The Path to the Throne Page 4

  William Wallace cursed as the faint sounds of hoof beats reached his ears. Obviously the skittish hind had heard them first, or perhaps felt the slight vibration of the ground. He cursed the unknown rider and glowered at the youth who trotted up to where he stood. It was early December and the breath from both horse and rider condensed into wispy clouds in the cold air.

  The rider, a boy of about William’s age, wore the badge of the Stewarts and, from the dagger hanging from his belt, he must be a squire, though he scarcely looked old enough. William’s father, Sir Alan Wallace, was a Norman knight who held his manor of Elderslie from James Stewart, the High Steward.

  ‘You just robbed me and my family of meat for our table for the next week,’ he complained, scowling.

  ‘Hardly,’ the other boy replied and, when William looked puzzled, he added ‘not next week, it would have to hang for a while first.’ He then grinned at the exasperated look on the other’s face.

  ‘You’re being bloody pedantic, you know that, I suppose?’

  ‘So I’m told.’ He leaned down and held out his hand. ‘Robert de Brus, squire to Sir Andrew Stewart. I’ve a message for Sir Alan Wallace of Ellerslie.’

  ‘That’s my father,’ the boy sighed, realising that hunting was over for the moment. ‘I’ll come with you and show you the way.’

  He held his hand out and now it was Robert’s turn to look puzzled. ‘I’m not bloody walking whilst you ride; now pull me up behind you.’

  ‘What’s this message about, that’s so important it has to interrupt my hunting?’ William asked once he was seated behind Robert.

  The latter considered whether he should tell the son before handing the message to his father but, as it was common knowledge in Renfrew, he saw no harm in it.

  ‘The Queen’s baby was stillborn so the Maid of Norway is now the heir. The nobles are arguing amongst themselves about the regency and there is a rumour that the Maid’s father, King Olaf, might try and seize the throne for himself.’

  ‘Phew, so the High Steward is gathering his men, just in case?’

  Robert nodded. ‘Yes, I assume that’s what the message says.’

  Fifteen minutes later they scattered a grazing flock of sheep as they rode up to a stone tower house surrounded by a wooden palisade. There were a number of mean single storey dwellings with sod roofs dotted around Ellerslie and two dirty urchins, wearing nothing other than a length of cloth wrapped around their waists and over one thin shoulder, threw stones at them in retaliation for scattering the sheep. When William yelled at them, threatening to castrate them before they were old enough to sire any more ugly urchins, they laughed and ran off.

  William grinned and muttered ‘bloody Cowan twins – Malcolm and Findlay; they’re cheeky little buggers.’ Robert smiled to himself. He suspected that William had a soft spot for the two younger boys.

  As they neared the entrance to the palisade, he turned and asked William how old he was.

  Thirteen, I think,’ he replied. ‘My father isn’t great at remembering things like dates and my mother, who I suppose would know, died several years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry, about your mother I mean. We’re the same age then. I’ll be thirteen in a couple of months’ William grunted in reply, not greatly interested.

  As he rode back to Renfrew, having delivered the message, Robert wondered about William Wallace and the very different lives that they led. He had liked the boy instinctively and suspected that he was the sort of person that people would take to easily. Then he forgot about him; they were never likely to meet again.

  William had also liked Robert. Normally he detested the stuck-up scions of the nobility, or at least those few he had met. Although his father was a Norman knight, he lived more like a Celtic laird in his remote glen in Renfrewshire. Following tradition, he had arranged for William to go as a page in the household of the High Steward when he reckoned that the boy was about ten years old. It hadn’t worked. William had hated it and was always getting into fights. After two weeks he ran away and made his way home. He was half-starved by the time he got there and his father resigned himself to the fact that his son would never become a knight.

  William had accompanied Robert into the hall to meet his father and had waited as the squire had recited the message from the High Steward. In essence, the posthumous child of King Alexander having been a stillbirth, there was no clear claimant to the throne. The Stewarts had decided to back the claim of Robert de Brus of Annandale as he had been nominated by Alexander II years ago, before he had fathered a son. William had only half listened as he wasn’t greatly interested in the events unfolding in the world beyond his glen, though he realised that his father and some of his men would be leaving soon to join the muster at Renfrew. After Robert had left, he set off again to resume his hunt for game for the larder.

  Twenty minutes later he was slowly making his way through a small copse on a hillside, placing his feet down carefully so as not to break a twig or rustle a fallen leaf when he heard a sound behind him. He moved behind a tree and waited, expecting it to be the Cowan twins creeping up on him to see if they could surprise him. He grinned; they were good at tracking but not as good at hunting. As someone crept past the tree where he was hiding he leaped out at them and they crashed to the ground together, William on top. He heard the whoosh of air being forced out of the other person’s lungs and he grinned into their face as they lay there winded. The face was that of the Cowan twins but there was something slightly different about it. Furthermore the second boy hadn’t rushed to his brother’s rescue. It was only then that he realised that it wasn’t a boy at all, but their thirteen year-old sister, Mary.

  He pushed himself up in a hurry to get off her but she pulled his forearms to the side so he collapsed back on top of her.

  ‘Now you have me at your mercy, William Wallace, aren’t you going to force a kiss on me.’ She asked breathlessly, mainly because she was still trying to suck air back into her lungs.

  The boy gazed down into her blue eyes, mesmerised by them. He lowered his lips to meet hers then, surrealistically, he thought for a moment that he was about to kiss one of her brothers and he hesitated. He hadn’t realised how alike Mary and her younger brothers were; mind you, it was difficult to tell what the boys really looked like under their normal coating of grime. The eyes were the same though, as were the button nose and the full, red lips. Somehow they looked so attractive on Mary, whereas he had always thought of the twins as fairly ugly.

  Of course he had noticed her before – she was the prettiest girl near his age in the glen – but she had always ignored him and he had given up hoping that he could get to know her. On occasion he had thought she had been looking at him, but she had turned away before he could catch her at it. She did seem on occasion to have a little secret smile playing around her lips though.

  Now here she was lying beneath his body, miles away from prying eyes or risk of being discovered. He put his hands back either side of her head and pushed himself back up but left his stomach and legs in contact with hers. He felt himself growing hard and, in a panic that she would feel his erection pressing into her, tried to get up again. This time Mary threw her arms around his waist and pulled him onto her.

  ‘My, my William Wallace, one might almost make the mistake of thinking you were becoming a man.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Well, don’t you want to kiss me?’ she asked archly.

  William might be inexperienced and nervous around the opposite sex, but he had seen other couples kissing and rutting together enough times. He lowered his face and their lips met. After the first tentative peck, he kissed her harder, then he felt his teeth being forced apart as her tongue darted into his mouth. William was an enthusiastic learner and it wasn’t long before Mary’s loose dress was up around her waist and William had lost his virginity.

  Mary had been looking forward to kissing William, which was why she had followed him into the woods, but she had let things go a lot further than that in her
excitement. Afterwards she was disappointed as she had found the whole experience unsatisfying somehow. He had finished almost as soon as he had started and then had collapsed back on top of her, moaning with pleasure. She felt a wet patch under her bottom and, pushing the dreamily grinning boy off her, she rolled over to see her blood seeping into the earth. She thought that at least she didn’t have the problem of a bloody skirt to explain to her parents.

  ‘Sorry.’ William lay on his side with his head resting on his hand. ‘It was my first time and I came too quickly. Give me a moment to recover and I’ll take it slowly the next time so I make sure you enjoy it as much as I do.’

  ‘What makes you think there’s going to be a next time,’ Mary said with some asperity.

  ‘The fact that you are still here.’

  She laughed and rolled on top of him, kissing him passionately. She told herself that, as she had let him do it once, she might as well make the best of it. ‘You’re lucky I’m giving you a second chance. Make sure you don’t fluff it.’

  Fifty yards away two ten year-old boys were trying hard to stifle their giggles as they watched William and their sister make the beast with two backs again. At least they waited until the couple had finished before they darted out of their hiding place with birch twigs in their hands and gave William’s bare posterior a couple of stinging cuts before running back downhill as fast as they could, laughing all the way.

  ‘You’re dead, really dead this time,’ an enraged William called after them, before looking back incredulously at a giggly Mary.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You are, with your hose around your ankles and two angry red marks on your naked arse.’

  Mary and the Cowan twins were the children of the bailie who helped William’s father to manage his manor. As such they were a class above the freemen in the village but they were socially inferior to the laird and his son. Mary was fairly certain that Sir Alan Wallace would expect his son to marry the daughter of another laird, or maybe even of a lord. However, she had fallen in love with William when she was ten and had set about ensnaring him two years ago. She realised that, if she threw herself at him she would just become a boyhood conquest, one of his rites of passage, so she had bided her time and teased him.

  Having attracted his interest, she played catch me if you can but he seemed too shy for that to work. Her brothers had cottoned on to her interest in the laird’s son early on and they had teased her unmercifully about it, but they never said anything to William. Sometimes Mary wished they would.

  Eventually she had tired of playing the long game and decided to push things along a bit. When she had followed William that day she had only intended to get him to kiss her and maybe cuddle her to get him interested. Instead her passionate nature had taken over. She had enjoyed it at the time but she really worried about her parents finding out. If it became common knowledge she would be ruined and no-one would want her, least of all William Wallace. The more she thought about it the more she wanted to blame someone for her predicament. The obvious candidate was the boy who had deflowered her. Soon her love turned to hate. She was too young to realise how closely those two intense emotions are linked sometimes.

  William bided his time until one day he caught the twins cleaning out the byre on their small croft. He had planned his revenge carefully. The byre was a timber structure and the uneven roughly sawn planks that formed the walls had plenty of gaps in between them. He waited until Findlay paused for a rest and leant back against the wall for a moment. Will put his hand through a gap to the side of the boy’s head and quickly reached across his neck to grasp the end of a lather strap which he had poked through another gap. Before the boy realised it, the strap was pulled tight around his neck and the plank. William then tied the two ends together outside the byre. Findlay tried struggling but soon realised that the more he struggled the more difficult breathing became. He stood there quietly wondering what punishment William had in store. Their chastisement of him for making love to their sister was only a joke so surely he wouldn’t do anything too bad to them, would he? The two boys had actually been secretly delighted at the thought of their big sister getting it together with their best friend.

  Meanwhile his brother, Malcolm, carried on shovelling muck out of the door, ready to be carted away to the midden heap, when a sixth sense warned him something was wrong. He glanced at his brother and, at first couldn’t see what was amiss in the weak light that came into the byre from the doorway and the gaps in the planks. By the time he had made out the leather strap around Findlay’s neck it was too late. William ran in thorough the door and grabbed him.

  At thirteen William was big for his age and was as strong as many a boy several years older than him. He picked Malcolm Cowan up as if he weighed no more than a lamb, sat down on a saw horse and put the young lad over his knee. He lifted up the back of the boy’s kilt and spanked his bare bottom until it was red and angry looking. Then he let him go, warning him to stay where he was. Then he cut the thong round the other twin’s neck and did the same to him. William didn’t normally hurt the two boys in the way that he did that day, but he was terrified that they would let slip to their parents what he and Mary had been up to. To drive the lesson home he made the two scared boys stand in front of him. He drew his knife and poked the point at the front of each of their kilts. The boys stood there quivering with fear and Malcolm felt a warm trickle flowing down his legs. He hung his head in shame. It was important to William that they were too scared to ever reveal anything about that day in the woods, even inadvertently.

  ‘If you ever say anything about Mary and me, I’ll use this knife to cut off what you’ve got under your kilts. Understand?’ They both nodded vigorously and, when William gestured with the knife that they could go, they ran out of the byre sobbing.

  As a deterrent it worked. The Cowan boys never told anyone, but people noticed that they didn’t get up to much mischief anymore; and they avoided William Wallace as if he had the plague. William regretted losing their friendship, even if it had usually been personified by the tricks they played on him. He also very much regretted the change in Mary’s attitude towards him. This had already started before he thrashed the twins, but he hadn’t realised it. However, he was soon all too well aware of it. He reckoned that Malcolm and Findlay must have told her what had happened in the byre because the next time he saw her and went up to her with a smile, she glared at him and then spat in his face. She turned without saying a word and stormed off.

  When it became clear that there was no imminent danger of a war over the regency his father returned with his men to the glen. They would be staying, which was just as well as the few crops they grew were ripening and would need harvesting soon, but his father was to accompany Lord James Steward to Edinburgh as part of his escort. The High Steward was now one of the six Guardians of Scotland, chosen to rule on behalf of the infant queen.

  ‘You’ll be coming with me as my squire, William. The youngest of the men served me as body servant and looked after my armour last time, but all the other knights had squires and I felt ashamed that I didn’t.’

  William wasn’t particularly happy about becoming a squire, mainly because of his unfortunate experience as a page, but he felt that leaving the glen, and the Cowans, for a while might be for the best. He was also proud to be serving his father.

  But he was surprised by the farewell the Cowan twins gave him. He was packing his father’s armour and weapons onto a packhorse as evening approached when a clod of mud hit him in the back of the neck. He whirled around to find the two boys standing there looking sheepish.

  ‘Peace?’ Malcolm asked as they walked up to him.

  ‘Peace,’ William nodded, then smiled.

  ‘Look, we’re really sorry for spying on you and Mary that day,’ Findlay told him in a whisper, ‘but you should have known that we would have never said anything. There was no need to scare the shite out of us.’

  ‘You’ll never k
now how sorry I am about that,’ William smiled ruefully. ‘Especially as it seems to have buggered up my chances with your sister.’

  ‘Mary will forgive you once we tell her we’re friends again,’ Findlay said. ‘She thought she hated you for a time but we think she still fancies you, she just won’t admit it to herself,’ Malcolm added.

  ‘Friends?’ William grinned.

  ‘Back to normal, anyhow,’ Findlay said; then they both punched him hard in the stomach, making him double over, winded.

  ‘Just something to remember us by,’ Malcolm called over his shoulder as they ran off laughing.

  William smiled as he stood up, getting his wind back. ‘Little sods,’ he muttered to himself as he watched them disappear into the twilight.

  ~#~

  William had thought that Renfrew was a sprawling, stinking mass of humanity when he went there as a page; but it was as sweet as a freshly mown meadow compared to Edinburgh. They didn’t call the city ‘Auld Reekie’ for nothing. As he followed his father he was glad that they were mounted. He pitied those on foot, picking their way through the mixture of mud, faeces and rotting bits of animal as they made their way up Butcher’s Lane towards the approach to the castle, sitting high on its rock above the surrounding countryside.

  At the gate to the castle his father and the rest of the escort halted. The High Steward entered the outer bailey with his squire and the rest then rode back into the city. With all six Guardians and their entourages present there wasn’t room for all of them in the castle and most had to find billets in the surrounding houses and taverns. William ended up sleeping with another squire on the pallet bed by the door of an attic room in a noisy tavern whilst his father and another knight shared the bed. He had just got used to the round of cleaning armour and weapons, training with sword and lance and exploring the brothels and taverns of Edinburgh when his father told him they were on the move again.