The Rogues (29 page)

“Alan, I think ye want to stay behind to make sure Josie doesna come to any harm,” I said.

The Rogue scowled at me. “That sort of talk's going to spoil my reputation as a ruffian.”

“Ye're reading me the wrong way,” I assured him. “I think the better of ye for it. She's a grand lass.”

A brief smile flickered over his dark features, then he was all business again, speaking quickly, all the while keeping an eye out for the redcoats. “Listen carefully, Roddy. Once ye're over the mountain, follow the shore of the loch all the way to Rannoch Moor and the village of Oichan. Got that?”

I nodded. “Rannoch Moor. Oichan.”

“Once there, ask for a man named Angus Durie.”

“Angus Durie,” I repeated.

“He was a comrade of mine in the wars. He'll see ye safe to Glasgow. Ye can count on him not to play ye false.” He was done loading the musket and turned to fire off another shot.

“Alan,” I said, “if not for the Blessing and my family, I'd stay with ye to the end.”

“Nae apologies, lad.” He squeezed my arm. “Just do me the one favor. Should things go awry for me, send word to Josie that I turned out to be a better man than she might have thought.”

“I will,” I said, “but I'm sure she already knows that, just as I'm sure we'll meet again.” I thought briefly about Josie and how she'd looked at Dunbar and was glad that the two of them had found each other.

Dunbar swallowed hard and turned away. He said over his shoulder, “Dig yerself in under that gorse and dinna come out till I've pulled the bloody hounds off yer scent.” He pointed to the spreading bush of prickly stems and yellow flowers. “I'm awa' now.”

I did as I was told, and he slipped off through the trees to a fresh position on top of a mossy boulder. From there he fired off yet another shot, then moved again. Each time he let the redcoats catch a glimpse of him, luring them on.

As I watched, screened by the yellow gorse, Dunbar became smaller and smaller, moving away from me, from my life, leaving me all alone. I kept as still as a stone, too tired now even to be afraid.

I waited till the redcoats were well away, intent on chasing the Rogue, then I crept out from under the gorse.

Overhead a buzzard soared lazily over Devil's Reach as if showing me the way. I set out for the peak at a mad scramble. Not once did I dare look back. Nor did I need to. The crack of muskets was farther and farther behind me now, fading like the last echoes of a bad dream.

It was a long climb, over loose scree and then shaky shale and finally a scramble through a tiny ravine before I gained the heights. There I found the spot exactly as the Rogue had described it—the broken tree and the rock.

I was out of breath but certainly not out of hope. I said a blessing on Dunbar's head. Then, taking one last look back, I realized that all I could see now were distant plumes of musket smoke. Dunbar and the soldiers were not even smudges on the landscape. As they were to me, so I'd be to them.

I sat for a moment on the fallen tree to catch my breath. Taking the Blessing from my pocket, I stared down at it. Such a wee thing to provoke so much trouble. To offer so much hope. Then I made a silent farewell to Dunraw, the old familiar hills of home, the whole of the life I'd known there, and tucked the Blessing back into my pocket.

“Good luck, Alan Dunbar,” I whispered into the wind. Then I started down the far side of Devil's Reach. “May the Lord lend ye wings.”

I squeezed my way into the fissure and wriggled through. When I stood on the other side, I could see the gentler country that Dunbar had promised me, a green road to a new world.

31 NEW SCOTLAND

Just as Dunbar had said, the silver finger of the loch led me to Rannoch Moor. I'd never been at such a place before—miles and miles of little grey-colored lochans, dangerous peat bogs and hidden, twisty streams. Tussocks of grass humped up before me, and I lost a boot in one mucky place, where the bog seemed to reach up and strip it from my foot. I was lucky not to have lost more than that. I had to pick my way across with care. But since no one was chasing me now, I had all the time in the world to cross the moor.

Slowly I found my way—one boot on and one boot off—to the village of Oichan, and there was a small tanner's shop belonging to Angus Durie. Angus fed me and gave me a pallet to sleep on, the softest bed I'd had in weeks.

“A comrade of Alan's,” he said, “is a comrade of mine.” He asked no questions of my age or why the redcoats might be hunting Alan and me. His doughy face had sharp black eyes like dried currants. They just took me in and seemed to approve of what they saw.

Durie gave me a pair of his son's old boots, which were just my size, and a shirt that was miles too big to replace mine, which was worn through. Then we went by wagon to Glasgow. The horse pulling us—a faded roan named Charlie—was old and settled into his bones. He never hurried, but we got there all the same.

No one questioned us along the way and—surprisingly—Angus himself never asked why I needed his help. I guess folks fleeing the Highlands had become such a commonplace, all our answers would have been the same: we'd been forced out by the lairds and had nowhere else to go.

It would be pleasant to report that I found my father and Lachlan and Ishbel by hanging around the harbor and calling on the port office day after day. However, I did not.

What I did do was to make a nuisance of myself at one of the shipping offices and then offer my help. I ran errands for a clerk who'd taken pity on me. His name was Master Ochen Lewis.

Master Lewis was scrawny and long-legged, more like a heron than a man. His nose was beaklike as well, and when he spoke, his nose moved awkwardly. He perched on his office stool as if in a heronry. His fingers were stained with ink.

At last he was able to find out from some Highland folk who had settled in Glasgow that my family had sailed three weeks earlier, on a ship called
Valiant
, to America's Cape Fear.

“Cape Fear? I dinna like the sound of that,” I said.

“Dinna ye worry, lad,” he said, “that's the best place for a farmer, though the fisher folk are none too pleased with it.”

“Cape Fear?”

“They say seagoing vessels can go up the river at the neck of the cape for over twenty miles.” His nose waggled at me. “Twenty miles, lad, and a lot of farmland in between. Why, we Scots have been settling there for a hundred years. It's a lot of land—but few people. Ye'll find yer family soon enough. Ships leave for that every month or so.” He sounded remarkably sure as he turned from me and made a series of hen scratchings on the paper before him.

I had to work for five months for Master Lewis before I had money enough for my passage. I ran errands, carried maps to the ships for him, made his tea the way he liked it best, “as dark as the grave.” He was a dour man but a fair one. I think he liked me because I never complained. Why would I? I was buying my ticket to America to find my family. I wouldn't sell the Blessing to do it, for that belonged to all of us, not just me alone.

At last I had enough for a ticket that guaranteed me a hammock deep in the bowels of a filthy, heaving ship and one meal a day. “If,” as a sailor remarked to me, “you can keep it down.”

I said goodbye to Master Lewis, and he gave me an extra coin. “Buy something in America and think of me,” he said. His pale eyes got watery and his beaky nose dripped. He touched a greying handkerchief to them. “Write sometime.”

I nodded, though we both knew I couldn't write.

There were nearly fifty of us crammed onto the ship, and half of them were made sick by the choppy seas. Men, women and some children as well. I was the oldest of the lads there.

At first we were all secretive about our stories, and belongings were never shared. But by the second week, we'd begun talking and discovered how similar we were. We'd all been burned out or bought out or thrown out of our homes.

“Damned sheep,” said one man bitterly, and by the end of the day,
damnedsheep
was a single word.

After two months on the ship, we came in sight of America, and the ship's hull shook with the cheering. I kissed a pretty girl, the both of us made bold by the air of the New World, and disembarked at Wilmington.

There I got into a canoe with a half dozen of the big ship's folk. We'd begun as strangers from different glens all over the Highlands, but were now like cousins, each story different, each the same.

At our first landing, I asked the men who helped us off if they'd heard news of Bonnie Josie McRoy, the old laird's daughter, or of the Rogue, Alan Dunbar. One man, a sour Angus farmer with a nose like a neep or, as they say in this new country, “a turnip,” said he'd heard that the redcoats were hanging rogues wherever they found them, without taking time for trials.

Turning away, I fought back my grief. I was nearly a man now, and I knew men didn't cry. Dunbar might have been a rogue by any man's definition, but he was a good man nonetheless.

We went upriver slowly, and people disembarked if they had kinfolk at the landings. Over and over, I was invited to stay. I was young and strong. Of course they wanted me.

But I was looking for my own people, and so I kept on going.

Ninety miles upriver, I disembarked and started asking around for anyone from the Kindarry lands, especially Macallans. I found many Campbells there, already rich and powerful, who'd been tacksmen back in Scotland and who could hen-scratch as well as Master Lewis. They had come to the Carolinas to earn the right to be American lairds.

But there were plenty more poor folk too, from Argyll as well as the islands of Arran and Jura.

Of the Dunraw folk, I found no trace.

Ninety miles and still no word of them. So I did what I had to in order to stay alive. I got off the boat and worked at odd jobs, enough to keep me in food and a straw bed, sharing a one-room house with other Scots in what one man called “slave quarters,” though we were not black slaves. And I asked every new shipload of folk and every old settler I could find about my family. And about Bonnie Josie and the Rogue. But no one knew a thing.

The land itself was strange and forbidding, yet fascinating too and the animals new to me. Dangerous vipers and large cats big enough to harm a man, as well as terrible bears that could crush you in their embrace. I wished with all my heart that Alan Dunbar could see them. But I supposed he was dead, hanged along with all the other rogues. He could have saved himself, but instead he'd saved me.

I do not desert comrades
, he said. I wondered if I had deserted him.

Then, one day a year later, on a trip farther upriver than I'd ever been before, we came to a small landing—really just a pier jutting into the water. I was helping a French trader named Lareaux buy skins to sell back in Cape Fear.

“Go over there, Roodee,” he told me, pointing at a man bent over a pile of fox skins. “See what he wants for them. Don't offer much.” I'd been with Lareaux a month now, and he still couldn't get his French tongue around my name. He was a homely man with a cast in one eye, but he had a gift for haggling, and he knew his way around the backwaters of the land.

I went over to speak with the man. With a start, I recognized him. His black beard was bushier than it had been in Scotland, his face ruddier and his shoulders more stooped, but still I knew him.

“Tam,” I cried. “Mister MacBride.”

He looked up, didn't recognize me.

“I'm Roddy Macallan,” I said. “From Dunraw.”

He looked again, cocked his head to one side, ran his fingers through his beard. Then he houghed through his nose like some kind of half-tame farm animal. “Roddy—yes. Yes, now I see. Ye've grown, lad. Put on muscle and sinew. A bit of a beard.”

I laughed and ran my hand over the rough scrub that was growing on my cheeks.

“And here we all thought ye dead. We sang psalms for ye last year.”

I was silent for a long moment, then whispered, “
We
?”

“Yer da and his wife and yer brother and the rest of the Dunraw folk who've settled here.”

Again I was silent. This time I looked around, beyond the pier. Through a stand of trees, I could see a path beside a smaller winding river and wondered where it led.

And then I thought about what Tam had just said: “My father's
wife
?”

He scratched under his beard. “Ishbel of the sharp tongue.”

I threw back my head and howled, half sob and half laughter.

MacBride put a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Welcome home, lad.”

Lareaux paid me only half of what he'd promised because I refused to finish the trip. And when MacBride took me up the small rilling river in his flat-bottomed canoe to a little wooden homestead, built with interlocking logs, and I saw the careful garden laid out in the rich dark soil, I knew it had been worth the long, empty days to come to this place at last.

“Mistress of the house,” boomed MacBride when we'd walked up to the house, and he hammered on the jamb of the open door.

Ishbel walked out, shaking flour from her apron, blinking into the light of the green clearing.

Wordlessly, MacBride shoved me toward her. She looked up and glared. Then her eyes grew wide. Her mouth opened, then closed again. For once she had nothing to say.

I took the Blessing from my pocket, for I never went anywhere without it. The sun flashed off its jeweled surface. “My mother spoke the truth,” I said. “It's just taken me longer than I thought to bring it to ye.”

Unaccountably, she began screaming, a sound like a dog howling, crying out, “Oh … oh … oh!”

Two men came running in from the furrowed fields, the younger one with a scythe in his hand.

They stared at me as if seeing a ghost.

I held out the lovely little jeweled brooch with the rampant lion on the top. “Father, Lachlan, I have the Blessing.”