White Rose Rebel (8 page)

‘
Mo ghaoil
, my love,’ she whispered, when he groaned her name, juddering as his seed came out of him into her, lost in wonder. She felt tears come just holding him, vulnerable as he was, unguarded now, while stillness washed through the weight of him.

‘Are you crying?’ he asked, raising himself to look into her eyes.

‘No.’ And, in truth, she wasn’t now, because her belly quivered, but with laughter.

He smiled, chuckled and rolled over on his back. They lay together, hearing the dancers call outside, the jig on the pipes, her head on his sweat-damp chest, fingers tracing the softer rise and fall of his abdomen, the smell of sex about them.

‘How can you know all that?’ she asked.

His head rose, looking at her, brows drawn together, then he grinned, broadly, threw his head back on the pillow laughing, a deep, throaty laugh which he would not explain though she pushed her fist into his ribs and threatened to fuck him again, but it was far too soon and they had to wait a while.

Reluctant to rejoin their guests, at least before morning or even the day after, they let the afternoon drift on to evening. They ate and drank from a tray the girl, Jessie, had left at the door. It was when dark fell, when pipes and celebrants grew silent, that the
enormity of marriage struck Anne. She would sleep the night beside him, rise in this bed next day.

‘And wake making love,’ he smiled, though his eyes were shut, near sleep.

‘In the morning?’

‘I don’t think the English have passed a law against it yet,’ he said.

‘Then they must mean to tax it,’ she said. And they laughed again, together.

A grey drizzle of rain hung over London, barely penetrated by the rising sun. In his chambers at Kensington House, the Duke of Cumberland splashed cold water into his face. At twenty-four, he already had the bulbous look of an English bulldog. His defeat at Fontenoy still smarted, the return home ignominious, leaving the French in victorious possession of Flanders. Behind him, a servant held his red coat ready. The Duke dried himself, threw the towel down beside the china bowl of water and slid his arms into the waiting sleeves.

‘Cope! Hawley!’ he called.

The door opened and General Hawley, a skinny ancient spider of a man meticulously dressed in black, came in.

‘Your Highness,’ he bowed. ‘All’s well with the king?’

‘My father is –’ Cumberland hesitated ‘– concerned. Where’s Cope?’

‘It’s morning,’ Hawley shrugged. It was well known in the army that General Cope liked his bed. From the hallway came the sound of clattering. The door burst open and Cope appeared, a rotund, red-faced man with his buttons half done and his wig askew, scarlet uniform spattered with rain. He flapped his hands, apologetically.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, I was –’

‘Late,’ Cumberland snapped. His jowls quivered. He swept up a sheaf of papers and waved it at the two generals. ‘Last week HMS
Lion
engaged two French frigates. The
Elisabeth
limped back to Brest. The
du Teillay
escaped. Now our intelligence reports my cousin has gone from France.’

‘He wouldn’t be such a damn fool as to land,’ Cope said. ‘Not with only one ship.’

‘That we know of.’ Cumberland sat down heavily and began to
write. ‘You’ll mobilize for Scotland. General Hawley, you’ll join General Wade in Northumberland.’

‘England’s Jacobites won’t start an insurrection,’ Hawley objected. ‘They only talk. A few gibbets swinging in the Highlands would ensure the peace.’

‘Or one for a would-be king,’ Cumberland corrected. He handed the paper he’d been writing to Cope. ‘A letter of credit, Johnny. That should cover your payroll. Find him.’

Rain had battered down throughout the first two weeks of July, a hard, unceasing rain that cut like knives, drumming on roofs, puddling fields and flooding the burns into spate. When it stopped, it was suddenly summer, dry and hot as if no such rain could be imagined, far less fall. Only flooded fords, swollen lochs and fast-flowing rivers gave the lie to that, and the crops. Grim-faced, Anne and Aeneas sat on their horses side by side, staring at the devastation. The field of barley was flattened.

‘The wheat will be the same,’ Aeneas said, dismounting to check the standing height of broken stems.

‘Can we harvest it now?’

‘Aye,’ he squinted up at her against the harsh sun. ‘But for hay.’ That would mean overwintering more cattle so the crop could return its worth fed through the beasts. It would be spring before any value derived from it.

‘At least the oats are in.’

‘Plenty of porridge,’ he agreed, swinging back up into the saddle, ‘and less to wash it down with.’

‘So it’s ale and
uisge beatha
you mourn,’ she teased. ‘Or that we’ll miss our contribution to German Geordie’s keep?’

He leant an arm on his horse’s neck and studied her for a moment.

‘There’s another shame this is a barley field,’ he said slowly, seriously, despite the light in his eyes. ‘You’ll not be wanting ears of that inside your skirts.’

The sudden twist of pleasure inside Anne, though familiar now, was always unexpected. Throughout June, they had tried walking
through the estate so she could learn it but could barely pass a grassy patch among the heather or a copse of trees. Hand-holding was fatal to forward progress so, if she was to know the extent of Moy, they had to traverse it on horseback. Unlike Aeneas, she could not control her smile.

‘I doubt they’d be a joy under the kilt either,’ she said.

‘
Ach
, I’m a man.’ He grinned now. ‘I can stand the itch.’ Then he chuckled. ‘At least till later.’

It took longer than it ought to reap and stook the half-ripe grain. Aeneas sent fifty cotter families over to help cut and stack at Dunmaglas, where MacGillivray, with more barley in exposed fields, would have suffered greater loss.

When the work was done, the boys who’d volunteered into the Black Watch assembled at Moy Hall. They’d been kept back for a harvest that would no longer come, their income from military service needed even more now. Lined up, fresh-faced and eager enough for adventure, they were mostly oldest sons of the poorest families. Cotters on the periphery of the estate were often exiles from other clans, banished for some transgression or voluntary exiles over some dispute, given the thinnest soil and most meagre grazing allowance until they proved themselves to their new chief.

Anne had dressed up specially to inspect the volunteers, walking the lines with Aeneas. A few, whose mothers refused permission, were sent home. In customary fashion, for welcome or to see men off to war, she kissed each one warmly on the mouth as Aeneas introduced them. They were tender boys, at the pretty age, sixteen or seventeen, not much younger than she was. This would be their first time away from home.

‘Calum M
^c
Cay,’ Aeneas said.

She remembered Calum from their wedding day, the first one pushed forward.

‘Duncan Shaw.’ The elder of two brothers, his mother had allowed only one to go.

The next boy was gangly with a wide lop-sided grin.

‘Shameless,’ Aeneas said. ‘He has no other name.’

‘M
^c
Intosh,’ Shameless said proudly, mistaking his chief ’s meaning. ‘I’m with Howling Robbie.’ Certainly the two boys stood, fingers entwined, close together.

‘
Howling
Robbie?’ Anne queried, smiling.

‘Do you not remember from the dancing,’ Aeneas said in her ear, ‘or him singing later in the night?’

Now she remembered; the hooching and hollering which owed more to energy than tunefulness. She kissed them both soundly.

‘It’s good you’re going together.’

There were fifty volunteers, the last Lachlan Fraser, the blacksmith’s son. Anne questioned that one. A smith was an important asset, not one to be given away lightly and not into government forces when a rising could be imminent.

‘The French never left port, Anne,’ Aeneas reminded her. ‘Only two ships escaped the blockade and the navy turned them back.’

‘But they might try again, and if the Prince lands in England, these boys could be sent there, on the wrong side.’

‘I won’t let that happen.’

Anne turned back to Lachlan, who stood, head down, fretting. Like all the young men there, he was eager to go fully armed and become the warrior he had trained to be since childhood.

‘You can go with my blessing,’ she said, kissing him. ‘But only for six months. Moy has more need than the Black Watch of a blacksmith in the making.’

Aeneas mounted up then, to deliver the boys to Fort George in Inverness. Anne stayed behind to make tokens for the next day’s handfasting but she watched them go, uneasy. She’d supported Aeneas in recruiting them because it felt right at the time, but now, watching them march proudly away, kilted plaids swinging, it seemed as though they marched to join an enemy. The clan had instinctively been repelled by the idea of their sons supporting a government garrison. Perhaps that should have been heeded.

The following morning there were disputes to settle before the afternoon ceremonies. Moy Hall, like the land, belonged to the people, as did their chief. It was to him they brought problems they
failed to resolve among themselves. The first two were simple, a boundary disagreement and some cattle put on to another’s grazing. Aeneas resolved them equally simply. He knew precisely where the boundary fell. If transgressed again, twice the ground encroached would be given for use to the aggrieved family. He didn’t accept the excuse that cattle wandered into a neighbour’s field.

‘It is for you to see they don’t,’ he told their owner, warning him that the neighbour would also gain an extra beast if it happened again, before addressing the need by allocating extra rights to the common grazing.

Anne listened carefully. It would take time before she knew Moy and its people well enough to make such clear-headed judgements. At Invercauld, she, too, had known every stone and tree, each name and person. She swallowed a surge of homesickness.

The third complaint was made with great anger. A crowd pushed into the hall, propelling a bruised cottar prodded on by an old woman with a pitchfork, and all of them speaking at once.

‘Let one of you speak first,’ Aeneas said, nodding to a stocky cottar. ‘Ewan?’

‘He has put a
torr-sgian
into his wife,’ Ewan said. ‘And she has the wounds in her back to show for it!’

‘So it’s no accident?’ Aeneas questioned.

‘They’d not be cutting peat this late,’ Anne, staggered by the brutality, interrupted.

‘Nor indoors either,’ the old woman snorted. She poked the guilty man with the prongs of her fork.

‘All right, Meg,’ Aeneas said, frowning. ‘Could none of you prevent this?’

‘As soon as we knew,’ Ewan drew himself up, proudly. ‘But the harm was done.’

Aeneas ascertained the woman would recover, then listened, calmly, to the man’s story, how it was an accident, how his wife was sharp-tongued and ungrateful, how he’d become enraged but meant no harm to her.

‘And I’m right sorry now,’ he said pitifully, clasping his bonnet to his chest.

‘Your temper is yours to keep, Dùghall,’ Aeneas said. ‘You came to us needing a home when your own chief banished you. Is this why?’

‘His wife said they ran from her family’s anger.’ Meg answered instead.

‘Will she go with him a second time?’ Aeneas asked.

‘She says not,’ Ewan answered.

‘Says and does are different things.’ Aeneas stood. ‘I’ll see to this outside.’ As the cottars huckled the man out of doors, he called for Jessie to bring a binding cloth and turned to Anne when she rose to go with them. ‘You needn’t see this.’

‘Aeneas,’ she insisted. ‘When you’re not here, I must deal with these matters.’

‘If I’m not here,’ he said, buckling on his sword, ‘MacGillivray would deal with the likes of this.’

‘We haven’t seen him since the wedding,’ she reminded, following behind.

‘He’ll come when there’s need,’ he said, standing aside to let her go out first. Outside, he called Will, the stableboy, to fetch a tether. With it, he bound the now whimpering Dùghall’s right hand to the tethering post at the door.

‘Hold him,’ he said unnecessarily to Ewan, who’d kept a good grip of the man to prevent him running off. To Dùghall, he said, ‘you’ll not do harm, nor find another home, so readily from here on.’ Then he drew his sword, raised it and swung it down, hard, slicing through the man’s wrist, the blow taking the tethered hand clean off.

The man fell back against Ewan, squealing. Blood oozed from the blunt end of his arm. As Aeneas sheathed his sword, Jessie went to bind the wound, Will to recover the tether and remove the severed hand.

‘If you take him to the smith,’ Aeneas told the cottars, ‘Donald will sear the wound. Then see him off our lands.’

‘He’ll be an outcast now,’ Anne said, as Aeneas came up the steps. The enor mity of the wounding was g reater than disfigurement. No chief would take the man in, his value as warrior or worker
nullified, his untrustworthy nature evident. Hanging might have been kinder.

‘His wife will be less inclined to follow him,’ Aeneas said, ‘when she hears.’

The men were already dancing at the far end of the loch where the handfasting feast was laid out by the summerhouse. Highland men danced often, alone, making their own mouth-music, or in groups. Fast or slow, the dances were complex, requiring skill. Dancers often risked injury if weapons were involved in the display. Now they danced exuberantly to the pipes, in celebration. Aeneas was immediately called to join them, which he did, taking his place at the front of the group.

Anne joined the women, talking and laughing with them as they watched the men, kilts and plaids swinging, feet flashing like knives. Handfasting was an old custom which many clans no longer observed, but the M
^c
Intoshes were descended from Celtic priests, their ancient ways dear to them. The men and women who took part committed themselves to live together as married for a year and a day. On that last day, if both chose it, they married. If either one chose not, the bond ended. It was a custom ignored rather than approved by their church. When marriage was refused, children conceived or born during handfasting were often given to the father’s family after weaning, but the choice lay with the woman. Pregnant or nursing, she was more sought after by other suitors, her fertility assured.