Robert Henryson, the old schoolmaster of Dunfermline, is dying. Yet as Death presses upon him in these final days, more insistent still are his memories of four students-the bright, passionate Isabel Inglis; the charismatic George Crichton; the somber, studious John de Leith; and the awkward, but brilliant musician Ingraham Bannatyne-whose lives were irrevocably changed in that summer of 1482, when a group of frustrated noblemen hanged James III's low-born advisers on Lauder Bridge. As the figures of these young people pass before his imagination, Robert turns to the one means he has left to discover meaning in this tragedy from so many years before and to celebrate the lives of those caught up in it-his poetry.