Braveheart (33 page)

“I have to keep my courage. See, my hands already shake.” Wallace held his hand out before them, and his friends could see the tremble, but it seemed to be from emotion, not fear. He said almost casually, “Whatever happens, if I know you’re alive, I can bear it.”

He leaned from his saddle and hugged them, Stephen first, then Hamish, whose great freckled cheeks bore twin rivulets of tears. But still Hamish seemed angry. “What will I do if I’m left alive and you’re gone?” he demanded.

William looked at him for a long time. “Tell our story,” he said. “Let our people dream.”

With one last look at his friends, William Wallace rode away.

The house designated for the meeting was a two-story stone manor owned by Lord Monteith. The grounds around it were landscaped and manicured, but no servants were tending the gardens now; the house itself looked quiet as Wallace rode towards it.

Within the house, Robert the Bruce and Craig stood at the hearth of its central room, waiting. The Bruce had noticed that Craig had seemed particularly edgy since their arrival twenty minutes before, but then the Bruce was strained as well. He looked out the window; nothing yet.

“He won’t come,” Craig said.

“He will. I know he will,” Robert said.

They heard the approach of a single horse. Robert looked out to see Wallace arriving.

“Here he is. And unarmed,” the Bruce said. “My God, he has a brave heart.”

They waited as Wallace reached the front door and dismounted, counting the moments as he tied his horse to the hitching post himself, since there was no groom waiting to do it for him. But before he could step to the doorway, two more riders appeared. “His friends,” the Bruce said, looking out.

“No matter,” Craig said. “They are welcome.”

But outside, Wallace was not so welcoming; he glared at Hamish and Stephen, who shrugged off his disapproval of their presence. “We’re here,” Hamish said, dismounting. “That’s all there is to it. So you may as well go right on, for we aren’t leaving.”

So it was three, not one, who entered the front door and then appeared at the broad opening into the house’s main room. There Wallace stopped, facing the Bruce.

Wallace reached into his shirt and took out the handkerchief, a symbol now to both of them. They looked at each other, their eyes saying everything. Truce. Peace. A future for Scotland.

Wallace stepped forward to clasp the Bruce’s hand.

And then the soldiers poured from every closet, every doorway, even leaping down from the balcony overhead.

Too late, Robert the Bruce understood.
“Nooo!!”
he screamed. But it did not matter. The soldiers—English professionals—were swarming Wallace and his friends. Wallace was stunned instantly by a man dropping onto him from above; Stephen was knocked senseless in the first rush; Hamish was smothered by three men—and sent them all flying like a dog shaking off water. One of the three bounced back from the wall, producing a dagger and plunging it high into Hamish’s shoulder.

“No blades!” one of the soldiers was shouting. “All alive!” Wallace had already disappeared beneath a blanket of men; the others began clubbing at Hamish. Craig had darted back the moment the assault began, but the Bruce, at the edge of the melee, charged into it. Because of the truce, he had dressed without weapons, but he threw his fists into the faces of the soldiers. But they were ganging in from all sides; hiding such numbers within the house had been a marvel of cunning. They trussed Wallace like a netted lion, while their leader, with an expertly placed blow to the temple, dropped Bruce senseless.

The soldiers raised their clubs over the fallen Hamish and Stephen, ready to beat them to death. “Forget them!” shouted their leader, fearful that any moment more Scots would appear to fight for Wallace as they had in the past. “Go! Go!”

In a quick scramble, the soldiers hauled Wallace outside. A wagon with a team of horses was just then rattling up from its place of concealment within the manor’s hedge maze. In seconds they had Wallace lashed down on the wagon’s wood floor.

Stephen and Hamish, bloody and still stunned, staggered from the house in blind fury. Their horses were gone, and the wagon was already to the top of the hill.

Hamish ran after it.

Stephen knew it was hopeless. “You’ll never catch them!” he shouted. “You’ll never . . .” He watched Hamish running, ready to explode his heart in pursuit.

And Stephen ran, too.

65

DRIED BLOOD STILL MATTING HIS HAIR, ROBERT THE BRUCE surged up the stairs of his father’s tower and tore open the door to the chamber. “You did this! You!” he screamed, grabbing at his father, too furious to flinch from the leprous flesh. “I hate you, you rotting bastard!”

His father was calm, no pain in his body, no pain anywhere. “Longshanks required Wallace,” he said. “So did our nobles. That was the price of our peace. And your crown.”

Robert shook him. “Die! I want you to die!”

“Soon enough, I’ll be dead. And you’ll be king.”

“I want nothing of you! You’re no man! And you are not my father!”

But the cold steel at the soul of the leper stiffened in him one more time. “You are my son. And you have always known my mind.”

“No . . . no,” young Robert said. “You deceived me.”

“You let yourself be deceived. But in your heart, you always knew what had to happen. The only thing that could happen.”

Robert’s hands fell away from his father. He stepped backward; even his legs had lost their will. He staggered to the wall and groped at it for support. All he could think was that he no longer cared to live in this world. And suddenly it was his father who seemed to have all the strength.

“At last you know what it means to hate and how to deal with enemies,” the elder Bruce said. “Now you are ready to be a king.”

66

WILLIAM WALLACE WAS CONVEYED TO LONDON STRAPPED to the spine of an unsaddled horse, his head bare to the sun. a procession of heavily armed English soldiers paraded with him, as country people came out to jeer the Scotsman who had sent such terror through their bones.

“Don’t look so fearsome, does he?!” some shouted, while others screamed, “Murderer!” and many more said nothing at all but threw rocks against his battered face and back or rotten fruit or worse.

While in the royal palace, Prince Edward inspected his father, who lay semiconscious in bed, his breath rattling ominously in his chest. The king knew of the successful capture of his hated enemy, at least he had been informed of it before he had another attack of coughing and smothering and his eyes began to roll separately from each other and he collapsed into the stupor in which he now lay. Longshanks was upon his deathbed, of that his son was certain.

Edward approved of this condition. He gave no instructions to the servants keeping vigil at the bedside.

As the prince left his father’s apartments and stepped out onto the corridor, the princess hurried up to her husband and followed him as he moved toward his own rooms. “Is it true?” she asked, barely able to keep her breath. “Wallace is captured?”

“Simply because he eluded your trap, do you think he is more than a man? My father is dying. Perhaps you should think of our coronation,” Edward answered and continued his march down the hall.

“When will his trial be?” she persisted.

“Wallace’s? For treason there is no trial. Tomorrow he will be charged, then executed.” With a faint smile, he shut his bedroom door in her face.

67

WILLIAM WALLACE WAS TRIED IN WESTMINSTER HALL--IF what occurred can be called a trial. He was not allowed to speak during the proceedings meant to establish his guilt and his punishment, and neither he nor anyone who might have dared to step forward for him was permitted to offer any defense or arguments on his behalf. Wallace made no effort to object to these conditions and stood in silence, gazing up at the windows as six royal magistrates in scarlet robes decried against him, shouting accusations of an endless litany of atrocities.

The slaughter of his enemies, in battle or in ambush, Wallace would never deny. But one of the charges hurled against him that day bears witness to the posture of his judges. They repeated the claim—spread through all of Britain after the sacking of York—that Wallace had spared the nuns of that city in order to force them to dance naked before his troops. The lie in fact attested to a deeper truth, for the propaganda of the dancing nuns had been spread by Longshanks’s advisors in an attempt to explain the fact, widely known, that Wallace had spared the lives of the nuns at York, whereas Longshanks, in sacking Scottish towns, had spared no one at all.

Finally the chief of the royal judges boomed out, “William Wallace! You stand in taint of high treason. You will be conducted to a place of execution, where you will be hanged, disemboweled, castrated, and beheaded! Have you anything to say?”

“
Confess, and you may receive a quick death! Deny, and you must be purified by pain! Do you confess?” The magistrate’s voice deepened with finality:
“Do you confess?!”

“
I do not confess,” Wallace said.

“Then you shall receive thy purification,” said the lord high magistrate who would oversee the execution. Then he added, “And in the end, I promise you will beg for the ax.”

68

WITHIN THE TOWER OF LONDON, WILLIAM WALLACE WAS alone in his cell, still in the garish manacles of hand and foot he had worn for the last week. He could not stand to his full height; the chain connecting wrists to ankles had been shortened to force him into a slight stoop meant to represent a posture of submission. But that did not affect him now; he was on his knees. “I am so afraid,” he whispered in his prayer. “Give me strength.”

Outside the cell door, the jailers jumped to their feet as the princess, with not a single guard or attendant at her side, appeared at the base of the stone stairway and strode quickly up to them. “Your—Your Highness!” the jailer stammered.

“I will see the prisoner,” she declared.

“We’ve orders from the king—“

“
The king will be dead in a month! And his son is a weakling! Who do you think will rule this kingdom? Now
open this door!
”

The jailers obeyed.

The princess stepped into the reeking cell. She could barely contain her shock at the sight of Wallace. “On your feet, you filth!” the head jailer shouted as he and his partner snatched the prisoner upright.

“Stop! Leave me!” the princess demanded, but still they hesitated. “There is no way out of this hell! Leave me with him!”

Reluctantly the jailers shuffled out of the cell, but they could still see her back and hear her. She looked at Wallace’s eyes and she couldn’t quite hold back her tears—dangerous tears that threatened to say too much. “M’lady . . . what kindness of you to visit a stranger,” Wallace said, trying to help her hide her grief.

“Sir, I . . . come to beg you to confess all and swear allegiance to the king that he might show you mercy,” she said.

“Will he show mercy to my country? Will he take back his soldiers, and let us rule ourselves?” he asked her.

“Mercy . . . is to die quickly. Perhaps even live in the Tower!” Her eyes brimmed with tears and the illusion of hope. “In time, who knows what can happen if you can only live.”

Princess Isabella and William Wallace stared into each other’s eyes. Neither knew nor cared how long. Then she pulled out a hidden vial and whispered, “Drink this! It will dull your pain.”

“It will numb my wits, and I must have them all. If I’m senseless or if I wail, then Longshanks will have broken me.”

“I can’t bear the thought of your torture! Take it!”

She pressed the vial to his mouth and poured in the drug. She heard the jailers shifting outside the cell door, trying to see what she was doing; she backed up, still looking at William, her eyes wide, full of love and good-bye. Then she turned, and keeping her face lowered, as if she could hide her tears, she was gone.

Wallace watched her go. When the door clanged shut, he spit the purple drug onto the stone floor of his cell.

69

LONGSHANKS LAY HELPLESS, HIS BODY RACKED WITH consumption. Edward sat against the wall, watching him die, glee in his stare. The princess entered. She paused at the door and watched the old king’s chest rising and falling; when she looked up at his waxlike face, she saw that he was looking at her. “I have come . . . ,” she said, “to beg for the life of William Wallace.”

“You fancy him,” Edward said.

“I respect him. At worst he was a worthy enemy. Show mercy . . . oh thou great king . . .and win the respect of your own people.”