White Rose Rebel (47 page)

At Moy, Aeneas took on the task of clearing weapons himself. There would be no more raids on his people. As August mellowed into September, he and Shameless drove the cart around the farms and cottars, thanking men and women for their co-operation, trying not to notice their shame.

‘Swords into ploughshares,’ Donald said, sorrowfully, as they delivered them to the forge for breaking, ‘as the good book says.’ But none of them believed good could come with dishonour.

Anne began the work of teaching the adults the language of the English. Their children helped them, since the school teachers would now not allow a word of their native tongue to pass their lips in class and the young were quicker learners. It wasn’t joyful work, except that she learnt more Gaelic curses in that first fortnight
than she’d heard in her whole life before. The interruption of their royal invitation was almost a relief.

‘You can’t really want to go.’ Aeneas watched Anne pack the last few things into the kist sitting on their bed.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I want to see these people who tell us how to dress and speak and live. And I want them to see us. Besides –’ she motioned him to sit on the lid of the kist so she could strap it down ‘– we have no choice.’

Aeneas wore his Black Watch kilt. Military was the only use of tartan not proscribed. He would have resigned his commission, but to do so would have meant no plaid or weapon, going naked in a world that was under duress. People were still hauled to prison from the straths and glens, and now there were additional reasons for punishment.

‘I feel like a traitor, wearing this.’

‘One of us should be armed for travel,’ Anne said, pulling the leather strap tight round the kist. ‘It will be safer.’

‘Are you expecting trouble?’

‘Not at all,’ she smiled, planting a light kiss on his lips as she moved around him to the second strap.

‘I’d feel a lot happier if you didn’t smile when you said that. You’ll have to behave down there.’

‘I’ll behave perfectly,’ she assured him, buckling the strap. ‘I have a duke to impress.’ The constraint against her would not be lifted until Cumberland agreed.

‘You’re smiling again.’ He pulled her in front of him, wrapped his arms round her waist.

‘Did I miss that bit?’ she asked. ‘There will be no smiling. Any Scot found smiling north of Stirling will be shot on sight.’

He rolled her over the kist on to the bed and pinned her down.

‘You need something to smile about,’ he grinned, pulling her dress up.

‘Now you’re doing it,’ she giggled, ‘smiling for no reason.’

‘Oh, I have reason enough,’ he said, kissing her throat, ‘and a cure, temporary though it is.’ His fingers stroked her thigh. ‘And
when I’m done –’ his lips brushed her mouth ‘– I’ll know why you’re smiling.’

The bedroom door opened. Jessie came in.

‘Could you two save that for the carriage?’ she said, seeing them on the bed.

‘Now there’s an idea,’ Aeneas winked at Anne, straightening her skirts as he got to his feet. ‘Did you interrupt just to suggest it?’

‘No, I did not,’ Jessie objected. ‘But there’s a boat to catch and I thought you’d want to know Nan MacKay was arrested three days ago. They won’t let her eat, sleep or even sit down till she says who helped Robert Nairn escape.’

‘Three days?’ Anne was shocked. She’d assumed that Nan, too poor to provide means of escape herself, would not be suspected. ‘Why did no one let us know?’

‘The Dowager just found out and sent word.’

Aeneas threw the window open and called Shameless up to help with the kist. Anne ran downstairs and grabbed her cloak.

‘Don’t forget,’ Aeneas reminded Jessie as they headed for the door. ‘Speak English while we’re away.’

‘What, to myself ?’ She put her tongue out at their backs but, that being the part she might lose, quickly withdrew it. There had been stories of people’s tongues cut out and nailed to public doorways as warning.
‘Gonadh!’
she swore, then glanced guiltily around the empty hall.

In the carriage, on the way to Inverness, Anne fretted. ‘It was my idea. I can’t let Nan be punished for it.’

‘Your confession won’t stop that.’

‘It would stop the interrogation.’

‘And put you back on the scaffold, with me alongside.’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll keep you out of it.’

‘You can’t.’ Aeneas drove home his advantage. ‘Even if I’d let you say I took no part, you’re my prisoner. I’m responsible for what you do now.’

Anne was staggered. In their home, the order against her had begun to seem no more than irksome. But out in the world, the incapacity inflicted by Cumberland was exposed. She was rendered
helpless, a burden not a companion, an unequal being, powerless to act or to take responsibility for her actions, like a small child or a miscreant dog. If she spoke or acted out of turn, Aeneas would suffer and, through him, their suffering people. Even as her spirit began to rise and the desire to fight back returned, it was quashed. The constraint against her struck deep. She was not free. It was crushing.

‘Then what can we do?’

‘They want victims, not justice,’ Aeneas said, taking a hand off the reins to take hold of hers. ‘One of the clan will confess, if need be. It will only be a prison sentence.’

‘And if it’s not?’

‘One step at a time. We can play it by ear. Just, please, don’t say anything unless we’re agreed.’

At the prison, they were allowed into the interrogation room only because Aeneas was an army captain. Five minutes, the guard said. Nan MacKay was in a bad way. The Skye woman’s legs were swollen and puffy from standing for so long. She was black with bruises where they’d struck her to keep her awake.

‘Uisge,’
she begged through cracked lips.

Anne fetched her a little water from the pail. She bit back the warning against speaking Gaelic. There was no point. Like most Highland and Island women, Nan knew no English. She still had her tongue only because they wanted her to speak.

‘We’ll get you out of here,’ she promised as Nan gulped from the tin mug.

‘I’ll not be saying,’ Nan whispered. ‘Whatever they do.’

‘You’re not abandoned,’ Aeneas told her. ‘Don’t think it. We’ll get this stopped.’

Forbes was with the Earl of Louden in his offices. The judge had grown old and disillusioned since the victory. To support the government, he’d bribed chieftains and funded Black Watch companies from his own coffers, yet no reparation had been made. Now his courts were bypassed. Parliament passed repressive
legislation against his beloved Highlands. Tribal people pushed off the forfeited estates fled to the cities. Others left of their own accord, unable to bear the changes forced on them. Ships sailed for America every day, crowded with disenfranchised clans.

‘Soon there will be nothing here but cattle and sheep,’ he complained. Hardest of all, the name of his home would live in history as the site of that bloody slaughter, as the start of a bloodier pacification, the ruination of a people, and not as the seat of a reputable justice. Culloden. Cumberland, amused by Forbes’s protestations, had thought it apt.

The Dowager Lady M
^c
Intosh had petitioned the judge as soon as she heard of Nan MacKay’s torture. Now he harangued Lord Louden. When Anne and Aeneas came in, the beleaguered earl threw up his hands.

‘I suppose you’ve come to confess?’

‘Of course not,’ Aeneas said.

‘I have,’ Anne said.

‘My wife was with me when Robert Nairn escaped,’ Aeneas glared at her.

‘If you’d let me finish,’ she protested, ‘I was about to add, if it will stop her torment.’

‘Oh, come now, Aeneas,’ Louden urged. ‘Don’t be left out.’ The commander was clearly under pressure. ‘I take it you know your aunt has already confessed to supplying whisky, clothes and transport to aid the rebel’s escape.’

‘She has?’

‘Along with every single member of her household,’ Louden fumed, ‘one after another. I’m just about to take Forbes’s confession, and his staff ’s, no doubt. Perhaps you’d like to get in line.’

‘Eh, no,’ Aeneas declined. ‘We’ve a boat to catch.’

‘Then catch it. I’ve just sent an order to the prison that the torture of Nan MacKay ceases forthwith. But she’ll stay in prison till her sentence is carried out.’

‘I came to protest at her treatment,’ Forbes growled, ‘not confess. I’ll also lodge appeal against that sentence. Eight hundred lashes is
an execution. She’s not military, they have no right to try or punish her.’

‘Eight hundred lashes?’ Anne grabbed Aeneas’s arm for support.

‘I spoke to the woman,’ he said. ‘She did nothing wrong.’

‘They all say that,’ Louden pointed out. ‘The guard insists she distracted him. I agree the sentence is excessive, but I can’t overrule the verdict.’

‘The Duke of Cumberland can,’ Forbes suggested.

‘Then we’ll ask him,’ Aeneas said. ‘When will the sentence be carried out?’

‘The end of next month,’ Louden answered. ‘Go to London. I’ll see she comes to no harm till you get back.’

With that settled, they all shared a dram. Forbes resumed his criticism of the punitive legislation. Yet another act was being drawn up, to end the heritable jurisdictions. The clan chiefs would have no authority over their people when it was passed.

‘You’ll be relegated to landlords,’ he told Aeneas, ‘nothing more. The clans are finished.’

‘They can’t prevent you being chief, can they?’ Anne asked. ‘The people chose you. Only they can take that away.’

Aeneas shook his head. This was a blow, perhaps the hardest to their culture than any. It removed the bond between clansmen, took away their choice of leadership.

‘Without the power to settle disputes, what will a chief be? The people will turn to the law, to the state. The reason to have and uphold a chief will be gone.’

Louden poured the old judge another whisky and saw Anne and Aeneas out to catch their boat.

‘Did you hear your lieutenant was killed?’ he asked as they reached the door. ‘We shipped his body south last week, with his wife. Just outside of Moy, it was.’

‘Was there a skirmish?’ Aeneas frowned.

‘No.’ Louden sounded weary. ‘The work of a solitary villain. Usual story, nobody saw anything. He left his wife in the carriage on the road and went to speak with an old woman. Never came
back. Stabbed twice, bayonet the surgeon thinks.’ He paused. ‘I saw the wounds. Strange thing is, I’d swear it was a pitchfork. So much for banned weapons, eh?’ He bid them safe journey and shut the door.

Anne and Aeneas stared at each other. The old woman had not been seen since the cotts were raided. They’d assumed she was dead.

‘Meg,’ they both said at the same time.

London was startling. Street after street after street of tall buildings, relieved only by the river running through it. Even that waterway seemed to be alive with people, throbbing with boats and barges, the many bridges constantly criss-crossed by horse-drawn carriages and sedan chairs. Grandiose stone mansions filled elegant squares, chained off with iron padlocked gates. Hovels huddled incongruously between them. Beggars, traders and hawkers crowded the pavements. Political pamphleteers and way-side preachers bawled their different furies on every corner. Smells of smoke, street food and bakeries mixed with the fumes of sugar-processing and textile trades, the stench of breweries, distilleries, the stink of fleshers and sewer ditches running open through the streets from overflowing cesspits under houses. It was altogether both grander than Edinburgh and more squalid.

‘Are you all right?’ Aeneas asked, coming over to the window where Anne watched the throng below.

‘They’re very small,’ she said.

‘But plentiful,’ he said, wryly, looking down. ‘Like ants.’

‘I can meet the men’s eyes without tilting my head, and the women only reach my nose.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You must feel like a giant.’

‘I feel out of place,’ he smiled. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Pensive doesn’t suit you.’

‘I think I’m afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘For Nan. Bad comes of everything I do.’ Her brows furrowed over clouded eyes. ‘Will Cumberland see you?’

‘I’ve sent a request, and he’s hosting the ball tomorrow. We can talk to him there.’

‘You can.’ Anne turned back to the window. ‘Helen says I should only speak to my superiors when spoken to.’

Aeneas turned her round to face him.

‘There will be none there,’ he said, ‘for there are none. Don’t accept this. At home, you speak with stable-lads, cottars and blacksmiths, or with princes, earls and dukes, and you are the same with each as they are the same with you. That’s who we are. If the opportunity arises to speak with Cumberland, take it.’

Unconvinced, she nodded. They were in Helen Ray’s home. The Englishwoman had insisted, despite her recent bereavement, and tutored Anne in the manners expected at court. Aeneas was a lost cause. He refused to entertain courtly bowing. A brief nod to humour Cumberland was all he would agree to, and that only because Nan’s life might depend on it.

‘It’s Highlanders they want, it’s Highlanders they will get,’ he insisted.

Helen fluttered back into the room, clearly excited. ‘You have visitors,’ she announced.

Behind her, a tall, blond man in city clothes ducked his head as he came through the doorway and then stopped just inside. Behind him, a dainty, younger woman hovered.

‘Francis!’ Anne breathed out his name in a whisper of disbelief, then rushed across the room into her cousin’s arms calling it. ‘Francis!’

‘Anne, Anne.’ Farquharson of Monaltrie lifted her off her feet and crushed her in his arms. ‘It’s been so long. I feared we’d never meet again.’

Aeneas crossed the room to join in the welcome. ‘If you’d put my wife down,’ he said, ‘I’d like to shake your hand.’ There was much back-slapping, hugs and teasing about the unfamiliar London garb. Francis, Baron Bàn, was a man back from the dead, his sentence commuted from hanging to banishment from Scotland for ever.

‘And, along with your petitions, my new wife to thank for my life,’ Francis said, introducing her. ‘Mistress Elizabeth Eyre, the Lady Monaltrie.’