Gentleman Captain (37 page)

She was standing by me now, only inches away; I could smell the scent of her body, sweet like gorse, salty and fresh. I looked up, and in the flickering light of that hall she seemed two different people. One was imperious and magnificent, every inch the future Queen Regent of this new land. Then the shadows would pass over her firegold hair and pale, smooth skin and she would seem, all at once, a creature fey and unnatural.

'Let me offer you an alternative history, Captain,' she said, her voice as harsh as the gulls that wheeled and called outside her castle. 'Your King Charles is already weak. A foolish man, he has alienated his own supporters, the Macdonalds among them.' She paused, raised her hands angrily and then dropped them, sighing. 'It is so much more than a matter of who has or has not got back their land, Matthew. Many compare your king with the great days of Cromwell, and find him wanting. You know this. Cromwell made Europe tremble. Charles Stuart is its laughing stock.' Her words were hideous, unbearable; doubly so, that I knew them to be true.

'Can you imagine what they will do in Whitehall and London when our little scheme comes to pass, Matthew Quinton? You know the politics there better than I. We succeed, and a Catholic state, protected by the guns of the Dutch, is carved out of the west of Scotland.' She bent close to me and I felt her breath against my ear. 'Think of the humiliation, the disgrace. A Stuart king who cannot even preserve intact the Scottish kingdom that he inherited? The old Puritans, those who served Cromwell–many others will rise up. There will be a great host, Matthew. All those who look on your king as a whoring incompetent, and I'm told that's most of the people of England. They will throw him back across the sea, Matthew, or send him to the block, as they did his father.'

I knew there was truth in what she said. I knew it in my heart as well as my head. But my father had fought and died for a Stuart king; a man who was weak, inept, but still the king. Perhaps it was my turn to do the same.
Yes.
I knew in that moment that I would fight for my king until my dying breath, just as my father had. What else could I do? It was my duty, my being, and my God-given honour. It was my family and it was my life. I had no choice. And yet, at that instant, I chose.

I took a draught of the wine and looked hard into Niamh Campbell's blazing green eyes. Time to begin that fight; time, at last, to confront her, and the full depth of her dread conspiracy.

'Is that what Captain Judge has led you to believe, my lady?'

She stepped back, her eyes wide and her lips parted.

'Is that informed enough for you, Lady Niamh?' I stood and drew myself up to the considerable height that came with the Quinton blood. 'Oh yes, I know Godsgift Judge is a traitor. But there's one thing that stopped me believing it, and not even your tale of the Lordship of the Isles reborn explains it. Whatever kind of foul turncoat Godsgift Judge may be, my lady, he's no papist. If he's still a Commonwealth's-man at heart, and a fanatic, who fooled us all with his clothes and his flattery, then so be it. But a man like that will not aid your cardinal uncle, nor truck with the pope, his friend, to set up a papist state in these parts.'

There was a moment of utter silence. Then she looked at me levelly, calmly. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but strong.

'What man would not seek a kingdom for his own son?'

His own son.

A wave of nausea drove my senses into the pit of my stomach. I reached for the arm of my chair, found it at the second attempt, and sat down. Lady Macdonald stood in front of me, at once more desirable than any being I had ever known and more treacherous. And she spoke.

I heard her words, not hostile, not triumphant, as she told briefly of her hopeless marriage. Sir Callum Macdonald of Ardverran had brutalized her. At first it had been occasional, almost accidental. But as time passed, it seemed to become his means of raging against her failure to give him an heir. The oldest and proudest bloodline in all of Scotland would die because of her, he claimed. His anguished revenge took many forms, and she endured them all, whether mental or physical. She had been so very young–so full of hope and life–when she arrived at Ardverran. She thought she would change her husband, or that she would get with child and become, suddenly, the cherished mother of the Macdonald heir. But after many years darkened by barrenness, cruelty and violence she came to understand that life as Macdonald's wife would forever be unendurable.

Then Glencairn's rebellion against Cromwell began, and Macdonald went away to fight in the south of Scotland. Only days later, an English naval squadron sailed into the sea off Ardverran to act against that same rebellion, and an English naval captain came to pay his compliments at the castle. Godsgift Judge, without his false trappings of foppery, was strong, attentive and kind. He warded off a raid by the vengeful Campbells and protected and comforted the Lady Niamh. A bond grew between them, the Puritanical sea captain and the papist countess, thrown together by fate in a castle at the edge of the world. Whether that bond was ever love, she was not certain; or so she said. But for two people far from their own homes, in a place where hostile forces ranged against both of them, it was sufficient. And before long there was conclusive proof that the Lady Niamh's failure to conceive an heir to Ardverran was entirely the fault of her husband.

Judge's ship was cruising some miles to the south when Sir Callum Macdonald returned to Ardverran. He had been wounded as Glencairn's forlorn cause collapsed against the invincible armies of the Lord Protector. Too weak to beat his wife as his healthy self might have done, Ardverran raged impotently against her. Only the discreet loyalty of Macdonald of Kilreen, the only man who knew what had passed, kept her safe. Fearing for her unborn child when her condition became clear, she got word to Judge. He decided, in the name of Cromwell and with his heart bent upon the preservation of his woman and child, to deal once and for all with that known malignant, Sir Callum Macdonald. Judge's story of the fight at the gun battery was true enough, she said, except for one vital detail.

'Callum's death was no honourable death. His battery had already surrendered, expecting quarter. But Godsgift Judge was determined that Macdonald of Ardverran would die that day. He executed him, Captain. In the name of the Republic. But in truth, it was a punishment for the wrongs done to me, and to protect our unborn child.' Her eyes were deadly cold yet I saw tears there. Tears that remained unshed. 'I forgave what he had done, Captain,' she said. And I have thanked him silently for it every day that has passed.'

Judge's ship stayed long enough for him to see his son born, she said, and the child was accepted without question by that part of Clan Donald as their new chief, Sir Ian, baronet of Ardverran. For Judge, it must have seemed a fair consolation for a man who knew he would never see his son grow up.

A fair consolation, perhaps, until a far greater one came within view.

A kingdom for his own son.

It was an unreal time, that hour in the great hall of Ardverran Castle. I sat unmoving in my chair, for if my mind could not cope with the enormity of her words, what chance had my limbs? All that time, she paced the hall, sometimes circling me, sometimes stopping so close that I could study the rosary that nestled upon her bosom. There was nothing to do but talk. I wanted the truth, so my questions were unvarnished. But I sensed that she needed to explain, to justify it all to herself as much as to me. Perhaps she, too, felt that in another time, when such a mighty scheme had not already been in train, matters might have stood differently between the heir of Ravensden and the Countess Niamh. So we talked with the openness and honesty of those who know that they have not known each other well enough, and will have no other chance, for they will never know each other again.

I asked when the conspiracy had first formed, and at whose hand. 'Like most of his kind, the Puritan swordsmen, my Captain Judge saw the return of your king as the end all of his hopes for a better world, of all that he had fought for. Like so many of them, he admitted defeat and surrendered himself to your new royal order, swearing the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy with bile in his throat.'

I had witnessed it myself: the lackeys, the time-servers and the fanatics, all competing with each other to find a tame lawyer or cleric to testify to their undying loyalty to king and Church. It was strange to think of Godsgift Judge among that unholy rabble.

'At first, his attempts to ingratiate himself with you Cavaliers were real enough. Then, when he saw how readily Charles Stuart trusted those who had so recently fought against him and how blindly intent he was on reconciliation, he began to conceive a great scheme. He wrote to me secretly, and I in turn wrote to my uncle. All this is Judge's doing, Matthew, even if the money comes from Rome and Amsterdam. And now we even have the tacit support of Spain, thanks to your king's idiotic choice of a Portuguese bride–the one marriage above all that could give mortal offence to the court of King Philip. Yes, Matthew. The Lordship of the Isles for the son of Godsgift Judge, triggering a revolution in England to bring down your feeble king. That is how it will be.'

I resisted her still, though I felt the cold grip of fear in my bones. It seemed both preposterous and yet perfectly likely to succeed. 'Glenrannoch will stand against you,' I said. 'I will stand against you.'

'Not even the good general and his Campbells will be able to withstand the army we will shortly put into the field. And, dear Matthew, there will soon be a Dutch army to uphold our new independence. So you see, I am not afraid of you, either.' And with that, she stooped and kissed me.

The Dutch? It all hinged on them. And I knew the Dutch. Something in what she was saying was not right, but I could not place it. I knew the Dutch, I knew their country and the perverse way in which they organized it. My wife was Dutch, her brother commanded a ship for the Dutch, Glenrannoch had been a general for the Dutch, I had lived among the Dutch...

Of course.
Yes, I was informed enough, at last.

I found my strength again and stood. I looked down at her, so tall and slender in the firelight; then I made my best bow, a courtier's flourish at the end. 'I must congratulate you, my lady. What you have achieved–gaining the support of the whole of the States-General–I had thought impossible. All of their high mightinesses together? Truly, this is so unlike the Dutch way, where one province seems always driven to spite another, that I am amazed.' Her face, the way she clasped her hands together, told me that I had hit home. I stood looking at her and my smile fell away. 'I know the Dutch, my lady. Give them any proposition, and they will divide, as sure as the sun rises and sets. They are not a state, they are a confusion, and you have the support of only a fraction.'

Every plot, every great conspiracy in history, has some flaw, some fatal weakness; its success or failure depends on whether that flaw reveals itself in a timely fashion. This was their flaw, my countess and her lover, for their whole scheme depended on a state that was not a state, but a hydra. Even so, she recovered herself quickly.

'Our support is sufficient, Captain. The plot is secret enough, and will be executed swiftly. More swiftly than you realize.'

She beckoned to me and led me up the spiral staircase, until at last we emerged onto the roof of Ardverran's ancient tower.

There was the
Jupiter,
off to the east, bearing down slowly and according to my orders. Her quarry, the arms ship, lay silent and empty off the jetty of Ardverran. And now, too late, I saw her for what she truly was. Bait.

For there, behind the
Jupiter,
emerging from the channel and edging round the headland, was the unmistakeable shape of the
Royal Martyr.
Unmistakeable but for two stark alterations: her royal figurehead had been decapitated, just as its mortal namesake–the late King Charles the First–had been. And the flags that she flew were at once strange and dreadfully familiar. Two of the four quarters bore the red cross against a white background, the sign of St George; the other two the white cross on blue of St Andrew. They were the colours of an older and deadlier Britain, when England and Scotland had been brought together as one by the force of Oliver Cromwell's arms.

I knew her for what she was. She was the
Royal Martyr
no more. At last, she bore the name, and the flags, of her true master.

She was the
Republic
again.

The lady moved to my side. My treacherous countess rested her fingers on my arm, but I stepped abruptly away from her.

'You are still my guest, Matthew,' she said gently. 'The old way and the old laws abide here at Ardverran of the ages. You knew that when you came here tonight; knew that you were safe under the roof of one who had invited you. And you were right. I will not see my guest harmed. You may remain here, or I will see to it that you are taken in safety to England.'