He lifted his face now, and their eyes met.
“You resemble….” He began. “But not just in how you look. She was strong inside, like you are. She could have been a queen herself. In another world, a sweeter, kinder world, a world of justice, she would have been.” He tried to push the memories away, moving his hand as if they were physically beside him. He stared fully at the princess, and his voice took on an urgency, like pleading.
“Someday you will be a queen. So you must open your eyes,” William said. “When I was seven years old I saw thirty Scottish patriots hanged in a barn, lured there by Longshanks under a flag of truce. My father and brother stood up to that savagery and lost their lives. When I grew to be a man. I tried to live in peace. I fell in love with…” But he could not bring himself to speak her name.
But he wanted — needed — to tell this woman who reminded him so much of Murron just how and why he had lost her. “The soldiers of your kind decided they could take her, like everything else in Scotland. I fought them, but she was caught. To lure me to capture, the king’s magistrate cut her throat in the square of Lanark Village.”
He paused and drew in a long slow breath. Isabella watched him, her eyes burning, her arms aching to hold him. He looked at her, his eyes growing harder. “My fight is not with fortress cities. It’s with one man’s desire to rule another man. Tell you king that William Wallace will not be ruled. Nor will any Scot while I live.”
The princes rose slowly from her chair, moved in front of him, and lowered herself to her knees. Hamilton and her other attendants saw this from a distance and were shocked. But the Princess of Wales bowed herself before the heart of this commoner.
“Sir,” she said in a voice only Wallace could hear, “I leave this money as a gift. Not from the king but from myself. And not to you but to the orphans of your country.”
She lifted her face. Their eyes held a moment too long.
Wallace and his captains sat on horseback at the head of their company and watched as the princess’s procession left. Hamish studied Wallace’s face. Wallace noticed and gave him a noncommittal shrug. As the carriage rolled away, its window curtains lifted back slightly. All they saw were the princess’s fingers, but they knew she looked back.
Wallace reined his horse away and rode back to camp.
37
THE LIGHT OF THE MOON SLIPPED DOWN THROUGH THE clear night air, over the charred broken timbers of York, into the barren streets of the sacked city, and onto the shoulders of William Wallace.
He walked there alone.
The bodies of the dead had all been carted away and buried, a task organized by York’s monks and nuns. They had gone to the monastery and convent Wallace’s men had spared and had recruited helpers from outlying villages to come back to the city and give the men who had once defended it a Christian burial. At first he villagers had been too frightened to come; they were amazed even to find the monks and nuns alive, knowing that Longshanks, when he had sacked a Scottish city near the borders, had slaughtered everyone within it, including not only the women and children but the nuns themselves. The monks and nuns of York assured them that this had not been the case with their city and that Wallace had given them a promise to allow Christian burial of the dead. Still the villagers would not come, many of them believing the nuns and monks were but ghosts or false apparitions sent by the devil to deceive them. The churchmen returned to the villages with women and children who themselves had been spared, and finally the people came out and hauled away the dead for sanctified burial.
The decapitated body of the governor was an exception. Wallace order it hacked apart and fed to the dungeon dogs.
He ordered the bodies of the Scots who had been hung from the walls to be cremated in a giant common pyre, and their ashes taken, to be spread upon Scotland.
And so York was empty, an entire city laid to ruin, and William Wallace walked among its burned-out, empty streets. Even the rats and dogs and cats had deserted the wreckage. There was nothing here but charred wood, dirty cobblestones, and moonlight. Never had William felt so alone.
He felt something unfamiliar. It was fear. Since Murron’s death, he had feared nothing. Death did not frighten him; if it meant he could join Murron on the other side of life, he would welcome the passage. His dreams of her, though full of sadness, were still a comfort, a reassurance that his hopes of reunion might find fulfillment.
But something had stirred in him when he was with the princess that day, and he worried that those stirrings might keep Murron from coming to him, if only in his dreams.
Wallace walked through the streets all night long. As the black sky was turning gray with dawn, he returned to his campfire, where he found Hamish slumped in the seating position and dozing. He snorted and started as Wallace sat down beside him. Hamish had been there all night, waiting up for him, worrying about him.
He said nothing about William’s absence. “Want some meat?” he asked, pointing to a joint of meat kept warm beside the fire.
William shook his head. “No word yet from Edinburgh?”
Hamish glanced over to the tent where his father lay snoring. He had hoped old Campbell would be the one to tell William. “One of the messengers got back last night, just after you went on your walk.” Hamish paused, took a breath. “They’re not sending any more men, William.”
“They know about York? About our victory here?”
“They know.”
“And still they won’t support us with reinforcements?”
“They say you have heaped glory onto the throne of Scotland — whoever ends up sitting there. They had decreed more honors and glories for you-”
“As if they could decree honor!” William said bitterly. Then he tried to hold back his anger. “But no reinforcements.”
“No reinforcements.”
William stared at the fire.
Old Campbell stirred awake, saw William at the fire, and rose stiffly. He looked to Hamish, who nodded in answer to his father’s unspoken question: yes, he had broken the news to William. Old Campbell sat down at the fire with them.
Finally William spoke. “The princess was right about one thing. We can terrorize northern England, but we can’t complete a conquest, not without reinforcements.”
“We can get food from the land! We can supply ourselves from England itself!” Campbell said. “All my life — do you hear me, William? — all my life I’ve wanted to fight them, the way they’re fought us, on their land! Now we’re here. I don’t want to go back. Not till we’ve finished it.”
Hamish said nothing. William knew Hamish’s opinion differed from his father’s but they would speak of that later. William looked at old Campbell, who so often seemed like his own father, and said, “No one wants to finish this fight more than I do. And the men with us are like you, they would fight to London itself. They feel nothing can beat us. And truly I think that nothing could if we had a full army and true support. But it’s not just battle that bleeds an army. It’s disease. It’s accident. To march from here to London we would lose more men to sprained ankles and dysentery than we lost in the taking of York. We would get to London. If I lead this army to London without reinforcements, then I lead it to slaughter.”
“So what do we do?” Stephen said. He was lying near the fire, beneath his blankets. He spoke without ever opening his eyes. He may not have slept at all.