already known to Longshanks.
Wallace, snatched timely from an escape, to be paid for by the proceeds of robbery from the King’s Treasury? With a safe conduct from the Pope so vague it could easily be ignored? It was a tale that could not fail — all Menteith had to do was deliver the man safely to those who would take him south to London and he could not avoid doing that without ending in irons himself.
Menteith knew it, too, for all his desperate wine-swilling.
‘Will you see him?’ he demanded and Kirkpatrick tried not to react violently at the suggestion.
‘Best he does not know of my part in it,’ he said, as if the entire affair did not hang on Wallace knowing nothing of Kirkpatrick’s involvement, which would lead him to the Bruce part in it.
‘Best to let him believe Lang Jack did him in. That way, word will get out to those Wallace men left and there will be further division among them — and no further rebellion in this part of the realm.’
Menteith nodded sullenly and Kirkpatrick eased a little. If Wallace discovered that Kirkpatrick had betrayed him nothing would convince him that Bruce had not ordered it and there was no telling what secrets he might spill.
This way, the Wallace was sent off, growling and tight-lipped, for a date with the executioner, while Lang Jack would last as long as it took for Kirkpatrick to track him to a dark alley, reeling drunk with his new riches. No- one would mourn the traitor who had led Wallace to the English, or help find the vengeful killer.
And Bruce had his road to the throne unblocked.
A big risk, of course — but Bruce had sat, quiet and still when Kirkpatrick had voiced this, the pair of them alone.
‘He will not betray anyone he believes holds the freedom of the Kingdom in regard,’ he had replied and so clearly, breathtakingly, considered that to be himself that Kirkpatrick had no answer to it. He had left Bruce kneeling, head bowed in prayer, or penitence, for what he was about to do.
Or mayhap he tries to appease the Curse of Malachy, Kirkpatrick thought to himself with a bitter twist of humour, for forcing him to weigh his soul with so great a sin. I doubt he will, but it would be good of him to offer a prayer for the sins he has heaped on my soul.
He stepped out into the rainwashed night, wanting to put distance between himself and the shackled giant he could feel through the stones of the keep.
Yet, all the long, wet night’s ride away from the place, he felt the heat of Wallace’s unseen, accusing stare through the dark of his prison and felt something he had not felt for a long time, something calloused over long since and now split open, raw and red.
Shame.
He stared at the stones as if he could dig through them with only his gaze, as if his eyes could search out those left and shame them into rescue.
In the dark, he knew most of them were dead. Those who had stuck by him, that is — the others would deny him faster than Saint Peter did Christ. He crossed himself for the blasphemy, but could not stop the wry thought creeping in, that even God had forsaken Will Wallace faster than he did Christ on the Cross.
Who else had forsaken him? He thought of them then, the faces coming at him like dead leaves whirling in a wind. Fergus the Beetle, arguably the most loyal of all, had died of the coughing sickness last winter, slick with sweat and pain and fear and still able to call Wallace ‘the best chiel he had ever walked with’.
There had been others there to meet Fergus when he slipped into God’s Grace, good men — aye, and women as well — who had followed him for the belief in it. They had fought and laughed, taken hunger and plenty in equal measure and had found the understandings that come with a life so close together, so shared in the one desire — a good king in a realm that was their own.
Gone. All gone, snuffed like a guttering candle and the best part of him with it. He looked at his hand, grimed and shackled; once it had slashed Hell into his enemies, had pressed an arrogance of seal into letters on behalf of the Kingdom. Now it was fastened to the wall of the cell they called Lickstone, because the only way of quenching your thirst was to suck the damp from the run-off near the lintel.
He knelt in the darkness, shivering and silent and wondered who had betrayed him. Lang Jack Short, of course — but he would have been put to it, by appeals to vengeance as much as a fat purse. Should not have broken his neb before, Wallace thought. Even if the wee moudiewart bastard had deserved it, carping on and on about what should be done and what should not, as if he had been leader…
Leader of nothing now. Left to pay the price for it — his fist closed, as if on the hilt of the sword he no longer had. Everything worked for, gone like smoke.
Like dreams.
Who had betrayed him? A woman, possibly, though he could not recall any he had treated particularly badly — nor any he had loved particularly well.
Menteith, mayhap. No, he was only the luckless chiel who had to carry it out and was clearly unhappy at it. He had come to Wallace not long after he had been huckled into the cell, loaded with enough chains to stagger a pachyderm. Poor Sir John, Wallace had thought at the time, seeing the man standing with his mourn of a face and his feet shuffling in the filthy straw, trying to summon up the words to say how sorry he was.
‘When you decide that peace is best at any price,’ Wallace had told him, ‘the price you pay is in chains.’
‘It is you in chains,’ Sir John had spat back, unable to contain his pride, even now.
‘Here,’ Wallace had replied, shaking his shackled wrists, not yet fastened to the wall.
‘No’ here or here,’ he added, touching his heart and his head.
Clever Will, who could not button his arrogant lip. Menteith had flushed to the brim of his fading hairline and ordered ‘the prisoner’ fastened to the wall.
Not Menteith, then. Buchan or Badenoch, playing some cat’s cradle game of their own in which they saw Will Wallace’s end as some new beginning for the Comyn.
But if it was new beginnings we are speaking of, he thought to himself, then Bruce is at the heart of it. He heard himself say it, clear as running water, when they had crossed swords at Haprew.
If I remain, you cannot get started.
In the end, it did not matter which black heart had done it, for he knew that his time was done and that all he had fought and bled for — aye, and all the bodies he had stepped over, on both sides, to achieve what he did — was come to nothing.
Freedom was as far from the Kingdom as it now was from himself and he knelt in the sodden dark and felt the black years of it leak from him in a series of hacking sobs, a brief collapse into pity for poor Will Wallace, abandoned and alone and facing sure death.
Just as quickly, he reeled back from it. A last few sobs, a snort of snot into the back of his throat and he hoiked out his fear and loss in a disdainful spit. That life was gone and what was broken could not be mended. All he could do now was die well, so as to leave some flame for others to follow.
He knew they would — and if they had to do it over his body, then it was no more than he had done over others. It does not matter if I fall as long as someone else picks up my sword and keeps fighting.
He climbed unsteadily to his feet, though there was no-one to see. Better to die standing than live on your knees.
London
The Vigil of St Bartholomew, August, 1305
The great pillared aisles sweated with those craning to see, genuinely curious even if many had only come because the King wished it. They watched him, sitting in state, in ermine and gold circlet, one hand stroking his curled silver beard, the drooping eye like a sly, winsome invite to the giant who stood alone and overloaded with chains on the top step of Westminster.
The great and the good, crusted with finery and stiff in their curule chairs, stared back at Wallace with fish eyes while le Blound, Mayor of London, cleared his throat and read the indictment, uncurling the considerable roll of it as he did so.
‘… trial at Westminster before Johannes de Segrave, P. Maluree, R. de Sandwich, Johannes de Bakewell, and Jean le Blound, Mayor of the Royal City of London, on the vigil of St Bartholomew, in the thirty-third year of the reign of King Edward, son of Henry…’
Bruce watched Segrave, who had brought Wallace to London in an overloading of chains and would take away the pieces of him afterwards — and be handed a purse of silver for his expenses.
