Braveheart (27 page)

But there was no answer. They headed downstairs. At the bottom of the staircase, they looked in both directions but saw no sigh of Wallace. Both men were troubled; there were men here who would have been happy to plunge a dagger into their friend’s back, and they meant to be watching it. Without a word, Stephen and Hamish split up and move off to search for him.

Several minutes later, Hamish moved into the stables, just as Stephen wandered in from the opposite side. A groom was there, currying the horses.

Hamish and Stephen sat down on the wet hay and watched the rain. They watched for a long time. Then Hamish stood slowly and reached for his saddle.

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.”

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.”

“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.

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.

For a long time after young Robert had gone, his father sat in his chamber and stared at the slowly dancing flame of the candle.

50

King Philip of France did not consider himself a decisive man. He never expressed this opinion publicly, of course; kings are expected to demonstrate some deference to God –claiming, as they do, that their right to rule flows from Him and thus they are closer to the Almighty than are other mortals –but they can never compare themselves to other men, much less do so unfavorably.

But Philip knew his history and was aware that kings are judged – when they are dead, and appraisal is allowed –- by their victories. Conflicts that remain unresolved throughout their reigns seem testaments to the limits of their abilities, and Philip had know nothing but struggle.

At the age of seventeen, he came to a throne that had been held by kings who, in retrospect, seemed to have been all powerful. They ruled the Holy Roman Empire, that political manifestation of the Catholic dream that all Christendom should be united under one temporal head, elected by the pope and his cardinals. But Philip seemed born into squabbling. His throne was attacked from within and from without. Longshanks, across the channel, claimed that he should rule both England and France, and Philip was forced to spend almost all of his time forging alliance among his own nobles to resist Longshanks’s diplomacy and armies. And in moments when Philip found breathing room from that problem, his energies were drawn to the perils of the Holy Catholic Church itself; the Vatican had fallen into so much of corruption and contention that Philip would eventually be forced, in the year 1309, to move the papacy to Avignon, and the world would have not one infallible pontiff but two, each of whom consigned the other to hell.

The demands of the throne were complicated and Philip managed the best he could. Faced with hundreds of difficult decisions that, once made, only seemed to result in the need to make other decisions, he began to consider himself indecisive, if he could truly
decide
something, he thought then he wouldn’t be forced to keep deciding again and again. If he could somehow make things simpler, then he might achieve a name like Charles I, who had become known as Charlemagne – Charles the Great – or Louis IX, who had been canonized as Saint Louis.

Philip IV was known as Philip the Fair.

It was midafternoon on a fine Parisian day when this handsome, dark-haired king of France was hoping he could conclude his business son enough to stroll among his gardens while the sun was still up, that Deroux, one of his many advisors, entered the palace audience chamber wearing a worried look. This was not unusual; all his advisors were forever looking troubled. The king only noted the weighty expression because he had been working since dawn and had thought the stream of troublesome matters being brought before him had finally dried up for the day. This last advisor waited his turn as Philip waded through the deliberations at his usual steady pace; but when at last the king turned to him and said, “Yes, Deroux,” The man seemed unprepared to respond.

William Wallace
. King Philip knew in an instant why Deroux had been hesitating. That name had cause head scratching and uncertainty in the French court since the first time it was spoken, just after the Battle of Stirling, where an English army more powerful than the ones that had been bedeviling France had been driven from Scotland in a single day. An unknown commoner? A military genius? A legendary figure who had taken an army away from the nobles who owned it and then led it to victory? Some of Philip’s advisors doubted this Wallace actually existed.

Then they had received a letter from him. It was written in clear, forceful French strictly correct if a bit academic. The letter petitioned the French king and his court to enter pacts of defense and trade. It made no mention of their common enemy but pointed out in a direct fashion the benefits to both countries of such an alliance. King Philip had often thought how advantageous it would be to utilize the military and economic potential of Longshanks’s northern neighbors; it was obvious to him that Longshanks’s efforts to crush the Scots were meant to prevent just such a possibility.

But nothing was ever simple. Philip’s advisors had told their king that it might not be prudent to respond to Wallace’s letter favorably; perhaps it was dangerous to respond at all. The Scottish nobles were distrustful and divided. Did this Wallace possess the authority to create alliances? If so, how long would his ability last?