The Wallace

by Nigel Tranter

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

At the end of the 13th century, Scotland was a blood-torn country suffering under the harsh domination of a tyrant usurper, the hated Plantagenet, Edward Longshanks. During the appalling violence of those unsettled days, one man rose to become leader of the Scots. That man was William Wallace. Motivated at first by revenge for the slaughter of his father, Wallace vowed to cleanse his country of the English and set the rightful king, Robert the Bruce, upon the Scottish throne. Though Wallace was a heroic figure, he was but a man - and his chosen path was to lead him through grievous danger and personal tragedy before the final outcome . . . Praise for Nigel Tranter: 'One of Scotland's most prolific and respected writers' Times 'Through his imaginative dialogue, he provides a voice for Scotland's heroes' Scotland on Sunday

Release date: January 19, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 452

Sample

WILLIAM WALLACE: Second son of Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie.

MASTER JOHN BLAIR: Benedictine monk.

ROBERT BOYD: Farmer.

EDWARD LITTLE: Nephew of Wallace. Son of small laird.

MARION BRAIDFOOT: Wife of Wallace. Daughter of Sir Hugh Braidfoot of Lamington.

ADAM WALLACE: Cousin. Son of Sir Richard Wallace of Riccarton, head of family.

MASTER THOMAS GRAY: Parish priest of Libberton, Lanarkshire.

LORD JAMES STEWART: Lord of Renfrew. 5th High Steward of Scotland.

MASTER ROBERT WISHART, BISHOP OF GLASGOW: Second of the Lords Spiritual.

MALCOLM, EARL OF LENNOX: Great Celtic noble.

STEPHEN MACGREGOR: Vassal of Lennox.

MACFADZEAN: Servant of Lennox.

FAWDON: Irish servant of Lennox.

SIR JOHN GRAHAM: Son of the Graham chief, Sir David Graham of Dundaff.

MEG DRUMMOND: Perth prostitute.

SIR JOHN BUTLER: English knight. Deputy Governor of Perth.

PATRICK AUCHINLECK OF THAT ILK: Cousin of Wallace.

SIR THOMAS LEARMONTH OF ERCILDOUNE: Eccentric laird, known as Thomas the Rhyme.

SIR HUGO DE MORELAND: English keeper of Lochmaben Castle.

SIR WILLIAM DE HAZELRIG: English Sheriff of Clydesdale.

SIR ANDREW MORAY: Lord of Pettie and Bothwell, heir of Moravia.

SIR ALEXANDER LINDSAY, LORD OF CRAWFORD: Great noble.

ROBERT BRUCE, EARL OF CARRICK: Eldest son of Lord of Annandale, later King.

SIR WILLIAM DOUGLAS: 5th Lord thereof.

ALEXANDER SCRYMGEOUR: Dundee burgess and soldier. Later Standard-Bearer.

DUNCAN MACDOUOALL OF LORN: 2nd son of Alexander, Lord of Argyll.

SIR NEIL CAMPBELL OF LOCHAWE: Chief of Clan Campbell. MacCailean Mor.

MALCOLM MACGREGOR OF GLENORCHY: Chief of Clan Alpine.

SIR RICHARD LUNDIN OF THAT ILK: Scots knight.

SIR JOHN RAMSAY OF AUCHERHOUSE: ditto.

MASTER WILLIAM SINCLAIR. DEAN AND COADJUTOR-BISHOP OF DUNKELD:

SIR WILLIAM RUTHVEN OF THAT ILK: Former Provost of Perth.

LORD HUGH MACDUFF: Uncle and Tutor to the young Earl of Fife.

GARTNAIT, EARL OF MAR: Great Celtic noble, brother-in-law of Bruce.

JOHN COMYN, EARL OF BUCHAN: Lord High Constable of Scotland.

SIR JOHN COMYN, LORD OF BADENOCH: Chief of the great House of Comyn.

SIR JOHN STEWART OF MENTETTH: Sheriff of Dunbarton and Perth. Uncle and tutor to young Earl of Menteith.

MASTER WILLIAM COMYN: Provost of the Chapel-Royal, brother of Buchan.

MASTER WILLIAM LAMBERTON: Chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral, later Bishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland.

LORD NIGEL BRUCE: Brother to the Earl of Carrick.

JOHN BALIOL, KING OF SCOTS: Exile.

PHILIP THE FAIR, KING OF FRANCE:

ENGUERRAND DE MARIGNY: Intendant of Finance. French administrator.

SIR SIMON FRASER OF OLIVER: Scots veteran soldier.

RALPH DE HALIBURTON: Border laird.

JOHN STEWART: Nicknamed Jack Short, a young esquire.

SIR JOHN DE SEGRAVE: Grand Marshal of England.

SIR PETER MALLORY: Lord Chief Justice of England.

The man stood, weeping. If weeping describes the dry-eyed, deep and tearing sobs which racked his enormous frame, in an extremity of sorrow, pain, hurt. The three men with him eyed him askance, or sought not to eye him, afraid almost to look on his distress. Not that they were ashamed, embarrassed. They were, in fact, terrified — terrified of their friend.

The scene was indeed terrible. But it was not the scene which frightened them. It was the big man weeping, sobbing. Most things this man did, he did with his whole heart and mind and faculties — and that could hold its own alarm for the less committed. When his emotions were strongly aroused, subsequent action could be swift, shattering, shocking, indeed — not in sheer impulsiveness nor mindless violence, but in intense, calculated vehemence. For this was a man of thought and assessment equally as of action — a rare combination, in itself apt to make others uneasy. Just as in reverse as it were, his gentleness, kindliness even patience, could be as unexpected, insupportable in its implied demands on others.

Yet the three others loved him.

William Wallace’s lips were moving. ‘God in Heaven help me!’ he whispered. ‘God in Heaven — help me!’ He raised two great hands up and forward and open, towards that scene of horror, but higher. ‘I need … Your help.’ His hands and arms, like his entire huge frame, were trembling, so that the ground they stood on seemed to shake in elemental accord.

For long moments he stood so — and his companions scarcely drew breath. Then, suddenly jerking both hands higher still, he reached over in a single swift and sure movement, above and behind his bare head, to whip out with the harsh shriek of steel, the mighty two-handed sword sheathed at his back. In a great sweeping arc he brought its five feet of length over and down, and, as its tip nearly reached the ground, released his grip on its hilt to catch it again expertly, halfway down the broad blade, and so to raise it aloft before him, cross-shaped hilt and guard forming the sacred symbol. There he held it, still, unspeaking — and no sound save the faint residual crackle of fire, and the ululant howling of a hound in its desolation, broke the hush of the warm afternoon.

Unspoken, the fearsome, fatal vow was made, there in the quiet green Ayrshire valley — unspoken because it required no words, no detail, no explanation. For life and death, for ever, for eternity, the vow was made, the decision reached, the compact sealed, the task dedicated. And his witnesses, Master John Blair, Benedictine monk, Robert Boyd, tenant-farmer, and Edward Little nephew and small laird’s son, stared destiny in the face and shivered.

After a little, still not trusting himself to speech, Wallace lowered the sword, and moved forward, heavy-footed, towards Carleith Tower.

It was a small place to have undergone so notable a visitation, a simple square keep of but three storeys and a garret, of no more than twenty-five feet measurement, crowning a grass-grown artificial motte or mound, some twenty feet high, the soil for which had been dug out to form a deep surrounding ditch, into which a lade from the nearby Killoch Burn had been led to fill a moat. Within the ditch, but below the mound a high stone wall arose, square also but rounded at the corners, the paling for this pele-tower, pierced only by a single gateway, to the west, at the end of a drawbridge across the ditch. This gateway stood open, the heavy oaken and iron-bound doors wide but undamaged. The bridge was down. A pall of blue smoke rose lazily in the warm early autumn air from all within — even from the square keep on its mound, for it was not a stone tower but built of stout timbers, only coated with whitewashed clay to protect it from blazing arrows. It was not blazing arrows that had done this. The whitewashed walls were still comparatively unscarred. This fire had been lit from within, as had the fires which had destroyed the lean-to domestic buildings and stables built against the curtain-walling around the mound. There had been no arrows, no assault, no fighting, here.

None of all this held the gaze of the four young men, as they paced so slowly forward. It was the bodies which appalled them. Dead bodies were none so rare a sight in the Scotland of 1296, admittedly; but these were perhaps exceptional. When the drawbridge was let down, the portcullis apparatus here projected two long timber beams, from which the chains depended. These beams had been used as gibbets. Hanged men, likewise, were not a scarce sight, under the Lord Paramount Edward’s rule; but hanged women and children were less common, especially hanged as were these.

There were fourteen bodies, or parts of bodies, swaying gently on ropes. Old Cunninghame of Carleith himself, the laird, had pride of place, and hung, not from one of the beams, but from the keystone of the arched gateway itself. The newcomers knew it was he from his girth, he being a large and bulky man, heavy, in his late sixties — for his white-bearded head, sadly reddened now, did not hang below his shoulders, but was kicked into a corner of the entrance. The rest of him hung by an ankle — they all did — in particularly ignominious postures. None, it seemed, had died by hanging.

The laird, however, was the only one who had retained any of his clothing. His son, Dod Cunninghame — whom the four young men had, in fact, come to see — had not lost his head, only his genitals and all his limbs. His younger brother Rob, likewise, but also partly disembowelled. Something horrible had been stuffed into his open mouth.

But it was the women who had them all but vomiting. Lady Carleith, twenty years younger than her husband, her three daughters and two serving women, had all suffered alike — at least, in appearance. All hung upside-down, naked; all had their breasts sliced off; and all had stakes or axe-shafts or other, wooden handles projecting upwards from between their thighs. Five children, the offspring of Dod and a married sister — whose husband was a prisoner captured at the defeat of Dunbar and awaiting ransom — aged from two to eight, had merely been hacked to pieces and the parts strung up anyhow, in bundles.

The flies were a humming dark cloud about all.

Forcing himself to look, not to hurry past eyes averted, William Wallace still dared not speak. John Blair, the monk, was muttering Latinities in an unending, incoherent gabble; Edward Little, whose far-out kinsfolk these were, was mouthing incessant obscenities with tears streaming down his cheeks; Robert Boyd, hard man, kept smashing a clenched fist into an open palm, again and again and again, as eloquence enough.

A paper was affixed to one of the half-doors, held in place by a reddened dirk. It was only roughly penned, and in blood — probably no better ink was readily available — and not very legible, for the blood had run and clotted. But the intimation was clear enough, and brief. It said, in Norman French:

‘King Edward’s Peace.

These failed to do homage to the King’s Grace, as commanded.

So suffer all traitors.

God Save the King.’

Wallace ripped the paper from the timbering, and crushed it in convulsive grippings of his huge hand. Then he paused, smoothed it out again, and folded it, to tuck it away inside the calfskin leather sleeveless jerkin which he was wearing in lieu of the steel jack and chain-mail which was his more usual travelling garb in these unsettled days of English Edward’s Peace — for this had been more in the nature of a social call than any expedition. He led the way through the gateway into the courtyard.

Here all was the expected ruin and chaos, with smouldering thatch and straw, scattered clothing, smashed furnishings and implements, dead and charred poultry and dogs littered on the cobblestones, in the doorways of the burned-out stables and outhouses, on the steps up to the keep. The horses and cattle had gone, as worth driving off. Life remained only in the shape of a single grey wolfhound, a red gash on its shaggy flank, whose baying to the uncaring sun-filled sky had warned them from afar, even before they saw the smoke, as to what to expect at Carleith Tower. Now it stood over the body of a mutilated child, which somehow had escaped the hanging-up process, and snarled in white-fanged fear and hatred at the intruders.

But it was not so much to the surviving dog or its small forlorn charge that the young men’s eyes were drawn, but rather to the round well-parapet in the centre of the cobbled yard. Out of this, as though from a stuffed and bursting sack, sprouted legs and arms and torsoes, some clad, some naked. The fact that they so protruded, from a deep well-shaft, told its own story.

Here was the answer to the question of why the scatter of cot-houses, thatch burned and ravaged, which the visitors had had to pass along the Killoch burnside approaching the Tower, had held neither occupants nor bodies. All the cottar-folk, farmhands, shepherds, cattlemen, wrights, smith, miller and the rest, of a little self-contained community amongst these Ayrshire-Lanarkshire border hills, with their families, had been driven in here, to their laird’s courtyard, and slaughtered en masse, rather than outside in penny-numbers, their bodies crammed down the well, where the lairdly family had been elevated on ropes. There might be thirty or forty or more, in that well. No small group of marauders could have done this; it must have been a sizeable company of soldiery.

They were not so very far from the main highway from Ayr to Lanark, here at Carleith, four miles up the dead-end valley of the Killoch Water from Mauchline. The young men had themselves ridden eastwards from the Ayr district that morning — and they had passed no body of troops. Therefore the perpetrators of this outrage, in all probability, had gone on eastwards towards Lanark, a score of miles further through the empty hills by Muirkirk and Douglasdale. There was almost nowhere else they could have gone, to shelter for a night secure, for a fairly large party of English in a country hostile if largely subdued, sullenly repressed. Only the large towns, garrisoned, offered safe lodging for the invaders. Ayr was the headquarters of the Percy, Warden of Galloway and Ayrshire; and Lanark the base of his principal deputy, Sir William de Hazelrigg, new-styled Earl of Clydesdale and Sheriff of Lanark. The company who had done this thing were almost certainly, then, on their way from Ayr to Lanark.

After a minute or so of stunned reaction, Wallace pulled himself together and took charge. Digging any sort of graves for all these dead was out of the question for four men. They took the top bodies, shamefully reluctantly at first, out of the well-shaft, until there was a sufficiency of space below the parapet, and this they filled in meantime with charred thatch and straw from the stables. The half-dozen dead thus removed, they carried out to the drawbridge, where they cut down the ghastly things which hung there. They found blankets and plaids from the sacked keep, and in these they wrapped all the remains, as reverently as they might, and took them to a sort of small re-entrant of the moat, a grassy hollow to the south, slightly higher than the water level. In this they placed the bodies. All kneeling, Father John said a disjointed, broken-voiced prayer of committal and Christian burial. Then they filled, up the hollow with more thatch and straw, and dug out a layer of soil to cover all, hacking and shovelling at the earth with the muscular fury of strong men who desperately needed physical action of some sort, any sort, to relieve something of their pent-up emotion. Then they went back and said another prayer over the wellful of victims. Robert Boyd put a crossbow-bolt between the eyes of the snarling, half-mad, wounded wolfhound, since they could by no means either approach or aid it.

There was nothing else that they could do here — whatever fell to be done elsewhere. Apart from the praying, they had scarcely exchanged a score of consecutive words with one another throughout. Words, muttered half-formed curses apart, were as inadequate and valueless as they were emotive, liable to release an embarrassing flood. But as they strode away from Carleith Tower, towards their horses left by one of the cot-houses, William Wallace paused at the bridge-end, and looked back.

‘God aiding me, the men who did this evil thing will go to answer for it. To a higher court than Edward Plantagenet’s!’ he said, deep-voiced, ‘And, thereafter, we will seek to cleanse this good land of, of …’ The deep voice cracked and broke. He could not go on. Nor required to. He swung away abruptly.

‘So be it,’ John Blair took him up, quietly. ‘In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

Mounting, they rode back down the empty valley, to head eastwards, for Lanark.



It was the dove-grey of a quiet September evening before they reached the hill-terraced town of Lanark, above the deep gut of the upper Clyde valley, its climbing narrow streets already beginning to be dominated by the towering stark stonework of the New English castle being built, on the site of the older strength on Castle Hill, by the equally new and self-styled Earl of Clydesdale, the Cumbrian Sir William de Hazelrigg, Sheriff of Lanark under Edward Longshanks’ improved administration for the occupied Kingdom of Scotland. Away in the foothills, Lanark was less conveniently sited than Ayr on the coast, so Percy, Governor and Warden of all the South-West, did not base himself there. But it was strategically important too, lying at the north-west extremity of that vast upland area of wilderness known as The Forest, more properly Ettrick Forest, which covered so much of the southern part of Scotland, providing a buffer between the Borderlands and the populous and fertile central belt — and a notorious refuge for the numerous outlaws, broken men and fugitives from settled authority. Lanark, although fifty miles from the Borderline, was a frontier town, and the English treated it accordingly. This summer of 1296, it swarmed with soldiery.

It was not a place that William Wallace and his friends would have chosen to frequent in the circumstances, especially not to leave his recently wed wife in. But she was undoubtedly safer here, in her family’s townhouse, amongst her own folk, than she would have been anywhere else that her footloose and presently homeless husband could have installed her. It was their misfortune to have wed just before the time that Edward Plantagenet had decided to end the sham semi-independence of King John Baliol’s puppet government, to strip John of his powers and freedom, and send him a humiliated prisoner to England, taking over with an iron hand the rule of the northern kingdom for himself. Included in his edicts was the peremptory requirement that all land-holders, officers, magistrates and men of substance take the oath of allegiance to himself, Edward of England, no longer merely as self-appointed Lord Paramount, but as King — not of Scots, since he no longer accepted Scotland to be a kingdom — but of England, under pain of death. Most, at least in the southern part of the country, had done so, however reluctantly and with inward reservations. Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie had refused — and had died for his pains. It was wise, therefore, for his sons Malcolm, William and John, not to make themselves prominent, not to claim any lands, even those most rightly their own, not to identify themselves meantime with houses, offices, positions. They were not exactly outlaws — yet; but they were marked men. Will most especially, for sufficient reason. In the circumstances, the new bride, daughter of Sir Hugh Braidfoot of Lamington, was best remaining in her father’s house, since he was one of the majority who had taken the oath.

The four young men avoided the main streets of the town, crowded with strolling and drunken soldiery — and such of the local women as would associate with them. Wallace was apt to avoid busy places anyway, these days. He had a distinct physical handicap, when it came to associating with other folk; he was six feet seven inches in height, broad in proportion, and in consequence stood out head and shoulders in any company he kept. It went without saying that this was a great trial to a young man who very frequently had need to be inconspicuous, anonymous, before the present ruling authorities in Scotland. He was, in fact, a highly unsuitable husband for Marion Braidfoot, or any woman — at least in some respects.

So the newcomers slipped into Lanark by back ways, left their horses at the rear of an obscure alehouse in the South Vennel, in the care of Robert Boyd — and Wallace’s huge sword with him, hidden, for such a thing to be found on any Scot would be as good as a death-warrant — and found their way across to the North Vennel and so by a lane to the garden-door of the Braidfoots’ house in the Castlegait, near the High Street Normally the family would be at their country home of Lamington Tower at this harvest season; but it was remotely set in The Forest foothills, ten miles to the south-east, and in these unsettled times the laird preferred his womenfolk to be in the security of the walled town.

Even the back-door of the house had to be unbarred and unchained cautiously to let the trio in — a sign of the said times. And it was a man with hand on dirk-hilt who gingerly opened to them. But there was no mistaking the towering figure outside in the dusk, and the serving-man admitted them at once, and cheerfully, raising his voice to shout for Mistress Mirren, that here was Master Will, by God! It was himself, the Wallace. Master Will had come.

There was a cry from somewhere in the depths of the quite large house, and the sound of light running feet. Into the stone-flagged kitchen raced a laughing, wide-eyed young woman — wide-mouthed also for, as well as seeking to gasp aloud her gladness, she was gasping for breath, being in fact in no state for running, six months pregnant and heavy with it. Otherwise she was a slender, almost fragile-seeming girl, the more so of course when seen beside her large husband, with great gentle brown eyes, oval features and luxuriant dark hair, her small head poised proudly on a long and shapely neck. She flung herself bodily into Wallace’s arms, and he raised her high, high, until her head was all but touching the curve of the smoke-blackened, stone-vaulted ceiling, holding her there — but gently almost reverently, before lowering her panting, laughing person so that their lips could meet and cling, her feet still some fifteen inches from the floor. But on this occasion, vehement and fervid as was the love and warmth of his greeting, the laughter was all on her side — although that man could laugh as loud as any. It was almost three weeks since they had seen each other.

As women will, she sensed something different, and her gurgling, kiss-interrupted laughter faded. She drew back her comely, flushed face a little way, to peer at him.

‘Oh, Will! Will dear — how good!’ she got out, the first coherent words she, or he either, had managed to enunciate as yet ‘My love, my love! But … there is something wrong? Amiss? What is it, Will …?’

He set her down carefully. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, and nodded slowly. ‘Aye, Mirren — there is something amiss.’ He glanced over at the others. They were glad to take the hint and followed the serving-man out into the passage and along to the front part of the house.

‘You are well, at least,’ she declared, eyeing him. ‘It is not that. Are — are you in trouble, Will? Again?’ And, when he shook his auburn head, ‘Of a mercy, then — let me look at you! Before — before you tell me. Just let me look at my husband I see so little of. When there is so much of him!’

He mustered a smile at that, as she looked him over. And he was good to look at, not handsome in the accepted sense but with features pleasing as they were strong, an open, candid face, warm blue eyes under a broad but not high brow, and a fine head of slightly curling auburn hair kept sufficiently short so as not to get in the way of the great sword which was so frequently sheathed at his back, its hilt rising behind the pillar of his neck. For the rest, his nose was on the short side, and both his upper lip and chin on the long side, with a beard kept short and neatly trimmed. That he was massively built goes without saying; but there was no surplus of flesh to him, no heaviness in proportion to his gigantic frame. And, strangely, for so active and vigorous a young man of twenty-six years, little appearance of muscular tension or bracing; on the contrary, rather an air of physical calm, relaxation, the more unusual in one of this man’s reputation.

Presently he told her something of what they had found at Carleith. He did not dwell upon the details; but nor did he gloss over the scale and vileness of what had been done. That it was not so much the horror itself, but some significant and vital effect on the man himself, however, she was quick to realise. Great-eyed, urgently, she gazed at him, seeking to control the words, the pleas, even the denials which all but sprang to her lips.

‘And you?’ she said, at length. ‘This evil means — what? To you, Will?’

He was as slow to answer her, to put into actual words his committment, his vowed total committment. But she had to know.

‘I cannot stand by, Mirren,’ he said quietly. ‘I must do something. Carleith cries to Heaven for vengeance. But — it is more than vengeance that is required. Punishment, yes. But it is cleansing that this land and people need. Cleansing, not only of these savage invaders, but of this realm’s own inner spirit. Its soul — if a nation may have a soul. The soul which cowers under this tyrant Edward’s iron lash, the spirit which accepts tyranny, savagery, insult shame. Aye, accepts — for Carleith is not the first such shame. I could name a dozen others. And what of Berwick? 17,000 died at Edward’s sack of Berwick, men, women and bairns. For what? To cow us, for an example. That we should bow to tyranny. We did not bow at once — the folly of Dunbar showed that. But we have bowed and cowered, since. It must not go on.’

‘Yes, Will. God knows it is true. But — what can you do? One man. One unimportant man — unimportant, save to me! Not a great lord, not a noble, landless. What could you do?’

‘I could do something, God aiding me. And I will,’ he said. ‘Someone must — or we deserve to be trodden down under the Plantagenet’s heel. Deserve it, I say! I have much — a powerful body, a strong right arm, wits enough for some few to follow me. I can wield a sword …’

‘Aye, these you have. That you have done already. And are a marked man, in consequence. But that was different. Oh, Will …!’

‘That was different, to be sure. I have slain Englishmen, yes. In wrath. In revenge. Because they attacked me, taunted me, insulted me. Or harmed someone of mine, or in my sight. But that was … me, just. Myself. For myself. A man defending himself, striking back, refusing to bend the knee. No more than a man angry, Mirren. But — now it is different, yes. I have sworn an oath. If I am to respect myself ever again, I must now act. Not merely against this arrogant Englishman, or that. But against what they stand for. Against the invader — not just this cruel assassin or that petty ruffian. Do you not see?’

‘I see, yes. Oh, I see, Will! I see you going away from me again. Going into grievous danger, fighting. Being hunted by the English. Being caught, it may be. And then, and then … She gulped and could not go on.

Unhappily he considered her. He could not deny anything of what she had said. He could only grip her arm, and shake his head, wordless.

She knew her man too well to seek to argue with him, to try to convince him against his own considered judgement, his conception of his duty. He might have been called an obstinate man. She sighed — and then closed with him again and, folded within his huge embrace, sought to tell herself — although not him — that she was still the most happy and fortunate young woman in all broad Scotland.

In time, they moved through to the others, eating in a pantry. Sir Hugh was at Lamington with his sons, helping to get in the precious harvest — for famine was never far away when war was about. The second Lady Braidfoot was bedridden upstairs, and only Marion’s two younger stepsisters were at home with her cheerful girls in their mid and later teens, now bombarding Ed Little with questions and sallies — though restrained a little by the priestly character of their other guest. Not that John Blair appeared any solemn monkish figure; indeed bore no evidence, meantime, of a monk, whatsoever, in dress or bearing. Clearly the girls had been restrained from rushing through to the kitchen, no doubt highly unwillingly, and now hurled themselves upon their brother-in-law in typically uninhibited welcome.

Wallace gathered that his friends had not told the younger girls about the Carleith massacre. He commended their judgement.

Nevertheless, the thought of it and its consequences was still very much in the forefront of his mind; and when the girls were away preparing more food, he told his companions what he wanted. They were to slip out, presently into the town. They were not kenspeckle, recognisable, as was he. Try to find out in the wynds and closes, the alehouses — aye, and the whore houses — what party of military had come in from the South-West that day, who the leaders were, and anything about them. Some folk would know. There might well be evil, shameful boasting. Men would have loot mementoes. Somewhere in Lanark, almost certainly these butchers were to be found. Their officers would be installed up in the old castle, and safe; but their men would be celebrating in the town. The night was young yet.

So presently, their bellies filled, Blair and Little excused themselves, the first to go relieve Rob Boyd at his vigil in the South Vennel alehouse yard; all to gather what information they might. Then the two younger girls were packed, protesting, off to bed. And William Wallace could be alone with his wife.

Just before midnight Rob Boyd was first to come back. His news, gleaned at the alehouse and elsewhere, was interesting but general rather than particular. Hazelrigg had gone to Ayr to confer with Sir Henry Percy, the Warden. There was word of a revolt in the far North-East, in Buchan and Moray on the fringes of the Comyn country, led, it seemed, by young Sir Andrew Moray the Pantler’s nephew. It was apparently serious for troops were being summoned from far