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  For long moments after that no one spoke, and it was the young newcomer, Sir Alexander Lindsay, who broke the silence.

  “You said, my lord, unlike any leader in this part of Scotland.” He cleared his throat nervously. “Forgive me if I seem foolish or ignorant, but there are other leaders elsewhere, I’ve been told. One in particular in the north, beyond Forth, the young nobleman Andrew de Moray, or Murray. I know the name, of course, for he is heir to one of the great estates in all Scotland. But the tenor of all that I have heard—although that be garbled reports from people who have heard tales from other people who have been told by others—is that this young man is something of a paragon, single-handedly putting the fear of God into every Englishman north of Forth.” He looked from one to the other seated at the head table. “Is there anyone here who can speak knowledgeably about this man?”

  The Steward laughed, a booming, wholehearted sound, and waved a hand in invitation to Bishop Wishart, who smiled almost as broadly as he leaned forward to address the knight of Lindsay.

  “You are fortunate to have asked that question here, Sir Alexander, for there is one among us who can speak with certainty and familiarity about the man you have named.” He pointed down to where I sat with my four clerical companions. “Father de Moravia there has been pastor of Bothwell these past few years, but he is uncle, godfather, and mentor to the very man of whom you speak, young Sir Andrew Murray, the heir to Petty in Moray. Father?”

  Father Murray nodded around the gathering. “De Moravia,” he said, “is Murray nowadays, the old name changed, like that of the House of Stewart, to reflect our Scottish identity today. I know not if I might honestly claim to be a mentor of any kind to young Andrew Murray, but I think highly of him and I know he holds me in equal regard. I met with him a few days since, and I will be glad to tell you all you want to know of him. But it will take time, and I think we might do well to pause and stretch our legs before I continue.”

  I saw agreement written plain on several faces, for we had been at table by then for more than two hours, and the idea of an interruption, however brief, was a welcome one. When Lord James rose from his seat moments later and began to make his way towards the latrines at the rear of the house, I followed him, along with several others, and, in the way of such things, ended up standing shoulder to shoulder with the young Earl of Carrick as we voided our bladders thankfully.

  When we had finished and were adjusting our clothing, he walked out with me into the gloaming and looked at me with amicable curiosity. “Bishop Wishart has asked me to make some time to talk with you, Father, and I admit to being a bit perplexed. Am I permitted to ask what it is you wish to talk to me about?”

  I smiled, hoping to put him at ease. “You are, my lord. I had the privilege of meeting your grandfather when I was a boy, and he told me then he had a grandson my age—a grandson who shared his name and was to be the seventh Robert Bruce. I have been curious about you ever since, for no other reason than that, and so when His Grace the bishop told me you were here I said I hoped to be able to meet you and talk with you, to still that curiosity, I suppose.”

  “I see. And how came you to know my grandsire?”

  “Through my cousin William Wallace.”

  “Of course! The bishop told me that, but I had forgotten.” He shrugged. “I doubt we’ll have much time to talk tonight, the way things are transpiring, but perhaps tomorrow?” He hesitated. “Do you hunt, by any chance?”

  “No, my lord, I do not,” I said. “But I can ride a horse adequately well, and I can beat the bushes in a good cause as well as any man.”

  His lips twitched in the start of a smile. “Good. We are riding out in the morning. If you would care to come with us, you and I might find time to talk between stalks. More chance there than anywhere else that I can see.”

  Moments later we were back at our separate tables, preparing to listen to what Father Davie Murray had to say about his nephew.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE PRIEST FROM BOTHWELL

  As we took our seats again, it occurred to me once more that this group with whom I was dining was no mere accidental agglomeration of passing strangers. I suspected—and the impression was growing steadily stronger—that I might be the sole outsider in the assembly, but I had no awareness of what the group represented other than a fierce resentment of England and all things English. I knew I should not have been there, strictly speaking, and I could feel Bishop Wishart’s patronage hanging over me like a protective canopy.

  Father Murray looked about him unhurriedly, an easy smile on his lips as he acknowledged each man there, and I felt a stir of admiration at his complete lack of nervousness or self-consciousness. When he started to speak, he addressed us in Scots, which surprised me at first, because I had been expecting a priest to speak in Latin. But then I acknowledged that some of the knights among us, and in truth probably all of them, spoke little or no Latin.

  “Bishop Robert has asked me to tell you about my nephew Andrew,” he began. “But I’m not quite sure where to start. The beginning’s always a good place, of course—makes developments far easier to understand in the normal run of things. But once in a while I find a situation where I can’t simply point and say, ‘There! It started there.’ That’s what we have here. How many of you have ever been north of Forth?”

  The group was surprised by the unexpected question, and three of his listeners raised their hands—Lord James Stewart, Bishop Wishart, and Alpin, the Bishop of Dunblane. Father Murray nodded. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “that makes things easier. I’ll start by telling you a wee bit about my home in Moray, and then you’ll have a better idea of what life is like up there. Of course, the first thing you need to understand is that everyone there speaks the Gaelic.” He pronounced it the Highland way, making it sound like garlic with no r. “You’ll find no other languages in use up there at all, except English, and the only people who speak that, as you might expect, are Englishmen.

  “What you probably do not expect to hear is that there are more Englishmen in Moray at this time than there are in all the other regions of Scotland combined. So, let me tell you what is happening up there.” He drew in a deep breath. “There are three great firths on Scotland’s east coast, the southernmost being the Firth of Forth, which as you all know divides the country into north and south and which you may not know the English call the Scottish Sea. Above Forth, some fifty miles farther up, is the Firth of Tay, and north of that, eighty miles across the mountains as the crow flies, or a hundred and more miles along the coastline afoot, lies the Moray Firth, the homeland of us Murrays.

  “Don’t be confused by the names. They may sound the same, but they are not the same at all. Our family name, as you have heard, was originally de Moravia—some of us still call ourselves that. But we settled in Moray many generations past, and our family name changed, over the years, to Murray, taking the name of the region, so that we are now called the Murrays of Moray and the two sound identical. As they should, for they are identical in our minds and hearts.

  “We have two towns worthy of note: Inverness and Aberdeen. Both are seaports and both are wealthy and prosperous. Which means that both are very attractive to England and its masters. Inverness is a small town, as towns go, but it is dominated by a very large castle that looms over it.” He added dryly, “Ye’ll note I did not say it’s protected by a very large castle. It is not, because the castle is garrisoned by England.”

  His bushy eyebrows shot up high on his forehead. “‘Oh,’ you say, ‘they even have a castle up there!’ Let me tell you, my friends, about some of the castles up there.” He held up a hand and began counting off names on his fingers. “Urquhart, Auch, Nairn, Forres, Elgin, Lochindorb, Boharm. They’re all castles in Moray. And they’re all as big as anything in Lothian.

  “They are also,” he said, knowing his words would shock, “all held and garrisoned by England. And I should mention, while I’m talking about them, that most of them belong t
o my eldest brother, Andrew … Sir Andrew Murray, Lord of Petty in Moray and father to the Andrew Murray I am here to talk about. My brother Andrew, more than twenty years my senior, is a patriot in the finest sense of the word—a true lover of the land that nurtured him—but I fear his day is done. He is an old, ill-used man now, and his lengthy confinement in London’s Tower will do nothing to better that.

  “His son, though, the younger Andrew Murray, is a worthy son to the brother I’ve known and admired all my life. Young Andrew was arrested with his father, of course, during Edward’s last campaign against us. But where the father was hauled all the way south to prison, the son was sent to Chester, in north Wales. Young Andrew had recently been married, though, and a young man in love will stop at nothing to avoid being separated from his mate. So he broke free last winter and came north to find his wife, and he stopped in Bothwell on his way, to ask for my advice.”

  “And what did you advise?” The question, low-voiced and growling, came from Sir William Douglas.

  “I advised him to keep moving north, avoiding contact with anyone until he was back in Moray.”

  “And was that last you’ve seen of him since?”

  “No, I saw him again ten days ago, before I returned here.”

  “Returned from where? You’ve been in the north, in Moray?”

  Instead of taking offence at the surliness in Douglas’s voice, the priest gave a half smile. “I have. Why should that surprise you, Sir William? It is my home, and I had time to visit family there for the first time in years once my recent tenure as pastor of Bothwell ended.”

  “So tell us, then, what’s happening up there.”

  “Chaos. There is panic and confusion everywhere, except, thanks be to God, among our own folk. The English are in turmoil throughout the entire region because the people there—the folk they thought were easy prey—have turned on them. They’re sickened and outraged by the abuse they’ve had to suffer from England’s arrogance for years now, and so they’re fighting back, killing Englishmen anywhere they find them. And as a result, faced with hostility on a scale they never imagined, the English don’t know where to turn for aid. They are too far away from home to summon support easily. And as if that were not discouraging enough, they have no confidence that their messengers are even getting through our lines.”

  Everyone, including me, was leaning forward, listening avidly.

  “And are they getting through?” Sir William Douglas asked in his rasping, intolerant-sounding voice.

  “No, to the best of our knowledge. But it’s only a matter of time until someone breaks through our lines and manages to summon help.”

  “Wait! Wait a moment, if it please you.” It was Sir Alexander Lindsay interrupting, his brow deeply furrowed. “This is disturbing.” He glanced around at the others. “Was everyone here but me aware of this?” It was plain, though, from the blank faces looking back at him, that everyone else was as ignorant as he was, and he turned back earnestly to the priest. “We have heard nothing of this, Father—nothing credible, at least. We hear the odd rumour about stirrings in the north, but nothing solid, nothing of this magnitude. How long has this been going on, and how did it begin?”

  The Highlander shrugged slightly, making no effort to disguise his lack of surprise. “It’s been going on since the beginning of May, though it could have started earlier. God knows everything was ready to erupt long before then, but matters lacked a spark to set the grass afire. It was the homecoming of Andrew Moray that set flint to steel. That and his meeting with Sandy Pilche. Both of those happened at the start of May.”

  The Steward spoke from his seat at the head table. “Who is Sandy Pilche? Should we know this man?”

  “No, my lord, you should not—not yet,” Murray said. “There was nothing to know about him until these past few weeks. But you’ll come to know the name well now, if I am any judge of things. Alexander Pilche is a burgess of Inverness, an important and influential one. He is a successful merchant, a free and well-respected citizen and, from what my nephew tells me, a natural leader of men above all else. Fate threw him and young Andrew together on the last day of April this year, and nothing has been the same in all of Moray since that meeting.”

  By merest chance I was looking at Lord James at that moment and I watched him turn and look inquiringly at Bishop Wishart, who shrugged in response and mimed wide-eyed ignorance. The Steward waved an urgent finger at the bishop and jerked his head.

  “Your pardon, Father Murray,” Bishop Wishart interrupted, “but I think this is something we should pursue, this matter of the man Pilche. If he’s to be as prominent as you suggest, we’ll need to know as much as we can about him, and the sooner the better. You said that nothing in Moray has been the same since he and your nephew first met, but you said nothing of whether that be for good or ill. Did they fight? Is there ill blood between them?”

  “Between Andrew and Sandy? Heavens, no.” The priest made it sound as though the very thought was ludicrous. “They are the best of friends, and I’m told they became so within days.”

  Wishart was frowning slightly. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, but close friendships, in my experience, are seldom spontaneous.”

  Father Murray dipped his head. “I gather that, in truth, they had not been complete strangers to each other. Pilche had a sister—a twin named Meg—who had been a lifelong friend to Andrew’s wife, Eleanor, and so when Andrew returned home to Inverness, knowing of course that his wife could no longer be living in Auch Castle, he sought out the town provost in search of trustworthy information. It was there, I believe, in the provost’s home that night, that he first encountered Sandy Pilche. I gather that the spark between them worked from that first meeting, because Andrew told me that he went the following day to Pilche’s warehouse, where they talked further and formed the bond that exists today. That is all I know. The history of their friendship did not appear important to me when I was talking with Andrew. There were other elements, like the uprising itself, that struck me as much more significant at the time.

  “I know not what else I might tell you. I know they spoke of many things that day, because Andrew told me how impressed he had been by Sandy’s attitude to the situation in Moray. And Sandy went to great lengths to try to keep Andrew from going anywhere near his family home. Auch lies a mere seven miles away from Inverness, across the firth on the promontory known as the Black Isle. And like every other castle in Moray at that time, it was held by the English, in this case, a knight called Geoffrey de Lisle. In Sandy Pilche’s opinion, de Lisle was the most dangerous and vicious Englishman in all of Moray. Intolerant and ruthless, unpredictable and universally detested—even, it was said, by his own garrison troops. The man had held the local populace in a state of terror since his arrival the previous year, when he quickly established a pattern of hanging men and women for no discernible reason other than whimsy, as though for his own amusement, since he invariably attended all such executions. The word of these atrocities had quickly reached Inverness, of course, but nothing could be done to stop them. De Lisle was all-powerful within his own fiefdom of Auch, and not even Sir Reginald de Cheyne, the military governor of Moray, could raise a finger against him from Inverness when de Lisle claimed to be following his orders and dealing harshly with rebels.

  “Even worse than the murders committed, though, Pilche deplored the other effects of the terror. Distracted by fear of losing their own lives and their families, some of the local people had begun informing on others around them, selling their friends and neighbours in the hope of purchasing their own safety. Under such conditions, Sandy Pilche believed, it would be more than merely difficult for Andrew to go undetected. He doubted that the young nobleman would be able to live openly in his home country, let alone survive there.

  “But Andrew merely laughed. Auch Castle was his home, he said. He had been born there, and he would take it back as his birthright. His father’s holdings were enormous, he pointed out, and he could l
ive anywhere within their borders, with the support of his people. He would be safe with them, he said. The Inverness provost had assured him that his wife had been living openly among them since Andrew’s capture, her identity unknown to the occupying English. He did not yet know what he might be able to achieve, now that he had come home, he told Pilche, but he had not returned all that way to sit around idly and do nothing, and it was obvious to him that the first thing that needed to be done was remove de Lisle from Auch Castle. He told Sandy he doubted that his folk would be content merely to hide him. They were Murrays, like him, and they would want him to lead them, too. He was sure they would follow him wherever he chose to go.”

  Hearing Father Murray say that, I looked across to where the young Earl of Carrick sat listening. According to the reports I had heard from Bishop Wishart, the younger Bruce had been in similar case to Andrew Murray very recently, but he had lost his young wife mere weeks before my cousin Will had lost his Mirren, and he had received very little support from his father’s tenants in Annandale when he returned to Scotland afterwards. On the contrary, they had viewed him with great suspicion because of his purported relationship with Edward of England, and had pleaded loyalty to his absent father. If the earl was making comparisons, however, it did not show on his face.

  “He did do something, though,” Lord James said. “Is that not so?”

  The priest smiled again. “Oh yes, indeed so. And it was something noteworthy, as all Moray knows today. Within a week of his return, he organized three score of the youngest and strongest of his men into a mounted fighting force, taking them into the wilderness of the Moray uplands to train them. Their mounts were mountain ponies, though, not English warhorses. Andrew had no intention of riding into battle against English cavalry. He set out from the start to use the land itself, its natural features, as a weapon, and so he trained his mounted corps to move quickly and attack swiftly, then withdraw and disappear into the hills before any organized pursuit could be thrown after them.