Consequences Unforeseen

Douglasdale, Scotland - Palm Sunday 1306

DOUGLASDALE, SCOTLAND - Palm Sunday 1306

It was a cold day in Hell…

The girl merely sighed as he slit her throat.

Not a slash to the jugular, but two precise incisions to sever both carotid arteries, giving her the briefest moments of pain before the anesthesia of blood loss to the brain.

Fiona Doyle smiled up at him as she went to sleep because she knew his face and was glad to be done with the pains of the past few hours.

She had known that she was dying slowly and painfully from the after effects of the red hot poker brutally inserted into her bowels by the English rapists following hours of their torment and abuse.

She was the oldest – yet barely 18 – of the ten girls tied hands and ankles to the X shaped crosses in a rough line across the floor and in front of the pulpit of this, the Temple of the Castle.

Either bleeding or oozing fluid they lay spread eagled and delirious from the continual rape at the will of the 200 or so invading troops now laughing and dancing in drunken abandon or sleeping in alcohol induced stupor.

The girls were forgotten now. Used, abused and of no further interest to the rabble. The celebration of Palm Sunday had been going on for hours!

He touched her head gently as he moved on to the next girl. She was but 14 years old. He had nine more to release before attending to his primary goal. The grim but merciful task took no more than fifteen minutes to complete. He had known and loved these girls of his town. He had loved them like they were his own daughters. Some indeed were no doubt related to his bloodline.

Those of the soldiers awake enough to sense his passing and see his actions either cheered and laughed at the flowing blood and death twitches of their victims, or cursed him for his mercy.

Those of them just slightly less inebriated perceived him, dressed as he was as just another English soldier taking his own sadistic pleasure at the torture of these Scottish heathen girls.

Finished, he turned to the room, raised his knife in salute to those still awake. He made his exit through the vestry, taking down the burning door torch from its mantle bracket, and slicing through a rope fastened to the wall.

This, the all important rope controlled the death he had set aside for these abusers.

The pitch buckets released from their fastenings in the beams of the hall tumbled down onto the troops below. The oily and sticky contents splashing and soaking both man and floor alike,

With a wry grin belying his tortured mind, he tossed the blazing torch into the room. He paused long enough to see the first few men burst into flame and to hear the screams of those awakening to the agony of death by burning. “Burn in Hell bastards” he thought to himself with total gratification.

He locked the only remaining exit to the Temple and returned to his three men in the West Tower.

James, son of Sir William Douglas was feeling better now! The Black Douglas had struck once more at the hearts and minds of the English animals for that was what they were to him.

Gathered in the family quarters of the West Tower were 8 very scared women and their some 15 children. The comfort of the large circular room, huge fireplace and wall sleeping cubicles was long forgotten to these, the wives and offspring of the officers now burning and crisping in the Temple.

Over the past hour, one by one his men had taken the women to the vestry door and forced them to witness the events of humiliation and brutality being perpetrated on girls no older than some of their own children. Understandably, they were shaken to their core by what they witnessed and the pure shock they exhibited could not have been false.

Now cowering and pleading for mercy, for they were sure they too would be raped and killed along with their brood, they felt helplessness like people in their lofty positions were never meant to feel.

Douglas himself, could never understand the English and their need to take women and children along with them on raids and warfare expeditions. Yet here they were, their illusions destroyed by events in the Church and he knew deep in his gut, that they had no prior knowledge of the horrors their men folk had intended and conducted. This and this alone saved their lives! The Douglas addressed them curtly:

“You have nothing more to fear good ladies, other than living the rest of your lives with the memory of what you have seen here today.

You and your children will be escorted from here to Berwick where you will be free to enter the town for transport to your homes in Windsor.

Tell your King - Longshanks and whoever else you feel so inclined about today's events: But above all tell him that I am coming to get him – and kill him I will!

Be gone, make haste and may your God go with you”

He left the room then with not a backward glance. His men knew what to do and he left them to it.

He was 21 years old, only 5 or so years from a grand old middle age. A Knight at 16 years old, he had seen carnage and battle many times so far in his life. He had lost his father William to the English just a few short years ago.

Now, he was years into a mission of stealth and destruction of his mortal enemy and using skills that seemed to come naturally to him. The English would come to fear him like no one before. Even William Wallace and his glorious victories taken together with his father, Sir William Douglas the Hardy, would pale beside his intent.

He was a killer by stealth and seemingly invisible to all his enemies. “Blacker than Earl of Hell,” as his mother said of him at his birth, were his hair and eyes, and his skin with either wind or sun or both was perpetually brown or red depending on the season. He was truly a descendant of the bold dark man, tales of whom his father had recounted to him as a young boy. Dou – Glass truly lived again in this boy.

His only regret that night was the burning of the Temple so dear to him and to his father's memory.

The Temple of the Knights, the Temple of his Brothers and Ancestors.

He swore to them there and then that he would rebuild it all.

“Hush ye, Hush ye – do not fret ye.

The Black Douglas, he'll no get ye”

Old English lullaby.