Midnight Honor (33 page)

“I was under the impression, when I left here this morning, that I had your promise, your word of honor, if you will, that you would not set foot upon the battlefield.”

Trying the same tack she had used with the prince, Anne moistened her lips and attempted to defuse her husband's quiet wrath. “I never actually gave my word, not in so many words.”

“And you think that absolves you of any blame for your actions?”

“It is the same absolution you sought in explaining why you did not declare for the prince.”

“Do not attempt to use my own words or logic against me, madam,” he warned, pushing away from the door. “Or to twist them to suit your own purposes. You know damned well
your place was not on that field today. You know damned well what could have happened.”

“Indeed,” she answered calmly. “John might have been killed. I thought the risk worth taking.”

Angus's chest swelled as he took several measured breaths. His hands clenched into fists and the knuckles turned pink, then white, as he debated whether or not to strangle her now and be done with it. In the end, he came forward and took her face between his hands, drawing her into a hard and forceful embrace that lasted far longer than reason or sanity decreed. His mouth was bruising, almost brutal, his body clearly too aroused to even contemplate denying him anything, not even when he scooped her into his arms and deposited her summarily on the bed.

With their mouths still joined, his hands fumbled at joinings and closures and in a few feverish moments, his kilt was raised, her trews were stripped away, and his arms were hooked beneath her knees, lifting them, raising them so that she was completely open to the heat and hardness of his body. He plunged savagely and repeatedly between her thighs, thrusting deep enough to shock them both into stiffening as the heat poured from his body into hers and kept pulsing, strong and swift, until there was nothing left but the quiet pants of repletion.

“You realize,” he gasped when he could, “that I would be more than justified in beating you blue for disregarding the orders both MacGillivray and I gave you. I could tie you hand and foot to a wagon and send you home with ten men strong enough to keep you locked in a turnip bin if need be.”

Anne swallowed hard. She was bent almost in half, her knees pinned to her shoulders, and the image of being stuffed into a vegetable bin struck her as being a terrifyingly funny threat after all she had been through that day.

“Have you nothing to say? No clever witticisms? No sarcastic rebuttals?”

She curled her bottom lip between her teeth and shook her head. The rest of her body began to shake as well, bringing Angus's head up off her shoulder.

“Are you mocking me, madam?”

A great, glorious peal of laughter burst from her lips. “Never, my lord. I would never mock you for thinking of turnips at a time like this, not when my leg is cramping and the buttons on your damned
Sassenach
uniform are leaving imprints of the Royal Scots battalion crest on my belly.”

Cursing softly, he carefully extricated himself and sat upright. There he was, chastising her for her outlandish behavior, yet his own had undergone so many changes of late—many that were so astoundingly out of character he did not know whether to be disgusted or amused by this latest display of crudeness.

“I'm sorry. I… I don't know what came over me.”

“The same thing that came over me last night,” she said, touching his arm. “I believe the common folk call it lust.”

He leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, knowing I have lost
all
saving grace?”

She rose up onto her knees beside him and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Why should you be any different from me, my lord? You need only smile or crook your finger at me and I can barely stand.”

He stopped short of snorting, but only just.
“Me
crook
my
finger? One look from you, madam, the smallest touch, the faintest scent of your hair or skin, and I am reduced to a randy schoolboy stumbling about on three legs. Even now, as angry as I am, as angry as I should be, all I can think of is being inside you again. It is as if I can't get enough of you. As if I am afraid I will never get enough of you.”

Anne smoothed a dark lock of his hair off his cheek, tucking it tenderly behind his ear. She cupped his cheek in her hand and gently forced him to turn his head, to look at her. “I wonder: Will you still feel that way a dozen years from now?”

“Those words will be on my lips with the last breath I draw on this earth,” he whispered tautly, “and the first I take in eternity.”

Trembling, Anne drew him down onto the bed again. “I am so very glad, my lord, for I will never tire of hearing you say them.”

At almost the same time Anne was welcoming Angus back into her arms, General Henry Hawley raised his sword and brought it slashing down with out preamble or sentiment. He was trembling as well, but out of rage, not pleasure; with contempt, not anticipation. He stood in the market square of Linlithgow, the snow falling thick as wool shearings over the bowed heads of every officer who still possessed enough sense to have answered the general's summons. To Hawley's immediate left was a long, sturdy tree trunk that had been chopped down and denuded of its branches before being suspended from the corners of two buildings. From this makeshift gibbet the bodies of fourteen men jerked and twisted at the ends of their ropes, their lives forfeit on the downstroke of Hawley's blade.

Most of them were dragoons whose names had been put forward by a choleric Major Hamilton Garner. Another score waited hatless, their tunics stripped of any identifiable rank or rating, their hands bound behind their backs. When the macabre dance of their comrades ceased, they too would be summarily hoisted above the solemn crowd by way of demonstrating the extent of Hawley's outrage and disgust.

“Cowards!” he screamed. “Cowards and curs! Look well on these fornicating dogs, for they are no better than the dung they left behind in their haste to desert their posts! Was there ever an army so rife with poltroons and miscreants! Was there ever a general so cursed, so shamed, so humiliated, so completely appalled by the character of his troops! Hang them! Hang them all, by God, for they are not worth the powder it would take to shoot them! Powder, I might add, that we no longer have in any adequate supply since
every godforsaken piece of equipment, fourteen heavy artillery pieces, and ammunition was left behind for the enemy to enjoy!”

Winded by the fury of his diatribe, Hawley paced to the end of the raised boardwalk and, having no other immediate outlet for his rage, broke his sword over the head of the nearest man.

“I want names,” he raged, his chest heaving, his mouth flecked with spittle. “I want the names of every man in every regiment who turned and ran. I want them flogged! I
want their skin flayed and hanging in shreds, and I want them left on the racks so that every soldier who sees them will know the consequences of cowardice in my army! I want them to
know,”
he screamed, “that in future, death on the battlefield will be a thousand times preferable to dereliction or dishonor! Never think …
never think for one foolish moment
that I will hesitate to hang the lot of you if you fail me again! Now go! Get out of my sight! You disgust me!”

He strode off the end of the walk and stormed away into the darkness, leaving the officers shaken and silent enough to hear the heavy flakes of snow falling around them. As the bodies of the first hanged men were cut down and new ones pushed forward to take their place, those who had been lucky enough to avoid the worst of Hawley's wrath began to slink away.

Garner was one of the few who lingered, as was Major Worsham, both of whom had found redress on the battlefield following their inauspicious departure from Callendar House.

Both men were wounded. Garner stood with his hand bracing two broken ribs, his face gray with the pain, his jaw set against the nauseating sound of the bones grinding together. Worsham's cheek had been sliced open to the bone and his left arm hung limp and nerveless by his side; his injuries had been hastily bandaged by a surgeon stained to his elbows with other men's blood, but he dared not have them properly stitched until the general's spleen had been vented.

The opening Jacobite volley had shattered the resolve of the dragoons; less than half an hour later, the government forces had been in full flight. It was impossible at this time to even begin to know the tally of dead, wounded, or captured, for there were surely those who were still running and would keep on running until they were certain they would never be found again.

Worsham had no qualms about punishing deserters or cowards. It was a harsh fact of army life that any man who signed his name to the roster was giving his oath to obey the orders of his superiors regardless of whether he agreed or disagreed with the execution. Any man who violated that oath did so at his own peril.

And then there were the men who'd had no intention of fighting at all. They had formed up in their ranks and they had marched onto the field, but once there, they had crouched down to avoid the heated fusillades and, when those had passed, had run across the moor and joined their Highland clansmen. Worsham had shot one such man just as he was about to hand off Pulteney's regimental colors to a kinsman in the Jacobite ranks.

The MacKintosh contingent was a fine example of this attrition. Most had deserted on the march from Edinburgh, but of the handful who remained to take the field that day, not one had returned to his regiment. Their chief, Angus Moy, had not been seen since forming up on the field, and Worsham sincerely hoped, for the bastard's own sake, that he was lying among the dead on Falkirk Moor.

He closed his eyes against the sharpening agony in his arm and reached into the pocket of his waistcoat for the small packet of powder the surgeon had given him to dull the pain. He had only taken a few grains the first time, cautioned that too much would render him so free of pain he would be unconscious. He measured out more this time, holding it on his tongue until he could reach one-handed for a flask of wine confiscated from one of the condemned men. The powder was bitter and it required several swallows to wash away the worst of the taste. What remained was a dry metallic taint that coated the back of his throat, not unlike the taste of blood.

And, oddly enough, not unlike the aftertaste left by the dinner wine served to them the previous evening at Callendar House.

He dismissed the thought, attributing it to his own state of near exhaustion. He looked into the swollen face of one of the last men to stop twitching and recognized him as the young corporal who polished his boots each night.

Now that was a genuine waste, for he had been the only man able to polish the boots to a high gloss.

Chapter Seventeen

U
pward of three hundred Hanoverian prisoners were taken at Falkirk; nearly twice that many lay dead or wounded. On the Jacobite side, there were fewer than eighty casualties all told, but with the weather turning sour and Hawley's army retreating hastily to Edinburgh, it once again became incumbent upon Lord George and the chiefs to convince the prince his force was still vulnerable.

Lord George had implored Charles Stuart to send his troops after the English, but the prince, taking the advice of O'Sullivan instead, decided that the retaking of Stirling Castle, which had been under siege since the Jacobites had departed Glasgow, would be far more beneficial to morale than chasing after a defeated army. Better, he said from his sickbed, to consolidate their victory at Falkirk by driving the rest of the government troops out of Stirling and Perth, thereby reclaiming control of the Lowlands south of the Grampian mountains.

Lord George disagreed as violently as he dared, but to no avail. He could only vent his frustration in private, then get reeling drunk at the squandering of such a hard-won opportunity to crush their enemy—one that might not come again without paying a much steeper price. He understood, where the prince and his insufferable Irish advisor did not, that the
Lowlands had never been receptive to the Stuart cause. They could waste weeks trying to take the impregnable castle at Stirling—weeks that would be better spent in the Highlands, where most of the clans were sympathetic to the prince and it would be possible to strengthen their army, not weaken it.