The Ghost Read online

  He shook off the concern. “Don’t listen to me. I am an old warrior who has seen his life’s great work accomplished and now doesn’t know what to do with himself. Which reminds me . . .” He turned to Seton. “Tell Chief I have one more mission for you.”

  Alex didn’t hide his surprise. “My lord?”

  “Now that the pope has finally agreed to lift the interdict and my excommunication, I would like to go on a pilgrimage to Whithorn.”

  His words had made them both visibly distressed—or perhaps sad was the better word. For they recognized the truth: that this would be Robert the Bruce’s final mission.

  His work was done. It was time to join his ghosts.

  “We will be ready, sire. Airson an Leòmhann.”

  The battle cry of the Highland Guard that had rung out more times than he could remember. For the Lion.

  For Scotland.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE BATTLE OF Bannockburn is one of the most important battles in Scottish history. With the seven-hundred-year anniversary in 2014, there has been increased interest and scholarship in what is often hailed as one of the greatest Scottish victories (or worst English defeats) in history. I was fortunate to be able to take advantage of quite a few of the new books on the subject, as well as attend the “Bannockburn Live!” anniversary celebration, which featured some wonderful reenactments of the battle. One of the highlights for me was coming face-to-face with Sir Alexander Seton—or at least the reenactor playing him. I’m sure I probably scared the poor guy with my excitement.

  Sir Alexander Seton, a Scottish knight who was fighting for England, did famously switch sides at a critical juncture on the night after the first day of battle. The information he provided helped persuade Bruce to fight the next day. Seton’s key part in the battle was related by Sir Thomas Gray in The Scalacronica, a historical chronicle written about forty years after Bannockburn. This Sir Thomas Gray is the son of the English knight Sir Thomas Gray, who was taken prisoner by the Scots on the first day of the battle—he is the prisoner who I have addressing Alex as he goes into Bruce’s tent—who was presumably in a position to know.

  Alexander Seton is usually said to be the brother of Bruce’s closest friend, Christopher Seton, who was taken prisoner and executed after Methven in 1306. He is also probably the same Alexander Seton who entered into a band with Neil Campbell and De la Hay (Thomas or Gilbert) in 1308 to support Bruce “till the end of their lives” (Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, Edinburgh: G.W.S. Barrow, Edinburgh University Press, 2005; p. 291).

  This promise didn’t last long for Seton. By November 1309 he is in England, receiving a “cask of wine” for his “sustenance,” along with other notable Scots in the English service such as Sir Adam Gordon (also one cask), Sir Edmond Comyn (two casks), Sir Ingrim de Umfraville (four casks), and Malise of Strathearne (four casks) (Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, Vol. III (1307–1357), edited by Joseph Bain, Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1887; p. 23).

  What caused Seton to defect to the English after signing the band isn’t known, although it is certainly conceivable that the no-win, catch-22 situation of the Border lords played a factor. There were many Scots who thought their best bet was with the English, and given the circumstances you can’t really blame them. No one could have predicted Bannockburn. Whatever his reasons, after Seton’s timely return to the Scottish fold during Bannockburn, he serves Bruce faithfully until his death.

  After the battle, Seton was rewarded by the king with more lands in East Lothian and was appointed a steward in the royal household. As I noted in the epilogue, Seton is one of the signatories on the seminal Declaration of Arbroath (“. . . for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”), a precursor to our Declaration of Independence, and is appointed governor of the Castle of Berwick in 1327. The marriage of Prince David to Princess Joan did indeed take place at Berwick Castle the following year. Bruce dies about a year later, on June 7, 1329, but he is said to have been ill for some time.

  Most sources name Seton’s wife as a daughter of Francis Cheyne, but a reference in a genealogical chart said that she was the daughter of Isabel, the daughter of John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, and Isabella MacDuff, which gave me the idea for the connection and my fictional Joan. Readers of The Viper will recall that most sources say that Isabella MacDuff and John Comyn did not have any children.

  Alice and Margaret Comyn, Buchan’s nieces, were his co-heiresses. The fight over the Buchan lands in Scotland would eventually lead to what is known as the Second Scottish War of Independence from 1332 to 1357. Margaret Comyn was a ward of her brother-in-law de Beaumont when she was married sometime around 1315 to John Ross—a loyal Scot. As a result, she lost her claim to the Buchan lands in England. It seemed strange to me that she would be allowed to marry a Scot. Although it gave de Beaumont the English lands of Buchan outright, it gave her an easier claim to the Scottish lands, which he also craved. But it did give me the idea for her part of the story.

  I hope the members of the Seton family/clan will forgive me for adding a wyvern to their arms, but early on I needed a good war name and, well, I liked Dragon.

  The attempt by Edward Bruce to take Carlisle Castle that Alex foils in chapter 2 happened the week after Easter 1314—around the sixteenth of April. Edward Bruce was sent to Cumbria by his brother to harry (possibly for nonpayment of tribute) and gather supplies for the army. While doing so, he makes something of a haphazard attempt on the castle.

  Historians don’t agree on the exact dates for Edward Bruce’s siege of Stirling Castle, but the April raid in Cumbria could have been either after he makes his agreement with Sir Phillip Moubray (the former Scot patriot now holding Stirling Castle for Edward II) or during—possibly to relieve the boredom of the siege.

  Conventional wisdom has viewed Edward Bruce’s truce with Sir Phillip Moubray, whereby the Scots would lift the siege on Stirling with Moubray agreeing to hand over the castle to Bruce if he was not relieved by St. John’s Day, as a major tactical blunder on the part of the king’s brother. The eager-for-battle, aggressive, hotheaded, and impatient Edward Bruce (who is said to have hated sieges) essentially throws down the gauntlet to the English, forcing the very thing his brother had been trying to avoid for eight years.

  But recently, some historians have suggested that perhaps it wasn’t a blunder at all—that Edward Bruce’s actions were actually directed by his brother. Historian and author Chris Brown posits that Bruce might have deliberately chosen Stirling as a target for Edward II, and then spread the news of his dismay with his brother as a means of propaganda to not alert the English (Bannockburn 1314: A New History, Chris Brown, Gloucestershire, England: The History Press, 2009; p. 216). Not only does the truce give Bruce a place to wait and prepare for the English army, which at this point Bruce already knows is marching, it also gives him the benefit of terrain of his choosing, and he doesn’t have to spread his men out.

  When coupled with the gauntlet Bruce himself had thrown down the year before, threatening to forfeit the land of all the Scots fighting for Edward II if they did not submit to him within a year’s time (which he knew Edward II would have to respond to), and the fact that the Scots left the English unmolested on their march to Stirling—completely forgoing their usual guerrilla tactics—I think it’s a very sound theory and decided to go with it rather than the conventional wisdom of an Edward Bruce blunder.

  After the execution of Edward II’s favorite, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, in 1312 by some of his barons, the king seems to have been in a period of mourning. Although he had a few favorites in between—Roger d’Amory, Hugh de Audley, and William de Montacute—I decided to bring forward the much more important (and better known) Sir Hugh Despenser the younger, whose “reign