The notorious Scottish general William Wallace, to be precise. On this white-hot August afternoon Wallace—who had caused no end of trouble for King Edward I—was feeling the wrath of that king and his English subjects. Few foreigners were hated more than this Scotsman, whose stubborn resistance to Edward’s rule had caused high taxes, ceaseless conscriptions, and many English casualties in a decade of war.

Hardly surprising, then, that the entire population of London had gathered to watch Wallace get hung, drawn, and quartered—a particularly English style of execution that combined mortal suffering with dramatic spectacle in a most innovative way. Those peasants smart enough to beat an early path to the suburb of Smithfield milled about in the heat, drinking and waiting for Wallace’s arrival. Beyond the sea of excited faces—and the swarm of gnats and flies they attracted—an advancing dust cloud on the road heralded the victim’s progress.

Wallace had been tied behind two horses and dragged naked four miles through the streets of London and out to Smithfield. As his nearly-skinned and bludgeoned body was untied in preparation for the rest of the execution, the vast throng who’d followed his whole progress tried to press into the packed execution grounds. A melee might have ensued, but Wallace’s agony diverted the masses. Stretched above the crowd by tight ropes around his neck and limbs, he began the second stage of his punishment—a slow, excruciating strangulation.

This was the moment the crowd had been waiting for. A forest of strong arms pelted the pinioned man with rotten food, sending the executioners running for cover and adding humiliation to Wallace’s agony. Some of those throwing offal had genuine hard feelings toward the Scotsman; others just wanted to put their mark on the spectacle. Whatever the motivation, the result was a nauseating cascade, not always finding its mark, that only heightened the crowd’s bloodlust.

At length, the executioners prevailed upon the mob to quit throwing things so that they could watch the prisoner and judge when he was just about ready to die. At that moment Wallace was released. His remarkably large and well-proportioned body hit the podium with a monumental thud. When they strapped him onto a heavy butcher’s table, the serious process of killing began. The once-dreaded warrior met each new torture with a strange, high-pitched, windy scream, the death wail of a man with no voice left in his throat.

A man whose luck had run out.

Hands resting on a borrowed ceremonial sword, Stephen St. Clair watched the event with as much interest as a dog might expend upon a passing fly. Hot as it was, he neither squirmed nor sweated. His white mantle, emblazoned with the rosy cross of the Knights Templar, hung from his shoulders in immaculate folds, somehow impervious to the dust and gnats. His eyes never left Wallace—not because he was interested in the proceedings, but because he was performing an official Temple function and wanted to do it right.

As the executioner began to extract Wallace’s innards and drop them into a glowing brazier, Stephen became aware that nausea had doubled over some of his Templar brethren; a few vomited on the dais. Nasty way to die, certainly. But as a career soldier, Stephen had few illusions that his own passing would be any less painful, nor perhaps even less prolonged. Wallace had done his share of skinning and torturing prisoners and must have hardly expected better treatment as a vanquished foe himself. This sort of death was a soldier’s lot, and, having ridden six campaigns to Scotland, Stephen had seen enough of it to pay it little mind.

Not so with some of the other Templars in his company today, for this was a solemn occasion that had necessitated a full turnout from the London Temple and several smaller local preceptories. Seven years before, Wallace had killed the English Templar Grand Master Brian de Jay in combat. The English Templars had not forgotten their fallen leader, nor his murderer, and that was why every available ranking knight had been called to witness Wallace’s last breath. Some of those available—Stephen included—were fighting men. The majority, however, ran the extensive Templar businesses and banking interests in London, or politicked at court, or sought ways to increase revenues by selling memberships in the Order or burial plots to those turned away from the more popular Catholic cemeteries. These fellows were poorly equipped to meet the rigors of standing in the midday sun, even if all they planned to watch was a minstrelsy. Wallace’s suffering was far beyond their ken, no matter how splendid they looked in military attire.

The execution plodded along—not for nothing did the English use the phrase ”painfully slow”—and eventually the contingent of Templars began talking amongst themselves. Stephen, the only veteran of the Battle of Falkirk in attendance, had been placed in the front ranks for the viewing. The honor did not please him; it meant he had to pay attention to ceremony rather than concentrating on the chores he needed to do before leaving London for his wintertime duties in Kent.

He heard laughter behind him, coming from two fine-looking Templars he had trained for knighthood in the Order.

”What’ll you do now, commandant?” the one joked, prodding Stephen’s back. ”Whatever will you tell the green stompers?”

Together the two Templar knights intoned: ”YOU WILL HAVE TO FIGHT WALLACE! HUH! BACK TO WORK, LADIES!”

Practically the whole pack of Templars gave way to chuckling. The two young knights had imitated Stephen perfectly, right down to his odd Mediterranean accent.

Stephen blushed and chuckled, too, unsure whether he was being complimented or teased. Regardless, he was glad his trainees were able to be casual about the execution, setting an example of sang-froid for the softer brothers.

”I suppose I will have to find a new motivator for my drills,” he said, looking over his shoulder at his former pupils. ”Any suggestions?”

”How about the Prince of Wales?” someone murmured. This brought a bright, if secretive, swell of laughter. It didn’t do to be heard making light of the heads of state, even if you were beyond their legal jurisdiction.

”That is Wallace yon, brother Stephen?” the one recruit asked.

”Aye, it’s him. What’s left of him.”

”Big man.”

”He looked bigger at Falkirk,” Stephen observed.

”WALLACE! HUH! HE’LL BITE OFF YOUR HEAD AND USE YOUR TEETH TO LANCE THE BOILS ON HIS ARSE! BACK TO WORK, LADIES!”

The elderly and high-placed Templar next to Stephen said: ”So that is your position with us, Brother Stephen. Trainer of our supplicants. I’d wondered why I’d not noticed you before.”

“My duties keep me in the countryside,” Stephen said. ”And in the summertime I ride with King Edward’s army.”

”And you were at Falkirk when our Grand Master was killed.”

”Aye.”

”Why did you do nothing to stop it?”

For the first time Stephen felt the sun’s heat prickle his back. The soldiers behind him rushed to his defense. ”Brother Reynald, if Brother Stephen could have saved de Jay, he would have,” one of them said. ”He’s not afraid of anything, if that’s your meaning.”

”That’s exactly my meaning,” the elderly brother replied. ”Brian de Jay was worth the life of every man on this dais! It’s fine that we stand here watching Wallace get his due, but the true fault lies in battlefield cowardice. The fact that this brother is standing here today proves that he has no mettle in the field.”

Now several voices from within the ranks rose to defend Stephen: men he’d ridden with in past campaigns, men he’d trained in the martial arts, even some strangers who felt the moment inappropriate to discuss bravery or cowardice. Sweating, Stephen tried to remember Falkirk, found that its distinctive moments of heroism or cowardice had long ago blended into a vague picture of the vicissitudes of mounted warfare against the Scots. Only with effort did he finally recall a hazy picture of Brian de Jay charging off through a tangle of brush to chase Wallace—after the English had won the battle. What actually happened to Brother Brian was a mystery to Stephen, but the Templar force had taken considerable trouble to recover de Jay’s body. What was left of it.

”Well? Are you going to let others fight your battle even here, brother?” the elderly Templar demanded of Stephen. ”Have you no words with which to acquit yourself?”

”I have none,” Stephen said. ”I am ever ready to give my life for any brother in this Order. The will of God is inscrutable, and I am sure I will answer for my defects when He judges me.”

The elderly Templar sneered. ”The countryside is the perfect place for you.”

A heated protest descended on the old man, led especially by the soldier who had partnered with Stephen that summer. The praise made Stephen squirm worse than the previous insults, because the countryside was the perfect place for him and he strove—everywhere but on the battlefield—to call as little attention to himself as he could.

No, he was not cowardly. But it would be a practical impossibility to explain soldiering to a fat old man whose gall had been raised to a fever pitch by the heat and horror of a summer torture-execution. Every battle ended with hot-heads like Brian de Jay being dragged off the field on biers. The smart soldier—the lucky and smart soldier—inflicted the maximum damage while living to fight again. Besides, there were more important battles to be fought than a sad quarrel over who ruled the sour bogs of Scotland.

At long last, William Wallace moved too close to death to be coaxed toward more suffering by even the most skilled executioner. The general’s heart was extracted from his chest, held aloft for the cheering crowd, and placed in a box for the king’s private viewing. Then the axe men moved in to remove the Scotsman’s head and carve him into quarters like a beef. Their ministrations sent sprays of blood and tissue into the air, provoking a fresh round of retching from the more sensitive. The execution was finally over.

”Perhaps the Scots will crawl back into their caves and quit fighting,” said one of Stephen’s trainees. ”Templar blood is too precious to waste in the carses ’round Stirling. We should be preparing for Crusade.”

”Amen,” Stephen said, crossing himself.

The king’s soldiers busily cleared a path for the Templar dignitaries, and one of the first to go was the old man, showing surprising vitality in his haste to flee the scene. Stephen held back and let the others precede him. Only when the scowling mob threatened to bar his path did he join his brethren for the walk back to the London Temple, where he planned to linger only long enough to organize his small expedition back to Kent.

Before he could get far, a suitably respectful peasant begged his attention. The man held out a small piece of flotsam. ”Buy a bit of the body of Wallace, your grace?” he asked. ”T’would make a nice souvenir. This is a fine, big chunk . . . and see, it has skin on it still.”

Stephen stopped to inspect the flotsam. It was indeed fresh flesh, a shard of skin clinging to it against all odds. Properly preserved, that skin would cure like leather and yet be smoother and softer than any animal hide. There would be no saving the flesh, though. It would either dry hard as a rock or fill with maggots and rot.

Stephen slipped sixpence from his expense funds into the man’s palm and furtively took the relic. He had a momentary impulse to send it to the old Templar as a macabre present, but instead he squeezed it once and threw it over his left shoulder.

For luck.

The bishop, an afficionado of architecture, never ceased to thrill over Giles Trainer’s home and its stunning view of the English Channel. But never before had he felt quite the twinge of anticipation that he felt now. Despite himself, he pictured awaking in the master bedroom as a servant built a fire in the mantel to ward off the chill in the sea breeze. He checked the thought: it was premature, but . . . ah! No longer out of the question.

The bishop and his entourage presented themselves at the door of Villa Trainer; servants admitted them. The house was cool and quiet, effectively illuminated by exquisite stained-glass windows of a sort generally found only in the better cathedrals. The bishop affected a mournful countenance, requested food and drink for his staff, and then asked: ”Where is the girl?”

“In her chamber, your grace,” the housekeeper replied. ”We had to lock her in to keep her from wandering away.”

No surprises there. The bishop scowled and made final mental preparations for his audience with Eleanor, only child and heir of the recently-departed Giles Trainer.

A plague of smallpox had passed through Rising Sun on the Sea with the usual devastating results. Still, it was odd that a powerful man like Giles Trainer—a man so tall he had to bend over in King Longshank’s presence and stoop to go through doorways—would be killed by a pox. One would have thought that he’d come up the victim of his profession, die after being kicked or trampled by one of his destriers, say. But instead he’d perished in a common misery, brought into his house by a daughter who had been allowed to wander amongst the villeins as if she were one of them.

Bishop Pike had had smallpox as an infant and was therefore immune from the scourge. Nevertheless, he took care to cover his face with a silk bandanna as he passed through town and had not removed it when he came inside. Best to exercise care around these illnesses.

“I will see Eleanor now,” the bishop said, donning his vestments.

It was unnecessary for anyone to lead him to the girl’s upstairs room. The bishop took a deep breath, pulled himself to his most imposing height, and unlocked the door.

With its windows closed to the dampness, the room reeked of honey and herbs and the sour perspiration of the sick. Eleanor—no longer a child, but hardly a woman either—lay on her bed with the curtains open, her face and limbs covered with the small bandages applied to soothe the pox. The treatment was effective, indeed, for she hardly showed any sign of the dread disease. When she focused her gaze on the bishop, a great pool of tears welled and began spilling from her eyes.

The sight gratified him. He had come to Rising Sun expecting an audience with a tiger, and instead was confronted by a diminished and rather perplexed-looking sparrow.

“God be with you through this tragedy, Eleanor Perviance Trainer,” he said sternly.

“Oh, Your Grace . . . my father . . .”

“He is facing God’s judgment now, and I doubt he’ll be found wanting. He was a good man.”

That was true, at least. Giles Trainer, a hard worker, had never let wealth isolate him from the other citizens of the village. Bishop Pike wondered who would now organize the maintenance of the town walls and direct the committee for defense against pirates. (In passing irritability, he realized that these tiresome duties might soon fall to him.) Trainer’s lone fault—a common one to men who had their children later in life—was his penchant for spoiling his daughter. Eleanor was at an age when most young ladies embarked for other households to learn the gentlewoman’s arts. But Trainer would have none of that, and since his wife had died long ago, no one stood in opposition to his wishes. Thus had Eleanor grown up her father’s precious pet, running wild in the hills and along the beaches, galloping like a lunatic over the downs on a horse no proper lady would ride. It was whispered that she could swear like a man.

No more of that.

“A terrible, terrible tragedy,” Bishop Pike said softly. ”All the more so to think that it could have been avoided . . . had you comported yourself as a gentlewoman and kept to your hearthside.”

The child blushed a deep crimson. She had never looked like this before—so thin and frail . . . and malleable.

“The burden of this is heavy upon me, Your Grace. I loved my father more than anyone, save Almighty God. And what shall I do? The servants haven’t been paid, and I am too young to run the horse farm just yet.”

Just yet. As if some day this gangly slip of a girl would be able to breed, train, and sell destriers! This was the legacy Giles Trainer had left to his daughter. Preposterous as the notion was, he’d always allowed her to think she might some day work at his side.

“I will take care of your business concerns, Eleanor. Just now you need to pay more heed to your immortal soul.”

He held up a jeweled crucifix and began intoning a Requiescat pacem in the soothing voice that had helped him win a bishopric. The girl rose from her sheets and fell onto her knees, tiny scraps of bandage flaking from her limbs. Bishop Pike had never before seen Eleanor Trainer frightened. He liked the sight.

So the girl will be easy to control after all, he thought. Now there’s only the uncle to contend with.

The minute Bishop Pike had heard of Giles Trainer’s untimely death, he’d spared no expense to ascertain that Lord Gilbert Perviance, Eleanor’s uncle, was out of the area. By the time Lord Gilbert returned—and straightened out his personal business enough that he could look to a niece’s inheritance—Bishop Pike hoped to have the whole Trainer estate securely in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church.

Of course Bishop Pike had no interest in the horse business. The Church could hardly be expected to profit from the sale of creatures whose sole use was to careen about stomping, biting, and mauling anything in their paths. But the estate could be tied up in the courts for years . . . or a bargain could be drawn. The bishop wanted the villa. And he had little doubt that, in order to get his hands on the lucrative and prestigious horse farm, Lord Gilbert would be willing to negotiate.

All that stood in the way of these machinations was Eleanor Trainer, a girl sadly in need of feminine discipline.

“Eleanor,” the bishop said, returning his crucifix to a pocket in his robe, ”you realize, don’t you, that Hell is full of disobedient children?”

“I’ve never been disobedient, Your Grace.”

“Would you say that you’ve lived a life of obedience to the will of God, Eleanor?”

The child thought about it, shook her head. ”No, Your Grace.”

“What would you do, then?”

“I wish to be obedient to the will of God, Your Grace. I am sure . . . it is what my father would have wanted. I shall go to my uncle’s manor and help in his household as becomes a gentlewoman.”

“Do you honestly think God will hear your prayers from the worldly atmosphere of your uncle’s manor?”

The girl looked confused. ”There is a church there, Your Grace. A Templar church.”

“And theatricals every night. Dancing. Music. Drinking. Cousins whose behavior is reported with dismay even this far from their demense.”

Eleanor’s eyes went wide. ”Oh, Your Grace . . . a convent? A convent? I am not . . .”

“Not what? Not interested in praying to Almighty God? Not interested in atoning for your sins? That is despicable, Eleanor Perviance Trainer. You must re-make yourself, and quickly, before Satan comes to claim you. Pay some mind to your immortal soul! The fires of Hell burn brightly for those such as you, who live only for the moment and care not what havoc they wreak. For the love of God, look what you have done! And you would eschew a period of penance to atone for it?”

“Oh, no . . . Your Grace . . . you are right.” She stiffened, wiped tears. ”I place myself, and all that I have, in your care.”

The bishop was glad he wore the kerchief over his face. A victory smile was a hard thing to hide. ”We will leave immediately after the funeral mass for the Convent of Poor Claires. You know of it, I presume?”

“I have seen it on my rides,” she said.

Further proof of her disastrous upbringing. The convent was more than twenty miles distant—she had never had any business riding so far!

Out came the crucifix again. It caught the light from the stained glass in almost mesmerizing patterns. The bishop held it out for Eleanor to kiss.

“Now,” he said, ”I will hear your confession.”