As Campbell supervised the cleaning and cauterizing of this second wound, Hamish moved over and put a hand on William’s shoulder. “You’ve fought back, William,” he said.
“But I didn’t bring her back.”
There were noises outside. A whiskerless lad, one of the sentries Campbell had scattered along the approaches to the farm, burst into the house. “Somebody’s comin’, I think they’re soldiers!” he sang out.
The men scrambled for their weapons and rushed to protect the entrances while they looked out every window, searching for the safest route of escape. But Liam Little came in just after the lad and said, “Nay, ‘tis not soldiers! ‘Tis MacGregor from the next valley!”
The farmers moved to the door, opened it, and found twenty more farmers with torches and weapons, dressed in battle tartans. Campbell had made it to his feet as if he’d never been wounded and shook hands with MacGregor as easily as if welcoming him to dinner.
MacGregor was a man Campbell’s age, darker of hair and grayer of beard. He was short and powerful, and at least three of the men behind him were his own sons. “We heard about what happened,” MacGregor said. “And we don’t want ya thinkin’ ya can have your fun without us.”
A smile spread across Campbell’s face. “Just like a MacGregor to invite himself to a party.”
MacGregor grinned back, but then his gaze shifted; William had moved up behind Campbell.
William looked out to the earnest young faces glowing in the torchlight. Then he gazed around at the faces of the others gathered inside the house. Then to MacGregor he said, “Go home. Some of us are in this, I can’t help that now. But you can help yourselves. Go home.”
“We won’t have homes to go to soon enough,” Macgregor said. “Word of what you did at Lanark has spread through the whole valley, and the English garrison at the castle will be comin’ through to burn us all out.”
They looked at Wallace—all of them did. And it seemed, at least to Hamish, that his eyes seemed to change temperature. Before they had been warm and soft with grief, but now they turned steely, like a blade left overnight on the heather and covered with winter frost.
The castle of Lord Bottoms stood along the river an hour’s ride upstream from Lanark. Its stone walls were barely taller than a large man, but Lord Bottoms, master of the castle, took far more comfort in the presence of the two dozen English soldiers who endorsed his ownership of these dominions and augmented his own personal bodyguard of like number. It was Lord Bottoms who had taken the bride Helen to his bed upon the claim of the right of prima noctes, indulging not only his appetitie for fair young women but also that for more lands, for the understood Longshanks’s desire to dominate these people. He equally understood the certainty of Longshanks’s displeasure should an act of rebellion such as the one just occurring at Lanark go unpunished.
So it was that in the courtyard within his castle walls Lord Bottoms was personally directing furious military preparations. Armorers pounded breastplates, honed spears, and ground swords in a shower of sparks; kitchen servants bustled about preparing rations for travel. And through all this Bottoms was shouting orders. “Gather the horses! Align the infantry!” He snatched the arm of a man running past. “Ride to the lord governor in Stirling. Tell him that before sunset tonight we will find this rebel Wallace and hang him—and twice as many Scotsmen as good men they killed! Go!” Bottoms heaved himself up onto his own horse and shouted, “Form for march!”
The troops scrambled from every doorway and out into the courtyard. At the same time, the man Bottoms had dispatched as messenger tugged a horse to the gate and nodded for the keepers to open it. As they pulled the windlasses to wind up the chains that lifted the gate, he mounted the horse. The moment the gate was high enough he spurred the animal, galloped outside—and rode squarely into a spear that impaled him.
Wallace and his Scots, hidden just outside the gate, came pouring through the gate before its keepers could react; they were knocked to the ground and the ambushers had control of the entrance. A whole band of them streamed through. The English soldiers were taken completely by surprise. Bottoms sat on his horse and gawked around in confusion as the troop he had thought of as so powerful suddenly broke up all around him. Many of his men still hadn’t taken their weapons from the grinders; they found themselves beaten to the earth, or they knelt there on their own in surrender. Bottoms tried to shout orders: “Stop them… Don’t let… Align…”
Scots dragged Lord Bottoms off his horse: One drove his spear at the lord’s heart when Wallace’s broadsword rang in and deflected the blow.
“On your way somewhere, m’lord?” Wallace asked. The Scots, with the fortress already theirs, laughed in victory.
“Murdering bloody bandit!” Lord Bottoms spat.
Wallace’s sword jumped and stopped a whisker from the lord’s eyeball. “My name is William Wallace. I am no bandit who hides his face. I am a free man of Scotland. We are all free men of Scotland!”
The Scots cheered, drunk with the new taste of victory.
“Find this man a horse,” William said.
Stewart, father of the abused bride, was sputtering. “This is the lord who took my daughter on her wedding night!” he said.
William looked evenly at Stewart. “Yes. And now he would have killed this whole country if we’d let him. Now give him a horse.”
A spearman extended the reins of the lord’s thoroughbred.
“Not this horse. That one.” Wallace pointed to a bony nag hitched next to a glue pot. Then he glared at Bottoms. “Today we will spare you and every man who has yielded. Go back to England. Tell them Scotland’s daughters and her sons are yours no more. Tell them… Scotland is free.” As the Scots cheered, Wallace threw Bottoms onto the nag’s back and slapped the horse’s rear. It shambled away, followed by a handful of survivors, as the Scots chanted… “Wal—lace, Wal—lace, Wal—lace!”
Into a flat patch of ground, not far from the Calendonia trees where Murron and William had met for their secret nights together, they dug the hole for her body. A carver from the village had made her a stone marker bearing the name Murron McClannough. Beneath her name he had chiseled the outline of a thistle into the stone.
It was sleeting on the day they buried her, as if the tears of heaven had frozen on their way to the earth. Bagpipes wailed like banshees as Murron’s body, wrapped in burial canvas, was lowered into the earth under the gaze of her mother and father, her neighbors, and William Wallace. Her mother was crying loudly, her father wept in silence, and William knelt at the graveside, hiding within his closed fist the wedding cloth she had embroidered for him.
He stared at the chiseled thistle in unspeakable grief as the village priest sprinkled in dirt and holy water and the gravediggers filled the hole.
When others began to drift away, William stayed. When he looked up, he saw Murron’s father, old MacClannough, still there, broken in grief. The old man’s eyes stared at Wallace from across the grave of his daughter, then at last he, too, drifted away.
Alone, William reached into the tartan that wrapped his chest and withdrew the strip of cloth he had given her. He placed it above her heart and pressed it with his fingers deep into the dirt. Then he put the embroidered handkerchief inside his woolen wrap, next to his hart, stood slowly, and walked away.
23
IN THE ROYAL PALACE DOWN IN LONDON IT WAS A VERY different kind of day, sunny, even warm. Prince Edward was in his garden, playing a medieval version of croquet with his friend Peter. The princess, ignored by her husband but expected to be at all time attentive to his interests, sat watching. But Nicolette was at her side, and together they could talk, always being careful not to be so loud as to be a distraction or so quiet as to cause suspicion, for whenever they whispered, Edward seemed to think they were discussing him.