Highland Crown

by May McGoldrick

  “Hang by the neck until dead unless…” Kenedy stopped and threw the handbill on the table.

  Cinaed knew the rest of it, what was being offered. For the capture and delivery of Isabella Drummond, a reward of two thousand pounds, and Searc Mackintosh’s punishment would be commuted to transportation for life. Hudson was counting on a link between Searc and Isabella. As for Cinaed, he had no name and only his description was printed on the notice.

  Since this morning, the news of the arrest had spread through Inverness like a spring flood tide. Kenedy had come immediately, while many of Searc’s other connections had sent messages, offering assistance. He was the dealmaker, unethical and mercenary, but he made the town click like a well-oiled clock. From his house in the Maggot, Searc played both sides of the political chessboard between Highlanders and English authorities. And he was the heart of Inverness. Everyone—merchants, shipowners, tradesman, and even the poor—relied on him for their survival.

  Cinaed knew no one would have any difficulty identifying the woman on the notices. Too many of Searc’s friends had been introduced to Isabella at the reception and at the dinners that followed. No one wanted to lose Searc in this way; he was too valuable to the working of the city and the area … and the cause. But if he was already lost to them, and many believed that to be the truth, then two thousand pounds sterling in exchange for a Lowlands woman would be ample motivation for anyone.

  Cinaed looked around the room and had no doubt these men knew the truth.

  “Hudson cares nothing about Searc,” he said. “It’s Isabella he wants.”

  “I’ll take her up into the mountains. To Dalmigavie,” Blair offered. “I swear to protect her with my life.”

  Cinaed shook his head. “My wife’s escape will not end this. Hudson won’t hesitate to execute Searc when he feels he serves no further purpose.” He turned to others around him. “Hudson has been embarrassed by his failures here, by his loss of men and his loss of John Gordon. He needs to get his hands on Isabella. Right now, he’s a mad dog who’s chewed through his muzzle. So, before someone above him gets a grip on his leash, he’ll continue to overstep his authority. Today, he took Searc. Tomorrow, it’ll be you.” He motioned to Kenedy. “The next day, he’ll start to arrest you and you and you. And he’ll manufacture charges if he needs to.”

  Men nodded one at a time.

  “He won’t stop until he has this town by the throat. He’ll arrest and execute everyone who came out to those fields. Speakers, protesters, and bystanders—one by one until every one of us is hanging by the neck in the parade grounds at Fort George.”

  These men were older than Cinaed. Some of them had to know the stories handed down of what happened in Inverness after Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite forces were defeated in the fields of Culloden a few miles away.

  “Were you never told the story of William Rose? Just a few hundred yards from here, twelve wounded men were carried out of his house and shot in a hollow.”

  He paused, waited for acknowledgment from the others.

  “Or the story of an elderly gentleman named MacLeod who was pursued by two dragoons to a hill near the cattle market. He went down on his knees and begged for his life, but the dogs shot him through the head.”

  More nods.

  “Or the poor fellow shot dead by a soldier at the door of a widow on Bridge Street?”

  Someone else continued Cinaed’s story. “Aye, and then the fiends went and hacked off the arms of the bairns next door.”

  Cinaed had grown up hearing tales of the atrocities done by the Duke of Cumberland’s troops after the battle. All in the name of the Crown. Those histories had remained banked fires within him and no doubt fueled the life he’d pursued.

  “How many men in the town had their throats cut for no reason?” Kenedy asked.

  “The treatment of prisoners kept in the bell tower of the High Church was monstrous,” Mr. Carmichael interjected quietly. “Few nightmares can compare.”

  “My auld granddad told me they gave those men a handful of meal a day but no water to swallow it,” one of Searc’s men said.

  “Many lay sick with wounds that festered until they died in the utmost agony.” Carmichael tore the notice in his hand in half. “The minister Hay sent his bishop a catalogue of atrocities.”

  “My great-grandfather, Murdoch McRaw,” another said bitterly, “was hanged by the road from an apple tree out on Haugh Brae. Them demons left his naked body out fer two days and a night … and whipped it fer their devilish amusement.”

  Cinaed nodded. They all remembered. They were Highlanders. Inverness was their home. They never forgot.

  “Are we to allow Hudson to do the same to us now?” he asked.

  The answers came as one. “Nay!”

  Cinaed looked at the faces around the room. They were few, but they all had sound hearts and courage enough. Attacking Fort George to free Searc would be impossible and foolish to try. They’d be cut down before they got over the walls. The Deputy Governor of Fort George and his staff had fattened their purses and built their reputations on keeping the Highlands quiet, thanks to Searc. They wanted no trouble and would get Hudson back in harness.

  Cinaed needed a way to bring those commanding officers back to Inverness in a hurry, but if he could draw Hudson out and destroy him before their return, all the better.

  He turned to Kenedy. “What English ships are in port?”

  * * *

  The deserted malt house across the lane from Searc’s house fit Isabella’s needs perfectly. The growing rooms were large and dry, and with some help cleaning the place up, it would serve a much greater purpose than sitting shuttered and empty.

  She understood what Cinaed planned to do tonight and tomorrow. She worried, but she couldn’t chastise him. And she wouldn’t try to change his mind. A battle lay ahead, and she understood the value of strategy and preparation.

  At the same time, she wasn’t about to keep herself locked away in the tower chamber, pacing the floors and feeling useless. No matter what Cinaed said, she still felt completely at fault for what was happening to Searc Mackintosh. She knew about the offer Hudson had circulated to encourage people to hand her in. But Isabella wasn’t afraid. She’d been in this situation before. She wasn’t going to be intimidated again.

  Right now, they each had a task to accomplish. Hers was to get a temporary clinic ready, in case of reprisals for the attack on the prisoner escort and for what Cinaed had planned.

  “We’re up to twenty-five lasses,” Jean announced as she ushered in two more women who’d come to help.

  “And their children?”

  “Told ’em to bring the bairns along. Cook is sending over food enough for all.”

  “And you told them they’ll receive an honest day’s wages so long as they stay.”

  “Aye.”

  Isabella had seen enough hungry faces on Maggot Green to know Jean’s offer would be popular. Cleaning the large growing-rooms was the priority, and she’d arranged to have bedding and blankets brought over from Searc’s house and from Carmichael’s temporary clinic in the book warehouse later.

  In the event of trouble, the clinic by the fields would have been an ideal place, but she knew Cinaed would be concerned about her safety if she decided to work that far away from the house. Also, by starting to renovate the malt house, she decided it might be a good place as a temporary shelter in the future. She’d seen a number of them in Edinburgh, and the need existed here as well. Too many women and children in the Maggot were wandering the riverbanks.

  She rolled up her sleeves and was about to join her small army of workers when she saw Cinaed come in.

  All work stopped. All conversation ceased. Everyone was openly staring at him. Isabella had seen the same reaction the night they’d walked into Searc’s reception. Even during the speeches, she’d watched the heads turn as he came through the crowd to her. Cinaed was impressive. More than impressive, she corrected herself. He was b
eautiful.

  He filled the doorway, his shoulders blocking the light. He searched the low-ceilinged room until his gaze connected with hers, and then a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he took his time walking through. He spoke to the women, nodded at whatever they said to him, patted a child on the head. With every step he took closer to her, Isabella felt her heart beat faster.

  Their time together felt like stolen minutes. Each time she saw him, kissed him, made love to him, Isabella feared it was their last. And every time they came together again, she thought of it as a gift.

  He reached out and the tips of his fingers touched hers. “What would these women say if I lifted my wife off the ground and kissed her?”

  “I’m not afraid of what they’d say, but what they’d do. You’re not like any man they have, if they have one at all. And if I’m your woman … well, jealousy is a terrible thing.”

  “Then we need to be careful not to stir up such feelings in them.” He took her by the hand and pulled her out of the nearest door.

  Drawing her past the ruin of the kiln, she followed him into a darkened hallway beyond, where he encircled her with his arms and crushed her breasts against him.

  “You are my woman. My love, my wife, and all I hold dear.”

  He kissed her, and she felt the hunger in the assault of lips. There was no hesitation on Isabella’s part. She moaned deep in her throat, and her mouth opened under the pressure of his.

  He looked up and down the dark corridor and pulled her into a storeroom. He began to open her dress, and she helped him, wanting to feel his hands on her breasts.

  “I ache for you,” he growled. “I want to bury myself deep inside of you.”

  They had no time to go back to their tower room. He was leaving soon, and she couldn’t desert the people she’d assembled here.

  Isabella lifted up her skirts with a smile.

  “Now? Here?”

  “Now, Cinaed,” she replied softly, sliding her hand inside his trousers. “We must make the most of every minute we have.”

  * * *

  Across the black waters of the canal’s wide basin, HMS Pitt, a third-rate ship of the line, sat at the new Merkinch Wharf. According to Captain Kenedy’s friends in the harbor master’s office, the vessel was delivering, along with kegs of gunpowder, a special shipment of experimental weaponry—exploding shells for the long guns at Fort George. Unloading would begin in the morning.

  Cinaed could not have asked for better.

  He and Blair crouched in the tall grass, wearing only their trousers, waiting for the clouds to cover the moon. Time was running out. The few short hours of darkness in the summer night were being made even shorter by the light of the white half-moon shining over Inverness.

  Cinaed felt Blair’s soot-blackened hand on his arm. He pointed to the armed sentries patrolling the wooden drawbridge at Telford Street. The men were talking with three sailors in a small skiff in the basin. The muzzles of the muskets, on the bridge and in the boat, gleamed in the moonlight. A moment later, the skiff pulled away and moved the length of the ship and continued down the row of smaller vessels. They’d be back in just a few minutes.

  Nothing would awaken the British military authorities faster than losing prized weaponry. Inverness, a conquered town to them for more than fifty years, was a forgotten place, beaten and subdued. Cinaed believed this was why Hudson, after the protest assembly and the day of strikes, felt emboldened to do as he pleased.

  Everything was about to change.

  A red-coated marine patrolling this side of the waterway came along, his musket and equipment signaling his approach from fifty yards off. The two men, still and silent as death, watched him come closer. When he was no more than ten feet away, he stopped. Standing by the edge of the water, he unbuttoned the fall of his breeches and pissed down the bank.

  They waited impatiently until the sentry moved off, buttoning himself up as he went.

  As a cloud slipped across the face of the moon, Cinaed and Blair moved to the water’s edge and waded in. It took only a few minutes to cross the canal, and they used the tow lines hanging down the side to climb to an open port hole on the lower gundeck.

  They crept stealthily amidships between the rows of guns and hammocks and descended to the cargo holds. As Blair stood watch, Cinaed set the fuses and lit them. Moments later, they were back in the water, swimming for the far shore.

  When the ship went up, a series of fireballs rose in quick succession high in the sky, as one hold after another detonated. Without doubt, the explosion would be visible as far as Fort George.

  Come out of your hole, Hudson, Cinaed thought as they gathered their clothes. Come out and play.

  CHAPTER 23

  That day of wrath, that dreadful day,

  When heaven and earth shall pass away,

  What power shall be the sinner’s stay?

  How shall he meet that dreadful day?

  —Sir Walter Scott, “Hymn for the Dead,” Canto VI

  Two miles west of the city, Cinaed sat astride his mount on a rocky rise, looking out over the tiny cluster of fishing cottages at Clachnaharry. The mud flats of Beauly Firth lay below him, along with the narrow cart path that his foe would need to travel to reach the half-built monument outside of the village. Whitecaps crowned the chop on the grey firth, and the wooded hills behind offered a lush, green place to hide his men. Toward the port, a few small plumes of smoke were all that remained of the ship they’d destroyed last night.

  Stretched out along the ridge on either side of him, fifty Highland fighters waited. With his men, gathered from the area’s clans—Fraser and Innes, Macpherson and Chisolm, Grant and Mackintosh—he would finish this mad dog today, as he should have done the day they met.

  “The lads are all in position,” Blair said, reining in his horse beside him.

  Cinaed nodded and looked across the canal toward the city. Immediately after the ship exploded, he’d sent one of Searc’s men out to Fort George with a message for Lieutenant Hudson. The woman on the handbills, he’d been told, had been found and would be turned over to him at the half-built monument at Clachnaharry at noon today. The message had come back that Hudson and his men would be there to take her into custody.

  He glanced at the fighters. Situated where they were, they would cut the Hussars down with the same lack of mercy Hudson had been showing throughout the countryside for the past fortnight.

  Ever since the ship had burned and sank at its berth in Inverness last night, Fort George had reportedly been in an uproar. Word from the weavers had come that dispatches had already gone out to Fort William, where the Deputy Governor of Fort George was meeting with the Governor of the Highlands. The expectation was that the two generals would be coming north directly, which meant Hudson’s time off the leash of his superiors was coming to an end.

  Taking Isabella into custody would mean the successful completion of the lieutenant’s mission to the Highlands. Cinaed knew Hudson would never be able to resist the bait.

  And he’d be waiting.

  “By the devil, Cinaed. Look.” Blair was pointing toward Inverness.

  An hour ago, the skies over the city had been grey. Now, however, beyond the canal and the River Ness, smoke was rising, thick and black as the fires of hell.

  * * *

  The Maggot was ablaze, and it seemed to Isabella the end of the world was upon them.

  Wounded men and women, hacking and coughing, were staggering in faster than she could find space for them to sit, never mind lie down. Thankfully, Mr. Carmichael had joined her earlier in the day, and the surgeon was working relentlessly to treat those in the worst pain.

  She’d been expecting saber cuts and broken bones, but burns were by far the most prevalent injury. Gathering together a few of the local women who’d stayed to help, she sent them off to fetch pitchers of water. The best way to help those with burns was to cool what was left of the charred skin and flesh. She saw Carmichael carrying in two bu
ckets of water himself.

  “How close is it to us?” she asked him.

  “Roofs of buildings bordering the Green are on fire.”

  “How did it start?”

  A group of coughing children came in, and the surgeon motioned to them to come closer.

  “It’s Hudson’s Hussars,” he replied. “They’re burning the town.”

  Her heart clawed its way into her throat. Isabella looked at the crowd of people needing help all around her. She didn’t know what they would do if the fire reached this building.

  “Where is Cinaed?”

  “I’m afraid Hudson saw through his plan,” the surgeon said in a low voice. “The blackguard came here instead of going out to Clachnaharry.”

  A young boy standing in the middle of the crowded floor began to cry out hysterically for his mother. Isabella went to the child and lifted him in her arms. Taking another little one by the arm, she hurried them to a corner where a group of bairns huddled around Jean.

  Her friend opened her arms, and both boys crawled onto her lap.

  A man cried out in pain on the far side of the room. Two young ones coughed dreadfully as they tried to tend to their unconscious mother. Calls for help surrounded her. Isabella moved from one person to the next. A sip of wine. Positioning a bucket of water for three people to share and immerse their burned hands and arms in. Soaking cloths in pitchers of wine, hoping it would be sufficient until more water arrived.

  The smell of smoke was getting stronger. She feared the fire had reached them. Isabella rushed to the door and stepped out into the lane. The sky had disappeared, replaced by a billowing charcoal blanket. The roar of flames competed with the shouts and screams of people in pain. The report of a gun pierced the air. Where the lane ended at the river, she saw people filling buckets and moving back toward the blaze.

  A horse stamped and neighed behind her, and Isabella spun around. In front of her, mounted atop the wheeling animal, a blue-jacketed officer sat, seemingly oblivious to the chaos.