His own fellows were gathering round him again, trying to make a stand against a thick body of infantry that were pushing and panting through the scrub. For an instant Hurry took these for their own islanders, and then realized that they were men of the Monroes and Rosses, who had been waiting on the opposite slopes to see how the tide turned, and now swooped down like carrion crows to share in the victory.
‘Sons of dogs, come and get your flesh!’ he shouted on a sudden high note of despairing rage as he hacked at one of them who had ventured too far ahead of the rest. Then he turned and ran for it with the foreigners, his breath coming in thick sobs, his heart hammering against his ribs, while his legs seemed to have turned flabby as cotton, his heavy riding-boots dragged along the uneven ground, tripping in the mud and the brambles that stretched their thorny arms to catch his feet, his face, his torn coat, on which a patch of deep blackish-purple was slowly spreading.
This would finish it, there was no chance for him now. What a God-damned fool he’d been to pick the losing side yet once more, or was he indeed Sir John Jonah, did every side become the losing one when he joined it? A curse on him there must be, and he’d never see Pitfichie and the brats again.
They were all being pushed further and further up the heights, and a furious volley from below made them break into a blind run for cover among the brushwood. He jumped into a ditch which felt oddly springy, and found he had jumped on a man’s chest, his dead startled eyes staring up past Hurry’s shoulder as if still looking in amazement at the man that killed him.
Hurry crouched down beside the body, which he pushed up for shelter from the bullets. One had grazed his arm, another his hand, but he could still use his sword if he got the chance. He got it quicker than he wanted, for a big musketeer came up and attacked him, and Hurry’s sword broke on his iron breast-piece as the man leaned over to hack down at him. But he hit below the belt and sent him on his back, howling, then scrambled up and seized the fellow’s sword as three or four more came running up, and swung it round, slashing a man’s face and breaking the guard of another man’s arm, shouting forgotten foreign oaths as he did so and laughing insanely.
He was making them give before him and had his back to a tree, but another man was coming up round it behind him, he did not know if it were friend or foe, only heard the crack and crash of breaking twigs and the heavy panting breath, and then the swordthrust got him at the side of his head, and another in front only just missed his eye. He fell headlong, and they grabbed his sword and ran on over his body, thinking him dead, and so did he as the warm blood gushed over his face, blinding him.
But he wasn’t dead, for he still wondered what was happening and where was Montrose? If Montrose got away it would be with no loss of troops worth counting; he could get into the hills and start the job again from there, and with better material than the islanders – he couldn’t get worse.
‘Five hundred Highlanders’ went round and round in his head like a squirrel in a cage, throbbed maddeningly in the pulse of the blood that was ebbing from the cut in his head; with his five hundred Highlanders Montrose had got off from a worse fix than this and far worse odds, when Hurry had all but trapped him at Dundee. ‘If I’d only been with him then’ – even now there was room for that agonizing regret among the pain and deafening confusion buzzing in his head. A just-his-luck man, that was all he’d ever been, and now his death was just his luck, no more and no less.
He heard the crash and tearing rip of branches as horses came plunging through the undergrowth. He’d not lie here to be trampled to death; he grabbed at the wet moss and mopped some of the blood from his face – it smelt fresh and cool and earthy; he struggled up somehow and plunged forward again in short staggering rushes as though he were drunk.
The wood was getting misty, the white birch trunks all bluish – he didn’t know if it were the smoke of the muskets, or twilight, or his own dulling vision. The noise of fighting too, the clash and shouts and shots, was streeling away as if going up over the hill – or perhaps he was going deaf. He saw some of his foreigners making through the wood and joined them, but could not understand a word they called to him though he knew Danish and German quite well.
He had no weapon, but he was too weak to use it if he had one; he was still losing blood fast and his head was singing louder than the noise round him. ‘Five hundred Highlanders’ it sang; those Highlanders at Dundee, Montrose could have got them back into their trenches; but they’re all dead now, lying under Slain-Man’s-Lea – dead men don’t fight any more. He would soon be a dead man himself, he’d shot his bolt and missed as usual – he’d got himself on the wrong side at the wrong moment, and he’d never get another chance to get it right; it was too late now, he’d joined Montrose too late, and even if he lived he was under sentence of death and it would be too late to change again.
The wood was clearer in front of him. There was more noise ahead and sharper. He was coming out into the clearing before the next patch of wood higher up, and his side must be making for it, higher ground, thicker wood, away from the cavalry. His side – ‘on which side, Sir John Hurry?’ ‘The same side, the losing side, always the same, it’s a damned lie to say I ever changed it.’ He was laughing again in a silly broken giggle.
He blundered out on to the darkening hillside under a pale sky, and saw close by him a few of his horsemen fighting like mad against some of the Covenant dragoons, flanked by musketeers. His half-shut eyes blinked open furiously, he knew that sword-arm swinging up and down, it was Montrose there in the midst of them, and no sooner had he seen him than he saw his horse rear wildly into the air with a long piercing scream and fall with its rider. So it was done now, Montrose was dead, and it was all over.
No, he was up on his feet, fighting like a tiger with the musketeers. His sword had broken but he tore a musket from one of them, clubbed a man on the head with it, and holding it by the muzzle swung it round, clearing ground as he smashed down first one and then another, his face oddly cool and resolute in the midst of those mouthing, writhing faces.
Hurry’s head was suddenly clear for a moment. He got his breath together and gave a hoarse yell to young Frendraught – ‘Christ! force him on to your horse and make him ride for it!’
More and more men were plunging out through the wood up over the clearing; they surrounded Hurry’s band and called to him to yield. He flung up his hands to do so, and in the same instant crashed heavily forward on his face.
IV
Montrose rode off on Frendraught’s horse, the one man from whom he could bear to receive it, since Frendraught’s uncle would ensure his safety as prisoner.
‘I’ll yield and live,’ the young man shouted to him. ‘Do you live and save the cause.’
Major Sinclair seized his bridle-rein and urged him on with them, a little group of them galloping up over the slope into the next belt of wood just as their pursuers, close behind, checked to take prisoners.
Montrose saw Hurry go down in the tail of his eye as he rode off, either dead or taken (which meant death). There goes a fine soldier,’ he thought, but his regret was for more than that. There were many better men than Jack Hurry, and many loyal friends he had left on that stricken field, but for some odd reason the man who had been his toughest enemy, who had kidnapped his young son and heir James and sent him to prison in Edinburgh, was more in his thoughts than any of them during this headlong flight.
There was no time for any thought at first. With their heads laid low along their horses’ necks under the spatter of following bullets, the little group reached those further sheltering trees and then scattered, the better to evade their pursuers.
‘Tear off the Garter, my lord!’ gasped Major Sinclair. ‘Your coat, too, or they’ll see you a mile off.’
Montrose whipped it off, flung it into the branches of a tree, then with Sinclair and another of his officers made downhill towards the Oykell, and followed it upstream until they could make an attempt to swim it on their horses.
The current was fierce. Montrose’s horse was swept away and drowned, but he managed to swim ashore. Any mounted man was a marked man in this valley of death where Strachan’s cavalry were riding in all directions to slaughter whatever survivors from the battle could be found. Their clothes too would give them away to whomsoever saw them.
The other two turned their horses loose. Then the three men ran for it, mostly on hands and knees over the sopping marsh by the river, so as to keep their heads below the reeds as long as it was still light enough for their enemies to see any distance. The Northern spring twilight was long and clear, the budding whin and broom shining through it in points of pale fire. The valley where they groped on all fours ran in a long pit of cavernous shadow between the darkening shapes of the hills, and behind them the great grey crag of Craigcoinichean rose gaunt out of its surrounding woods.
Before it was quite night they stumbled suddenly on five shepherds returning from their lambing on the hillside, and each party drew back startled from the other dim forms in the dusk. But as the peasants began to lumber off in the darkness, Montrose called to them and offered to pay them handsomely to exchange their ragged homespuns for their own fine clothes. No explanation was needed.
‘We’ve had wind of a battle,’ said one of them: ‘they said the fighting would reach these parts this time.’
They did not dare to take the fugitives back to their homes for any food, and indeed it was likely they might walk straight in on some of Strachan’s troopers already searching all the houses near. The shepherds gave what directions they could by the stars, and clothed themselves in as few garments as they could possibly wear. They hid the incriminating finery under a stack of peats, then stared a moment after the three strange gentry they had encountered, wet from the marsh and their swim in the river, and one of them still bleeding from his wounds, who now turned away in the familiar rough clothes they themselves had just been wearing, and struck out north-west over the moor.
Montrose’s other companion was also a Sinclair, Sir Edward from Orkney, no relation to Major Sinclair of Brims in Caithness. He was a large fair gentle creature like a rather weak Viking, who took it greatly to heart that his Orcadians should have proved such poor fighters. Montrose had to tell him a dozen times that no infantry, however well trained and used to war, could have stood up against the amount of cavalry they had had to face that day.
‘They were led blindfolded into an ambush, and that crime is mine.’
‘Your scoutmaster’s,’ corrected Major Sinclair, and cursed Robert Monro for a little, but neither of the others cared to echo him, they were too anxious about their direction. The still air of that golden afternoon had broken into gusts and rushes of cold wind, and now a great cloud, palpable in shape as a mountain, was coming up from the west, blotting out the stars as it spread over the sky.
Soon the night was black and void of any guidance, but they struggled on through bogs and water-courses, knowing that at any moment they might sink into a peat-hag, but knowing that their only hope of escape was to put as much ground as fast as possible between themselves and Strachan’s troopers, who would be scouring the country for Montrose for days after the battle. Their best chance was to get up to the north-west into the Reay country which was friendly to them, but Sir Edward Sinclair was desperately anxious to get further round on the north coast to Thurso where Montrose had first landed and left a garrison, and so get back to his own beloved Orkney.
‘That is our true base,’ he said; ‘we’ll have no peace, no chance to recruit again until we reach Orkney.’
Montrose could well understand his longing for those strangely placid, fertile islands of the north that were his home, but it meant a far longer and more difficult circuit, and Sir Edward was the last of the three who would be likely to make it, for his leg had been grazed by a bullet and the heavy going was very painful to him.
‘Wait till we get into the hills,’ Montrose said, ‘and then we’ll see what we can do.’ And again and again through that night, ‘Wait till the morning, then we’ll see we’re going right.’
But the morning came in driving rain and sleet and no hint of sun to show which way they were going, and not one of the three had ever before been in this country. They plunged on through drenched heather and the treacherous bright green of bog moss; they heard running water whispering among the grasses, running fast and low and secret to the sea, and always the light stayed white and obscure over the desolate land, a snow-light reflected from the white heads of the hills, a mist-light with no hint from whence it came in that clouded, hidden sky. They might have been groping their way along the bottom of the sea. And then those low thick clouds darkened down again on them and burst in tempestuous rain.
‘A place this to perish the crows,’ Major Sinclair said.
‘And that’s why they call it Corbiesdale,’ Montrose answered.
‘The corbies will have fine pickings there now anyway after that ambush,’ said Sinclair with a laugh like the sharp bark of a fox.
His namesake groaned. ‘It’s my leg,’ he said quickly in apology, as though he were less ashamed to groan for that than over the fate of his wretched islanders.
They talked desultorily as they tramped, chiefly of the trap that had been so cunningly laid for them. Strachan must have done his job cleverly, got his men across the river and up under its high banks into that scrub of whin and broom. Who had been with him? Major-General Holbourn probably; he was his right-hand man now, just as Strachan was Leslie’s.
‘They’ve been too well prepared for us, that’s what it was,’ Major Sinclair said. ‘All this delay, everyone looking to see what the King will do next, and the King trying to look both ways at once, now to you, my lord, and now to Argyll, who hopes to marry him to his daughter – that ought to cure the young rake, to have that psalming sneaking Campbell for a father-in-law!’
And again he laughed on that harsh note that was far from cheering.
Montrose began to talk instead of foreign captains he had met abroad. The Emperor’s brother Leopold, that was a fine man though a damned unlucky leader – he had met him just after Conde had smashed his troops at Lens. ‘Now there’s the greatest genius in the field I’ll swear – Conde – though he’s as mad as a March hare – or is when he’s in a rage. I’d rather have Leopold to deal with as an ally – he’s a staunch friend, too, of Prince Rupert’s.’
‘What’s happened to the Prince these days? Since he’s taken to sailing round the world in those leaky ships he grabbed from the Parliament one hears nothing of him or his brother Maurice. One day we’ll hear they’re under the waves, or sold as slaves to the Turks, and that’ll be the end of them.’
And again Major Sinclair laughed, and silence fell like the rain, steady, soaking to their skins, and chill as death itself.
When Montrose could not get them to speak or listen, he sang or whistled marching-tunes until sometimes they would join in. Almost every tune he could remember he sang, going back in music all through his life: the foreign music of late years, German, Swedish and Danish drinking-songs, wild dances from the Tartar steppes that he had heard in Prague, bawdy nonsense set to martial airs that the French troops sang on marches, courtly English love-songs, his own Scots ballads of bold ruffians riding to some Border raid that he had sung at college at St Andrews or with his sisters in the great hall of Kincardine, now a burnt-out ruin, cradle-songs he had heard his wife Magdalen croon to their babies – ‘Oh can ye sew cushions?’ and
‘When our gudewife had puddins to mak’
She boiled them in the pan.’
He even sang the tune he had first marched to in Scotland when he was a ‘true blue Covenanter’ fighting for Scotland’s freedom, only to find that the Covenanters denied freedom to Scotland as to all else. He had given his colours to his soldiers, who had worn his blue ribbons in their bonnets and marched against the English armies to the new song of defiance—
‘All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the Border.
’
‘A good song, whatever the cause of it,’ he said, and they joined in:
‘ “March, march, why the de’il dinna ye march?
Stand to your arms, my lads, – fight in good order,” ’
until the next night fell on them.
It made but little difference, that deeper, more solid darkness. Cold now as well as danger urged them on. If they lay down in this ice-wet ground in their sodden rags they would surely die. So they struggled blindly on and on. By next morning, said Montrose, they would see they were going right.
But next morning it was snowing.
The snow came stinging their frozen faces, stretching across the vast spaces of the valleys like a cloud walking; it came in the thick folds of a curtain, and then fell on them. Once they were in it there was nothing to be seen but the scurrying stinging air made palpable, a witch’s frenzy of small thick flakes hard as hailstones, striking their frozen hands and faces with sharp tiny blows, here, there, there, sharp tiny voices laughing at them, telling them they were caught and lost in a whirlwind of imps.
And when it cleared at last, there was nothing to be seen but the whitened grey flanks of hills like sleeping mammoths, streaked and splashed with snow, their heads lost in the indeterminate grey of the snowy sky.
Montrose stole a glance at his companions and saw how much they had changed since their flight began. Their faces had sharpened till every feature seemed a peak through the stubble on their unshaved skins.
Sir Edward was the worst. His leg had swollen, and every limping step was agony. They were all very weak from lack of food, but Sir Edward with his heavier frame and less practice in campaigning was feeling it the most. There were black shadows in the lines at the side of his big nose that looked as though they had been graven there by the advancing shadow of death.
Montrose himself was so faint with hunger that he began to chew the leather riding-glove he still wore over his left hand to hide from his friends the amount of blood that had kept seeping down from the cut on his arm.
The Bride Page 31
