49
Wallace rode through the storm, the falling rain lashed his face and beat upon his hair, yet he did pull up a fold of his tartan to shield and warm his head but rode on like a man insane — or dead already.
He was going nowhere. He rode slowly. Sometimes the horse would stop when the drops of rain were stinging and they had moved beneath the cover of a tree. The horse would wait, expecting the rain would stop, but after awhile the waiting became tedious, and he would move on.
They moved through villages, passing common people taking shelter from the rain. They came to their doorways and looked out at the specter of this rider in battlefield dress, all tattered and marked from fighting, with wounds still seeping blood into their bandages.
Wallace looked at them. They started back, their faces showing no recognition. Did they know who he was? He gazed around them, the people for whom he fought. The seemed to find him disturbing, this battered man riding in the rain. Mothers pulled their curious children back from the doorways, and men watched him like guard dogs, ready to growl should he turn their way to ask for bread or a place by their fire.
He rode on.
He came to the place where he’d been going all along without knowing it; the grove of trees where Murron lay buried.
He dismounted then fell to his knees beside the secret grave. The rain fell on his face like tears. But he had no tears of his own. The cold, the icy rain, the wounds, nothing seemed to touch him. With his fingertips he carefully drew her embroidered cloth from beneath his leather battle shirt. Hanging in his trembling hands, filthy with grime and gore of battle, the handkerchief she had made for him looked impossibly white, something from a better, purer world.
Rain fell that day in London, too, and thunder rumbled through the sky, its dark roar penetrating even the thick walls of the palace and reaching its innermost rooms. Snug by a massive fire in its central audience chamber were Longshanks; his son, Edward; and the king’s closest advisors. On the far side of the room, away from the fire, the princess stood at the window and listened to the rain pounding against the wooden shutters.
She heard Hamilton telling the king, “Their nobles have sworn allegiance, m’lord. Every last one.”
Longshanks savored the victory — and gloated to his son. “Now we kill two birds at one stroke. We must eliminate Scotland’s capacity to make war against us, and we must renew our campaign for the French throne. So we recruit from Scotland for our armies in France.”
“The Scots will fight for us?” Edward sputtered.
“Surely you cannot believe they could be reliable –”
“What choice do they have? Now they must serve us or starve.”
But Edward hated the amused curl of his father’s lip and tone of his voice that seemed to dare his son to find any flaw in his logic. And Edward was afraid of his father no loner. Longshanks could beat him to death if he wished; that no longer mattered to Edward. And yet Edward knew his father would never do that — not because of love but pride. Edward would succeed him for better or worse; Longshanks would have no other son. If he should lose this one, there would be no more Plantagenets on the throne of England. Edward’s disregard for any physical threat from his father made him safe — but only bodily. Longshanks’s desire to crush what he saw as his son’s arrogance had only increased. And the prince was fighting back. “They fought for Wallace even when they were starving,” he said. “They died for him. They won’t fight for us.”
“No,” Longshanks said, shaking his gray mane like an angry lion. “You are wrong. They didn’t fight for Wallace. They fought for the idea that he would bring them victory. Now that idea has been destroyed. There is nothing unique about the Scots; they are like all people in their desire to align themselves with the strong and not with the weak. This idea, this dream, that Wallace was leading them to glory will make them even more likely than ever before to follow us, precisely because we are strong.”
“But if we have not caught Wallace –“ Edward began.
“He is gone!” Longshanks shouted. “Finished! Dead! If he as not yet bled to death or had this throat cut for him, he will not survive the winter! It is very cold — is it not, our flower?” He turned and smiled at the princess, standing far from the fire, at the cold draft of the window.
Everyone in the room was silent. Even Edward thought, The cruel bastard knows she thought Wallace was a better man than any she had met in London. He enjoys this, seeing he illusions shattered as well. And Edward himself, through he had never thought himself capable of feeling jealousy over any of Isabella’s affections, felt a sliver of satisfaction. When she had returned form her meeting with Wallace, she had glowed, and neither the king nor the prince had failed to notice it. When she had heard of Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk — Edward had taken the time to inform her of it personally — she had paled.
Now she stood on the far side of the room and heard the king’s question but didn’t turn around. She pushed open the shutters and stared outside at the wet snowflakes now swirling among the raindrops. Her breath fogged the air, and her eyes were we as the rain.
Inside the Bruce’s darkened chamber, the elder Bruce, his decaying features sagging from his face, stared across the table at his son. “I am the one who is rotting,” the old man said. “But I think your face looks graver than mine.”
“He was so brave. With courage alone he nearly won,” Robert said, his voice distant and tired.
“So more men were slaughtered uselessly!”
“He broke because of me. I saw it. He lost all will to fight.”
“We must have alliance with England to prevail here,” the elder Bruce said, pleading for his son to understand. “You achieved that! You saved your family, increased you lands! You –”
“Lands? Titles? What has this to do with that?”
“Everything.”
“Nothing!” Robert stood so suddenly his chair flew backward against the stone wall of his father’s dark chamber; the old leper sat so still that any visitor peeking in upon this private meeting might have thought the father’s skin was melting like sooted wax in the flame of the candle.
Young Robert paced back and forth in the square chamber. But he could find no words to open his heart, to let it spill out its hurt and anger. The leper spoke gently, “What I have asked of you is not easy. A king’s choices never are. But in time you will have all the power in Scotland.”
And suddenly young Robert exploded. “You understand nothing, Father! You say I own lands, title, men….. power! And you would have me own more.
Men fight for me because if they do not, I turn them off my land and starve their wives and children! Those men who bled the ground red at Falkirk, they fought for William Wallace, and he fights for something I’ll never have! And I took it from him in my betrayal. I saw it in his face on the battlefield, and it tears at me still!”
Robert shuddered; and yet he felt a strange feeling rising in him, a new strength that frightened him, threatening to overwhelm him, even as it struggled with his old weakness.
“All men betray!” his father was saying. “All lose heart. It is exactly why we make choices we make.”
“I don’t want to lose heart! I want to believe as he does!”
“My son…”
“No!!!” Robert shouted, his voice like a dagger to his father’s core. He spun to the door and looked back.
“I will never be on the wrong side again.”
He opened the door, not with the impulse of an anger that would fade but the slow calm of a man who had turned from a path he never meant to walk again. The leper did not look up, and he knew that his son did not look back.