Jennifer Roberson (50 page)

“ ’Tis for you to say,” Murdo declared, “as you are laird now. But you would do better to go, John. Alasdair Og and I will come along smartly when the leg is whole again.”

John wheeled, turning his back on them. He stood rigidly in the cave, the rocky ceiling looming over his head. Dair could read his spine well enough. He did not require John’s face.

Dinna be a fool, John . . . not for me
. He shifted a tiny amount and caught his breath on a muffled hiss; he dared not let John know how much he hurt, or his brother would surely never agree to go.

Even as the sweat dried on his face, John swung back. “Aye!” he shouted. “Aye, we shall go. But I dinna like it, Alasdair! D’ye hear me?”

“Och, aye,” Dair said mildly. “And any soldiers below, as well.”

John swore viciously, then caught himself. Women and children were well within earshot, waiting in the shadows. “Verra well. But come you to Appin as soon as may be.” He fixed Murdo with a sulfurous glare. “See to it he does!”

Murdo bobbed his head in a nod sufficient to acquiesence. Dair waited until John turned away to set about preparing the others. Then he shut his eyes.—
Robbie will give them aid
.

And they need not live in fear that each day might be their last.

 

Despite Una’s protests, Cat made her way down the stairs to her father’s writing table, and there took up parchment, quill, and ink. It was a laborious procedure; she could not as yet use her left arm without significant pain, and if she did cause herself pain, she would be unable to write. And so with great effort she relied only upon her right arm and hand to do the work.

The stairs had tired her more than expected. She sat a moment in the hard chair, closing her eyes against dizziness, then opened them again and slowly began to write. She had never been known for her letters; now she was worse than ever, sorely troubled by pain and weakness.

“I will do this,” she said aloud, grimly. “I will, aye?” If she did not, no one else would. And she would not have falsehood spread. “I will do this.”

Letter after painstaking letter, page after page, nib ground harshly into the parchment so that the ink spread. Very black letters that even a man with failing vision might read.

Cat did not sign her name. She was a woman; who would care about a woman’s grief? Better to let them believe it was a man who wrote, a man in extremity, whose world had been destroyed.

She reinked the nib, then wrote at the bottom of the parchment: “
MacDonald of Glencoe.
”

She had no strength to sand it. She let it sit, let it dry, while she waited in the chair and tried to regather her strength. When she could, when the ink was dry on all the pages, she folded the packet haphazardly and used wax to seal it closed. There were men who would carry it for her to Edinburgh, Campbells who served her father. It would reach its destination.

“There,” she murmured. “Let them ken the truth of Glenlyon’s bravery.”

Glenlyon’s breath ran short in his chest. How could they stare at him so? How could they mutter and murmur of him? How dared they suggest he deserved disgrace?

The Royal Coffeehouse by Parliament Close had been a comfortable retreat before when he had visited Edinburgh, but of a sudden it was inhospitable. Before, he had been treated with the respect due a laird, but now they stared at him, now they murmured of him, now they pointed him out with hard glances and unsubtle stares as the butcher of Glencoe.

’Tisn’t fair!
He had followed orders. He had served the king. He had done as he was told.

He wanted whisky, not coffee. A dish of chocolate sat on the table before him, untouched. His hands, thrust beneath the table, trembled across his abdomen as he linked them tightly. It was difficult to breathe, to maintain the appearance of an officer at leisure, awaiting his orders to sail for Flanders and King William’s forces on the Continent.

News of the killings had come at last to Edinburgh; had made its way south to London. There was no secret of it anymore, no privacy in his doings and the doings of his soldiers. What should have been touted as a discretionary action taken to suppress rebellion, to force peace among Highland clans, was now viewed with a perverse mixture of fascination and horror.

Men shot dead in their beds. Women and children, fleeing through the storm, cut down by Campbell swords.

How dared they?
Can they not understand?

Broadsheets were left in the Royal Coffeehouse as well as in other public rooms. Little written was truthful; Glenlyon had found a crumpled copy and read it in private, appalled by the brutality the words attached to him, the merciless bloodlust ascribed to a Campbell who hated Glencoe MacDonalds.

Now he dared read nothing, not in public, lest they watch him read and remark upon his pallor, the thin, flat set of his mouth, the rigidity of his posture. And so he sat quietly at his table and did not drink his chocolate, but attempted to face down the disapproval of his peers.

No one could know who had not been there.

The stories were patently false, many of them, but there was truth as well. He did not believe the most virulent rumors truly came from a Glencoe MacDonald, but he suspected the worst. How else could there be so much fact mixed liberally with falsehood?

No one knew who had not been there.

But not all MacDonalds were dead. Glencoe was empty of MacDonalds, empty also of dwellings save the charred detritus, yet some of her people survived.

How did men come by such news? How could they know what to print? And he dared not confirm any of it. It painted too black a picture.

They canna understand!
He wanted whisky badly. He wanted worse to leave. But he would not. He refused to be defeated, driven away from public like a cow driven out of its pasturage.

A Campbell cow lifted from Glen Lyon and driven away to Glencoe.

He sweated. Glenlyon reached into the pocket of his coat for linen to dry himself, and felt the crackle of paper. He drew it forth, blinked to see the dark smears upon the parchment, then unfolded it.

—
Duncanson’s order
. . . Desperation welled up in Glenlyon’s chest, took lodging in his throat. Here it was. Here was proof. Here was vindication.

He rose of a sudden, shoving his chair away. The discordant scrape of wood on hard floor caught the attention of everyone in the coffeehouse and stilled conversation; Glenlyon retained their attention by holding the tattered, bloodstained parchment into the air like a victory flag.

“Here it is!” he cried harshly. “Let any man who questions me read it, and understand: I am a soldier, and an officer, and I follow the king’s orders!” He slapped the paper down on the table beside the dish of chocolate. “I would do it again!” he shouted. “I would dirk any man in Scotland or England, without asking cause, if the king gave me orders! So should every good subject of His Majesty!”

But they were hostile still, the faces; they none of them believed him. They chose instead to believe rumor and falsehood.

Trembling, Glenlyon rapped his fist upon the paper. “Here it is. You need only to read it to see I did my duty.”

And then they began to come. Slowly at first, then swelling in numbers, all reading the words written by Duncanson in the name of King William.

Vastly satisfied, Glenlyon sat back down. They would understand. They would see he had done what any man should do who served his monarch.

 

In London, lamplight guttered. The Earl of Breadalbane adjusted the wick, then bent again to his labor. When he was done, he set aside the quill and sanded the paper.

Satisfied, he nodded. In careful language he had phrased a vital message to John MacDonald, now MacIain: that if he and his brother, Alasdair Og, would swear and write by their own hands that the Earl of Breadalbane had no part in the massacre, he would use such influence as he had to procure them full pardon and restitution.

A sound gesture, he thought, designed to mitigate the extreme political damage the failed attack had done. Mercy had its place even in a ruthless world.

 

In Dair’s dream she lived: a vivid, vital woman who gifted him with her love, her passion, with her pride and defiance, altering strong men into mere echoes of their existence. He saw her atop the great rock in Glencoe, bright hair unfurled in the wind from off the loch, in trews instead of skirts, and a man’s bonnet on her head.

Give her a claymore and she would wield it . . . give her a musket and she wold fire it.
Give her his substance and she would accept it, unstinting in her vitality, in the brilliance of her spirit. He would be diminished until she gave him strength again, the inspiration and ability to begin anew.

He stirred, aware of an ache in his loins. He sought release, but instinctively knew there was none save the way of a young man with no self-control. And so he let the dream go, let the memory fade, and opened his eyes to the pallor of the cave, the hardness of a bed uninhabited by a woman.

The intensity of his grief appalled him. It was weakness, and yet confirmation that he yet lived. There were no pipers to make a song of it, to keen at the heavens the poignant lament of a man stripped of his kin, of the only home he knew. There was no bard to make a saga of it, to remind him with the discipline of words what had happened in his life. There was no structure at all, none to guide his thoughts to a place where he might find release, and the peace that came with such. And no one at all to mitigate the grief save Murdo MacDonald, who himself had lost his purpose in the murder of his laird.

The leg ached unremittingly. Dair knew little of broken bones save they were often fatal if the flesh were torn and corruption set in. In his case there was none because of John, who had burned him so badly with whisky. No corruption might live against such offense, and so he healed, but slowly. The splints and wrappings warded the leg, but made it difficult to move. He ached in every joint from inactivity, longing to leave the cave so he might see the day; so he could walk again and know the glen of his birth.

Murdo said he should not. Murdo considered his health, the welfare of his leg, but also the truth that would shatter the vestiges of memory as yet unbroken by fact.

He had seen Murdo’s face the day the man came back from searching as many dwellings as he could. His hands and arms were befilthed by ash and charring, black lines rimmed his nails, a smudge stood high on his cheekbone where the beard did not touch. His eyes were unquiet and his spirit promised grief, but he said nothing of it.

Until night fell and darkness surrounded them, softening the hard truth of a brutal daylight that knew nothing at all of tact.

“Naught,” Murdo said softly.

Dair leaned against the wall. “Naught?”

“Naught.”

There was water from the burns and such food as Murdo might scavenge, or catch in crude snares, or spear in the water. But he dared spare little time at any of his endeavors, lest the soldiers come to find him. MacDonalds were yet broken men and targets to others.

“You have searched all the ruins.”

“The last one today. There is naught, Alasdair Og—the Campbells have plundered it all. Only scraps remain, or bits all broken. There isna even a dog.”

No. They would have been killed, or, following scent, gone on to Fort William in search of food.

But
they
would not, he and Murdo; they would do neither.

“We shall make do, aye?”

Murdo’s smile was fleeting. “As we have, but with less than before.”

“Och, a wee bit of hardship will no’ harm us, and we’ll be for Appin soon enough.”

The smile ghosted again. Appin was not on Murdo’s mind. “He should be buried on Eilean Munde.”

So he should. So should they all. “When we are free to live in Glencoe without fear of murder, we shall see to it.”

Murdo nodded. He squatted upon the stone floor. “I have marked where his bones lie, so we may know them.”

No one could mistake the size of MacIain’s bones. But they might vanish beneath the soil, buried by turf and snows, before Glencoe was free again to tend her murdered MacDonalds.

Dair thought of Cat.
Where are her bones? How will I ken them?

Or had her father carried them, yet fleshed, home to Glen Lyon?

Murdo turned his back. Dair heard the muffled sobs. It was easier, somehow, to know he, too, could weep in such privacy as they made.

 

Her shoulder ached ferociously, but Cat did not care. It was penance for her name; pain was required.

She had not saddled the garron but rode bareback instead, clad in trews, shirt, and plaid, with a bonnet on her head. The pain and effort made her flesh run with sweat, but she ignored it. She was not cold. Winter had broken at last.