Free Braveheart by Randall Wallace

“Your coming back made us remember your father. And made us ask if we are still men.”
    William looked around the group, lastly at MacClannough.
    “I came back home to raise crops. And, God willing, a family. If I can live in peace, I will,” William said. He looked once more at old Campbell, then at Hamish, and walked out of the cave, leading his horse with him.
    Campbell shook his head. No one else spoke. Then MacClannough followed William.
    The two rode back in silence; they reached the crossroads on the ridge above the Wallace farm. As they were about to part, MacClannough stopped his horse and spoke. “If you can keep your intention to stay out of the troubles, you may court my daughter. If you break your intention, I’ll kill you.”
    MacClannough rode away. William rode down to his farm. But along the lane, he stopped and looked for a long time at the graves of his father and brother.
     
     
    16
     
    THEY DID NOT SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN FOR TWO WEEKS. BUT when one of the MacClannoughs wed his daughter to the son of another local farmer, he sent out a runner to announce the event and invite friends to the celebration. Young Wallace was included in the circle—scarcely anyone was left out, and yet he took the invitation as a sign of acceptance by his old neighbors. So on a Saturday afternoon in late summer he found himself beside Murron, strolling through grass up to their kneetops, in a field beside the church. All the farm families had turned out, but very few of the villagers, as the bride’s family, being tenents on the land of a nobleman, was not prosperous enough to invite and feed them all. Yet there was ample food and flowers full of spirits followed the nuptial couple about and serenaded them with bawdy songs.
    William and Murron had sat on opposite sides of the aisle during the wedding, she with her family, he alone. The words of the Latin mass, mysterious to most of the congregation, had bathed the ceremony with a majesty; and Murron, who had seen so many of her friends make the solemn journey into marriage and had turned down so many offers to take the trip herself, felt the spirit of the wedding in a way she had never felt it before, as if those holy words had been shaped at the dawn of time and sent down the ages specifically for her.
    Then she and William had met at the door of the church as the congregation had filed out behind the bride and groom to begin the real celebration. As Murron and William came face to face, they scanned each other’s features suddenly and desperately, as if afraid that in the days since they’d last met everything had changed, they’d gotten it all wrong somehow, the face that had been filling their waking thoughts and their sleeping dreams was really just like every other. But once their eyes met, they saw the same dreams, the same promise, the same gleam, like looking into the face of someone who is gazing through the door of heaven.
    So now they walked side by side, their steps matched, not daring to hold hands though their knuckles brushed as they matched steps. It seemed to them that everyone was watching them. And yet that didn’t seem to matter.
    “Your father doesn’t like me, does he?” William said, smiling.
    “It’s not you,” she said. “He dislikes that you’re a Wallace. He just says . . . the Wallaces don’t seem to live for very long.”
    He didn’t have an answer for that. His father, his brother, his grandfather . . . Death was a part of life; diseases and accidents seemed to take someone every day. But only William’s mother had died in her bed of what was known as a natural cause. The men –well, with the Wallaces it seemed that death in battle was a natural cause. And yet as William walked beside Murron and looked at her auburn hair drawing in the warmth of the sunlight and her eyes absorbing the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, he wanted his hands to know nothing but the touch of her skin and the feel of a plow in his