Jennifer Roberson (51 page)

She did not get far. Before she reached Rannoch two of her brothers found her. Dougal caught her rein and added it to his own while Jamie, the eldest, the cruelest, blocked her way.

“Let me go,” she said tightly, willing the pain not to show.

If Jamie marked it, he did not forgive her for it. “You will come back with us to Chesthill.”

“ ’Tis not my home.”

“ ’Tis.”

She thought of jerking the rein from Dougal’s hand, but knew she would fail. This time. “Glencoe is my home,” she declared.

Jamie smiled with quiet satisfaction. “Glencoe is no more.”

Cat raised her chin. “The glen is there,” she said steadily, “and houses may be rebuilt.”

“By whose hands?” Jamie inquired. “No man lives who might do it.”

Dougal’s eyes were worried. “Come back with us, Cat. ’Tis best for us all.”

“Best for
you,
”she countered bitterly. “You canna have Glenlyon’s daughter in the ruins of our father’s folly, aye? ‘Twould no’ look so bonnie.”

“Naught is left,” Dougal said straightly.

She challenged at once. “How d’ye ken that? Have you been there?”

“Father has,” Jamie said, “and he told us what was done.” His garron shifted; he reined the restive mount in. “They deserved such treatment. They were Jacobites who refused to sign the oath.”

Now she was cold, cold as a claymore in winter, letting them hear her hatred. “Och, it was signed,” Cat said softly. “MacIain did sign it. But they came anyway. They killed him anyway. They killed as many as they could, for no reason but the king’s.”

She saw it in their faces: neither believed her. Perhaps they could not, if they might; they were Glenlyon’s sons.

“You will let me go,” she said. “I have no place here.”

“Bring her,” Jamie said curtly and rode his garron past her.

Dougal held the rein. Cat had no choice, short of leaping from the garron and walking to Glencoe.
But I canna do that. Not yet
. Not until she was healed.

They led her back to Chesthill despite her protestations that she could direct her mount with no assistance. Then Dougal took the garron away. Jamie took himself.

Cat stood in the dooryard, struck by memory: a boy-faced lass warning away a MacDonald whose father was loud and harsh; overturning a cup with Campbell whisky in it, meant to succor a MacDonald coming home from Killiecrankie; standing in the doorway to welcome the same man in when he came to fetch his bonnet.

Ten years she had loved him.

“I
will
go,” she said fiercely, and strode into the house.

Colin, waiting for her, said nothing as she came in. She saw the worry in his eyes, the taut lines etched into flesh, the tension in his posture.

It faded as he saw her. “Cat,” he said only. Kindly.

Overwhelmed, she wavered. He caught her, held her, enclosed her in his arms. The tears were hot on her face. “I must go,” she said. “There are too many tales told of that night . . . if I dinna go, I will never ken the truth.”

Very quietly he said, “Even if he lives, he will not be there, Cat. Glencoe is denied to MacDonalds, lest they be killed for it.”

“I must go,” she repeated. “Only in Glencoe can I be certain.”

“Och, Cat—”

“Glencoe will tell me,” she insisted. “In Glencoe, I can be certain.”
If he is dead, or lives
. But she could not speak it aloud. She dared not speak of it, lest she somehow affect the outcome.

After a long moment Colin sighed. Crushed against his chest, she felt and heard it. “Verra well,” he said at last, “but only when you are well. I’ll no’ take a swooning woman all the way across Rannoch.”

“I willna swoon!”

She heard his hollow chuckle. “You were in a swoon when you arrived.”

“I was
fou
when I arrived! Christ, Colin, he poured so much whisky into my belly I feared I would drown!”

“Aye, well—our father kens no moderation. In himself or for his daughter. ”

Cat went rigidly still. Against his shoulder she said, “Nor in killing MacDonalds.”

T
he gloaming was past and true night settled in. Glenlyon, his belly full of whisky, stumbled through the damp darkness lit intermittently by smoking torches in iron brackets. Edinburgh was a noisome city, reeking of effluvia, smoke, dampness, the turbid stench of the poor overwhelming the finer scent of the wealthy. As for himself, he was poor in coin as always, but wealthier in notoriety than any man alive.

He heard a step behind him and clutched instinctively at the pocket of his greatcoat, then laughed harshly. There was naught in his purse to steal. And so he stopped and swung about unsteadily, willing the footpad to come closer to a soldier who carried a pistol at his belt.

The footpad halted some few paces away. “I am from the Earl of Breadalbane,” he said quietly. “You are bidden to meet wi’ your cousin.”

“Cousin, is it? I thought he had claimed I was no more his kin!”

The man gestured in dimness. “I have given you his words.”

“And does
he
wish to censure me as well?” But then Glenlyon shook his head. “Och, no—he would do that where all might hear, he would . . . serves him naught to keep it quiet, aye?” He peered blearily at the man. “Will he be serving usquabae?”

The messenger did not hesitate. “And brandywine from France.”

Glenlyon, mollified, grunted. And followed Breadalbane’s man.

 

With grimy hands and black-rimmed nails, Dair tore a frayed strip of soiled linen from the dead man’s shirt that now clothed his body and tied back snarled hair into a tail. It wanted cutting badly but he dared not attempt it himself, and Murdo was gone, hoping to catch a fish or two in the river.

On that thought his belly made known its temperament, growling impotently. They went hungry more often then not, depending on what small game Murdo might catch in crude snares, or the fish he managed to spear. Dair had accustomed himself to reduced rations, but no food for two days took its toll nonetheless. Murdo’s luck ran bad.

He healed steadily, but the leg yet ached despite his ministrations. Each day he worked the muscles with both hands, trying to keep them supple, but he had lost weight since the massacre and the strength in his tautly bound thigh had gone. The splints aided his bone but not the rest of him, and he feared to be a cripple if the muscle wasted away. That thought drove him more and more often to kneading his flesh, to wishing he might stand like a man again, unfettered by wood and wool.

Murdo had fashioned him a crude crutch out of a tree limb he stripped of bark so it would not bite into flesh. It was enough so that Dair might lever himself up and hobble to the mouth of the cave, or to a pocket in the back where he relieved himself. The cave now smelled of it, but he had no choice. Unlike Murdo, he could not go out and find a suitable place, but was limited by his leg to depend on the cave itself.

His mouth twisted in wry self-contempt. “I am made a beast, aye?—living in my own filth, bound to my den lest the soldiers find their prey.”

And so proud Glencoe was humbled, shattered in spirit by Campbell soldiers, by a Campbell laird. MacIain killed, his wife dead, so many MacDonalds dead. Even a Campbell-born woman.

Dinna think of Cat—
He shifted, then shifted again, cursing inwardly. Made awkward by the splints, it was difficult to find a comfortable position. His body ached of it, muscles trembling in spasms as if to remind him once he was a man who walked on two legs, instead of a beast bidden to slide himself across the ground when it took too much effort to stand, to balance, to hobble from the dimness of the rocky cave into the light of a spring day.

Murdo has never been gone so long.
His body thrummed with tension. He could not sit still. He itched, he twitched, he bit into his lip to stave off the urge to move, the need to answer in some way his body’s urgent demands.

Two days.

Murdo refused to be gone so long.

MacIain would not permit anything so puny as a broken leg to prevent
him
from doing whatever he wished to do.

No, not MacIain.,
John is now MacIain.

He could not be still, in mind or in body. Cursing, Dair reached out to the crutch and began the laborious process of rising from the floor.

 

Cat waited impatiently as Colin brought up two horses to the dooryard. She saw the expression on his face, the tension in his body, but gave in to neither unspoken plea. And when he stopped, she reached out swiftly and took the rein from his hand. “You need not come,” she said. “I ken the way, aye?”

His jaw hardened. “I’ll no’ let you go without me.”

“Will you not?” Cat set her teeth and placed a foot in the stirrup, then hoisted herself up. Her shoulder twinged, but save for a muttered curse she ignored it as she settled herself in the saddle, pulling folds of plaid out of the way. “Then if you mean to come, you’d best mount your horse. I willna stay here the longer so Jamie and Dougal may come out to fash me again.”

Colin’s expression was troubled. “What will this serve?”

Cat looked down on him. Had he believed she might reconsider, given time? Or merely hoped?

Grimly she said, “It serves me to see what has become of my home, and of the man I married.”

Colin still frowned even as he mounted his garron, though he said nothing.

“You’ve a wife yourself,” Cat told him, “and two bairns. Think of them as I do this. Think of not knowing if they lived, or if they died. For the rest of your life.”

Colin grimaced. “Not knowing might be easier.”

“It would not.” Cat turned her garron toward the track that wound through Rannoch Moor.
And you would ken that, in my place.

No one could understand who had not been there. And until she went back she would never know the truth.

Cat needed to know. Until she knew the truth there could be no future, only the past. In Glencoe, she would know. If he lived. Or not.
“Eraoch Eilean
, ”Cat murmured, riding out of the dooryard.

 

Sweat poured from Dair’s body. He had not expected it to be so difficult, to be so painful . . . it took effort now to breathe, to suck air into his lungs and cling to it a moment before it whooped out on a gasp of exertion, of taut, tremendous effort that drained him with every step.

Step. He did not
step.
Could not.

He could not recall now what it had been like to be whole, to stride across the glen, to nimbly avoid a
camanachd
stick looping down to trap his ankle. He could not recall the simple act of walking unhindered, of the ability to leap and run, or even to crouch.

The terrain was unkind. High above the tree line there was little ease of movement; the wild, rugged corries dug into shoulders of the peaks. Loose stone shifted as he tried to pick his way down from the cave, fouling the crutch, the splints, spilling from beneath his bare left foot so that he planted the splints abruptly to catch his balance.

Pain kindled throughout his thigh. Dair gave in to it, too weak to do otherwise; he saved himself as much as he could by twisting to the left, by taking his weight onto his left leg, and so it gave as well and spilled him there, so that his left hip was driven deep against the stone.

He lay there drenched in sweat, breathing noisily through parched throat. He dared not cry out lest there be someone to hear him, to carry tales of a hidden MacDonald, easy prey for soldiers. Instead he balled his right hand into a fist and beat it against a boulder, beat it and beat it and beat it until he felt the pain of it, the split flesh upon his knuckles. If pain lodged there, it lessened its fury elsewhere.

He pressed his hand against his mouth and bit into the heel, the flesh hard as horn from an honest man’s honest work. And when at last the pain of his broken leg lessened to a point he could bear it, he swore very softly with great elaboration, recalling the crude vulgarity of the men at Killiecrankie who held fear at bay by harsh speech, who scorned the thought of falling beneath a Sassenach ball or bayonet.

“Murdo,” he murmured, exhausted.

 

Wind rustled trees. There was no peat-smoke upon the air, no smell of cooking meat, no odor of fish frying upon flat stones set in the fire. There was no odor at all save of trees, and sap, and turf. Nothing at all of people.

It was Glencoe. It was not. The glen remained, girdled by cliffs and peaks, cut through by the river, but no one lived in it despite fertility. The valley was empty of habitation, save for its natural game. Empty of MacDonalds.

Cat rode unerringly to the house she and Dair had shared, ignoring the ruins of others. And there she found identical destruction as well as similar methods: charred timber and broken stone shattered by the heat, collapsed roof slates. Wind had scoured the ruins free of ash, so that only the stark timbers remained poking impudently skyward, fallen into a tangle like a handful of dropped sticks.

Nothing remained to mark human habitation. No scrap of cloth, no pewter plate, no perfume brought from France. Only the detritus of massacre, of fire and plunder, and the flowers of late spring breaking up through blackened soil.

She climbed down from the garron and left it to forage. She walked across what had been the dooryard—she saw it still—and through what had been the door—she saw it still—and into the room where the soldier had shot her, believing her a MacDonald.

There was no room. There was no house. But she saw it all regardless as she stood in the midst of wreckage.

Cat closed her eyes and conjured recollection. The house was whole again, with a peat-fire on the hearth, and the wailing of the wind as it buffeted the fieldstone, teasing at slate roof tiles. She recalled her cooling bed, empty of Dair, and the cracking noise of what she knew now was distant musketry.

She let it come, piece by piece. Sound by sound. Fear by fear. Let it come, and build; let it engulf, and take; permitted herself in all the ways to relive it again: the emptiness, the fear, the growing apprehension; the shock of being shot. And going into the storm to find Dair lest he be harmed, and alone.

Remembered rage when she knew it was all her father’s doing.

She was dry of tears. She was drained of grief. Nothing lived in her spirit save hatred of Glenlyon.

“Alasdair Og,” she whispered. “Alasdair Og MacDonald.”

“Cat.”

She opened her eyes, astonished; saw her brother’s face instead. “There is a dead man by the river. I wouldna take you to him, save he might be a man ye ken.”

“By the river.” He gestured direction.

Heedless of her footing, Cat ran as swiftly as possible. She was absently grateful for trews in place of skirts, for brogues in place of bare feet . . . but when she saw the body she forgot such things as clothing.

“Dair?” She hurled herself to his side. He was tattered, graying, bearded . . . facedown, she could not see him to know him. “Dair?” Colin had said “dead man.” “Dinna be dead, Dair . . .” She caught great handfuls of his soiled plaid and shirt and tugged him over onto his back. “Dair—?” She stared blindly into his face, into the pale, bloodless face.

Colin came up beside her. “His neck is broken. Likely he fell here in the stones—see?” He paused as she made no answer. “Cat—d’ye ken him?”

She said nothing. She could not. She had no voice with which to speak.

“Cat—?”

At last the words came. “I ken him.”

“Is it . . . is it him?”

Tentativeness. Apprehension. For his sister’s sake, Colin wanted otherwise than what he feared.

That broke her. Now she could cry. Now she could grieve. “ ’Tis Murdo. He was MacIain’s man.” She gazed blindly up at her brother. “I thought I would ken . . . I thought coming here—” All of it new again, the scab stripped ruthlessly off the wound so it might bleed afresh. “Oh Christ, I dinna ken—I
dinna ken, Colin—”

In sudden consternation he knelt down beside her. “Och, Cat—”

She rocked back and forth, wanting to keen aloud. “I thought I would ken, if I came . . . but I dinna.
I dinna.
”

In painful comprehension, in careful compassion he reached out to her. She felt his hand touch her head, then gently cup her skull. He unweighted her, pulling her to him as he knelt there, as she did, until he pressed the side of her head against his shoulder.

Nothing now but grief, and very little breath. “I thought I would ken it—if he lived, or no’.” And it was worse, she realized now, unspeakably worse knowing nothing after all.

“Bide a wee,” he said gently, “and then I’ll find a place for him and stones for his cairn.”

When she could, Cat sat upright, withdrawing from Colin’s shoulder. She patted his arm in gratitude, gazing blindly at dead Murdo. “Aye,” she said quietly, “find stones. I’ll sit wi’ him here as you do it, so he need not be alone.”

 

The Earl of Breadalbane could not suppress his disdain as his unkempt cousin stood before him. “You are
fou,
”he accused.

Glenlyon’s reddened eyes gleamed balefully. “What would you have me be? ’Tis bad enough hearing the whispers when I’m sober enough to understand them.
Fou,
they are no’ so loud.”

They faced one another across a writing table in the earl’s Edinburgh town house near Holyrood Palace. The earl set down the brimming cup he had poured and watched as Glenlyon immediately put out a trembling hand to take it.

Coolly he said, “You did as you were ordered to do.”

Glenlyon tossed back the liquor, licked his lips dry of it, blotted his mouth on the soiled sleeve of his greatcoat, then stared angrily at his kinsman. “Och, aye, so I did—but they must blame someone, aye? And I was there. My boots were soiled by MacDonald blood.” He looked into the empty glass, then smacked it down upon the desk top. “Did you call me here to complain I drink overmuch? Well, dinna. It has been tried before.”