The Guardian Page 6

  The morning that followed was no better, revealing a sodden panorama of drenched grasses and waterlogged meadows. I dismantled my small camp quickly, then headed steadily westward while I broke my fast on some of the food supplied by the priory kitchens, a dried mixture of grains, chopped nuts, and finely diced dried fruit that was both delicious and highly nourishing. I walked all day, eating another handful of the ration mixture around noon, and as the sun began sinking towards evening I met a farmer who directed me to a small monastery less than a mile from where we met.

  I was made welcome by the tiny community of Franciscan brothers there, the first members of that order I had ever encountered—they were foreigners and new to Scotland in those days— and I was more than simply glad of the opportunity to strip off my sodden outer garments and dry myself thoroughly by a fine, generous fire of well-dried peat. After a night of warmth and comfort in a padded straw bed that left me feeling mildly guilty over what felt like shameful self-indulgence, I stepped out again into the unchanged world of sullen, unrelenting rain and resumed my journey, concentrating grimly on my daily prayers as I trudged, ankle-deep and far from anything resembling a road, through the mire that served as my cross-country path.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ST. DOMINIC’S IRISHMAN

  Ireached Ayr just before noon on the fourth day. I had somehow managed to travel all around the town for years without ever actually setting foot in it, and when I finally did arrive there, I went directly to the parish church in the faint hope of finding Bishop Wishart. Faint hope, indeed; I could tell by the overall stillness and lack of traffic that the town held no great men that day.

  The church itself, as I had known from hearsay, was finer and more substantial than many another in similarly sized towns the length and breadth of Scotland, because it was the family church of the man all Scotland knew as the Steward or the Stewart. The Stewart family had been the hereditary High Stewards of the realm for a hundred and thirty years, since the days of King David I, and Sir James, the current chief whom my employer had come here to meet, was the fifth of his august line. His status as one of the realm’s greatest magnates was reflected in everything that represented his authority, including the great new cathedral that had been under construction for years by then in Glasgow, which lay within his territories, and this lesser, more mundane parish church of Ayr, which housed the remains of many of his ancestors.

  Unsurprised at finding the place deserted, I hitched up my travelling bag and made my way around to the presbytery behind the church, where I knew I would find someone in residence, even if it were no more than a caretaker. I stopped short of the house, though, and stood in the rain when I found myself being scrutinized by a tall, black-clad priest in the presbytery doorway who appeared to be leaning sideways, holding the wide single door open with his body as he watched me approach. I gazed back at him, seeing what I took to be suspicion and a hint of open contempt in his expression. I was more amused than offended by that, for I knew that had I been he, watching me approach the sanctum that was his charge, my own lip would have curled as his had.

  Even through the solid downpour, from more than twenty paces, I could see he was a Dominican, though whether monk or priest I could not discern. The order, sometimes called the Preachers, contained both and was characterized by its mendicant status, its brethren travelling the land in poverty, preaching in the local tongues and living on the goodwill and charity of the inhabitants. Ordinary folk everywhere spoke of them as the Black Friars, the name derived from the black cloak that they wore over their white habits, and the triple-knotted white rope girdling this one’s habit provided the final confirmation. I knew that nominally, at least, he would have recognized me as a cleric of some kind, from the muddy skirts of the ankle-length cassock beneath my heavy travelling cloak, but apart from that I could have been anyone, even an outlaw who had killed a priest for his cassock and was bent on further plunder.

  Beneficent theory and the platitudes of sanctimony both dictate that priests should treat all men as children of God, deserving of love, respect, and compassion. Pragmatic reality in sudden encounters with strangers, though, has a far more human focus. Four days of trudging over the hills in the worst weather Scotland could produce had done nothing to enhance my appearance, and I was well aware of how I must look to his eyes. Drenched and bedraggled, gaunt, wildly bearded and covered in mud from booted feet to waist, I stood and waited for him to acknowledge me, and he did not keep me waiting.

  “If you turn and look up at the sky over your left shoulder, you’ll see a wondrous sight.”

  The words were unexpected, yet spoken in Scots, and his tone was friendly, so I turned to look back as he suggested. And there, several miles away, beyond the grey rain that continued to fall all around me, was a rent in the clouds from which shafts of golden light spilled straight down. I watched it in silence for a few moments, then turned back to him.

  “Wondrous is right,” I said. “Strange how the most common things can appear miraculous, depending upon circumstance.”

  “Do you have a name, friend?” His voice, even across the distance separating us, was pleasantly modulated but definitely not Scots. I guessed him this time as being Irish, and the intonation of his next words proved me right. “For if you do, and if I recognize it, I might let you come in out of the rain.”

  “Wallace,” I said. “Father James Wallace, secretary and amanuensis to Bishop Wishart.”

  “Aha! Then you’re the very fellow I’m waiting for. His Grace bade me wait for you here and bring you to him. Come away in.”

  He stepped back, holding the door open for me as I crossed the threshold, where I propped my staff in a corner and set my heavy pack down beside it, then stood dripping in the entranceway.

  “Wet out there,” he murmured, and he reached for my cloak. “Give me that,” he said.

  I gladly shrugged out of it, and he reopened the door and, grunting with the effort, shook the garment hard, scattering a storm of water drops from the waxed wool. “There,” he said eventually, and kicked the door shut again. “We can hang that to dry for a while. How long have ye been walking?”

  “Four days.”

  “And rained on all the way? That might make some men doubt their own sanity, wondering why they did not stay at home in the first place.”

  I wondered if he was twitting me, but he was smiling gently, his face empty of guile. “It might,” I agreed, and then added on the spur of the moment, “Or even lead them to doubt the goodwill of the superiors who set them to the task.”

  It was a risky, even a dangerous thing to say to an unknown priest. He might use it against me afterwards, in pursuit of his own ambitions, or he might simply pass it on unthinkingly, unwittingly condemning me as deficient in my regard for authority. And yet some reckless urging had prompted me to test the man. His response, though, could not have been better designed to put my mind at rest about his motives.

  “Superiors who must have known long in advance how foul the weather was to be,” he agreed, straight-faced and soberly judicious.

  “Absolutely,” I concurred, grinning. “I’ll make sure to take my lord bishop to task on that when I catch up with him. Where is he, by the way? You do know, I presume?”

  “Of course I know. At least I hope I do. I’ve been waiting here to take you to him, so would I not look the fine fool did I turn out not to know where he is? But come and warm yourself,” he said. “There’s a grand fire in the hearth, in here.”

  He led me into a large, open room off the entranceway and waved me towards the leaping flames. I made directly for them, stretching my hands gratefully towards the heat. Then, simply because the words came into mind, I said, “I doubt I’ve ever met an Irish Dominican.”

  “I’m sure of it. There’s only me, I think, because I entered the order in France and I met none of my ilk even there.”

  “France, eh? And how came you to France, from Ireland?”

  “I was sent, right
enough. God be praised.” He blessed himself with the sign of the cross. “My tutors saw something in me when I was a lad that they said must have been planted there by God Himself, since none of my clan at home, fine men though they be, were capable of breeding it into me. They told my lord about it, and he singled me out for special teaching, which took me to France eventually.”

  “Whereabouts? I hear France is a wonderful place.”

  He grinned. “It is. I was in Paris. Where else? They sent me to study at the university there, and there I stayed, lodged with the Brethren of St. Dominic, at the Priory St. Jacques.”

  I made a phew-ing sound with my lips. “Had I a tooth in my mouth to make it possible, I’d whistle at that, for I’m much impressed. Who was your lord in Ireland?”

  “He is my lord still, and the greatest in all Ireland. Sir Richard de Burgh, the Earl of Ulster.”

  “Ah, now that’s a name worth naming. And what about you, my learned friend, do you have a name a man might call you? And are you priest or simple monk?”

  He grinned again, displaying a fine, surprisingly white set of sound-looking teeth. “I am both. Martin is the name my mother called me, and by it I have been christened, confirmed, and ordained.”

  Close to him as I now was, I could see there was no doubting his Irishness, even had his speech not betrayed it. He had thick, unruly black hair and a high forehead suggestive of a keen intellect. His ears were almost comically big, and the corners of his brown eyes were creased with laughter wrinkles.

  “Will you tell me, then, Father Martin, where you think my bishop might be?”

  “They set out for the Isle of Bute, Sir James and him, four days ago. D’ye know Bute at all? Lord Stewart has a castle there, at Rothesay. Since then, though, they sent back word that they had had to change their plans and were bound for Castle Turnberry, in Carrick. That’s Bruce territory.”

  “What prompted this change of plans, did they say?”

  He shook his head, no trace of levity visible now. “They neglected to say, so I’ve no idea. But I imagine it’s in Turnberry we’ll find them.”

  “And how far to there from here?”

  “Ayr to Turnberry? Fifteen or so miles in all, so six hours at a brisk walk, I’d say—and all on good roads, which you’ll enjoy.”

  I shivered despite being dry for the moment in the warm house, depressed at the thought of taking to the road again. “Then we had best be on our way, before they can change their minds again and make for Bute. Are you ready to leave?”

  “I am. But sure, there’s no need to trip over ourselves. His lordship took the trouble to send word that they were changing plans. It makes no sense, then, that he would change his mind again and not let us know that, too. Otherwise we’d never find him at all, and he wants us to find him. Remember what the Romans used to say: Festina lente. Go slowly, if you would make quick progress.”

  He crossed to one of the room’s two windows, where he pushed open the shutters and bent to look out and upwards. “The clouds are scattering and the sun is shining. Praise be to God, the storm is over. It won’t grow dark until near ten o’clock, and it’s not long after noon now, so we are in no hurry.” He turned back to me, his eyes alight with mischief. “Father Malachy is the parish priest here in Ayr, and he is avoiding us because he thinks I may be less than respectful in the way I show my gratitude for his hospitality. He’s here in the house, somewhere, but he is absolutely scandalized by what I was doing before you arrived, and so he is registering his disapproval by hiding from us and insulting you.”

  “I see … And what, exactly, were you doing before I arrived?”

  “I was exercising my initiative and preparing a welcome for you.”

  “And that scandalized the good father? I am almost afraid to ask, but what kind of welcome were you preparing?”

  “A hot bath, Father James, what else? Knowing you had spent days on the road in a howling storm, and having heard from the bishop himself about your love of hot baths, I asked myself what could have been more welcome to you upon arrival here. I had one myself, three days ago, soon after my own arrival and after but a single day in the storm. But the mere thought of such a thing sent poor old Father Malachy into a fit of nervous prostration. He had his annual bath at Easter, he informed me, and had considered his duty done for the year. But now, forced to tolerate the abomination twice in but one week beneath the roof of his own presbytery, he might never recover.”

  “Wait,” I said, waving a hand to silence him. “You prepared a bath for my arrival, when I myself had no idea when I would be arriving?” I looked around me. “And I see no signs of any bath.”

  “Hah!” I swear he performed a little jig. “You see no signs of it because it’s in the kitchen. I’ve had it ready since this morning, for I, at least, knew you would be coming—if not today, then tomorrow—and it is a simple thing to keep water hot, once you have it heated in the first place.”

  I was entranced at the thought of climbing into a tub of hot water, a luxury I would not have dared to imagine even a single hour before. “So,” I said, attempting to conceal any trace of the excitement I was feeling, “this bath is prepared, now?”

  “Aye, if you’re ready for it. And in the meantime, we’ll get your cassock washed and your boots cleaned up. We’ll need to leave by three, if we’re to get to Turnberry before ten, but that gives us two hours to dry off the worst of things in front of a roaring fire, and if the weather stays fine, to blow the smoke out of what remains. So, are you ready?”

  Two hours thereafter I was a new man in almost every respect, scrubbed and shaved and wrapped in fresh, warm clothing, the nethermost of which had lain clean and dry in the deepest recesses of my pack as I trudged through the four-day storm. My transformation was completed with a quick meal in the presbytery kitchen: a slab of succulent salted, spit-roasted pork between two thick pieces of bread still warm from the oven and a vast tankard of foaming, home-brewed ale, dark and rich textured, tasting of hops, nuts, and some kind of berry. Then, bolstered and rejuvenated, I took to the road again in the middle of the afternoon, happy this time to have Father Martin by my side.

  “Do you know Carrick?” he asked me as soon as we had passed through Ayr’s main gate.

  I glanced at him sideways. He had spoken in Latin for the first time since we’d met, and I wondered, because of that, what the question really entailed, for I doubted that a simple yes or no was what he wanted.

  “Which Carrick?” When he looked at me, clearly baffled by my question, I continued, “Do you mean Carrick the place or Carrick the earl?”

  “Oh,” he said, and shrugged. “Both, I suppose. I don’t know much about either one.”

  I thought for a moment. “Well then, I’m sure you know already that the name of the place comes from the old tongue, from the same word as crag, and means ‘the rocky place.’ And from what I’ve seen, it couldn’t be better named. You couldn’t farm there, even if you wanted to. You can raise sheep, but that’s about all.”

  “No goats?”

  “Aye, hordes of them, but goats don’t count. They’ll keep a man and his family fed and mayhap clad, but milk and meat’s about all they’re good for. Sheep, on the other hand, have wool, and you can sell wool profitably. That’s what all the folk in Carrick do. They’re all sheepherders.”

  “And what about the earl?”

  “He’s an earl. He probably wouldn’t even recognize a sheep unless someone told him what it was. And atop that, he’s a Bruce. Robert Bruce. But they’re all Roberts, the Bruces. He’s the seventh consecutive one.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw him nod. “I knew that,” he said, “but only because I overheard it somewhere. And I was told that the Bruces have been Stewart vassals since the first Steward was appointed. Is that not right?”

  “I suppose it is—right enough, at any rate. But the whole thing’s much more complicated than a simple liege-and-vassal relationship. It’s not plain tenantry and patronage. N
owadays there’s blood and kinship involved, too.”

  He looked surprised. “Then they’re related, the Bruces and the Stewarts?”

  I laughed. “Aye, that they are, and closely, nigh on incestuously, some might say. Close-knit by blood and marriage.”

  “Incestuously?” He had stopped walking the moment I uttered the word, and now he was staring at me with genuine horror. I remembered that he was very young and therefore naive, and a priest, to boot. I waved my hand dismissively, realizing I had gone too far.

  “No,” I said emphatically. “It is sinfully untrue even to suggest such a thing in jest and my tongue but ran away with me. I wanted no more than to emphasize the closeness of the bonds binding their two houses.”

  His expression cleared and he began to walk again. “No matter. Tell me, though, about this blood-and-marriage relationship. You used the word ‘nowadays,’ and that suggests a kind of newness to things. How did that happen, and when?”

  “A while ago. You know the Stewart family name was originally Norman, do you not?”

  His eyes widened. “No, not a bit. I thought they were all Highlanders, from north of the Forth. They’re Norman, you say?”

  “Aye …” I paused, remembering something I had heard years earlier. “But that might not be absolutely true. According to Bishop Wishart, the family’s ancestral name was fitz Flaad, and they were reputed to be, as he put it, Norman by culture and training, but Breton by birth. Anyway, the first one we know of over here in Scotland was a man called Walter Fitzalan, and his son was Alan Fitzwalter.”

  “And how came they here, to Scotland?”

  I grunted, wryly wondering how many times that question had been voiced these past two hundred years and more. “The same way all the others came. They were sent north to settle here by William of Normandy when he became King of England after his conquest. They arrived about two hundred years ago, and sixty or seventy years later one of them became king—King David the First of Scotland. It was he who appointed Walter Fitzalan to be High Steward of the realm, in return for his services to the Crown. The two were friends, of course, and had probably grown up together, but the new Steward, Walter Fitzalan, must have been a formidable man, because the King made the appointment hereditary, granting the stewardship to Walter’s sons in perpetuity. Lord James, the current Steward, is the fifth consecutive holder of the title.”