “You failed, of course, in your manipulation. After all, I have authority over you and no need to be responsive to your wishes. Few people ever attain the needed skills to influence others in any significant way, and most of those who do succeed have spent their entire lives learning how to do so. The very best of those, the adepts as I have come to think of them, are all leaders, men of power and influence.” He tilted his head and looked at Rob with eyes that twinkled with a kind of mischief. “But what I ask myself frequently is this: are they powerful and influential leaders because they are adept at manipulating people, or have they learned to manipulate people as a result of being leaders? That is a question you should ask yourself in the times ahead, Robert. Whatever the answer might be, you should know that your grandsire is such a man. Lord Robert Bruce of Annandale ranks first among his peers in this respect. I have often watched him play with people’s minds the way a cat plays with a mouse, manipulating them by using the strength of his own personality and the passion of his beliefs to persuade them to do what he wishes them to do. Your father is quite similar, although to a lesser degree, as he lacks the primal fire, the urgency that motivates your grandsire.”

Rob could find no words to express his astonishment, but Father Ninian was already busy with his tools, wrapping his pens with care and closing the tightly hinged lid on his inkhorn.

“And now you may go outside,” he said without looking at Rob. “We will return to Paul’s letters to the people of Corinth tomorrow. But in future, bear in mind what I have told you and try to look beyond the faces that your eye encounters, to discern what really lies behind those bland expressions. The day will come, not too long from now or I miss my guess, when you will need to know such things, if only to safeguard yourself against manipulation by others. Now go, and leave me to my work.”

Rob had had no time to dwell on that lesson in the days that followed at his uncle Nicol’s home in Dalmellington. Nicol MacDuncan was completely without guile, as open and honest as a man could be, and his household was run for him by his two stepdaughters, neither of whom appeared to have the slightest wish to wed a man of her own. They both loved Rob and demonstrated it by bullying him as delightfully and mercilessly as they did their amiable stepfather. Any efforts those two made to manipulate Nicol or his nephew were loud, assertive, and entirely lacking in subtlety, so the boy had no opportunity to practise the kind of assessments urged upon him by his tutor, and he soon forgot about them altogether.

Only now, in the dark hours of this sleepless night, did revelation wash over him like sunlight from a gap in heavy clouds. He had watched Angus Mohr MacDonald manipulate his small crowd of listeners effortlessly. Now he saw the Islesman chief again, using his hands expressively—those same hands he had worked so hard to keep concealed earlier—as he talked to his men in a voice that suddenly rang and echoed with changing, soaring notes and falling cadences. He had manipulated them, easily and deliberately, and now Rob was bemused by his failure to see it sooner. He understood now that Angus Mohr had kept his hands out of sight at first not simply to hide his anger but to maintain control, not of himself but of his listeners. Showing too much anger would have weakened the lesson he wished to deliver—it would have made him too much like the men he was admonishing, railing at them for their lack of discipline when he himself could not control his own emotions.

He knew, too, that Angus Mohr had used the band of guards to practise on, saying to them what he would also have to say, soon and with more conviction, to his chieftains and his supporters and subordinates. He recalled the exact words the man had used: Now, some may say—will say—that the Scots King has no presence here in the west, and thus no right to claim allegiance of any of us … Those people are wrong now and will be more so in time to come. That argument was one that Angus Mohr would need to win if he was to maintain control of his own.