The Wolf
by
Charles Mackie
Published by
Librario
www.librario.com
Formatted for eBook by
North Highland Publishing
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Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2001 Charles Mackie
Charles Mackie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the author’s permission
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events or incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or criminal cases, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Winchester papers, or "The Lairdie’s Papers"1 as they are known here, were, literally, unearthed during the preliminary examination of Spynie Palace by the Department of the Environment. Centuries of weathering and quarrying have reduced to mounds of grassy rubble most of the high wall which surrounded the Palace. Yet the empty shell of the fortified tower-house, built by Bishop David Stewart for his own protection in 1461, heaves its squared bulk eighty feet above the turnip fields. North and east is marshland where there was a small harbour six hundred years ago, and less than a mile of water is all that remains of the Great Loch of Spynie. "Davy’s Tower" sits astride the vitrified bones of an even older structure. This was the ancient Palace and Church of the Bishops of Moray from before the Cathedral at Elgin was built, until after its rape by the Wolf of Badenoch.
Sandy Dunbar, who inherited the old place from "The Lairdie", was pottering about in the dungeon beneath "Davy’s Tower", used by his predecessor in his romantic years for purposes of his own. Sandy still cannot explain why he decided to turn over that particular flagstone, or how he even managed to shift it. He worked away for a long time with a crowbar and heavy hammer, until he got it moving, and there, in the snug, dry space below, was the box. He took it in his Land-Rover to Pitgaveny House where we carefully prized it open. The box was lead-lined, which explained its weight, and the scrolls and linen tablets were as dry as they had been when first laid inside. Sandy was quick to guess at their antiquity.
"My God. Do you know what this is?"
I looked down at the Black Seal. "A Bishop’s?" I asked.
"Bishop John Winchester’s," said Sandy, "Bishop of Elgin Cathedral in the middle of the Fifteenth Century."
I called my wife and my secretary and spent the next four weeks at Pitgaveny. We got an expert up from Edinburgh and together sorted out the contents of the Bishop’s chest. There were records of the building of the Cathedral in Elgin and the cost to Crown and Church of its damage by fire in 1390. There were documents that have thrown a grim light on the fate of the Comyn family in Scotland. But to me, the autobiography of Sir Philip Hogeston2 was the prize find.
I have retold the story without I hope, altering it in any important way, except to translate the archaic idiom into understandable prose.
Time has forced some compromise. For instance I find it impossible to describe the location of Lang or Long or Bishop’s Steps, the extraordinary stone bridge that strode across the western narrows of the great loch of Spynie, without using present-day points of reference which were not there in Philip Hogeston’s time. On the north side of the loch, the tidal marshes ended at Crosslots and the narrows were bridged by the Lang Steps, to beyond where Waterton Cottages are now. These two farms stand where bridle tracks twisted through reed and swan-grass on the night of the first ambush.
So also, syntax and vocabulary have had to be changed. Because I have studied his story very carefully, I know that the construction of Philip Hogeston’s sentences, strange to us, was good colloquial writing, not too literary, but the normal stuff of everyday communication in 1439. The translation, of course, has meant using words Philip Hogeston could never have heard of, just as some of his vocabulary has vanished from present day use.
If we are agreed not to argue over small inconsistencies, then you can catch the mood of the writer and become spellbound as I was by his involvement in the burning of Elgin Cathedral by "The Wolf" in times not so very far removed from those of Merlin, Gramarye and the Lady of Shalott.
ONE
PLEWLANDS
March the First, 1437
A single event in my sixteenth year set the course my life has taken. If there had been no murder at the Bay of the Primroses I should not have met Bridget. May the ghosts of my dead friends forgive me such a thought. If I had not ambushed their murderers by the Long Steps my father would have had no cause to dispatch me to the Cathedral School in Elgin, as he said, "For the good of your soul and for my peace of mind." The last thing I wished for myself at the age of fifteen was to become a priest. I would not then have been in the Cathedral that violent night of the seventeenth of June or have been carried like a gralloched stag to a wolf ’s lair at Lochindorb.
On the brief occasions that my father was at home he was full of talk about the warring feuds of the border country. He was a strong soldierly man who spent most of his life, and nearly all his fortune, fighting the Sassenach. He would tell us of the siege of Roxburgh, its relief and its recapture, and of the terrible burning of Edinburgh by the English. My boyhood escapades were coloured by these war stories and we "killed" the English from the caves of Duffus to the rocks of Birnie.
My bosom friend and rival in those days was a St. Kilda lad who had come to live in Hopeman with his auntie when his father was drowned guga hunting on the sheer cliffs of that faraway island. His mother had quickly taken another mate. He was a natural bragger, but I suspected with plenty to brag about. His story of the journey from St. Kilda to Stornoway and from there through the Pentland Firth to Hopeman in a tiny fishing vessel, was hair-raising enough to be strictly true. His greatest asset was his long, slender, muscular toes, a hereditary feature of those dwelling on that ancient rock sprung from the bowels of the Northern sea. Their livelihood depended on the harvest of the gugas, the immature nestlings of the solan geese, who in their thousands laid their eggs on the high ledges of the sea precipices. It was said they travelled the length of the world to nest at St. Kilda, wintering in the surf of Africa. Eric Bigfeet and I became friends when I got stuck on Groff Hochs, a massive pile of rock along the coast from Hopeman, where the falcons nested. I was on a ledge which ended in an overhang with nothing below but foaming surf. Eric was fishing offshore in his uncle’s little coracle, bobbing up and down in the waves and hauling in the whiting and haddock from the sandy seabed. He saw me but paid little notice, until in desperation I yelled and yelled for help. The tide was coming in and already the sea thundered in white spume between the thick sandstone legs, which gave the rock its name. At that time I could not swim and it would be twelve hours later, three in the morning, before I ever got ashore, even if I did succeed in escaping from this damned ledge.
Eric came close in and hurled himself from the little flat boat on to the lowest of the ledges beneath me. He knew the waves would wash the boat ashore and that the jagged rock would never harm the frail looking, light skin craft. He climbed to me quickly, long strong toes gripping crevices and tiny ledges as he ran almost vertically up the cliff.
"Now you damn fool son of a pig," he shouted at me. "Get your fat arse off that ledge and on to my shoulders."
My cowardice evaporated at these calculated insults and rage propelled me into the intricate contortions necessary to place my "fat arse" on Eric’s back. Inch by inch, breaking my fingernails, and relying on Eric’s strong toes and superb balance, I was rescued from the ledge.
We dropped the final ten feet into the surf and slithered our way to the shingle beneath the cliffs. Eric’s first remark was "Hey Oggie, you’ll have to learn to swim."
A week later, we had a ride together, which I shall never forget. We rode from Plewlands towards the Castle and crossed the neck of the Loch by the Lang Steps. We took the woodland path over Cuttieshillock, past the farms of Mosstowie and Miltonduff and up the valley of the River Lossie to the Buinach. We were making for the moors that stretched from the Lossie to the Spey to hunt for hill gull’s eggs. These, laid by gulls feeding on farmland, are very good to eat and taste just like plovers’ eggs. We found the nesting places away beyond the Latterach Burn, high on the lonely moors, and had returned to the valley of the Shougle. Before joining the River Lossie, this little burn rushes headlong in precipitous plungings and gurglings all the way down a steep gorge, through deep rocky pools and dripping cliffs.
We left our horses free to forage and slipped through the birch woods to explore. Brambles trailed low by the banks and the stream sped into a narrow throat. We had been there often before but never in such a flood. Wet to the skin and slimy with green mud, we came to the middle pool, a broad, deep loch of a place in low water but now a seething cauldron of bubbles, spray and foam. The burn from above splashed into the middle of this and behind the fall was a cave quite hidden by the curtain of water. Leaping through the torrent we landed on moss. It was beautiful to look back at the light through the tumbling waterfall, and the older boys, to test their courage as well as to show off to the younger ones, would dive outwards through the screen into the invisible deep pool beyond. But today we were not alone in this cave. We had scarcely got our breath back when our blood froze and the hairs on the napes of our necks bristled with primitive fear. There was a sharp, feline stench and the unmistakable harsh hiss of a wildcat. We flattened ourselves against the walls. I was the bigger and struck my head a crack on the roof. The hiss continued, and, as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, we could make out the baleful, unflickering eyes of the beast, crouched near the back wall and the tiny sparks of yellow that were eyes of her kits. There is no animal in all Scotland, stag, wolf, fox, bear, otter or boar, quite so fearsome as the full-grown mother wildcat protecting her young. She can, in an instant, become a thunder ball of scratching, spitting, biting fury, which no boy of fifteen would dare to face.
Through gritted teeth Eric whispered, "I’m getting out of here. Follow me and I’ll look after you in the water," and with one leap he vanished through the roaring fall. I was alone, very, very, much alone.
To my left, within touching distance almost, crouched an animal the size of a large terrier, all tooth and claw and hate and ready to launch herself at my face. To my right, a leap into nothingness and a death by drowning in a bottomless pool. I had again to trust my friend Eric and hope that he was there to seize me as I plummeted into the water. I took a deep breath and leapt through the thundering white screen. It pelted down on me for an instant.
"Hold your nose," shrieked Eric. I hit the water and splashed into its bubbly blackness, then bobbed to the surface struggling for very life.
Perceptibly the thunder of the fall grew less. I felt myself in the gentle grip of the burn and, oh, miracle, I was floating. In a vigorous dog’s paddle I projected myself with the help of the current towards the bank. My fears vanished. I was swimming! A moment or two later I hoisted myself on the rocks at the far side having swum twenty yards and feeling proud of myself. But where was Eric?
"Here, you bloody fool," he shouted down to me. When he jumped out through the fall he had struck the branch of a birch tree, which hung over the water. This had caught on his belt and there he was suspended like a lamb’s carcass on a butcher’s hook. The paradox of the situation suddenly struck me and I roared and yelled with laughter.
"Get me down, you glayked gyte," he stuttered. I swung on the branch and we both fell into the water where we splashed about like young otters and, with bravado that follows fear, threw stones up into
the cave.
Some years later I had to swim for my life to escape from another wild animal, not a wild cat but a wolf – The Wolf of Badenoch.
Two
When we were not slaughtering the English or slaying the Vikings – the legends of Haakon the Bold and Eric the Red are real enough to us who live on the coast of the Moray Firth – we were exploring the labyrinth of caves in the sandstone cliffs between Causea and Hopeman. There were seven other boys who shared the adventures of my sixteenth year. Eric Bigfeet was my particular crony.
The Bews twins, "Chucker" and "Blether", were born in Orkney on a croft at Orphir overlooking the Scapa Flow. Chucker could throw a stone with accuracy fifty yards, a performance that was to cost him his life, and Blether could not hold his tongue for longer than it took to ask his name. The crop disaster in the stormy summer of 1380 had forced this family to move to the mainland and they farmed a croft at Stotfield to the West of Lossiemouth. The four of us were often joined by the Chisholm boys from the Castle when they could free themselves from their mother’s apron strings. Two serving lads from the Castle hung round hopefully. One of them, "Cleeky", an expert at "cleeking", or hooking out partan crabs from the rocks, was prepared to "borrow" his father’s boat as the price of joining us. The other, "The Gomeril", who could assume a deceptive idiot expression, sometimes volunteered as our scapegoat.
Lessons held us to the schoolroom at the Castle in the mornings, but in the afternoons of Spring and Summer we were free to act out the dreams of boyhood in the woods or down at the Loch or among the sea cliffs. There was one bay which we knew as "The Bay of the Primroses" because in June its steep green slopes are a mass of yellow stars. Its square sandy beach lies between forbidding cliffs, the home of hundreds of seabirds. Above this bay there are some heaps of rustbrown rubble we called "War Towers" which may have been Pict or Christian outposts during the savage centuries of survival against the Vikings. From there, on a midsummer evening, the hills of Caithness and Sutherland float on a pellucid sea while the sun dips behind the shoulder of Ben Wyvis and rises three hours later above the Paps of Morven.
During that hot June we explored every crag, every pool and every cave in the miles of cliff and sea-worn sandstone between the beach at Causea and the village of Hopeman. It was inevitable I suppose that seven inquisitive boys should sooner or later stumble upon the secret of this ancient shore. East of the Bay of the Primroses, behind a high pile of fallen rocks cloaked in seapinks and nettles, we dug away sand from the base of the cliff and found the entrance to a long narrow cave. Its slimy floor dried into dark sand marked only by the tiny spoors of rodents. We lit some drift-wood and the flames flickered on the yellow stone of a cavern with walls blackened in part by the soot of ancient fires. One of the Chisholm boys found drawings on the rock and we looked in amazement at pictures of shaggy bulls, wolves, and animals we had never seen.
"Look at the smoke," said Eric, and we watched the pale-blue haze coil and swirl into the darkness beyond our circle of light. We followed it and found the steps, chiselled out of the sandstone by the tread of many feet. We took flaming brands from the fire and climbed upwards. The steps ended in a fall of rubble.
"We must be near the top," said the Gomeril. "There’s dried peat amongst these stanes." We dug away at the dirt, coughing as the smoke from below swirled past us.
"Yer right," said Eric. "The fug’s gaain’ somewhere."
A chink of light appeared and a fall of earth nearly knocked us off the steps. Blether Bews squeezed through the gap and we heard a muffled stream of oaths when he hauled himself clear and into a dense clump of gorse. We scrambled out into the bramble and whin of the moor not fifty yards from Plewlands. The cave became our meeting place, our den. We called it the Cave of the Picts although I suspect now that the men who carved the steps and decorated the walls with their drawings had lived long before the painted men fought with the Roman legions at Mons Graupius.3
The adventure which had most impact on the course of my life happened after a week of storm at the time of the September Equinox.
My sister and I were awakened at dawn by shouts, the sound of running feet and the voice of Sime the smith booming above the hubbub.
"Get Lady Eupheme. Aye, wake her ye daft quine. She will tell us what to do." We were down in a trice.
"What is it Sime?" I asked. Sime, a puzzled look on his bearded face, extended an arm towards me and opened his large fist. In the palm of his hand was a green enamelled brooch with an engraved head in the middle flanked by a row buck and a swan.
"Where did you get it," I asked.
"Here, young master," said the smith, and, like a conjurer, he plucked a doll-like figure from behind his legs. The man was small and clad in tatters. He had flaxen hair matted by sea salt and a gold ring glinted on his right ear. My mother spoke behind us.
"Who is he Sime, and where is he from?"
"That, I don’t know my lady," said Sime. "John the Greek found him in the gardens. But he is either too full of fear or too emptyheaded to speak to us." My mother looked at the man, then slowly, in French, she talked to him.
"Are you a matelot?" she asked. Spoken to kindly and in a tongue he could understand, the sailor shrugged himself free from Sime’s grip and stammered out his story. His ship, the Monica, thirteen days out of Copenhagen and bound for Aberdeen had run before the gale into the Moray Firth. In the night, lost and dismasted, she struck on the dreaded Halliman Skerries and, lifted free by wave and storm, was driven sinking to the shore. She beached, in a welter of white water, in the Bay of the Primroses.
"Are there any men still aboard her?" asked Lady Eupheme.
"There might be," replied the sailor, but his eyes told us he would be surprised if they were alive.
"Who gave you this?" She took the green brooch from Sime.
"One of the passengers, a holy man, a very brave man who called on God to stop the storm – but how could God hear in such a tempest."
"Send the brooch at once to Bishop Bur," commanded my mother.
"Every man must go to the cliff top. There may be lives to save."
We found the wreck and my sister Elsie and I, searching the caves behind the heaps of seadrift and shingle, came upon a shivering group of men lying exhausted on the sand. They included the Captain of the Monica who wept as he watched the death-throes of his ship. His name was Thor Rifsun and, when they were warm and dry at Plewlands, those of his crew and passengers who survived told us how he had struggled to hold his vessel in the teeth of a gale he knew was too strong for him or any man.
Back at Plewlands we met the first of the many folk who came from Elgin that day and in the days to follow, to watch the break up of the wreck and to gather what they could of the flotsam on the shore. And by the first ferry from Spynie came two Black Friars. They asked to speak with Sir James Hogeston and saw me instead, and my mother.
They told us they were emissaries from Bishop Bur sent with haste to enlist our help in a secret and most important matter. They did not tell us immediately the nature of this but questioned us about the shipwreck and about the survivors. These, they insisted on seeing, the injured as well as the fit, and asked them to describe in minutest detail the last moments of the stricken ship. They questioned Thor Rifsun about his passengers and about their baggage. I was consumed with curiosity as to what these crow-like sinister men were seeking.
"What was that all about?" I asked as soon as we were back in my father’s room. The cowelled men exchanged glances. The one who had been most persistent in his interrogation spoke, but so quietly and
from the concealment of his cowl that I had to strain my ears to catch his words.
"Madame et Monsieur, you are witnesses to a most unfortunate occurrence. Many men have been lost and a king’s ransom lies at the bottom of the sea. The ship, the Monica, carried Bishop Pius, the emissary of his holiness the Pope. This we know, for this brooch belonged to him. Bishop Pius was to have represented the Mother Church at the consecration of the Chapel of St. Brinuth in Elgin Cathedral. We are certain he was the one who called in vain on God to calm the storm. He is dead. God rest his soul in peace. He bore with him from Avignon a treasure whose loss is more to be regretted than the death of Ten Bishops. He was responsible for delivering a gift from King Robert to Bishop Bur, a gift blessed by the Pope’s holy hand." He paused. His eyes glittered from the shadow of his hood.
"Two solid, carved, golden candlesticks, five feet tall, and a golden chalice three spans wide. They must be found." His voice had become a hoarse whisper and small flecks of white spit formed on his lips. "Each wave must be watched, every rock pool searched until God delivers up His treasure."
My feelings at that moment were conflicting. The golden ornaments, worth a prince’s ransom, kindled a blaze of excitement. Yet this cold insistence on their recovery linked to the callous dismissal of the death of Bishop Pius and others as a matter of little consequence set my skin prickling with faint horror. I looked again at these sombre creatures, listened to the menace of cruel intensity in their voices, and shuddered. They were the merciless inquisitors of a God who had exchanged pity for cupidity. I believe that was the moment when for the first time I doubted the righteousness of the Church; the moment when heresy took seed.
There were no lessons for the next week because from dawn to dusk we were at the Bay of the Primroses. A guard was mounted. Men and women, boys and girls searched the beach and the rocks, and all day long the Black Friars paced the cliff-path, robes spread by the breeze like bats-wings. A week after the shipwreck we were picking over the debris left by the tides of the equinox in a small cliff-bound bay half a mile to the West. The sea was calm and a long swell beat on the shore.
"Let’s look in the sea-cave," suggested someone, and six naked bodies splashed their way to the cave entrance. This was a hole in the cliff visible above the waves only at full ebb. Now, it was four feet under sea. One by one we duck-dived and six bottoms flashed and vanished like the white breasts of guillemots. We swam through the hole and bobbed up gasping and whooping inside a cave. There was a clatter and swoosh of invisible wings as a roosting of doves fled like arrows to the exit high above. The cave was lit from below. Emerald light, reflected up from the sandy floor of the bay outside, illuminated rock which dripped with seaweed the colour of ox-blood.
"Hey lads! What’s that down there?" The Blether, who had climbed on to a rock, dived deep to the sea-bed. He came struggling to the surface yelling, "Help me for Cris-sake. I’ve found the Pope’s bloody treasure!" Five pairs of hands grabbed at Bew’s find.
"Ye damn fools. Now ye’ve dropped it. Stop shoving. Phil, come down with me and give a hand." I knew what I held as soon as I touched it. It was the Bishop’s Chalice, a bowl of gold two feet in diameter. It took us some time to swim the Chalice out of the cave and back to the shore for the tide was ebbing and pulled against us. Then came our second piece of luck.
"Look," cried Chucker, "A candlestick." Wedged in a rock crevice where the sea foamed was a carved golden candlestick so heavy that we had a job freeing it. Then Chucker spotted the other one, rolling slowly under the sea beyond the wave burst. Our tiny coracles sank with the added weight so we hid the treasure in a heap of bird-dung and rowed for home. The news we brought sparked off a flurry of activity. The two Friars insisted, although it was now late in the day, that the treasure must be taken back to their safe-keeping. A boat was made ready and the Bews twins, who had found the ornaments, joined the men as guides, while the Gomeril was dispatched on horseback to break the good news to Bishop Bur. He chose to ride by the Lang Steps rather than take the slower route by ferry across the Loch of Spynie.
"Dinna lose the stuff Sime afore I come back," he called in jest to the boats’ leader. Not only was the treasure lost but the Gomeril never came back. Too late to warn us of disaster ahead, his body was found near the Southern end of the Long Steps. His skull had been smashed in. The message to Bishop Bur had vanished.
At the coming of dusk a cold seaward breeze sprang up and we found a sheltered place in the lee of the cliff top. There is a ledge just below the crest, and the Chisholm boys, Eric and I snuggled down there to wait the boat’s return. The warm September day was over. A hazy sun prepared to set behind the mountains of Sutherland and the bay took on the colour of a pigeon’s breast. Round the headland came the boat. At that moment a low voice spoke behind and above us and something in the speaker’s tone made us flatten ourselves against the cliff and hold our breaths.
"There she is, and the gold will be ashore in ten minutes. Keep your horses below the skyline and ride to the track at the West of the Bay. The plan will succeed if we surprise them. They must think we come from Bishop Bur so act like couriers. Be bold but courteous. I shall do the talking. Keep your weapons hidden and with luck we shall not need to show them. Alexander, your job is to get to the two friars and divert their attention while we load up the saddlebags. They must not be allowed to interfere, or killing will become necessary." There was a soft flurry of hooves on the moor behind us, then silence.
"Guid’s sake, what di ye mak o’ thon?" Answering his own question, Eric continued "Bishop’s men! – Bloody robbers mair like! We’ll hae tae stop them."
"How?" I asked.
"If we use the short cut we will be on the beach before them." We jumped down to the sand just as the boat grounded on the shingle.
"Listen." There was the telltale clatter of loose stones as the horses reached the shore.
"Look out," I shrieked. "You are going to be robbed." The men in the boat heard us, and so did the horsemen. Someone cursed loudly and hooves beat urgently on the soft machair above the sands. The boat was bow’s-out of the sea but with speed the crew might have pushed her back into the waves and rowed to safety. They were no cowards these men of ours. With a yell they leaped ashore. I saw Sime hurl himself at the leading horseman and horse and man crashed to the ground. I saw "Chucker" Bews heaving pebbles as fast as he could pick them up. He had the strongest throw of all of us and a shouted curse indicated that his aim had been good. Then it happened. To my horror I saw the flash of steel. Wee Bews had been reaching down for another stone when suddenly a round object, which could only be his head, rolled towards the sea and two black spouts poured from his neck. The scene had developed into bloody nightmare. Weeping with fear and rage the Chisholms, Eric and I took to our heels and ran for the Cave of the Picts and in minutes reached the small exit on the moor. Eric vomited into a whin-bush.
I was sixteen years old. I had looked on the bloated corpses of men whom I had known, thrown up by the sea; men made unrecognisable by what the sea had done to them. I had sneaked into a house to discover what a dead man looked like who had died from drink. But the murder of poor little Bews, before my eyes on the beach at the Bay of the Primroses, was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to me. By the time we had reached the stables at Plewlands, I had gained control of my fear and was ashamed of my cowardice.
Anger took possession of me, anger at myself and at the raiders. I turned on my companions. "Come on Eric, and you Chisholms.
There’s only one way off the island to the mainland that the murderers can take. We can catch them at the Lang Steps. Get on your horses."
The Bishop’s or the Lang Steps lie across the narrow part of the Loch, South-east from the Castle of Duffus and are of hewn blocks set five feet apart paved with flagstones. From the oak forest the ground slopes gradually towards these Steps and a pathway continues the final half mile across the salt marshes. We boys knew every island of the Loch, almost every waterhen’s nest along its verge, and in darkness we could pick our way from reed clump to reed clump. There was a fowler’s island some twenty yards from the last step and to this we cantered, after collecting our Welsh longbows. Mine had been given to me by my father for my fifteenth birthday. It had been copied at the Castle by the armourer and both the twins and Eric had similar weapons.
They were fearsome things for young boys to use but, with practice, we developed a knack of bending them which produced very satisfactory results up to about sixty yards. But this was different. Hares, partridges and even wild geese we had shot at and hit, but never men.
It was dark when we reined our horses at the salt flats, slapped their haunches and set them cantering back towards Plewlands. We lay on Fowler’s Island fifteen minutes before we felt, rather than heard, the sound of galloping horses, and there they were, reining in to pick their way along the narrow path towards the Steps with the tide rising steadily. We waited until they were almost on us and then fired our first flight. The foremost rider fell sideways. He was held by the stirrups and his mount floundered into the thick marshy water, trailing him by the boots. There was a roar of rage from the middle of the group. "Get on the steps, we are ambushed." Their confusion was such that our second flight of arrows missed completely. I was sighting my third arrow on the head of a man who had given the command when he turned to face directly towards me. In the moonlight I saw a bushy beard, black eyebrows, and a grimace of sheer fury as the arrow sped on its way. That baleful glance unsighted me for there was a thud and a bitten off shout of pain. The man had been hit but I had missed his face. Then the riders reached the Steps. We sent a volley after them but by now they were out of range and taking off like the wind along the causeway. They took a risk at speed on that narrow flagstone bridge, with the sea flowing in beneath them. We yelled with triumph and cut the dead man from his floundering horse. We were avenged. Little Bews was avenged and the Gomeril too, though we did not know then that he was dead.
The bearded horseman’s face rooted itself in my memory. Four years later, in captivity, I was to curse my poor aim with all my soul and wish my shot had flighted straight to one of these blazing eyes.
Three
This last disastrous adventure could not be overlooked even by my most tolerant of mothers and a message was sent urgently seeking my father’s return. When he arrived some three weeks later he crossexamined me about my part in the affair at the Bay of the Primroses.
He asked me to tell him about the robbers and, in particular, about the man I had shot at and winged.
"Well I’ll be damned," he swore softly, but did not tell me who it was he had recognised from my description. Life at Plewlands was suddenly serious. There was a visit from the Bishop of Moray, Alexander Bur. I was warned to be clean and at hand if his Eminence condescended to see me. This he did and I was confronted by a different pair of baleful eyes. His were pale and set on a white pasty complexion in a face that resembled the features of the inscrutable sphinx.
"Boy," a resonant voice boomed with surprising vigour from a scrawny neck.
"Boy, do you wish to join the Church of God?" I had expected this question. After a great deal of parental persuasion I had succumbed to this unattractive idea. I answered in truth that I could not admit to wishing to join the Church. I had been persuaded that it was the only course open to me. The Bishop fell silent and scrutinised me through those pale fish eyes of his.
"Scarcely an enthusiastic supplication, but we shall endeavour to make something of this unlikely material." What he said next surprised me, coming from a Bishop.
"I hear you think you are a passable bowman. You must improve your aim."
My youthful days of freedom were over. Gone were the blue days, the green days, the brown days of a boy’s crowded life. The cage of manhood was about to snap shut. My education hitherto had been by tutors, young men of some learning who had been hired to instruct us in Euclid, French and Latin. The Chisholm boys and girls from the Castle, my sisters Elsie and Mary, Eric and the Bews twins were my companions. I suspect that the latter were added to the group because my parents considered their freedom to be an unendurable temptation to me. We acquired some formal learning. We had one good tutor, a young novice from Pluscarden Abbey, who had studied physic in the University of Montpellier. He had the biggest feet I had ever seen, an infectious laugh and jagged teeth. They were broken, he told us, defending the Faith in an alehouse in Paris.
The murder at Primrose Bay ended this and I was banished to the Cathedral School to brush up my Latin before taking passage for Paris and the Scots College. These days are supposed to be the happiest of our lives and I suppose my three years in Paris were happy enough. I met, wooed and made love to a rare variety of girls, Hungarian, French, Scots, Danish, Turkish, Spanish and Arab. Paris was the centre of all the world and sooner or later everyone met on the banks of the Seine or in Notre-Dame Cathedral. I lived on a farm. In the summer I worked from four in the morning until eight and then again from six in the evening to ten. The harvest had to be fitted in to allow us to attend classes, and in the winter the classes were fitted around our other commitments and amusements. The system worked quite well for it was understood by our professors and produced the credits at the end of term which kept our fathers happy. I pursued with enthusiasm my hobby of weaponry and graduated with paper trophies in Latin, French and theology and with a practical understanding and expertise in wrestling, swordsmanship and archery. My religious instruction was a mixed study of classical dogma and the New Thought. We were in the era of pope and anti-pope and although Scotland, Spain and France adhered to the Pope in Avignon there was a great split in Christendom. Questions were being whispered in salons, bistros and in student lodgings which even ten years before would have been unthinkable. Had adoration become idolatory? Had the message of Christ been lost in all the pomp, pageantry and rich trappings of the established Church? Had corruption defaced religious practice? France was at the height of her power. The English possessions had been wrested from them and in the decadence which followed the ravages of war all sorts of heresies sprouted like wild vetch in a field of wheat.
In 1388 I was summoned home. My father had been slain on the field at Otterburn, in that dreadful moonlight battle, and my mother called me back. My ecclesiastic studies were incomplete, and out of deference to my father’s wish, I attached myself once more to Bishop Bur and the "Sang" School to continue my pursuit of grace. But I was restless. I had lost something in Paris – or had I gained something else?
My old complacency had been dented and I had begun to doubt the rightness of the right. Certain sacred cows had been revealed as scraggy old beasts, and there had been nothing in the cynical, satirical atmosphere of student Paris to fill the void left by the fallen idols. I was glad to return to my clean northern air, to scent again the myrtle of the wide moors and taste the blaeberries under the alder trees. My heart lifted to the sight of snow on the hills of Caithness and on the Sutherland of the Vikings. Morven reared her cone in the winter sky, sunsets were brighter than they had ever been while as always the Loch of Spynie raised its shining face to the heavens and welcomed its skeins of geese and squadrons of swans.
And so in the year 1390 I had celebrated my twentieth birthday, was Laird of Plewlands and novice to the Bishop of Moray in the Cathedral of Elgin, known to all men as the Lantern of the North. The months I spent within the cloisters of this beautiful place were distressing months for Bishop Bur and his canons and monks. I was a disrupting influence in their midst, having a head full of dangerous new ideas, hot from France. I had found it easy to despise the gawdy glitter of pomp and wealth while I lived the life of a poor scholar in Paris. I had succumbed, of course, to that usual student malaise of impatience and impertinence which condemned all institutions of the day and brooked no compromise with the past.
I have found poverty in all the great towns that I have visited. But in Paris, most of all, the poor were there in their thousands and in their rags, jostling, begging, fighting for scarce scraps of food and dying filthy in the gutters. The contrast with the powdered, scented ladies of the court and their fine consorts in rich leathers and linens, with their plumed hats and jewelled swords, assaulted the senses like the stench of sewage in the Seine after a downpour. Alongside the stark horrors of the destitute were the rich ornaments, the gold and the gawdy vestments of the Church.
Here, a whole world away from that teeming city life, my young and unforgiving eyes were picking out these identical symptoms of decadence and indulgence that I had ranted about in the bistros of Montmartre. I noted the mutual lack of affection between the common folk in Elgin and the community of the Cathedral. The pitiful condition of the unfortunates in the leper colony outside the East Gate was known, but disregarded by all save a very few. Mark you, I was not of the few. My criticism did not engender my own involvement for although I rather fancied myself as the reforming zealot who would change all this, I did not relish soiling my hands in the process. I was thoroughly disliked. I pried into every dubious undertaking and scented out all mysterious or suspicious happenings.
Thus I stumbled on the shame of the Urquhart Priory and on the jealousies which existed between the Bishop and the Benedictines of Pluscarden. Yet despite my discovery of unchristian conduct meted out to each other by this brotherhood of God, and despite the certainty of longstanding immoral practices, deep within me I was absolutely convinced of the truths of the Christian gospel and of the need of these pure ethics in the times we live in. These conflicting images preoccupied me, for it remained a paradox and a puzzle unsolved that in surroundings of such serene and noble beauty created by men whose minds must have been touched by God, there should remain this rottenness in the hearts of others. So I prayed for the souls of all but myself, for my own had not begun to exist.
As often as I could I returned to Plewlands. The Loch of Spynie abounded with wild fowl. Coot and waterhen were there by the thousand. Mallard duck nested in the reeds. Swans sailed like fighting ships on its surface and fashioned their huge island nests among the rushes. Terns screamed over the shingle beds to the East and hundreds of black-headed gulls built a noisy busy colony in the marshes to the South of the Bishop’s palace. Later in the year migrating birds filled the air with the sound of their wings, the teal, the golden eye, and the greylag geese from the far north. In the pine trees between the Loch and the River Lossie there was a heronry and at all seasons, if you looked very carefully, you could glimpse the shape of these silent, motionless fishers, standing knee deep in the mud, their beaks poised for the unwary fish or frog.
I think my companions at the Cathedral put up with my long pious face and disapproving eyes because of the good things I took back to them from my hours of freedom. My saddlebags would be heavy with wild duck taken in the traps set by Matthew the Fowler or there would be a brace of swans torn from the sky by my peregrine, Kitty. During the nesting season some dozens of black-headed gulls’ eggs found their way, hard-boiled, to the tables of the Maisondieu.
Four
During the first six months of that fateful year 1390, one man dominated out thoughts and our conversation. He was Alexander Stewart, King’s son, Justiciar of Scotland North of the Forth, Earl of Buchan and Ross and Lord of Badenoch. For years our Bishop, Alexander Bur, had ridden a collision course with this man, and all of us in the Cathedral Community now knew that explosion could not long be avoided. The Bishop’s temporal power extended into the wild hill country of Badenoch, bounded in the South by the Cairngorms and in the North by the valley of the Findhorn. In the heart of this waste of moor and mountain lay Lochindorb, a windswept expanse of water surrounding an island castle, the home of the Lord of Badenoch. The extension of the Bishop’s power into territory, which, of all his possessions, Alexander Stewart considered his closest personal domain, rankled and became the object of legal wrangling which lasted ten years and ended in ravage by fire.
The first confrontation between these two men had been staged by the Earl who told the Bishop to renounce his claim to the Church lands in Badenoch. Bishop Bur resisted this demand. As justiciar – the King’s legal representative – Stewart summoned Bur to appear before his court at the Standing Stones of Easter Kingussie. There, not unexpectedly, the Bishop’s claim to the Badenoch lands was rejected.
Bishop Bur read the writing on the wall. Out of this small rebuff he foresaw the gradual assimilation of his rich territories by this predatory prince. More important still was the effect of this decision on the Church which, growing in power and influence, aimed at the domination of temporal as well as spiritual affairs in Scotland that she had achieved elsewhere, notably in France.
At Ruthven in Badenoch a year or two later, these two powerful, ambitious men met again. Since their first confrontation Bishop Bur had been active. One would have thought the entire Faith was at stake, so assiduously had he prepared for this moment. Gathered on his sideat the Justiciar’s Court in Ruthven Castle was the power and the strength of the Church. Like all young men since at the Cathedral School, I was obliged to memorise the names of the churchmen present, and the list sounded like a Roll Call of Archangels! Faced with this adamant, glittering array of the powerful men of the Mother Church both in Scotland and from France, and placed under duress by a thinly veiled ecclesiastical threat, Alexander Stewart saw that he had met his match and before the assembled Court, he burnt his papers of proof. The history of these events was well known to all of us at the Cathedral for Bishop Bur had not been slow to proclaim his victory.
The clangour of Church bells announced it throughout the Province. Masses were held in his honour. He arranged processions to the furthermost Churches in Badenoch – processions scarcely to be distinguished from armed sorties, so strong was his bodyguard and so flamboyant his banners. In 1390 matters were made even worse between the Bishop and the Lord of Badenoch by the intervention of Stewart’s brother now King Robert the Third. For his own reasons, Stewart had deserted his lawful wife Euphemia Countess of Ross whom he had married purely for his own aggrandizement. He lived now in Lochindorb with his mistress, Mariota Athyn, the mother of all his children. The King, prompted by the Bishop, could do no other than support Bur’s uncompromising defence of the deserted Euphemia and commanded his headstrong brother to abandon his mistress.
We expected strong rhetoric from our Bishop on this subject and we were not disappointed. Once a week he addressed his budding clerics in the Church of the Maisondieu. We enjoyed these tirades for we then heard "Old Sticky-Bur" at his vituperative best. He knew that he was addressing a "bunch of young heretics" and was at pains to defend the "tried and proved" methods of the Church. A word he was fond of using was "reprobate" – "unworthy of salvation". Any of us boys who implied even the mildest criticism of the establishment was instantly, by Sticky-Bur’s definition and epithet "A fornicating reprobate". We were accustomed then to hearing this intriguing phrase hurled at our, sometimes, deserving selves. But when, in a torrent of rage, he applied to the Lord of Badenoch this choice description, we were quite convulsed by almost uncontrollable joy. The Arch-enemy of the Provincial Church had suddenly been compared with our unworthy persons – a pack of unruly, dissenting and oft-time fornicating novices. The label stuck. We loved it and soon it was a catch-phrase in Elgin. Had the Earl heard it he might have enjoyed it too, and who knows, the Cathedral might never have been burnt! But, alas, he did not, and his reply, addressed to his adversary and tormentor, Bishop Bur, was brief and uncompromising. It contained a statement of intent: should the Bishop not surrender to him his possessions in Badenoch and in Moray, he must suffer the direct consequence. His message is said to have ended "nemo me impune lacessit" – no one meddles in my affairs with impunity.
Hard on this warning in May, came the burning of Forres. To hear the Forres folk talk you would be forgiven for thinking the whole town was destroyed. It was the Bishop’s properties that the Lord of Badenoch fired; the Archdeacon’s place was burnt to the ground, the Church was partly destroyed and houses close by suffered damage.
The Bishop retaliated with the dreadful Ban of Excommunication. The fateful words we knew by heart as we young fellows were expected to. "The Holy Church shall cut thee off like a rotten and diseased branch to fall headlong into The Pit where eternal fire shall consume thee." It followed that every man’s hand was set against him and that his slaying would rejoice the Church. None dared. That fearful curse had but one dire result, Alexander Stewart became thereafter "The Wolf of Badenoch", a name he encouraged. His descent upon Forres from his stronghold in Lochindorb was described by Bishop Bur as "An horrid act of sacrilege and vandalism" and this devil-man was soon pictured in the public eye as possessing gigantic strength. We heard stories of his enormous black horse with eyes that flashed fire, teeth which champed on children and mothers brought their families scurrying indoors with the threat "The Wolf ’ll get ye".
To us of the Church, his assaults on the lands and buildings and purse and people of the Bishopric were the unprovoked and deliberate acts of the anti-Christ. But if the Bishop had thought to deter the Wolf by the fearful curse of excommunication, we younger churchmen were not so convinced. Four of us discussed it among ourselves and decided that should this demon descend on Elgin we were not prepared to submit without a fight. We knew that to wield a sword in anger was totally against the rules of the Church, as it was against the rules of the Maisondieu to keep any form of offensive weapon, but we managed to smuggle in and to hide a fair armoury under the flooring in our cells. So, when it happened on a cold June evening thick with haar, we were not caught unprepared. The great bells of the Cathedral awakened us with their clamour. The shouts and screams of frightened families running from the manses to the sanctuary got us out of our beds with a rush and we heard the cry –
"The Wolf, the Wolf". We raced to arm, uncovered our swords and round shields, tied our helmets under our chins and ran towards the burning manses. Flames were already leaping from the windows as these houses, largely made of wood, went up in smoke. There was running and shouting as the wild hill-men capered and whooped and threw their resin torches on the roofs and anywhere that would burn.