White Rose Rebel (40 page)

He did as much as he knew, and what seemed right to do, washing her face with cool water, rubbing a warm, wet towel over her belly and thighs. Growing up in a cott, he’d seen babies born, though he’d never delivered one. Grown men were chased from birthing mothers by the other women. The horse, cattle and sheep were his practice ground for this. It couldn’t be much different. While she groaned and writhed, he rubbed her back, talked soothingly, as he would to any scared beast. When it was time to push, he held her hand, arm round her shoulder, gave encouragement.

Will’s baby daughter was born just before dawn. Her tiny form fitted one of Aeneas’s hands. He held her so that Jessie could see. The baby’s arms moved, her legs stretched, her head turned. Awed, they both watched. Jessie, propped up in the kitchen box-bed, stroked her child gently with one finger. The little mouth opened, closed, but the breath of life could not be drawn in, the child born too soon, her movements only those left over from the womb. When they stopped, Jessie kissed the small dead face. Aeneas laid the body in the bucket waiting by the bed.

‘You see,’ he said to the tired young mother. ‘You made a perfect child. She just wasn’t ready for this world.’ He held the cup of ale to her lips, let her swallow a mouthful. ‘You have more to do.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You will,’ he said, ‘because you’re going to live.’ He put his hand on her belly. ‘I’ll give what help I can but you must push it out.’

She was seventeen, brave and strong, and the demands of nature brought the courage to bear them. When the pain came, she gritted her teeth and did what was required.

‘As hard as you can, Jessie,’ he urged, pressing his hand down behind the muscle in her abdomen to help. ‘Then it’s finished.’ The afterbirth slid out of her, far easier than either had expected. Jessie dropped back on the pillows, worn out. Aeneas cleaned up, adding the mass to the bucket, wiping Jessie clean, washing her face. He gave her another mouthful of ale then and let her fall asleep. By the time he had the bucket outside, the contents buried down by the loch, he was weary, worn out. He rolled on to Will’s pallet by the fire and shut his eyes.

It was Donald Fraser who shook him awake.

‘I thought you were dead yourself,’ he said when Aeneas jumped and stared at him, ‘the state you’re in.’

‘Jessie?’ Aeneas looked over at the box bed.

‘Sleeping.’ Donald winced. Fresh blood seeped through his shirt from the chest wound.

‘You get on here,’ Aeneas insisted, getting himself up and Fraser on the pallet in his place. ‘That’s deep and you’ve already bled too much. I’ll fetch Màiri over.’

Ignoring the redcoat bodies outside the stable, he saddled a horse and rode down to the forge. There had been smoke to the north when he’d chased the soldiers yesterday, but there was no sign of disturbance near the smithy. The troops had not gone beyond Moy Hall. It was his wife they’d wanted.

Màiri stared in horror as he went in, at the bloodied state of him, then got to her feet. She had been sitting next to Lachlan, laid out for burial on his bed.

‘Have you come to pay your respects,’ she asked, ‘or do you bring word of my Donald?’

Aeneas took his bonnet off, stepped over to the bed. The lad had come back from the dead once. This time he’d taken a shot in the head. Aeneas pulled the cover back over and turned to Màiri. He was father to his people, age no matter. That was his role and how he felt.

‘I’m sorry for your loss. He was a fine son, to yourself, his chief and his clan.’ He put his bonnet back on. ‘Donald is alive, at Moy. Good care will keep him so. I came to fetch you there.’

Màiri’s grief fell to one side as her fear turned to hope. She fetched her daughters and they all returned to Moy. When they arrived, Shameless was there. He had seen a body he thought was Howling Robbie, dead at the edge of the battlefield, and gone back to check. It was. He’d taken his friend home then come on.

‘I’ll not go back,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Not after what they done to Robbie and at the cotts.
Gonadh!
’ he swore. ‘They’re bad people.’

The cotts were in the direction of the smoke Aeneas had seen.

‘You’ve no duty to go back,’ he told Shameless. ‘You’re under my command and I need you here.’ They packed some food, saddled a second horse and left for the cotts.

The scene was desperate. Of the thirty cottars and their children, only six survived. The least injured had begun laying out the bodies. Aeneas and Shameless dug the long grave near where Seonag and Calum had been laid. Even in her burnt-out cott there was no sign of old Meg, no remains. The dead were put to rest, Cath’s baby on her breast, old Tom with his granddaughter. Somehow, the older girl had survived the burning, her face and body painfully scarred. One of the two cottar women tended her. She’d bide with them. Clan children were raised by whoever was able, if blood parents could not. The child of one was the child of all.

The redcoats had taken their livestock, looted the grainstore,
burnt or smashed their tools, fired their homes. A tumbled milking pail was all they had to fetch water. The ruined cotts were beyond repair, but a rough shelter could be made of the one least affected by the burning. The able-bodied pushed off the still-smouldering turfs from the roof, brought water to throw on the rest. It would be roofed tomorrow. That night, they all slept outside. Next day, when the cott was habitable and all that could be done for the injured was done, Aeneas and Shameless rode on up to Culloden, seeking survivors.

The battlefield was guarded. Troops still moved about, checking and dispatching any injured. The heady stench of blood had faded. The stink of decay had not begun. A slight sweetness hung in the air. All across the moor, scattered bodies lay, grey, lifeless, strangely twisted, like heaps of broken things that had been thrown away.

‘Why didn’t they cross the Nairn?’ Aeneas asked, expecting no answer except the shrug of incomprehension Shameless gave. This was his clan’s territory, land familiar as his own body. Drumossie was the worst possible site for Highlanders to fight on. He would have taken them across the river, if he’d been there. The other chiefs would have followed his territorial lead. It was senseless slaughter, easily avoided, had he been here.

They were not allowed to walk among the dead. A gruff English officer and his squad turned them back at gunpoint. Returning to Moy, they passed two burnt-out cottages. Corpses were being removed by others from the estate. Both men got down to lend a hand. By the time he reached home, Aeneas was bereft of strength or comfort.

Before going in, he tore off his ruined, filthy clothes and plunged into the loch, scrubbing and washing himself clean of blood and death and dirt and smoke. The greylag geese were gone. The ducks would soon return. His people would not. They had stood against oppression. He had not stood with them. He dived below the surface, came up, rubbed his hair roughly, dived again. The graze of the musket ball on his arm nipped. The cut on his thigh stung. But his body was whole and would heal. It was his heart and soul that were scarred.

With Màiri and her girls in the kitchen, the house was almost normal, if it could ever be normal again. The fires were seen to, food cooked, the sick cleaned and cared for. Even Elizabeth’s body was washed, dressed and shrouded in the hall. Tomorrow, after he buried the soldiers outside, he would take her home to Invercauld. Tonight, he was hollowed out, haunted by images of brutality and slaughter. Dead faces, broken bodies, his clan decimated, his wife in prison. A deep and terrible emptiness yawned inside him. What had he done?

Inverness jail was full. Anne sat in her small, walled cell, staring at the straw-covered floor. When night came, she lay on the hard bench, watching the moon and stars pass overhead through the tiny barred window high above. Inside her dress, MacGillivray’s note still pressed against her breast. She had not shed one tear. Around her, the prison whispered. A group of schoolboys, gone to watch the battle, had been deliberately slaughtered. Watching townsfolk were also killed. Voices asked who lived, who died, who was imprisoned, until sleep or sorrow silenced them.

In the morning, the jailers dished out water in metal cups. Anne was given a basket of bread, sent in by friends, the guard said. The only food available in prison was supplied from outside. Anne passed the loaves through the bars to outstretched hands on either side of her. The bread passed from hand to hand, the pieces becoming smaller as it went, cell to cell, round the room.

‘Few folk know we’re here yet,’ the woman in the cell on her right said.

‘Margaret?’ Anne knew that voice. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes,’ puzzled, then the realization: ‘Anne!’ All the questions came next, the where and how of capture. Margaret had been taken at the battlefield. She had no word of her husband, David, Lord Ogilvie, if he was alive or dead.

The other prisoners identified themselves. The Dowager Lady M
^c
Intosh, still mystified by her arrest, was incarcerated four cells down, between Lady Gordon and Lady Kinloch. Next door, among the men, Lady Kinloch’s husband, Lords Lovat, Balmerino and Sir
John Murray of Broughton were imprisoned. No one knew the whereabouts of Sir John’s glamorous wife, Greta Fergusson. No mention was made of Anne’s brother, James, or her cousin, Francis. At night, even in sleep, it seemed, the names of the dead turned over and over in her head, like stones in a pocket.

Each day, food came for her – bread, meat, a flagon of ale – and was shared around. Notes arrived too, often from strangers or people she barely knew, brought by a guard or pushed through her cell window, falling to her feet like snow. They offered sympathy and hopes, words she knew were well meant, and they gave news, venting anger over it. The army allowed no one near the battle site. No parents, wives or children could identify their dead. No bodies were released for burial. The wounded who had fled were hunted down, imprisoned if they were officers, shot if they were not. Rough treatment was meted out to any who harboured or helped them, goods and animals stolen, homes looted then burnt down around their heads. Then word came of Moy. Elizabeth was dead. Anne sat and stared, unseeing, for days after that, but still she could not cry.

At the end of the second week, with no evidence against her, the Dowager was released. Her young niece, the pregnant Lady Gordon, went with her, freed for the imminent birth. The Dowager returned next day, to visit Anne, furious to be barred from her own home by Cumberland’s occupation of it.

‘I’ve had to impose on friends for a bed to sleep in,’ she complained, before confiding the troubles of others. Lady Gordon’s release had been bait to trap her husband, with troops waiting at her mother’s house where their child would be born, a trap still to be sprung. ‘So it was not kindness,’ she said, bitterly. From among the prisoners, Lovat, Balmerino, Sir John Murray, Lady Kinloch and her husband, had all been taken away. Sent to England for trial, the guards said.

Anne listened without emotion, her expression bleak as barren moorland. Neither woman expected the courts to be more merciful than the murdering, victorious army. Culloden, the English had named the battle, after Forbes’s house on the moor.

‘Don’t give up,’ the Dowager urged, gripping Anne’s cold fingers. ‘They might kill your body, but don’t let your spirit die of grief.’ Then, keeping her voice low so the guards wouldn’t hear, ‘I have news of Lord George.’

‘He lives?’ There was relief in the question but no vigour.

‘Yes,’ the Dowager nodded. ‘He and the other officers who escaped gathered the army at Ruthven, three thousand of them, with more on the way.’

‘Then they’ll fight on.’ She couldn’t understand why they’d fought when half their army was elsewhere. Culloden. The puzzle of it wearied her.

‘No,’ the Dowager corrected. ‘The Prince sent a letter, ordering them to disperse. Let each man save himself who can, he said.’ She was bitterly angry. ‘Whose side is he on?’

‘His own,’ Anne said.

In the Dowager’s house, Cumberland sat back in his chair and studied his visitor. It was night. Informers preferred the dark.

‘General Hawley has been generous with our funds,’ he said, ‘and our promises.’

‘I delivered. You have your victory, and the dispersal of the rest.’

‘Yet your countrymen protected the Highlanders’ retreat before they surrendered. I have more to round up than I hoped.’

‘Well, you can’t buy the whole flock, and you’ll be remembering, as King Louis’s mercenaries, they’re prisoners of war not traitors.’

‘They ship for France tomorrow,’ Cumberland confirmed. ‘Your reward goes with them. I hope you trust the bearers.’

‘With my life.’

‘Now you hope to secure your own safe passage, with your master?’

‘That was part of the price.’

Cumberland stood up and paced the room. If he was to do as intended, eradicate this barbaric race and bring their nation to its knees, the threat must remain.

‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘there are already faint hearts bleating on about mercy. Those voices will grow if he’s gone. I can’t have him leave this land until my job is done.’

‘If you’re after catching him, you’d make a martyr, and a prisoner folk could rally to. France and Spain’ll not sit back and let him be cut down.’

‘Don’t tell me my business,’ Cumberland snapped. ‘A Prince in the Tower is not something my father relishes, nor parliament either. But nor is one left free and troublesome overseas where this rebellion can simmer and explode again.’

‘My influence –’

‘Will not last for ever,’ Cumberland cut him off, ‘might not last long when other flattery takes over. No, he cannot go until I say the time is right. Until every traitorous noble’s head is off its shoulders, every rebel hanged, their supporters transported and those who fund them broken and impoverished.’ He sat down again and explained what would happen next. The Prince would flee from place to place. On the pretext of pursuit, the army would come behind and clear out sympathizers. ‘There are more rats yet to be flushed out.’ When the Highlands and islands of Scotland were finally subdued, then, and only then, would passage back to France occur. ‘Do you understand?’