1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (24 page)

Chapter 28

The buttresses of the church of St. Giles—due to be reconsecrated as a cathedral in the coming weeks, not that Michel Ducos or any of his followers cared about
that
all-but-papist nonsense—provided remarkably little cover. The church was not, when all was said and done, a very big building, albeit big enough for the interior to be subdivided into all manner of uses. Still, the only one of them that needed cover was Ducos himself, as none of the others could be recognized by the people they were watching.

The Edinburgh chapter of the revolutionary organization he’d been building had as yet no formal name, Ducos having considered it best to remain covert for the time being—although Party of God was coming to seem like a popular choice. The members were solid fellows, for Scotsmen, and the differences in doctrine between the local brand of Calvinism and his own Huguenot version were small enough that they were simply fodder for whiling away long winter evenings, of which Scotland had a fine supply, in debate and discussion. It had improved his grasp of English out of all recognition, as well as giving him a Scots accent he could turn on and off at will. None of them, however, had met the crypto-papist Scotsman Lennox, who had the infernal gall to claim to be a Protestant after having accepted a papal knighthood from the very hands of the Antichrist himself. For the moment, they were simply loitering, troubling nobody in the nearly empty square at the front of St. Giles. They took turns at watching the main door of the Tolbooth a few dozen paces away while Ducos stayed behind the buttress, leaning casually against the sun-warmed stone and wishing, idly, that the heathen scum in the Tolbooth would get on with it and get out here before the sun went below the houses opposite and deprived him of the pleasant warmth.

His people in Edinburgh had called him over from Glasgow when they began to suspect that the United States of Europe was getting involved in Scots politics, giving aid and comfort to the then-nascent Committees of Correspondence.

That had turned out to be nothing, or little more than nothing. The fool German had managed to get himself stabbed
and
shot in the course of preventing a local business magnate from having a greengrocer killed. Inside a month he was dead of blood poisoning. He’d not even saved the greengrocer woman; she’d taken ill in the usual round of sickness that came with summer and shat herself to death. The rump of the local Committee was currently busy with the kind of retrenchment that always followed the departure of a leader who had made himself too necessary. They would be months at least before they could do more than run a charity kitchen. Badly. It was a business of old women and street charity and no more.

No matter. Discreet inquiries—and hadn’t the German made a fool of himself over
that,
his notion of subtlety being to go into a tavern and try to ask oblique questions of men he’d never met—had established the identity of the woman and that the real involvement of the USE was more in the line of offering personal help because of her acquaintance with the sole member of the local Committee of Correspondence. Of course, the woman was more useful as a dead martyr, so everywhere except Edinburgh, where people might know a contradictory truth, Jenny Geddes had been poisoned by papists for witnessing God’s truth in the teeth of royal tyranny. In Edinburgh proper the story was being put about that the merely local squabble involving hired bullies had been at the orders of the king, with royal troops. The Party of God might be small, but they had printing presses and active tongues.

If there was a feature of the politics hereabouts that Ducos heartily approved of it was that the king had virtually no troops or constabulary that were directly his own. He could order the colonels of regiments and the trained bands and the noblemen with armed retainers, but not the troops themselves. And he had no practical means of compelling obedience. The clan Campbell, however, had a number of highly effective means of compelling obedience, not least of which was the power of their considerable purses; it would be a rare Scots colonel that the Campbell could not buy the debts of and ruthlessly call in in full. Which left mercenaries, and apparently the king’s money had run out before he managed to send any of those north of the Tweed.

Of course, nobody needed to include inconvenient nuances of that kind in propaganda. Although this one seemed to have turned up true. Whether this Finnegan was a king’s man or one of the earl of Cork’s hired throat-cutters was unclear as yet. His men were a close-knit bunch who kept to Erse among themselves, and none of the Party had any of that tongue. Refused to, since apparently it was the language of papists hereabouts.

What was interesting that they had arrested the USE’s man in Edinburgh, the one married to the American woman who was famous for her shooting. Apparently on a Royal Warrant of some kind. Ducos understood how such things worked in France, but the legal system here in Scotland was a closed book to him, apart from the assurance that the differences between it and the English laws made for some pretty work for lawyers. What had got the Edinburgh chapter interested enough to call Ducos in was the presence of new faces, one of whom was apparently an old acquaintance of his.

Thus, his presence here—partly to have his thoughts on the matter first hand but mostly to have him identify whether or not the Major Lennox who was suddenly making a nuisance of himself was the same Lennox that Ducos had dealt with in Venice and Rome. For his own part, Ducos had never seen Lennox close-to, as he had been careful to only meet the young, impressionable and unbelievably stupid members of the American party in Venice, but he was sure he could recognize the fellow.

The summer evenings being long in Scotland, they would not even have to be very close. Midsummer was past, but this far north the long evenings persisted well into autumn, so there would not be work for linkboys for hours yet. The market stallholders had all long since packed up and gone, but there were still plenty of idlers about the place to function as cover.

Apparently the Americans thought of a prison visit as a full day’s business. It was the one place they could be sure of being found, with one of their number held pending trial. Word had been sent for Ducos mid-afternoon when they arrived, and they had not left in the hour or so it took for him to receive word and make his way there. The room that Mackay was held in had been identified, and there was light at the window. All the Party’s best efforts had not gotten an agent inside. It seemed the opportunities for corruption in the place were so good the existing staff were unwilling to share. While the creation of an opening was entirely in the realm of possibility, such things required planning. Ducos decided to put such planning in train. A dead jailer more or less was of no great account if there were likely to be more jailed notables in the Tolbooth. An escape—even if the prisoner escaped no farther than a nearby lime-pit, removing the possibility of embarrassing recapture—stirred the secular authorities to tyrannical overstepping like little else.

At last! There was movement around the entrance, and the American woman emerged. Although she’d taken to wearing local clothing, there was no mistaking the differences in movement and habits of someone who’d come to such garments later in life. Ducos liked to think he was a keen observer of such things. Even when the Americans were not dressing their women with disgusting immodesty or shocking mannishness, they seemed to value ease and freedom of movement in ways that the ordinary dress of common women across Europe did not. Put an American woman in such garb and she would be months adjusting.

With her was a shorter man with the gait of a lifelong horseman. Lennox, Ducos recognized him in an instant. There was a very definite USE involvement here, then. The man was one of their serving soldiers and his actions at Rome had been as clear a statement of their disgraceful tolerance of Romish deviltry as could be sought. All that remained was to be nonchalant until they were out of sight and the next step could, with the help of the local Party men, be planned.

An hour later in the upper rooms of a common tavern—the base and drunken ways of most of the locals made a fine cover for the business of the godly, and a reminder of the worldly sin against which they strove—Ducos assessed the men he had for the task at hand. The Gordon brothers, who were at pains to assure everyone that they were in truth MacGregors, their father having changed the family name due to the Act of Proscription when they were small boys. They were as fired for revolutionary activity by that as by the desire to do God’s work. No matter. McCraith, a thin and lugubrious fellow who had quit the USE in disgust over the matter of tolerance and returned home to find no work for an old soldier. Three Frasers, none related to the others, who made mild jests about the coincidence. All three—Jamie, Alexander and Rab—were at pains to point out that they were of the lowland Frasers, giving Ducos to understand that the Highland Frasers were a pack of superstitious papist savages. All six were, in essence, broken men of the kind that had been so useful in both sides of his work for the Comte d’Avaux. Some of them would work for money, but the best ones would work for the hope of vengeance against what they saw as the injustice of a world that had done them ill through no fault of their own. They could, unguided, reach some shocking misunderstandings as to the source of that injustice, but only a little persuasion to good Calvinist boys such as these brought them around to the idea that they suffered the hurts of a sinful world that had fallen from God. Ducos knew that there was no great difference between him and them save his early and burning insight that to take arms against the sin of the world was a very present remedy for the woe it brought on.

“He’s oor man, then?” Jamie Fraser—far the brightest of the group—said. “For if we’ve tae face the full might o’ the USE we’ve tae be richt careful. We cannae face them direct.”

Ducos nodded. It was always a sore temptation to seek a bloody martyrdom. A temptation that Ducos himself wrestled with, and often, but suicide was a dire sin. “Truly,” he agreed out loud. “But to summarize what we have learned, the USE is seeking to intervene in Scotland. The presence of this man Lennox confirms it. The manner of that intervention?”

“They’ve had a mort o’ visitors at the Mackay house,” McCraith said. He’d taken a potman’s job at an alehouse close by, no more than a few side streets over. Close enough that he could spend quiet moments watching the street outside the residence. He didn’t see everything, but enough to get a sense of the matter. “Mair around the time this Finnegan arrived. I’ve a fancy that there’s no coincidence in that. The Mackay servants spoke aye well o’ this Lennox, the Mackay bastard and his American wife is returned at the same time and there’s vistors fra’ England into the bargain. Put that wi’ the news o’ Cromwell’s break frae the king’s prison in England and there’s a fine meal, no?”

Nods all around. It certainly helped that Finnegan’s men were using the place as a rendezvous for their own watch on the Mackay house. What McCraith didn’t see in person he could sometimes eavesdrop from the few things the Irishmen said in English.

“Tell me, how many of the people of this town would rise against popery?”

That got a round of chuckles. “All, tae a point,” said the elder Gordon, “but they’re mair agin popery than they’re for the godly, if ye’ tak’ ma’ meanin’.”

More nods.

“Then we are not yet ready to provoke a rising?” Ducos asked. The future histories had shown that one would happen. Over the Romish deviation of bishops, and the Arminianism of the English king. Would the godlessness of the USE suffice?

The elder Gordon shook his head. “The divine providence may yet lead to one, if the fowk can be only persuaded to let His grace move in their hearts. Forbye, let them rage agin’ popery and it may come to that. I’d no’ think tae presume on it.”

Ducos valued Gordon’s clearheaded blend of optimism and pessimism. There was a point, though, at which consideration became inaction. “Then this motion of the great enemy is but a chance to thwart him?”

Again, nods from around the room.

The younger Gordon made one his rare contributions. “If this Lennox is as much a papist as he seems, faus knight o’ th’ pope as he is, can we no’ make oor strife agin’ the USE a strife agin’ popery? Would we no’ have the people wi’ us in that?”

General murmurs of agreement. “If we can place the USE and the pope together in the minds of the people, certainly,” Ducos allowed. Perhaps if they had begun weeks earlier, it would have been a possibilitty. “Fraser, Monsieurs Gordon, perhaps a broadside regarding the allegiance of the USE’s man in Edinburgh?”

“Aye,” Fraser said. “Be a few days, a week perhaps, before we have them writ and set and printed.”

Ducos nodded. “
Bien sur,
so for the moment we need to decide. The USE have a man in the Tolbooth, their riflewoman, the crippled elder Mackay, the papist Lennox, some other persons unknown, and an Irishman come from England to take Mackay under arrest.”

“Which comes tae a braw mess, aye,” McCraith put in.

“A mess, certainly,” said Ducos, “and I would suggest that we need not know the whys of any of it; in France, the king has his
agents provocateurs
. It is a stratagem we can use in the service of God, my brethren. Whatever might be done to cause this situation to become more of, as brother McCraith calls it, a mess, we ought to do. Whatever effusion of blood results is told to all as evidence of the USE and the popery they countenance.
Wherefore by their fruits shall ye know them.”

“
Seven Matthew,” Fraser said, nodding as he capped the quotation. “If we might ensure that the American shoots only at the papist Erse, that would spare innocent bloodshed. If God will it, o’course.”

“We can but try,” Ducos allowed. Fraser was at heart, a good man. It made him flinch from what had to be done in the service of God. Ducos was sure that at the moment of decision, God’s grace would move the man to the fullness of service in the divine cause. In the meantime, his fervent unspoken prayers that the cup should pass from him were endearing.