Jennifer Roberson (25 page)

Keppoch was young, well-made, and strikingly handsome, but no less shrewd for his prettiness. His hand was as quick with dirk or claymore as any man’s, and his pride equally prickly; Breadalbane did not placate, plead, or prevaricate, but spoke plainly instead. Coll would take his time, but he would offer answer; it was a skillful man who understood the best method was not to push a stubborn man, but to let him come to his mind of himself.

Breadalbane waited. Keppoch eventually took his attention from the ground beneath his feet and looked at the earl. His smile was edged, with a dirk behind his lips. “And what of it? What does this truce gain you?”

“Time.”

“To do what?”

“To get terms of William which are favorable to such men as ourselves.”

Keppoch arched dark brows. “ ‘Men as ourselves’? What men are we, Breadalbane?—what men are those such as
you?”

It was not unexpected; the earl had heard it from others. “I am a Highlander, as you are. I am the warden of my people—”

“Campbells.”

“Aye, Campbells; would you have me repudiate them?”

Coll laughed silently, baring strong teeth. “ ’Twould come as a shock to Argyll.”

Such small offenses the earl could withstand; he offered no weapon. “In my own way I have supported the Stuart cause—”

“By keeping your Campbells home from Killiecrankie?” Keppoch shrugged. “Such support as that offers little.”

“I offer it now,” Breadalbane said. “I have worked long and hard to gain the trust of Stair and William, and I have it. Now I intend to use it—but not in a way they might suppose.”

Keppoch raked him with a scalding glance, then smiled to dispell it. He knew how to use his looks, and his smile was very bonnie. “In what way
will
you use it?”

“To aid the clans.”

“Ah.”

“I have been given a commission by the king himself—” Breadalbane caught himself; to the clans,
James
was king. “—by the Dutchman to offer settlement to the clans. He is at war with France. The Jacobite rebellion robs him of strength; he would do better to have Highlanders in his regiments than destroying them.”

Keppoch grinned again. “Killiecrankie was sweet.”

“And Dunkeld, after?” The earl saw the flash of anger in MacDonald eyes; they had all lost men in the Cameronian fires. “He has put an army into the foothills under Livingstone’s command, and a garrison at Fort William at Inverlochy. There are naval cannon on the walls. There is a patrol boat with guns on Loch Linnhe. There are frigates likewise mounted tacking off the Isles. Killiecrankie, despite its glory, was an aberration, not the rule.” He waited a beat as color stained, then drained from Keppoch’s swarthy face. “I greet for my people. I greet for the Highlands. I have no wish to see our ways crushed under the heels of the Dutchman’s rule.”

“What would ye have?”

“A truce, as I said. No oath such as William might prefer. Time, so I may present our case to Stair, and to William, and make them understand that Highlanders as a force canna be overlooked, lest the war with France be lost.”

“Time.” MacDonald of Keppoch twisted his mobile mouth. He was a young man, much younger than Breadalbane, but Highland chiefs were bred to privation and conflict. He would not be intimidated by the king’s promised strength, but neither was he blind to its presence. “Such terms as are favorable to us?”

“As favorable as can be.”

“He canna have us for soldiers if we are sworn to James Stuart.”

“Of course not. He honors the oaths you swore at Dalcomera, and later at Blair after Dundee died; the Dutchman isna a Scot, but he’s no’ blind to a man’s pride.” Breadalbane smiled. “He would give you time to know James’s mind.”

“Jamie’s mind?” Coll took his arms out from under his plaid. “We’ve had nothing of the king for months; who is to ken what is in his mind?”

Breadalbane proceeded with care. “We might ask him.”

“
Who
would ask him?”

“We will send emissaries to his court at Saint-Germain and ask what is in the king’s mind, and what he would have his Scots do. If he released you from the oath to him, you would be free to swear another . . . And there would be an end to hostility in the Highlands.”

Keppoch laughed softly. “You make it sound gey easy, aye?”

“It is easy, when one kens the way.” Breadalbane did not trouble to hide his confidence; Keppoch would have turned him down by now if he intended to. MacDonalds were not known for patience or political wisdom, only hot tempers and intemperate wills. “Three months only, Coll. . . and if nothing comes of Saint-Germain, or William sends his soldiers against you, then you’ve no choice but to remain loyal to James. What harm in waiting?”

“Naught in waiting, I ken. As for after. . .” Keppoch shrugged broad shoulders. The cairngorm set in his plaid brooch glinted bloody amber in tree-filtered sunset. “ ’Twill be for Jamie to say, and Willie to do.”

Softly Breadalbane asked, “Will you sign a bond?”

Keppoch stilled. “A bond.”

“What you have just said. Sign your name to the words. A treaty in writing.”

Dark brows arched again. “You’d have it on paper?”

The earl smiled temperately, certain of his course. “William is no’ a man who honors the word of a Highlander. He is ignorant, and rude.”

Coll of the Cows laughed ironically. “No worse than Jamie, then, who rots in France and forgets altogether he is a Stuart. But an oath is an oath. . . aye, then. I’ll sign this treaty. You’ll have my name, and eight of my tacksmen.”

Breadalbane rose. “I thank you for it, Coll. You are a wise man.”

The wide mouth twisted again. “I am a Gael; I wouldna turn from any battle, nor look to another weapon save my claymore and my dirk. But only a fool would believe steel might win against so much cannon.” The young face hardened; Breadalbane had won a skirmish, but not the war. “Bring me your truce paper, then. . . you’ll have my name on it. But—” Keppoch put out a delaying hand. “There is something more, aye? Something given in return.”

Breadalbane was surprised only that it had taken this long for Keppoch to ask what he was prepared to offer; others had demanded it sooner. But Coll MacDonald was young, his suspicions as yet unseasoned. And so the earl explained it clearly, so that Coll of the Cows would hear the most powerful of inducements. It was, in its five-part simplicity, the most clever of all his plans.

“Private Articles,” Breadalbane explained, and he ticked them off on his hand, so intimately acquainted with them as a man should be who wrote them.

MacDonald of Keppoch had lost his smile, and his irony. “Proof of these ‘Private Articles’ would get you beheaded for treason. Rumor could ruin you.”

“If it were proved true that they were from me, indeed.” The earl smiled. “But such things as honor demand sacrifices, and risks.”

“And these are yours, aye?”

“And these are mine. Aye.”

There was no more respect in Keppoch’s eyes than had existed before, but a grudging acknowledgment that at least the Earl of Breadalbane knew enough to come into the Highlands with something of worth with which to bargain. Too many too often did not.

The young chief turned, plaid swinging, and strode away swiftly, making little noise in bare feet against summer turf and fir needles. Breadalbane waited until Coll of the Cows had disappeared before he permitted himself a broad, jubilant grin of sheer elation.

Coll MacDonald of Keppoch. He had the others already, save for three: Robert Stewart of Appin, MacDonald of Glengarry, and MacIain of Glencoe. Three men only, and the Highlands were his.

Breadalbane laughed.
And William’s.

 

Cat rescued her skirts as the hem snagged, snatching fabric off plundered cornstalks. With so much commotion behind her, so many tanglings of shouts and jests in Gaelic, she remembered her history. There was a tale told of old Achallader, before the castle was built, of an English mercenary with no Gaelic who, riding through, staked his horse for forage in the cornfield, and when discovered by the Fletchers, who held the Achallader lands, was asked his business. Having no Gaelic he could perforce offer no answer, and so after a warning to leave—in Gaelic, and thus unheeded—they killed him.

The township near the castle had also been burned after Killiecrankie. But on the brae above the ruins, swelling gently out of turf, was a green mound known as Uaigh a’Choigrich, the Grave of a Stranger, after the English soldier. It was there Cat went, climbing through rubble, skirting trees, to gaze down upon the fields which once had been carefully tended, which once grew Fletcher, then Campbell corn, yet now lay beaten down beneath the feet of a hundred Highland chieftains and their followers.

A dun-gray haze rose up from the field to drift upon the air, a smoky tapestry through which Cat counted the colors, the shining bits of pewter and iron, the glint of honest steel. It was summer and verdant with brilliant hues, all rich as new-dyed wool, none of it the brooding, blood-dark colors of winter, all brown and gray and black. At sunset the sky was gilded carnelian and salmon and orchid, tinted against the deeper violet haze of the heather-clad braes, the blazing vermilion of cloudberries, the spark of new-kindled fires leaping here and here and here.

The castle ruins stood stark against the horizon, jutting skyward from brick-strewn ground. She wondered what the chiefs and tacksmen and gillies thought to look upon the rubble, the cracked and blackened brickwork, the rigid corners still standing as sentinel to the fallen. Did they think of MacDonalds, who had plundered Campbell lands and laid waste to a Campbell castle? Did they think of Breadalbane, whose claim now was of broken brick and blackened rubble? Did they think of Killiecrankie and revel in victory, naming Achallader a symbol of Jacobite strength in the wake of Jacobite triumph?

Cat looked upon the ruins. She thought of none of those things, symbols or otherwise, but of a man instead. Of Dair MacDonald, who was, she knew, somewhere below tending his father, who had himself set fire to Achallader while his second-born son and Robert Stewart rode on to Glen Lyon.

A curl of music came up from the field below. She heard harp and the faint skirling rise of a bagpipe lament, the
ceol mor,
keening now not of war but of the brooding of the soul, of grief, of the indescribable longing of a Highlander for his past, bred so close to the barrow-graves of the Norse and the habits of the Celt.

She knew there were those who cursed the pipes, Lowlanders and Sassenachs, who lacked the blood of the Highlands, the burn-water and usquabae that ran so hot in their veins. But she was not one of them.

Another piper took up the lament. The
ceol mor
squeezed Cat’s heart, winding itself around her bones until she believed they might break of the longing. There was pipe-born grief, and taut yearning, and a loneliness of spirit she could not fully acknowledge, not knowing its name, its need.

She closed her eyes. The music took her, and its promise—and then of a sudden and unexpected the fire was in her: the kindling of her soul, the blossoming of arousal that sent a long convulsive shiver through every portion of her flesh, so that it moved upon the bones.

She was twenty years old. She was innocent of men. She was a woman, no longer a lass; and in that moment, at last, after years of ignorance, she was aware of the tides in her body, the beating of her blood against the fragile vessels that contained it, and the heat of tingling flesh birthing dampness in private places.

As the pipe music rode fir-smoke to Uaigh a’Choigrich, high on the brae above MacDonald-razed Achallader that once was Campbell-built, Cat could not but know what it was she wanted, how badly she wanted it, and that she could not have it.

He was after all MacDonald, and she a Campbell.

 

The shout came from behind. “Alasdair!” He twitched as a man does, hearing his name, yet hesitated only a moment before going on; it was a common name, as he had once told Cat Campbell before her father’s door.

There. She was in his mind again.
Still
. . . The first shout was closely followed by another in a voice that was too familiar, and it added the Gaelic diminutive that set him apart from his father. “Alasdair Og!”

He swore beneath his breath and swung around, scowling. John came up quickly, undaunted by the black expression. “What is it?” Dair asked. “Can it no’ wait?”

“MacIain wants you,” John answered. “And I wouldna take that face to him this moment, were I you. . . he’s had better moods himself, with no need to see it in his son.”

“His son is his own man, with his own moods,” Dair countered curtly, then regretted it; it was none of his brother’s doing, nor even his father’s. “Forgive me, John—but there is a task that needs doing.”

John MacDonald was disinclined to surrender the course assigned by his father. “Aye, well, I dinna doubt you’ll have a chance to do it—
after
. ’Tis MacDonald business.”

“So is this.”

“And Campbell.”

“So is this.”

“Oh, aye?” John did not hide his curiosity. “Has Breadalbane come to you already, then, in hopes of winning one of MacIain’s sons?”

Astounded, Dair was immediately diverted. “Does he mean to?”

“I imagine so.”

Suspicion bloomed in place of shock. “Has he come to you?”

“Earlier, aye.”

It was very nearly inconceivable. “To say what?”

John’s tone was ineffably dry, but Dair knew the ironic glint in his eyes. “To suggest he is a friend to the Jacobite cause.”

“Breadalbane?
He is William’s man!”

“ ’Tisn’t what he claims here.” John shrugged in eloquent dismissal; he would conjure no explanation for a man such as the earl. “He’s said naught to MacIain yet, and took care with
me
to say naught a man might construe as politics; he kens a laird’s pride, in such matters as precedence, and MacIain’s is fiercer than most. But he’s said enough. I thought he might have asked for you.”