The Adventurer (10 page)

Despite being of an age far older than most who had marched onto that battlefield, Uilliam Bain had stood beside his three sons, ready to fight to the death for the honor of his nation. They’d been among the front lines and had proudly shouted out the Mackay war cry—
Bratach Bhan Clann Aoidh!
—as they’d rushed at the redcoats with broadswords and targes at ready. Uilliam had fallen in the second charge, his ankle shattered by grapeshot. The lads had lifted him from the field to the safety of a drystone dike, leaving him while they went back to take up the fight again.

It was the last any of them had seen of him.

Word reached Calum months later that Uilliam had been put aboard a prison hulk. It had sailed about the isles, picking up other rebel prisoners, then on to Carlisle on England’s northwesterly shore, where the captives would be tried by the Privy Council. Calum and his brothers, Fergus and Lachlann, knew that when the time came, they would have just one opportunity to save him. To do so with success, they would need to determine just where and when would be the best time to strike.

So Calum had turned his sights on Lord Henry Belcourt.

As a secondary councilor of the Privy Council, Lord Henry had been given the task of managing the records of the Jacobite prisoners. He had traveled across the Continent in the name of the Crown to negotiate the exchange of the foreign prisoners. While at home, he had stood by to watch as many a Scottish nobleman lose their head, calmly ticking a mark beside each name as rebel after rebel swung from the gallows.

Lord Belcourt was known for his meticulous recordkeeping. He knew the names, the alleged crimes, and the locations of every rebel prisoner, and he had recorded them all for posterity’s sake into a collection of journals that had come to be known as Belcourt’s “bibles.” It was said he intended one day to publish them as a glorious record of the Scots’ final fall.

Calum, however, had another idea.

With the information contained on those pages, Calum and his crew would know how to find Uilliam. When news had reached them that Lord Belcourt was to be crossing the Channel from France, Calum had decided to send his crew to intercept them.

It would be the first step in the most important mission of their lives.

“Good morrow to you, M’Cuick,” Calum said as he came into the castle kitchen then.

In contrast to the bleak neglect of the chambers above it, the kitchen looked as fresh and new as it had in its heyday. Copper cooking pans and cast-iron kettles hung from freshly whitewashed walls. Casks of wine from the finest French vineyards stood beneath joints of smoked meats by the fire. Fruits and vegetables from faraway lands, bananas and pineapple fruit, awaited in wire baskets. And the goliath of a man who made this place his domain stood with his back to the room before the light of the kitchen hearth.

He said nothing as Calum entered the room, just continued to stir his porridge pot with an attention and precision that would not be interrupted. Unlike the others, M’Cuick had no interest in taking to the sea. He’d never wanted the fight, had been pulled into it unwillingly—and had paid the ultimate price. When he’d gained his freedom from the prison ship where Calum had found him, M’Cuick had had nothing to go home to. Nothing but the memories of the family he’d lost. Knowing the horror he’d faced, having watched his family butchered before his eyes, Calum could only imagine that the man had seen his fill of killing and violence.

So M’Cuick stayed on at Castle Wrath, cooking for the men, cleaning their laundry, and growing herbs and flowers in tiny clay pots. Instead of a sporran to hang around his waist, he now sported an apron cloth. And in place of the broadsword, he was found brandishing a basting spoon.

“Have you anything in that pot of yours this morning that might soothe my empty belly?” Calum asked.

M’Cuick turned from his cooking fire to regard Calum with a lazy nod. “Aye, there’s porridge, and bannocks baking on the fire.”

“Porridge is good. You’ve none of your curious spices in it, aye? Whatever you fed me last night must have addled my senses. I didn’t sleep an easy wink all night.”

M’Cuick scratched his grizzled head. “ ’Twas naught more than some ginger and a pinch of saffron. ’Tis good for the digestion, it is, and it’ll keep you from having a gas in your belly.”

Calum chuckled. “Aye, well, it wasn’t any belly gas that kept me awake through the night last night. ’Twas dreams. Odd dreams ...”

Clearly concerned, M’Cuick took up his book and started leafing through the pages. It was called
The Boke of Goode Cookery,
and in it were recipes, household hints, and miscellaneous lore examining most every aspect of the kitchen and its environs. It was a book they’d discovered among the other plunder after one of their more profitable raids and the man lived and breathed by what he read in the pages of that tome.

“Says here the saffron is a revitalizer of the blood and an aphrodisiac ...”

An aphrodisiac?

“Good God, man, are you trying to kill me?”

M’Cuick looked at him. “Nae a thing wrong with trying to give you a wee push in the direction of the lasses, Mackay. I’ve not seen you so much as glance at one since ...”

“Since never,” Calum finished. “In case it’s escaped your notice there are no lasses here. ’Tis a rule, and we have it that way specifically because they muddle the thinking.”

“Och, aye, that they do. But ’tis a fine muddling, it is.”

“Aye, well I’ve no need for such muddling.”

M’Cuick frowned. “ ’Tisn’t healthy for a braw lad such as yourself to be living no better than a monk. Take yerself aff to Durness for a wee bit. I hear tell of a lass named Jenny Sinclair there who will make you glad you were born a man when she—”

“Enough!” Calum didn’t want to discuss the subject of his sexual appetite, or lack thereof, any further. “I’m a simple man, M’Cuick, from simple origins. I’m thinking plainer fare is more to my liking. Agreed?”

M’Cuick looked at him, frowned, and then shook his head, muttering all the way to his cooking pot where he heaped a spoonful of oats into Calum’s bowl.

Calum took up a cup from the sideboard and started pouring tea from the kettle simmering on a hook over the fire, thinking quietly to himself until M’Cuick spoke again.

“Fergus has been by asking after you.”

“Fergus?” This was unexpected news. Calum turned. “They’re back a’ready?”

“Aye. Returned late last nicht, but winna tell o’ it to anyone but you.”

“Why didn’t you say something afore now?”

“You dinna ask!”

Calum took a deep breath, waiting. When the man didn’t say anything more, he said, “So? Where are they?”

“In the hall, waiting for you.”

Completely forgetting his breakfast, Calum took up his tea and headed out the door, trying hard to ignore the niggling sense that something, somehow, had gone terribly wrong.

Fergus was the first to greet Calum when he came into the hall. He stood from his chair and embraced his foster brother with a single, welcoming clap on the back that left Calum blinking from the sheer force of it.

Fergus was Uilliam’s eldest son and four years Calum’s elder. More brother than blood, he was the friend Calum had been able to count on for as long as he could remember. There wasn’t anything Calum wouldn’t trust him with.

Fergus’s younger brother, Lachlann, sat at one end of the table, five years shy of Calum’s own one-and-thirty. He was a near-perfect copy of his older brother, but for the six inches that separated them in height, eyes that were more gray than blue, and the unnatural angle of his hooked nose that had been broken in a brawl with his brother six years before. The lass who had been the cause of the scuffle was now long gone, wed to an island man who’d turned her head even more quickly than Fergus had vowed it would. The misshapen nose, however, would remain, a reminder of the fickleness of a lass’s fancy—and testament to the devotion of a brother who’d had to hurt the brother he loved in order to keep him from the far greater hurt of a broken heart.

Next to Lachlann, Mungo MacLeod rested his bulk on a spindly legged chair that looked as if it might splinter beneath his weight. He was uncle to the two Bain brothers on their mother’s side, a barrel-bellied Scot with hair the color of a dying flame, more red than blond, and streaked now with the white that marked a man who’d passed his fiftieth year. With him sat his only son, Hugh. Although the youngest of them all at three-and-twenty, Hugh MacLeod nonetheless had a head that thought with the shrewdness and wisdom of a man twice his age, a trait passed down to him from his father.

They sat around a stretch of table with a bottle of whisky set betwixt them. Just the very presence of that bottle told Calum that the mission had been a success.

Why then did he feel so wary?

He lowered into a chair, and had his tea while he listened to Fergus’s account of the voyage. Fergus told Calum of the
Hester Mary,
and how the ploy of a fire on the deck of a seemingly deserted ship had gone off without a hitch. They described Lord Belcourt’s indignation all the way down to the crooked tilt of his hastily donned periwig. The crew, taken unawares, hadn’t put up any fight. They’d essentially drifted in and then sailed right off with Lord Belcourt’s trunks all within the space of an hour.

It wasn’t until the very end of the story that Calum nearly choked on his tea.

“You did what!?”

He hoped, prayed he’d heard Fergus wrong.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t.

“We took the lass. The one I told you about.”

“What do you mean you
took
her? Are you saying you brought her here? To the castle? Are you completely daft?”

Fergus had to raise his voice to be heard above Calum’s outrage. “We had to bring her with us, Calum. We had no choice.”

In that instant Calum’s day had gone from not so nice to very, very bad.

“We’re not real pirates, you bluidy idiots! What next? Will you burn a village? Torture a small child perhaps?”

“Calum, will you listen t’ me? We had to take her. She has the stone.”

Stone.

Just the word had Calum’s mouth shutting with an audible snap. He looked at Fergus. “The ... ?” His voice fell to a near whisper. “You are certain? You are certain it is
Clach na Bratach?”

“As certain as any of us can be since we’ve ne’er seen the stone for ourselves, only heard tell of it in stories. ’Twould be our da who could tell us true but he wasna there to ask. It looks just as we were always told, and there it was, hanging from the neck of this lass like a tinker’s bauble. What were we supposed t’ do? We cudna just let her go aff with it and have it disappear for anither age.”

M’Cuick had come into the room then, bringing Calum’s porridge and a fresh pot of tea. He sat at the table to join them, and it was quiet for a few minutes while he ministered to his tea, adding sugar, a touch of cream, stirring it.

Finally Calum spoke.

“Who is she?”

“We dinna know.”

“Who is who?” asked M’Cuick, having missed the first part of the conversation.

Calum didn’t answer him. He was too busy trying to figure out what could have made men he’d always thought of as canny do something so utterly muckleheaded. Now, suddenly, he had a captive to deal with. Beyond being a considerable inconvenience, it went against the very articles of the letter of marque that governed their deeds on the sea, the letter of marque that had been signed by the prince himself.

In essence, Calum had just become the pirate he’d been accused of being. They’d be lucky if it didn’t lead the whole of the Hanoverian army straight to their door.

“She was with Belcourt, you say?” he asked absently, trying to put some semblance of legitimacy to the thing. “Perhaps she is a daughter, or a niece ...”

“We could ransom her,” suggested Mungo. “ ’Twould be interesting to see how much of a ransom Belcourt would be willing to pay for his own kin when the value of ours is so apparently worthless.”

Hugh was of another mind. “I say we send her back home t’ him, but with a Scotsman’s bairn growin’ in her belly. I heard tell of it among the French in our regiment at Falkirk. They called it the
droit du seigneur
or something like that.”

Lachlann looked at Calum. “What the bluidy hell is he talkin’ aboot?”

“It’s an old medieval custom. It allowed the lord of the land rights to a new bride’s body, and thus her virginity, on the night of her wedding. A way of improving the blood, they called it.”

“Aye,” said Hugh. “Auld Edward Longshanks gave his men the right back in the days of Wallace and the Bruce. They used to take our lasses and pass them around to their lords like playthings, thinking they could breed the Scots blood right out of us. So I say why shouldna we return the favor with this lass? We can all have a go at her.”

Calum was just about to tear into Hugh for the vulgar suggestion when M’Cuick took one hammy fist and banged it down upon the table. “I refuse to be left out of this conversation any longer. What the de’il are you talking about, ransoming lasses and breedin’ bairns ... ?”

Calum looked at him. “They’ve brought a lass back with them.”

The man’s face lit up like a bloody spark. “A lass? Brilliant! We were just discussin’ tha’, weren’t we, Calum? You won’t be needin’ Jenny Sinclair after all, eh? And I can certainly use the help in the kitchens, wha’ with the laundering and the housekeepin’ ...”

“She’s not that sort of lass, M’Cuick.”

He thought about it a moment. “Well, then what sort of lass is she?”

Calum frowned. “She’s the ‘captive’ sort of lass.”

M’Cuick’s mouth formed a silent “oh,” but the expression on his face showed he clearly didn’t understand. A moment later, however, he turned to Fergus, shaking his head dolefully. “I ken a man’s needs and all, Fergus Bain, but yer a braw-lookin’ lad. Could you no’ find yerself a willing lass? Jenny Sinclair in Durness wouldna have turned you out. Probably wouldna e’en have charged you ...”

“You daft ouf!” Fergus shook his head. “We took the lass because she has the stone.”