Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

As a castle, with towering mountains in the distance at its back, Lochranza was well established, built upon a high crag overlooking the bay beneath, and very easily defended, but its principal feature was inside: a great, strongly built hall that was both draft free and well lit, two elements that rendered it more hospitable than nine out of any ten other castles Will could think of. De Pairaud had already taken advantage of that, setting skilled carpenters to partitioning the huge hall onethird of the way along its length, leaving ample room for all the necessary daily functions that the garrison required. The partitioned third had been turned into a Temple Chapter House, complete with a single, fortified door; the required celebrants’ Chairs, mounted on rostra in the east, west, north, and south; and a squared central floor laid out in alternating foot-square blocks of black- and white-painted boards thickly covered with multiple layers of clear, hard-set varnish. Here, in quarters far more elaborate and sumptuous than those used by their brethren in Brodick, the knights of Lochranza would convene in the hours of darkness to hold their chapter meetings and conduct the rites and ceremonies of their Order.

Beyond the walls, a smithy had been set up in one of the castle outbuildings, and most of the heavy livestock, the knights’ big warhorses, had been brought from Brodick and divided into small herds of seven to ten animals, each of them tended by a small team of men and allotted its own grazing territory among the lush valley bottoms that penetrated the highlands and mountain ridges soaring behind the castle. The fisher folk who had lived in the village by the harbor had vanished with the approach of the strange Southrons, as they called the newcomers, and it was generally assumed that they had fled to the high hillsides out of fear, caused more by the treasonous conduct of their former chief, Menteith, than by fear of the newcomers per se . De Pairaud believed they would return eventually, as soon as they had convinced themselves that they were being neither hunted nor persecuted, but in the meantime, several of the sergeants had moved into the small stone huts left vacant at the sea’s edge and were making themselves valuable to the community by fishing every day, bringing in a constant and varying supply of fresh fish for the castle tables.

Farther out, de Pairaud explained, on the high moors behind the castle and sloping towards the island’s western shores, other small teams of men were amassing and drying mountains of peat that would be stocked for the following winter’s needs, while yet others were busy felling the remaining trees of the island’s only extensive woodland, pillaged beyond salvation by the English garrison that had built the hall at Brodick. A team of men from both chapters had refurbished the old sawpits used by the English soldiery, and sawyers were now hard at work, cutting the green logs into planks, boards, and beams for their construction needs in both Brodick and Lochranza. Those, too, would have to be stacked and dried before they could be used, but Will no longer believed that his party’s stay on Arran would be a brief one, and even if it were, the exercise of cutting and stockpiling both the fuel and the green lumber served a worthwhile purpose in keeping the men busy and preoccupied against boredom.

He ended his visit to Lochranza by setting out on a long, southwestward sweep of the high moors on his way back to Brodick, visiting the various worksites and greeting the men involved in person, inspecting their efforts and expressing his satisfaction and encouragement to each group he met. But he found himself fretting more and more about the King’s rumored illness, for if Bruce were to be removed from power, he and his men would be in great peril on this island, perhaps even unable—and this thought chilled him—to reclaim their galleys from the MacDonalds. That final thought weighed heavily on him from the moment it occurred to him, and he arrived back at Brodick Hall on a blustery day of wind and chill rain, his mood matching the weather perfectly, bleak and comfortless.

His worst fears were put at rest immediately. Sir James Douglas had called in to Brodick while Will was at Lochranza and had left word that the Bruce was well, and had withdrawn with his brother and all his army to Strathbogie on the Deveron River near Aberdeen, where the local lord was a staunch supporter and where the King was recovering his strength and preparing for a spring campaign against the English forces in the area.

Douglas had left a packet of dispatches for Will, in care of Sir Richard de Montrichard, and Will collected it and took it with him to read while Tam Sinclair supervised the preparation of a hot bath—a weakness, in the eyes of many, that Will had developed in his years of traveling among the Moors in Spain. Whenever he grew chilled or was drenched by cold rainwater, Will would insist on bathing in hot water, and Tam had long since grown inured to the strange behavior. Tam had not accompanied him to Lochranza, opting instead to remain in Brodick to undertake the interrupted training and education of Will’s nephew Henry, who, as squire now to a military monk, would need to know far more than was required of the squire of a common knight, and Will had been content to leave them both behind.

Will cut the leather binding on the packet and withdrew two documents. One was a folded note on a scrap of parchment from Douglas himself, written in a bold, looping hand, with the tidings of the Bruce’s sickness and mentioning that the King, now much improved, was greatly pleased with the loyalty and dedication of the “Arran” men who rode with him. It ended with a simple, flourished signature, plain “Douglas.”

The second missive was entirely different, carefully folded into a neat oblong and sealed at the rear with a waxen stamp that Will had never seen before. His name was written in a small, neat hand in the upper right front corner. Curious, he broke the seal and opened up the letter, aware of the rich and supple texture of the three sheets of fine parchment between his fingers. He turned first to the last page, his eye going directly to the name at the bottom, and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the simple signature of Jessica Randolph de St. Valéry. For long moments he could do nothing, his pulse pounding and his thoughts churning, seeking vainly for reasons why this woman, of all people, should write to him. But eventually, accepting the folly of such feckless thoughts, and acknowledging his own unreasonable excitement with chagrin, he turned back to the first page and began to read the delicately formed Angevin script, whispering the words aloud to himself in the accents of his own boyhood, in the time before the more ubiquitous French overwhelmed his native tongue.

Sir William

I have little doubt but that you will be filled with outrage at my temerity in writing thus to you, but you will be aware, even now, that I am writing in the language of your latter years to some purpose. Should this letter fall into unfriendly hands, it is my sincere wish that it should remain incomprehensible to those who find it.

I write to you from a place in Scotland’s northeastern lands, where it has been my honor and privilege, these past two months, to take part in tending to our King, who has been gravely ill but is now mending rapidly and regaining his former strength, to the joy of all around him and the great good fortune of his realm.

I know the countryside is rife with rumors of my Lord’s imminent demise, all kinds of lurid tales of grief and disaster being carried far and wide by people who know little of the truth. I know, too, from experience, of your uncomfortable situation on your far-off island there, and I have been concerned lest, hearing such tales, you may fear for the welfare of your charges there. If that has been the case, then put your mind at rest, Sir Knight, and know the truth: His Grace is well. The crisis is long past and the man himself recovering strongly enough to act the man and the King again, planning campaigns for the coming year with all his friends and commanders.