Amanda Scott (3 page)

“Aye, your worship, that it did, taking the eastern shore of the loch whilst we occupied Campbell and his wee playmates on the western side. Your own share will have been delivered to your back doorstep this morning before dawn. Och, but I wish it were possible to have had a picture made of yon Fergus Campbell’s face when he found himself staring eye to eye with that barrelful of herring! ’Twas a rare and splendid sight, that was.”

The sheriff frowned. “Have a care, Andrew. Their suspicions rise a wee bit higher every time you twist their tails like this. ’Twas bad enough when they suspected you of plotting against the present royal family. Take care lest they lay siege to Glen Drumin in hopes of ferreting out your stills.”

“But Campbell has looked, your worship, and more than once. As I keep telling him, there be nary a still for him to see.”

“Keep it that way. You, by the door,” he added, raising his voice. “Look out and be certain that no one is loitering nearby.” When the man had looked, shaken his head, and shut the door again, the sheriff said, “What other news have you, Andrew?”

“He’s to visit London midmonth,” MacDrumin said, lowering his voice. “Our Bonnie Charlie will not come again to the Highlands, they tell me, unless he can first be assured of support from those damned capricious English Jacobites. Since the blatherskites refused to join him the last time, the thinking in the Great Glen and elsewhere, as you know, is that this time the business must
begin
in the south. However, once again, France has promised us full support when the rebellion gets under way.”

“We saw how little such promises were worth in forty-five.”

“Aye, we did, but memories are short and wishes strong.”

Maggie, moving nearer, said, “I have been telling him, sir, that we must make a push to discover what passes with his highness in London and to assure those who might help us that we stand ready to join them the instant they make plain their intent.”

The sheriff nodded thoughtfully. “We do have lads in London with their ears to the ground—and a few lasses, too,” he said, smiling at her. “Indeed, mistress, I warrant news comes to us from England at a speed that would astonish German George had he but the least notion of it, so I cannot agree that your father ought to go south, if that is the course you have urged upon him.”

“’Tis true,” MacDrumin said, nodding, “and so I’ve told her, but she’s got this maggot in her brain that we’ll not get the whole truth if we cannot hear it from one of our own. Not,” he added with a sigh, “that there might not be a wee bit of sense in the lass’s argument when all is said and done.”

Kate had moved up behind Maggie. “What of Angus or Cousin Dugald, my lord? Could one of them not go?”

“Nay, lass,” MacDrumin said, his gaze sweeping over the two young men. “We’ve a need for someone who can move in the first circles, for that is where he will learn the most. What’s more, with young Ian and your auld mother and gran to look after, you’ve more need of Dugald and Angus here than we have for them in London. But enough chatter. We are not so safe, even here and now, that we can afford to rattle on about such things without great care. We’ll be off now, your worship, if it’s all the same to you. You’ve my deepest thanks for this.”

“I accept your thanks,” the sheriff said, “and your excellent whisky as well, you rascal.”

“And welcome,” MacDrumin said, grinning, “though ’tis a pity you couldna see your way clear to making yon Campbell pay for the herring. We could have used the gelt.”

“I thought it unwise to infuriate him further. Are the herring truly all spoiled?”

“They should be, and the kegs as well—which is much worse, of course—for they’ve been sitting amongst the pine trees these four days past, waiting on a proper moon, whilst our Fergus hid harmlessly under a bush each night and peered at the loch.”

They left the sheriff chuckling and made their way to the south end of town, where they were met by friends who had been expecting them. Mounted at last and fed, they made good time along the eastern shore of Loch Ness to the trail leading to Glen Drumin, nestled deep in the heart of the Monadhliath mountains.

As she rode, Maggie thought back to their brief conversation with the sheriff and knew her father had been tactful for once when he had so gently refused Kate’s suggestion that either Angus or Dugald serve as their envoy to London. Neither man would do. Whoever went to meet Charles Edward Stewart—their own Bonnie Prince Charlie—must be someone who could meet him in polite company, for although he would travel incognito, he would scorn this time to travel as a commoner. He had surely had enough of that after Culloden, during the months he had been forced to hide out in the hills, protected by Highlanders who slipped him from hut to hut and cave to cave, often right under the noses of the soldiers who searched for him, before his escape to France.

She thought again of her cousin Colin as a possible emissary, and dismissed him. He was still young, only a year older than she was, and seemed even younger, despite the fact that at eighteen, he had been old enough to fight at Culloden and come home with no more than a sword scratch.

Glancing at MacDrumin, she saw that he was smiling again, no doubt congratulating himself on the success of his latest venture. She wished she had as much confidence in his illegal activities as he did, but she could not believe it would be long before his entire operation was unmasked and the English locked him away. Fergus Campbell was a dreadful man; worse, he was a tenacious one. The thought terrified her, for she knew not how she or the rest of the clan would survive without MacDrumin’s leadership.

Life had been difficult the past four years since Culloden, for the relentless hunting down of Jacobites and their fugitive prince had resulted in months of terror followed by savage reprisals, the banning of all weapons, the outlawing of proper Highland dress, and the English garrisoning of all Highland fortresses. The English had even outlawed the bagpipe, calling it an instrument of war. Small wonder, she thought, that the Highlanders had turned increasingly to whisky as the answer to their problems. Chiefs who, like her father, had returned to their lands after Culloden had soon realized they were no longer patriarchs but merely landlords or stewards. Clan lands had been divided arbitrarily into tenants’ lots too small to support their occupants, who were in any case in no position to pay rents.

Had the wicked English not been determined to change the entire system, the MacDrumin clan might still have continued to function as it had in the past, with those who made shoes for the clan continuing to make them in lieu of rent, and those who wove cloth, tended cattle, or farmed the clan’s more fertile acres continuing to do their bit as well, providing the clan with a thriving economy and the manpower to guard it. But MacDrumin had not been allowed to make the choice. Because of his known Jacobite sympathies, his lands had been forfeited and awarded to an Englishman, the mighty Earl of Rothwell, who lived in London and had never so much as set foot in the Highlands, and who no doubt never would set foot there unless he, like others of his ilk, decided to turn his Highland acres into a sporting estate to be visited as and when the spirit moved him. In the meantime, English factors, supported by the odious bailie Fergus Campbell, collected his rents and posted them to him in London.

That was not the way things ought to be, but in Maggie’s opinion there was only one way to change them. If no one else could go to London, she would go herself. She was not, she thanked heaven, as volatile of temper as her father or Kate MacCain, but she did know how to get her own way when she set her mind to a purpose. And never had she believed in one more strongly than she believed in that of Bonnie Prince Charlie. MacDrumin and the others, surrounded by enemies as indeed they were, and likely to find themselves in the direst of straits at any moment, needed help desperately. If necessary, she would find their hero in London and drag him, and his army, all the way back to Scotland with her own two hands.

London, August 1750

E
DWARD CARSLEY, FOURTH EARL
of Rothwell, leaned back in the leather winged chair. Smoothing an imagined wrinkle from one lace-trimmed golden-brown velvet cuff with a perfectly manicured fingertip, he said languidly to the dour elderly man standing with apparent if unexpected composure before his desk, “Did you not hear me, MacKinnon? I said, his majesty the king has granted you a full pardon. You can go home to Kilmorie.”

“Aye, I heard you, my lord.” Ian Dubh MacKinnon of MacKinnon, painfully thin, his face pale from three years’ captivity in the Tower of London, stared calmly back at him.

“Is that all you have to say?” Rothwell glanced at the third man in the room, but although a glint of amusement lurked at the back of Attorney General Sir Dudley Ryder’s clear blue eyes, he remained silent, watching the old Scotsman.

MacKinnon said evenly, “Did I ken what it is you wish me to say, Rothwell, mayhap I could oblige you, but as it is—” He spread his hands.

“Good heavens, man, we know that you fought at Culloden and took part in the meeting of chiefs on the following day. We know, too, that when the pretender Charles Stewart finally reached MacKinnon country on the Isle of Skye, he was given shelter and entertained to a feast on your land the evening before you and your nephew John conveyed him to the mainland, where you continued to accompany him for at least twelve days.”

The old man’s chin lifted. “In the Highlands, a gentleman refuses welcome to no man who seeks it. Mayhap Sassenach hospitality is less generous. I’ve certainly small regard for what little of it I’ve experienced in your Tower of London.”

“As the matter was recounted to me, MacKinnon, that damnable feast took place in a dark, extremely inhospitable cave.”

MacKinnon shrugged. “Mayhap that is so, my lord.”

“Dear sir, I take leave to remind you that you were put on trial for your life, found guilty on all counts, and ought to have been sentenced to death for your transgressions. Instead of which, because of your advanced age and obviously mistaken sense of chivalry, you were merely imprisoned for a time and have now been pardoned. Do you not wish to express at least a modicum of gratitude to his majesty for his gracious mercy?”

“Oh, aye, certainly,” the old man said. “You may tell German George for me that, had I my own wish in the matter, I should serve him in precisely the same way he is serving me, by sending him back to
his
own country!”

After a tense silence, Rothwell signed to Ryder, who opened the door and called for a guard. The earl said gently, “Is there anything you wish to retrieve from your Tower room, MacKinnon?”

Looking surprised, the Scotsman replied, “Aye, I’ve some books I’d like to take away, and a few other odd trappings.”

Rothwell nodded. “Then you will be taken back there long enough to collect your gear, after which you will be given sufficient funds to take you back to Skye. Not in grand style, I’m afraid, but by stage to Bristol and then by packet up the coast. And, MacKinnon, I’d not advise you to linger in London.”

“I have no more wish to linger than you have to provide me hospitality. I’ll be off by the first coach.”

He moved to follow the guard when Rothwell said, “There is just one thing more, MacKinnon. Do you know aught of one Andrew MacDrumin of MacDrumin?”

The old man paused, and for a moment Rothwell thought he stiffened, but when he turned back his expression was calm. “I have heard the name, of course, for it is a proud one in the Highlands, but Glen Drumin is east of the Great Glen, you see, so I cannot say that I know him. To ask me such a question is much the same as asking a man in Bristol if he knows one from Oxford.”

“I see. Thank you. You may go.”

When the door had shut, Ryder chuckled. “That old reprobate. Butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth, but did you see the look on his face when you asked if he had belongings he wanted to claim? I daresay he expected us to order him clapped up again after his impudence, though he recovered quickly enough. ‘Oh, aye, my lord, I’ve some books,’ says he. Well, by now my lads will have turned that room of his inside out, so if he had anything worth discovering, we shall soon have word of it.”

“My thanks for allowing me to be the one to give him the good news,” Rothwell said with a faint, mocking smile.

“You were the one who pressed hardest for his release, after all, and oiled the wheels of the mill. When you choose to ally yourself and your fortune with one faction against another, Ned, the outcome is generally predictable and your rewards are usually more tangible than this one was. It was the least I could do.”

“My stepmother could not have said that better, if your meaning is that you would have liked to do less.”

“It is no great secret that I disagreed with you about releasing any of the leaders of the uprising. After all, it is my duty to keep as many damned Jacobites as possible locked up.”

“One sometimes gains much by a show of mercy, however.”

“I leave mercy to heaven, Ned, and to politicians.”

Rothwell stood up, shaking out the deep lace shirt ruffles that had inched up beneath the turned-back cuffs of his full-skirted coat. “What do you think of this rig?” He opened the coat, showing off his heavily embroidered gold satin waistcoat and revealing the elegantly jeweled hilt of his new smallsword. “Lydia nearly had this satin made into a petticoat before I could send it to my tailor. I tell you, it is as much as a man’s life is worth these days to have new fabric delivered to his house.”

“Your stepsister is a delightful minx,” Ryder said, smiling, “and as beautiful as she is, I doubt that you will have her on your hands for long. As for your pretty waistcoat, you know how little heed I pay to such stuff, so do stop behaving like a damned fop. That may serve you with others, but having known you for twenty years, since our first days together at Eton, I am quite immune to it and well aware that the jewels on that weapon of yours are of less value to you than the fine Italian crafting of its blade. Do you think MacKinnon really will leave London at once, or will he linger to take part in the forthcoming events?”