The Rogues

by Jane Yolen

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  The Rogues

  Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris

  For Adam and Betsy,

  who love Scotland,

  even the difficult parts

  —JY

  For Carmel and Steve

  and Ruth and Robert,

  friends in Scotland

  —RJH

  CONTENTS

  I. LAIRD’S PLUNDER

  1. GHOSTS

  2. THE INVADERS

  3. THE LODGE

  4. THE INTRUDER

  5. UNCLE AND NIECE

  6. HOME

  II: TENANTS’ ANGER

  7. THE ROGUE

  8. SUPPER AND GRAVES

  9. THE RAID

  10. A DEAL

  11. FEAST

  12. CHURCH

  13. BURNING

  III: ROGUE’S APPRENTICE

  14. HILLS

  15. THE RETURN

  16. ROBBED

  17. TAKEN

  18. ROGUE’S APPRENTICE

  19. THE CAVE

  20. THE STILL

  IV: THE BLESSING

  21. THE TALE OF WATERLOO

  22. THE BUNDLE

  23. BONNIE JOSIE

  24. A THIEF’S HONOR

  25. THE GARDEN

  26. THE FLIGHT

  V: ROGUE’S BLESSING

  27. HIGHLAND CHASE

  28. DARK CLOUDS

  29. AT A RUN

  30. DEVIL’S REACH

  31. NEW SCOTLAND

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS STORY

  A Personal History by Jane Yolen

  A Personal History by Robert J. Harris

  I. LAIRD’S PLUNDER

  Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,

  Wha struts, an’ stares an’ a’ that;

  Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

  He’s but a coof for a’ that.…

  —Robert Burns, “A Man’s a Man for a’ That”

  1 GHOSTS

  I have seen ghosts in a burned-out cottage and the devil on horseback. This is no lie. The first I saw on the day my brother, Lachlan, and I picked our way through the shell of Glendoun. And the devil—well, he followed soon after.

  It was a spring day not long ago. We had heard that something awful had happened to some of the villages in the valleys several mountains over from ours. It was said their laird had burned the people off his land and shipped them to the Americas. Such a brutal end to centuries of kinship, the lairds being of the same blood as their tenants, only lots and lots richer. But as Lachlan said, “Can we believe everything we hear?”

  I shook my head. “Cousin Ishbel would say, ‘Believe only a quarter of what ye hear and half of what ye see.’” And while we didn’t always listen to her, she’d never done us any wrong. She’d come to nurse Ma before she died, and then she’d stayed on to cook for us and keep the cottage. “A woman’s hand,” she called it. “Taming the wild beasts,” Da added, meaning us.

  Lachlan laughed. “So …” He was a year older than me—a year and a day—and he was always the one who got us into trouble, yet I could never help following him.

  “So …,” I repeated slowly, pushing my hair out of my eyes.

  He grinned. “So we go and check and see if all they say about that laird burning folks out is true.”

  “Don’t smile about it,” I said. I knew that look. His grin was always the beginning of an adventure. An adventure that usually led us into trouble. “If a laird has burned folks out of their homes, there’s nowt to smile at.”

  Still, Lachlan’s grin was irresistible. So, without Da’s permission, we rode Rob Roy out of the byre—Lachlan in front and me behind—and headed over the mountain into the next valley. That was where the village of Glendoun stood, fifteen cottages and most of them filled with our distant cousins.

  “We’ll ask if they’ve got news, and from there it’s an easy ride over the next mountain to see if the rumors are true.” Lachlan was still grinning.

  It was going to be an adventure indeed.

  Cuckoos sang back and forth to one another as we rode along, and white clouds scudded across the sky. It wasn’t a day you’d look to bring trouble. Just a late Scottish spring, a bit raw with wind. The prickly yellow gorse was just budding out in great rough bushes on the hillsides. We startled a dozen rabbits from their burrows, and Lachlan cursed that we had brought no snares along.

  “Cousin Ishbel would surely love to make a fresh rabbit pie,” Lachlan said, meaning he would have loved eating it.

  We didn’t know what we might hear in Glendoun, nor did we especially care. It was an adventure, an escape from our daily chores, a way to satisfy our curiosity. And if Lachlan could see the lovely Fiona, who was known as “The Beauty of Glendoun,” his mood would be lightened, whether she laughed at him or not.

  And after, we’d be over the mountain to the next glen.

  I found myself grinning like Lachlan.

  But when we crested the hill that overlooked Glendoun, Lachlan gasped. He said over his shoulder, “My God, Roddy …”

  I couldn’t see past his shoulder, so I jumped off the horse to look myself. And then I gasped as well. Glendoun was a shambles, no longer the pretty huddle of homes we knew so well. The roofs of all the cottages were gone, the thatch burned through, which left the stone walls open to the sky, to wind and rain and buzzards and owls. And half the walls had been pushed down as well. A kind of haze lay over the place, like the remains of smoke.

  I turned and looked up at Lachlan. “Oh, Lord,” I croaked. “What’s happened here?”

  But I knew, even without his answer. A natural fire would not have taken all the houses like that. They are stone after all. And even without a roof, a house can be lived in, as long as it isn’t winter. Anyone can re-thatch a roof. But it wasn’t just the roofs that were gone. The doors of the houses had been pulled off as well, the window frames knocked in. No—it was clear that our laird had made the houses uninhabitable so that the Glendoun folk had to move on.

  I felt tears start in my eyes. These weren’t strangers who lived far away and over several mountains, but cousins whose names I knew—Big Johnny and Dune and the beautiful Fiona and the rest. They were but an easy ride from us, their farms in our own laird’s holdings. I bit my lip and took several steps closer.

  Lachlan rode up to me, pulled me back up behind him, and we rode on down the hillside, growing more and more quiet as we rode along, for we knew that no one would be coming out to greet us.

  Lachlan slid off Rob Roy’s back and peered through the smashed-in door of the first broken-down croft.

  “Look, Roddy,” he called, signaling me to him.

  I crossed my left leg over and slid down Rob Roy’s broad side, letting the reins loose so he could graze where he would.

  Sticking my head through the open doorway, I saw an overturned bowl of porridge and a spilt cup of ale lying close to a wall. There was a baby’s cot thrown down on its side, and the mattress of the box bed had been pulled onto the hearth and partially burned. The place was so dead, even the smell of smoke had faded like a dream.

  “They must have been …,” I began.

  Lachlan finished for me, “… taken by surprise and chased off like startled birds.” His voice was bitter, and I knew he was worrying about Fiona.

  Only two weeks earlier, Glendoun had been full of people like Dune and Big Johnny—working, laughing, drinking whisky, singing songs. We’d come over for a wedding and had danced until dawn, going home without any thought of fear.

  But now …

  “What do ye think
happened to them?” I asked. “They didna come to our town for help. We would have taken them in.”

  Lachlan’s shoulders sagged. “I dinna ken. It’s as if they’ve all turned to air and disappeared.”

  The narrow fields of barley and potatoes on the outskirts of the cottages had been trampled down. I could still see the mark of boots on the new plants. The little peat-water burn trickled halfheartedly down the glen. Not only were there no people here, but there were no cows or chickens or dogs either.

  Now we knew for sure that the stories were true. Only now our laird—like others in the Highlands—was clearing out his land, sweeping it clean of every living thing to make room for his new English friends. Anyone who stood in his way was to be brushed aside like chaff.

  I went back into the first cottage and squinted. For a moment it was as if I could see the family of crofters there: the mother rocking the cradle with her foot as she stirred the stew. The father sitting at the table sipping his whisky. A boy carving a stick. A girl at her small weaving. Then I blinked again and they were gone, like ghosts, in the fading light.

  “It makes my skin crawl, Roddy,” said Lachlan, coming up behind me. “Ye’d think nobody had ever lived here at all.”

  I nodded. “Do ye think the laird and his factor will be bringing them in soon?”

  “By the hundreds,” said Lachlan, nodding. “That’s what I heard. Thousands even. I don’t think I really believed it till now. We’ll be the next driven off, ye know. Driven from our hearths and left to starve out in the wilds. Along with the folk of Glendoun.”

  “Ye’re just trying to fleg me, Lachlan.” He was always doing that, saying things to give me a scare. For years he’d convinced me that there was a goblin hidden among the rocks by the mill and that if I got too close he would jump out and bite me. Even though I was now old enough to know better, I still gave the mill a wide berth.

  “Maybe the laird will stop with Glendoun.” I was trying to sound confident. “Maybe that’s enough for him.”

  “Our laird? He’s too greedy,” Lachlan told me. “Look at what he’s done here.” He raised his chin to the destruction. “Da says that money’s like whisky to our laird. Once he’s tasted it, he canna stop at one cup.” Lachlan sounded just like Da then, that rough, certain voice.

  “We canna just let it happen to us,” I said. “Somebody has to tell him no.”

  “Who?” Lachlan challenged me. “Would ye say nae to his face?” His green eyes got hard as agates. Just like Da’s.

  I shrugged.

  “He’s the laird, Roddy,” said Lachlan, his voice almost a growl. “The land is his, and we’re only his tenants. He can do whatever he pleases with us. Toss us out. Burn us out. Bring in new tenants onto the land. And he’ll no turn a hair at the doing of it.”

  “Not now,” I told him. “Da says the English government’s put a stop to that. The laird canna just act as judge over the clan, no anymore. He has to pass our troubles over to the courts.”

  Lachlan began to laugh, his cheeks growing as red as his hair. “What the law says and what really happens here in the Highlands is more a matter of money than justice.” That was Da speaking too. What did Lachlan know of money or the law? He was only sixteen, after all, a poor farmer’s son. He’d never been farther than the glens.

  “Well, somebody has to stop him,” I said. Then I added almost slyly, “There’s always Bonnie Josie.”

  Lachlan turned a bit dreamy at her name. If it wasn’t Fiona he was mooning about, it was Bonnie Josie. “Aye, there’s always Josie. If anybody can trip him up, she surely can.”

  I was about to laugh at the thought when an awful screech made me jump. We whirled around, fists up—and then stared wide-eyed into each other’s faces. So—there were ghosts haunting this place.

  The cry came again, this time more of a squawk.

  Lachlan looked about, then his face split in a smile of relief. “Och, it’s only a hen!”

  Now I saw the bird too, hopping out from behind a bush and pecking the ground. “It must have been left behind.”

  “Poor wee orphan,” said Lachlan. “We should take it home with us. Cousin Ishbel would like that.”

  I nodded and made a move toward the bird, but it scurried away in a flutter of brown feathers.

  “It might take a bit of catching,” I said. But when I looked at Lachlan, expecting a joke, I saw he’d lost interest in the hen. Something else had caught his attention. When I listened, I heard it too, echoing off the far side of the hills. Even at a distance, the sound cut harshly through the morning air.

  Barking.

  “Dogs,” said Lachlan, all but spitting out the word.

  It was a long series of harsh barks, with a purpose. We both knew there was only one kind of dog that made a noise like that: working dogs.

  “So—they’re here,” Lachlan said. “The laird’s new tenants. The invaders. To take over the Glendoun hills.”

  “Aye,” I replied, suddenly sure we should be going. The burned-out houses had taken on a deadly air, a warning about our own fate. A tremor ran down my spine, but I wouldn’t let my brother see my fear. “Lachlan,” I said, as calmly as I could, “should we no be going quickly?”

  “Hush!” he answered fiercely, raising a hand. “I want to see this.”

  So I stood by his side to be a second witness, my fists clenched to keep my hands from shaking.

  Soon enough we heard—alongside the barking of dogs—another sound. This second noise started like the drone of pipes swelling up to a march, but as it came closer it broke up into a ragged chorus of bleating voices.

  “It’s them!” I gasped. And that moment, I felt the impulse to take to my heels, like a man spying a rockfall that’s about to bury him. I looked to Lachlan. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

  So, I turned and stared up at the hilltop, willing it to be still. But then they burst over it, like a white tide cascading down toward us, a hundred of them. No, twice that number and more, their black faces like lumps of coal scattered over a field of snow. Four dogs nipped at their heels.

  The invaders. The ones the laird had imported to supplant us, his own kin. Hundreds and hundreds of English sheep.

  2 THE INVADERS

  A pair of shepherds came puffing up to the crest of the hill and paused to peer down into the deep glen. They whistled to the dogs and waved their wooden staffs.

  The sheep began spreading out over the valley floor. Some stopped to crop the plants, others to sip at the burn. A few wandered down onto the Glendoun pathways, finding their way into the once carefully tended gardens. One ewe and her lamb even got into a cottage and lay down by the broken door.

  I had never seen anything like them before. They were big and plump. With their fluffy wool, some of them looked as large as Highland ponies, not at all like our small, scruffy animals.

  “Are ye sure these are sheep?” I asked Lachlan. “They look like a different beast altogether.”

  “Cheviots, they’re called,” Lachlan answered, “after the English hills where they’re bred.”

  I wondered how he knew that and asked.

  “That’s what Da says.”

  As much as I hated the English sheep taking over our good Scottish land, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Their wool was so thick, one of them could have clothed a whole family for a winter. And there was enough mutton on a single ewe to make a feast for a village the size of Glendoun. Fingering my coarse, brown shirt, woven from the untreated wool of our own scrawny breed, I thought that compared to these plump, snowy animals, ours were little better than rats. But they were our rats, not foreign invaders brought here to swell a greedy laird’s purse.

  A sudden anger flared up inside me at the thought of how poor Scottish farming folk were being driven from their land so the laird could let it out to English sheep farmers at double the rent. I began to shake with my anger, like a small birch in a high wind. “This is no place for these fat foreign beasts.”

  “W
hat are ye talking about?” Lachlan looked at me, his eyebrows arched up. “Are ye havering, lad?”

  I ignored his question and charged at the nearest ewe, whooping and waving my arms over my head. The animal turned and bolted off, followed by three others, all bleating in panic. For all their size they were no braver than the sheep I was used to. Laughing, I turned and called over to Lachlan, “No havering, big brother. Just spoiling for a fight. Let’s chase them back where they came from. Show them what true Scotsmen can do when they’ve a mind to it.”

  He nodded, whooped, and flung up his hands, for once being led by me. “Ye’re right, Roddy,” he shouted. “We’ll show them the English have nae welcome here.” He soon had a group of sheep racing off in terror, threading their way around the golden gorse.

  We charged back and forth across the wee town of Glendoun, sending the invaders in all directions. All the while I was the loudest of the two of us, for this time the idea had been mine and I was making the most of it.

  Caught up in the rush of it all, I soon forgot why we were doing it. No longer were we brave Scotsmen fighting off intruders. It had become a hilarious game of chasing the sheep one way and the dogs desperately herding them the other. I fell twice, missing the prickly gorse by little more than a hair the first time and into a deep puddle the next. But I laughed and got up again to chase the sheep some more. Sometimes laughter is the best way to fight the thing you fear.

  The shepherds shouted angrily from the hilltop and shook their fists, but we just made faces back at them. And now the dogs were bounding about, almost as aimless as hares, barking furiously, trying to keep the flock together.

  “If they don’t … like it, they can … go back to where they … came from,” I said, speaking in bursts. I was out of breath from all the running and laughing.

  Lachlan nodded in agreement, then stopped short. I looked up to see what had silenced him. A horseman had appeared at the top of the hill and was riding down toward us. There was no mistaking him.

  “Willie Rood,” said Lachlan, screwing up his face as if the name put a bad taste on his tongue.