Candace Robb: A Cruel Courtship

‘All the men,’ Margaret said softly, ‘even the commanders? The master of the spital?’

David nodded. ‘It is plain to all that Father Andrew was called by God to be a confessor to men. He chooses no sides.’

Celia brought ale and they were quiet as she poured.

‘He spoke of you, Dame Margaret,’ said David after a good long drink. ‘He said if I made it, and if by some blessed chance I saw you, that I should tell you he is glad he went to the castle.’ The man kept his eyes on his cup as he spoke the words, as if he did not wish to know how they were received.

Margaret crossed herself. ‘Bless him,’ she said softly. Andrew’s subtle message was that he did not blame her for being sent to Soutra. Ah, but she still blamed herself. She had asked Andrew to go to the English sheriff at Edinburgh Castle, the father of an acquaintance from his time at Oxford, to inquire about her husband. Andrew had disobeyed his abbot in granting her wish. It was this defiance that had sealed his fate.

‘Father Andrew knew of your plans to desert?’ James asked, half rising to reach for more ale.

‘I had much on my mind, and Father Andrew listened. He sometimes talked about God’s kingdom on earth, how men should all join together in community, and how it’s our greed and jealousy and fear that divide us. He is a holy man, Father Andrew is,’ David said, nodding down at his cup.

For a moment, no one spoke. Margaret was moved and not a little surprised by the man’s description of her brother. She had never doubted Andrew’s vocation, but she had never heard anything so profound and all-encompassing from his mouth. ‘How do the other priests regard him?’

‘He and Father Obert seem easy with one another. I think Father Obert worries that he will lose Father Andrew to a more important post.’

‘In truth?’ Margaret murmured, glad that Andrew had a friend in his fellow priest. At least he had that companionship, and perhaps protection.

‘It is men like Father Andrew who helped me see the evil in King Edward’s ambition.’

‘I should have thought a Welshman would have learned to hate Longshanks while in swaddling clothes,’ said James.

Something in James’s tone caught Margaret’s attention, and she realised how restless he was, playing with his cup, shifting on the bench. James was not easy about David. Neither was Margaret. She did not believe his last statement.

‘My da said that Scots fought with Longshanks against us, so it was fair to return the favour,’ David said, ducking his head. ‘But Father Andrew helped me see it differently.’

‘Did he encourage your desertion?’ Margaret asked, anxious about her brother’s trust of this man.

‘He — no,’ David shook his head. ‘He made sure I understood the danger. Not that he knew how I meant to sneak away. He forbade me to tell him that.’

‘You said he is well. Does he seem — content there?’ Margaret asked.

‘Not when he talks of home. And how nothing is as it might have been. But as I said, he is respected and the soldiers are grateful for his readiness to hear confession at any time.’

Later, Margaret learned that James was indeed uncertain whether to trust the Welshman, so he was keeping David in a shed in the backlands with a midwife to attend him.

‘He’ll not fight with the Wallace?’ Margaret asked.

‘I would not risk it,’ said James. ‘He escaped too easily for my comfort.’

‘The rash, Jamie, and the fever — his escape brought him great hardship.’

‘It smells wrong to me, Maggie.’

‘Except for his suffering, I’m uneasy about him too, Jamie.’ Margaret admitted. She wondered whether there were different degrees of the Sight.

The thought brought her out of her reverie and back to her mother’s quiet, stifling room. The tablets were in order now. She handed the basket to her mother.

Christiana waved it away. ‘I’ll tell you this, Maggie. I’ve had no visions since the one that sent those men to their deaths.’

‘But you knew I was coming.’

Christiana shrugged. ‘Perhaps the Sight has been taken from me. I pray that it is so.’

Margaret knew it was not so, but that her mother wanted to believe it. ‘And you did not have a vision of Roger’s danger?’

Christiana shook her head. ‘I told you I’d had no need. I could see with my mortal eyes his unsteady gait.’

‘What did Great-Aunt Euphemia teach you about the Sight?’

Christiana idly poked at the tablets in the basket. ‘I pray that I have the strength to complete this soon.’ She sat back and gazed past Margaret’s shoulder. ‘She told me to discipline myself with meditation and long stretches of solitude to provoke the Sight and thus learn how it comes and how I might make use of it.’ She sighed and dropped the basket on to the floor beside her. ‘I have not the patience. Even the holy Dame Bethag despairs of me — though she never says so.’

‘Ma, your fasting is going to provoke visions. Hasn’t Dame Bethag told you that?’

Christiana shrugged, picking at a thread on a cushion.

Margaret said nothing of the fact that Christiana had at long last discovered to her sorrow another way to provoke the Sight — by pretending to have a vision. The Sight was a dangerous gift, requiring careful training, else it was as treacherous as a bird of prey in the hands of an inexperienced master.

Hearing of the English force moving north towards the border, Father Andrew crossed himself and prayed for God’s help in finding a way to get word to William Wallace. His disgust with himself for blindly obeying his abbot’s orders in support of Edward Longshanks had led to his defiant act of going to Edinburgh Castle on behalf of his sister Maggie, and thus to his abbot’s condemning him to the post as confessor to the English troops that camped at Soutra on their arrival in Scotland. As a Scotsman hearing the confessions of the enemy he would never be allowed to escape, nor would his own countrymen trust him if he managed to do so. But he kept despair at bay by telling himself God had a purpose in bringing him to this English camp, and he believed it was for this — to pass information about the strength of the companies to Wallace.

It felt as if it had been long ago that Andrew and his servant Matthew had arrived at Soutra, but in fact they’d made the journey but four months earlier. They had approached the gate of the spital to the sound of their horses’ breath, the clop of their hooves on the stony road. The wind had funnelled beneath Andrew’s mantle as if urging him to fly. He remembered the bitter cold.

In the spital’s forecourt the soldiers had hovered close to a crackling fire. Though the high walls created a windbreak, it was still very cold on the height. Several large tents took up most of the courtyard. Andrew was taken aback, wondering how many English resided here that the guest house and infirmary were not enough.

‘I had not expected so great a company,’ he’d said to his servant.

‘Where will we sleep?’ Matthew asked.

‘I’ll propose that we sleep in the canons’ dormitory.’ Andrew was determined to keep the lad with him, for Matthew had volunteered to accompany him into this exile. ‘They would not bed soldiers there.’

The dormitory — Andrew wanted nothing more than to go straight there to lie down, but a servant greeted them with the news that the master of the spital wished to meet with Andrew at once.

‘Go with the groom,’ he told Matthew. ‘See that the horses are well rubbed down and then have him show you to the kitchen.’

The servant led Andrew past the soldiers’ tents, the infirmary, and the kirk, to a half-timbered house of imposing size. A clerk greeted him at the door and led him through a hall in which several men lounged, all with the presence and expensive clothing of nobles, and on into a windowless chamber monopolised by a large table with intricately carved legs. A leather-backed chair stood behind it, a hide-covered bench before it. Three oil lamps illuminated the table, the doorway and the chairs. Andrew settled on the bench. Presently a servant arrived with wine, a bowl of fragrant soup and a chunk of brown bread.