The Blood of Roses (62 page)

The dozing gunner who had been left with the meager battery of three guns that divided the center and left wing was so bleary-eyed, it had taken all his concentration just to keep his smoldering linstock—the fuse soaked in saltpeter used to fire the cannons—out of the rain. He heard the roar of voices and jerked himself awake. He saw the prince’s saber waving, saw the arm lowered in a grand sweeping motion, and, adding his own voice to the Gaelic roar around him, lowered the glowing fuse to the nearest cannon.

Catherine and Deirdre both knew there could be no mistaking the cause of the distant rolls of thunder. It was the sound of guns, firing steadily, volley upon volley until each echo blended into the next with the quaking impact of a volcano. Struan MacSorley, honoring his oath to Alexander to see to Catherine’s safety, rode with them as far as Moy Hall, setting such a fast and furious pace across the fields that the women were too weak and out of breath to protest when he left them unceremoniously at the door and streaked off like a demon toward the sound of the guns.

Lady Anne was not in residence, they were told. With complexions as pale and waxy as sheep tallow, the servants relayed the events of the past twenty-four hours—ending with the fact that only moments before Catherine and Deirdre had arrived back at Moy, the last of the clansmen who had been seeking food and respite had departed for the battlefield.

Aye, there was a battle under way five miles to the northeast, near as they could guess, on a moor adjacent to the Lord President’s estates at Culloden. The cannons had been roaring steadily for nigh on half an hour. Nearly all the servants from the house and stables had gone to watch. Lady Anne was there …

Dizzy and weak in the knees, Catherine clung to Deirdre for support but would not leave the great hall either to change out of her wet clothes or to retire to a warm bedchamber. She sat by the fire, her eyes dark and haunted as she stared into the flames. Her hands were like ice, her feet and toes had no feeling left in them at all. She drank the hot broth someone pushed into her hands but there was no taste to it. She moved her arms and legs dutifully as Deirdre and another maid peeled away the soaked layers of her clothing and bundled her into a plain but warm woolen gown.

At one point she stood listening, uncaring of the cup she had dropped that crashed and shattered against the hearth. She ran to the front door and flung it open, straining now to hear and identify the cause of yet another shocking sound: the sound of absolute, deathly silence.

The battle lasted under an hour. Although the rebels had fired the first round of shot, neither their guns nor their gunners were an adequate match for Cumberland’s disciplined artillery. The prince, after unwittingly giving the signal to commence firing, retired to a position of safety behind the front lines, where he remained, so rattled by the swift and sudden eruption of violence all around him that he neglected to issue the command to his generals to charge-—not even when the Hanover artillery began pounding in deadly earnest … not even when the men in the front lines began screaming and dying, as shot after shot raked through their ranks.

Count Fanducci was like a wild man, running from gun to smoking gun in an attempt to keep the men swabbing, loading, ramming, and firing, but Cumberland’s aim was better, his master of ordnance more skilled and determined, and in less than nine minutes the last Jacobite cannon was silenced.

The clans screamed for the order to charge, but Charles Stuart had moved again in search of the best vantage point, and murderous time was wasted in locating him. If he was waiting, as it seemed, for Cumberland’s infantry to attack, he was waiting in vain. The Hanover general was too canny a soldier to hasten his men forward while his guns were tearing the rebel ranks apart where they stood.

Lord George Murray, appalled by the disaster unfolding before him, did not wait for the prince to give the order but released his Athollmen on a cry of
clai’ mor!
His men broke out of the line only to find they were not the first; The MacKintoshes of Clan Chattan, being closest to the nest of now-silent artillery and having suffered the worst of the bloody cannonading, had broken away under MacGillivray’s command and streamed across the moor only steps ahead of the Athol Brigade, the Camerons, and the Stewarts of Appin.

The charge was not the wild, bowel-clenching rush of bloodthirsty humanity it should have been. The MacDonalds, with the farthest to go to reach the enemy line, were the last to realize the prince’s order was taking too long in coming. With wind and hail and smoke from the enemy guns blinding them, the MacDonalds finally gave the order to charge, but by then Cumberland’s seven regiments of front-line infantry—each consisting of four hundred men— had been ordered into position.

“Make ready!”
the majors screamed, and in a wave, the first of four ranks went down on their right knees.

“Pree-zent!”
Muskets snapped up to red-clad shoulders, right cheeks pressed close to wooden stocks, right eyes sighting along hammer to muzzle. As the first of the leaping, kilted clansmen came pouring through the smoke and haze …

“Fire!”

Donald Cameron of Lochiel, running at the head of his clan, felt a sheering hot wave of powder and shot slash through his men. A second wave, not of musket fire but of human agony, rippled through his contingent as men went down in a thrash of bloodied arms and legs. Donald’s voice, already strained to the limit, altered in pitch as he felt the ground give way beneath him. Pain unlike anything he had experienced before flared through his body, stunning him so that he was not even aware of the second, added crush of agony as he sprawled broken and bloodied on the grass.

Behind him Aluinn MacKail swerved to avoid the staggering, reeling mass of dying humanity and fell to his knees beside Lochiel.

“Go!” Donald screamed. “Go, f’ae the love O’ God!”

Aluinn took a last, despairing look at the shattered mass of bone and torn flesh at the end of Lochiel’s legs and launched himself furiously to his feet, firing both of his pistols as he ran, charging headlong into the red, unmoving wall of soldiers.

Cumberland’s gunners, seeing the charge had begun, acted smoothly and calmly on the orders of their commander and changed from ball shot to paper cases containing powder, lead miniballs, nails, and jagged scraps of iron—partridge shot, the English called it. After each volley, the Highlanders went down in waves, fathers stumbling over sons, brothers over brothers, their wounds more raw and terrible than could be envisioned in any nightmare.

Screaming their clan battle cries, the Highlanders still drove forward, their broadswords, axes, scythes, and sometimes only fists waving in determined fury. With fifty yards still to go, Alexander was deafened by the roar of guns and musketfire, sickened by the screams and shouts of the men who fell and died on either side of him. A volley from Cumberland’s center line forced the men of Clan Chattan to veer to their right, and Alex found himself running alongside the equally tall, equally fearsome MacGillivray. Their combined force of men struck the government lines, the sheer impact of their rage causing Cumberland’s ranks to break and fall back toward their second line of defense.

Alex hacked and slashed his way into the midst of the soldiers, his face, arms, and legs instantly splattered in bloody gore. On all sides, his men put forth a valiant effort, but no sooner had they carved their way through one phalanx of soldiers than another rushed forward to take its place. Moreover, it soon became appallingly evident that someone had reschooled the English soldiers in their methods of bracing themselves for a Highland charge. They no longer cringed from the sword-wielding Highlander directly in front of them, but angled their bayonets at the clansman attacking their comrade on the right. That Highlander would have his arm raised for the killing stroke, leaving his entire right side unprotected.

Alex, stunned to see how the simple change in stance and tactics was succeeding in obliterating the Highlanders’ power, tried to scream a warning to his men. Even as he shouted, however, Cumberland’s second line was advancing, forming a deadly pocket around the Camerons, MacKintoshes, and Athollmen, trapping them in a fatal crossfire. The clansmen had no choice but to abandon the ground they had gained—and might have held, had the entire Jacobite front line charged simultaneously. Lord George Murray, his horse shot out from beneath him, hatless, wigless, covered with blood and filth, was one of the last to fall back, guarding the retreat of his men and somehow surviving the renewed and galling storm of fire from the closing ranks of the English.

Driven back, but too proud to retreat, his men stood and screamed curses, waving bloodied and broken swords in the empty air. They were shot down where they stood and trampled underfoot as the columns of infantry advanced.

The Appin Stewarts lost nearly a hundred men in an enraged charge to win back their standard, captured by a group of infantry, and in the end, it was torn off the halberd and carried off the field wrapped securely around the waist of one of its staunchest defenders.

The ground over which the clans retreated was covered with the bodies of their dead and wounded. Among them, his sword still gripped tightly in his hands, was Donald Cameron, weeping openly as he dragged himself between the heaps of the slain in an attempt to locate any among them who still breathed. He was picked up and carried off the field by his brother, Dr. Archibald, and another clansman, who had had his hand severed from his wrist.

Far on the left flank, where a gust of wind had briefly pulled away the curtain of smoke, the crusty old curmudgeon MacDonald of Keppoch saw that the remnants of their brave army were now in danger of being run down by the regiments of mounted dragoons Cumberland had just unleashed. Keppoch ordered his clan forward in a gallant effort to block the duke’s cavalry, but they were too few to stem the tide. Wounded twice by musketfire, the Chief of the MacDonalds continued to charge and fight until he was finally crushed beneath the churning hooves of the dragoons.

The rain and sleet had stopped, and with nothing to wash away the smoke, the air became a thick, sulfurous yellow. The moor itself appeared to be in motion as the wounded writhed and thrashed in agony. Here and there, where an injured man managed to crawl to one side or drag himself to his feet, he became easy game for the dragoons who rode him down and gleefully hacked him to pieces.

Lord George Murray, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, took advantage of the fact that Cumberland could use neither his artillery nor his infantry without risk to his own pursuing cavalry and organized the shattered clans into a defensive retreat along the road to Inverness. The prince, disoriented and in shock over the carnage he had witnessed, rode among the men crying for their forgiveness. A bare-armed, blood-streaked clansman, responding to a sharp command from Lord George, seized the prince’s horse by the reins and led it off the field before its sobbing rider came to harm.

There were still sporadic pockets of fighting taking place on some parts of the moor, but the battle was over. The government soldiers, having been so recently terrified for their own lives, took out their revenge in a frenzy of blood-lust. They did not allow the Jacobites to withdraw peaceably with their wounded, but followed the express orders of their commanding officers to pursue and slaughter not only the fleeing rebels but those who lay wounded and defenseless on the field.

Clansmen who could still stand and fight did so; a hundred or more spread themselves across the road, their swords raised to ward off the advancing flood of dragoons. Alexander Cameron and the MacGillivray were among them, both men bloodied almost beyond recognition, but too maddened by rage and despair to worry if the blood was their own or belonged to their slain enemies.

The first wave of dragoons was repelled with shocking ferocity. They persisted, however, and, one by one, the Jacobites fell or were driven back. Wounded, cornered against a low stone wall, and surrounded by a score of grinning redcoats, the fair-haired MacGillivray seized up the broken axle of one of the ammunition carts and managed to break the heads of seven of his attackers before they brought him down. Encouraged by their senior officer, the remaining cavalrymen proceeded to stab and mutilate the valiant captain of Clan Chattan, so bloodying themselves in the process they looked more like butchers than soldiers.

Alex, seeing what had happened to the brave MacGillivray, launched himself at the circle of dragoons, severing the head cleanly off the shoulders of the first man he encountered, then swinging his broadsword back to split into the chest of another.

Major Hamilton Garner was slow to recognize the bloodied and powder-blackened features of the swordwielding madman who carved a swath into the ring of dragoons. Two more of his men lay writhing and limbless on the ground before Garner screamed the order for his men to put up their weapons and stand aside.

Alex whirled around, the hilt of his sword grasped in both crimson fists, his eyes black and wild with hatred. Sweat and blood streamed from his brow in torrents; he was cut and bleeding from his arms, legs, chest, and back. His ears still rang with the insanity of battle, but Garner’s shout had somehow penetrated the murderous rage and scratched along his spine like a shard of broken glass.

“Cameron … you bastard.” Garner circled slowly, his saber gleaming dully against the gray sky. “I told you we would meet again one day. I told you we would fight again … to the death this time.”

The major lunged suddenly, his saber slashing in a blur. Alex deflected it to one side in a ringing shriek of steel, spinning with the lethal grace of a dancer to easily avoid a second deadly thrust.

“You haven’t lost your touch, I see.” Garner rasped, pleased to find there was still enough fight left in his adversary to make for an interesting rematch.

“And you are still the same pompous, strutting peacock you were in Derby, Major.” Alex snarled, wary of the nine dragoons who were fanning out behind their major and moving stealthily to encircle the two adversaries “You have trained your animals well. Taking no chances on another loss, I see?”