1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (18 page)

Chapter 20

Town house of Lord Reay,

Colonel-in-chief of the Mackay regiment in the Swedish Army

Copenhagen, Denmark

“Yeez c’n gaw un an see th’laird noo,” the orderly said, none-too-discreetly scratching at an armpit that was clearly troubling him. And, apparently, unwilling to speak clearly to a superior officer. How the man did when he had to deal with anyone not brought up in Scotland was anyone’s guess. Most foreigners learned English, if they learned it at all, the way it was spoken in England, and assumed the various forms of Scots speech were other languages altogether. Come to that, a fair few native English held the same opinion. Most Scotsmen, be they ever so broad in their brogue, managed to at least rub the rough edges off with a few years of foreign service. Not this one.

“Thank ye for that, soldier,” Lennox said, speaking clearly to set an example and trying not to sniff. Not just because it wouldn’t do to be too snotty about a soldier under someone else’s command. Nor because he’d taken on board lectures about prejudice and didn’t want to show the lowlander’s bred-in-the-bone contempt for thieving, drunken papist highlanders. Rather, because the private soldier who was overseeing Lord Reay’s anteroom clearly hadn’t seen the inside of a laundry or bathhouse in far too long.

Major Lennox of the United States of Europe’s Marine Corps still listened to his inner sergeant about such things. Long a stickler for keeping the men clean in barracks and in the field, he’d had his views confirmed by twentieth-century learning on hygiene and reinforced by the USE’s up-time standards of military grooming.

Private McAuslan, in his view,
Would Not Do
. Doubtless there was some reason Colonel the Lord Reay kept the man around and tolerated his slovenliness, though. It wasn’t for a late-starting major to question the eccentricities of a regimental colonel with several years seniority and a patent of nobility.

He still didn’t draw breath to sigh until the horrible little man had shut the door to the laird’s room behind him.

“He’s a character, is he no’?” Lord Reay asked as he returned Lennox’s salute in the modern style.

“As your lordship says,” Lennox replied, picking the most diplomatic of the responses he could think of. And, to follow up on his hunch, “I’ve no doubt he’s done your lordship fine service, at times.”

“Aye. Man’s a reekin’ pint o’ piss in barracks, but ye’ll not see his like in a fight. Owe the man my life more times than I care t’ count. He hides here wi’ me to keep his comrades from having at him wi’ a stiff brush an a bucket o’ soap.” Reay was grinning. There was clearly some joke he wasn’t letting Lennox in on, for that surely wasn’t the whole story.

Lennox decided that if his superior wanted to have the little joke with him, he wasn’t going to object. Out loud, at any rate. “Your lordship summoned me,” he prompted.

“Have a seat, Lennox. I sent for ye so as to talk man to man, without rank and the like getting about our ears.”

“Aye?” Lennox took the chair Lord Reay had pointed to while the other sat himself in a plain carver by the window. “It’s in my mind that we’ve both commissions in allied armies. And your lordship a peer of Scotland and the chief of the clan I took service with.”

“Right enough, Major, but I’d have as little of that as may be today. What d’ye ken o’ oil?”

“Yon stuff they mine at Wietze? Little enough, y’lordship. Enough I’m determined t’ have a bright lad by me that understands the business should I have tae deal wi’ it. Enough tae ken the stuff is vital. Need I more for this wee talk?”

Reay chuckled. “Have a bright lad by ye, ye say. Aye, there’s half the art an’ science’ o’ lordship in a nutshell, right enough. I’ve the same understanding, it so happens. And a very clear understanding o’ the importance of the stuff. Did ye hear from any o’ the Americans about North Sea oil?”

“No’ that I recall, Chief.”

“Ye’ve heard about it now, then, frae me. We’ll be many a year before we can mine it out, mind ye, but there’s oil under the sea-bed, and much of it within waters Scotland can control. Scotland, mind ye. Not the United Kingdom.” Reay stopped there and looked pointedly at Lennox.

“I—” Lennox stopped himself short. He’d be the first to admit he was none of the world’s great or deep thinkers. Enough wit to manage his professional responsibilities. Enough learning to manage them well, and follow scriptures on the Sabbath. Each had served him well enough until that day in 1631 when he and young Alexander Mackay had happened on the first days of the Ring of Fire. Since then he had joined a new service, seen marvels he’d never have dreamed of as a wee lad in Coldstream, and, yes, taken a role on the fringes of high politics. There was that to be said for the Americans. They’d find you work for what you could do, not who you were born. If a peer of the kingdom of Scotland was taking up the same attitude there was a very real prospect of Lennox finding himself in the kind of situations that the treason laws applied to, will he or nil he.

“Aye, it’s a grand big thought, right enough,” Reay said, “take your time wi’ it.”

Lennox took a deep breath and let it out. “Ye’re talkin’ o’ risky matters, y’lordship. We’re the both of us in foreign service as it is, I mind that well enough, but if ye mean what I think ye mean, well…”

He groped for a word, for an idea he only had the merest mist of, an idea that he was fairly certain was more complicated than just the word
treason
would cover. “We’d no’ be allowed home in peace again.”

Reay nodded. “Aye, that. More than just lives, fortunes and sacred honor, but all that’s at hazard too. If we try, and fail. And we may be sure Charles Stuart will not stay his hand against all in reach of it, should we make the least misstep.”

Lennox felt the heat rising in his face. It would be this way, then? The lords and chiefs, moving the common men like chess-men. He mustered every effort to speak civilly. “I’m no’ sure ’tis proper t’ speak of it, Chief. Just to scheme of it would be the excuse the Stuart needs. We’ve all folk at home. I’ll not see them ruined and killed over the minin’ o’ oil.”

“Aye. Ye’ll have no blame from me for the concern ye have. And were it just oil, I’d not fash ye with it. I’d no fash myself, come to that. But still. Take a drink with me. I’ll tell ye how it seems to me, and how ye may do good for Scotland and Clan Mackay that ye’ve done good service for, and for the United States ye have the commission of now. I cannae see how a good fellow such as you will refuse, but I’ll think no less o’ ye if ye do. Nor will I bother ye for an answer this day nor the next. It’ll be a hard thing I ask, when ye’d a mind to settle down in the new training establishment. We’re of an age, we twa’, an past the time where campaigning is a grand boys’ adventure.”

Lennox chuckled. The remark was true enough, and the little jest helped settle Reay’s reassurances in his mind. “Ye’ve the right o’ that, aye, m’lord. I’ve to kid on I’m not sore in the arse after a long ride, these days. It’s hard work not t’ let the wee nippers goin’ for soldiers see that the auld bastard trainin’ em’s no’ as hard as granite.”

Reay grinned. “And there’s the most o’ the rest of being a master o’ men. One o’ the Americans said it, never let ’em see ye sweat, and I kept that right by me, depend on it.” He paused while he poured hearty measures of brandy. “As I say, it’s not just the oil, but much flows from that one little thing, so.”

Lennox took the glass Reay handed him, and after a snort nodded in approval. Not that he’d expected a regimental colonel and peer of the realm to have anything but the best. “How so?”

“Did ye look at the future of Scotland, in the other time?” Reay had an intent, earnest look on his face now. Although the history that now never would be, after the Ring of Fire, had an unreal air to it, it was terrifying to look on and see the mistakes that the future would make, to know that they could be avoided, and to realize that they would be replaced with other, novel mistakes. Lennox, in his gloomier moments, found himself wondering if they wouldn’t be worse ones. All that new knowledge, flooding into the world without giving anyone time to get used to it. Some of it good, like the dental work he’d finally had done, the plate of gold teeth he’d had young Alex’s father-in-law make him with the reward he’d had from the pope.

Ha! There was a change, if you’d like. Bred-in-the-bone presbyterian kirk-going borderer, saving the pope’s life from what turned out to be the utter stupidity of children. Children, dazzled by the prospect of a bright new future of freedom and prosperity, willing to follow the vilest of villains to get there. The scar where he’d lost most of one ear ached terribly sometimes.

“A wee bit, aye. Mair an’ closer union with the Sassenach, rule from London. Cardinal Mazzare said he saw a single nation with nae troubles, nae mair than words o’ discontent, an’ those spake civil for the most part. Plenty o’ Scots havin’ place and station, fame and money.”

“Aye, at the end. Did ye learn o’ the suffering and dying that took us there?” Reay’s tone was somber. “Our menfolk slaughtered, our way o’ life gone? The Scotland Cardinal Mazzare saw, and aye, I’ve spoke wi’ the fellow, wasnae the Scotland we twa ken. Neither highland nor lowland nor your ain borders.”

“Aye, but those Scots of the future, they were aye happy, I hear?” Lennox had satisfied himself that whatever the political arrangements, up-time Scotland had been a nation that knew no great want, paid no tribute great or small and governed her own affairs as part of a greater nation. If there was no trouble, he reasoned, there was no call to be borrowing it. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, as the scripture so correctly said, in a translation commissioned by a Scots king. Indeed, Lennox took a quiet pride in the fact that that translation, with some small editing, was still in wide use four hundred years later. And plenty of the machinists in Grantville, many of Scots extraction themselves, had taken their own pride in telling him how many of the marvels of their own home time were invented by Scotsmen. Case very much closed as far as Lennox was concerned, who fancied himself a practical man put on the earth to solve practical problems and let the conundrums of philosophy mind their own business.

“Happy, aye. But how much the better wi’ a more equal partnership wi’ the English on the way to that? Years o’ squallin’ an’ brawlin’ an’ no a penny made but by our wits. Say instead, Scotsmen stood together, with oil tae give us capital? What a nation we’d have been!” Reay grinned. “And nae need for slaughter nor discord! I’m nae the only peer that sees his way clear to this, mind ye. We’ve a mort o’ bright lads in Scotland. Led right and wi’ capital, who’s t’ know what we may do? Here’s tae us!”

“Wha’s like us?” Lennox grinned back, raising his own glass in turn. “Ye’ll no do this without bloodshed, mind,” he added as he lowered his glass from the toast.

“We’ll come to that, but d’ye like the taste o’ the notion as well as ye seem t’ like the taste o’ the brandy? Another?”

“Aye, it’s no’ so early,” Lennox said, “but ye ken I’m a borderer. Should it come to war wi’ the Sassenach, it’s ma own folk as it goes hardest for. I’ll no’ see the lowlands be another Germany.”

Reay nodded “I’ll not say it cannae come t’ that. Was it no’ a lallans boy said the schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley?”

“Was it?”

Reay grinned. “Rabbie Burns. Look him up.”

“Oh, him. Ayrshire man. They’re a’ daft up that way.” Lennox grinned back. “But enough wi’ the distractions, how d’ye mean tae have no war on our own doorstep?”

“Good auld politicking, Major Lennox, politicking. That an’ maybe the slittin’ o’ a few throats o’ the worst troublemakers.” Reay tried to pass that off as wit, but his grin was that of a man long in the business of killing. “I read o’ the civil war the Stuart lost, right well I did. Since I was to be in wi’ the losers for the most o’ it.”

He set his glass down and began counting on his fingers. “First, the covenanters. Minded tae have a presbyterian kirk for all Scotland. We’ve a fine example in the USE of a grand big nation with freedom o’ religion, so they cannot say a nation must fall if she tolerates more than one confession. I’ve a sentiment that most o’ the throats we slit’ll be divines, mind.”

Another finger. “Second, the bishops’ wars. Hard t’ find in the books, these, but there’s enough there. Freedom o’ confession again. Half my highlanders are papists, the rest are Church o’ Scotland, I say leave that wee trouble to bide. And if the papists raise more men like Mazzare, aye, we’ll find it’s a wee trouble enough. And, mind ye, the bishops’ party is all peers an’ notables, such as can have their mooths stuffed wi’ gold. Did ye tell me tae haud ma’ noise aboot religion and see Scotland be great and ma purse full, if I’d no’ seen the sense before I’d kid on I did then.”

A third finger. “The Irish. Nae Black Tom Tyrant. With him in the Tower, nae rebellion, nae Confederation. Or, if they have their revolt, they’ll win. I’ve no fash wi’ offerin ma’ hand in friendship t’ ’em, do they only use the leavening o’ Scots among ’em well enough.”

A last finger. “Fourth. Royalist lairds. I’m no’ among that number after the Stuart’s follies, Leslie’d no’ take a peerage for much the same reason. Montrose I’ve t’ find out about, for all that I have guesses. Campbell, for one, will follow the money, as the Americans say, and with him go so, so many others. Politicking, Lennox, wi’ that an’ a wee bit o’ luck we’ll give the Stuart England an’ bid him joy o’ the place.”

“Aye, but will he no’ invade?” Lennox was finding it all convincing, compelling even, but still couldn’t see where he fit in.

“The man’s no’ the sense o’ a dead rabbit, but he can count coin an’ soldiers both. We have more veterans here in Germany than we can use”—forgetting they were actually in Denmark, at the moment—“and we have the support o’ half o’ Grantville—aye, the half that’s Scots! Wi’ no more than a spirit o’ unity we may have a standing army by the banks o’ the Tweed. Glarin’ o’er the border, and nae foraging, either. Scotland standin’ by herself, friend to the USE, wi’ all that oil, extendin’ our hands t’ the Irish.” He paused to pick up the bottle. “Another o’ these brandies and I’ll give ye a United Kingdom governed frae Edinburgh!”