The Rogues

by Jane Yolen

  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.”

  Lachlan laughed, dropped the scythe and clapped. “Roddy! Roddy!”

  But Father stepped up to me and put his arms around me. I almost wept to see him fit and strong again.

  “Roddy, lad,” he said, “ye are all the blessing this family needs.”

  EPILOGUE

  We had a clerk write a letter to Bonnie Josie, telling her of Alan’s bravery and of the fine home we had made in the backwoods where the soil was rich and the game plentiful. We didn’t know where to send it except to her uncle’s house, and so we had to be careful what was said.

  One can live like a laird here, I had the man write, or a laird’s daughter.

  A half year went by, and then a letter came in return. It was short. Coming to Cape Fear, it said. Sailing in August. I suppose if she still lived at her uncle’s elbow, she had to be as cautious as we.

  But it was already October when the letter arrived!

  Lachlan and I took our canoe down the river, not knowing what we’d find. We combed through all the boardinghouses asking for her. Finally in one poor place near the port, we found her. To my surprise, she was nursing a three-month-old child. She’d filled out, her skin rosy and burnished by the sun. Before I could wonder at the change or worry who the child’s father was, I heard a laugh behind me.

  “Where’s that Blessing, lad?”

  I turned, stared, then laughed. There was the Rogue himself, big as life, hands on his hips, a broad grin on his face. His eyes, so grey the last I saw of him, were once again that cloudless blue. He walked over to Josie and took the baby from her with practiced ease, setting the child against his left shoulder and giving it little taps on the back. So I hadn’t been wrong about his feelings for Josie, nor hers for him. We clasped right hands, like old comrades, and my hands were now as large as his.

  “Not hanged, then, Alan Dunbar?” I asked.

  “They couldna find a rope strong enough nor a gallows pole long enough.”

  Josie added, “The soldiers were too slow to catch him.”

  “And yer uncle?”

  She shrugged. “Stewing in his own evil juices. He is not my care.”

  “Nor mine,” Alan added, giving the child back to her and putting his arm around her waist.

  We brought them safely back up the river to our farm.

  With the family’s approval, Da sold the Blessing to one of the richest men in Carolina, of a strong Jacobite family. With the money, he bought land, rich farmland, easy to plow. He gave a great share of it to Dunbar and Josie. “Ye saved my lad’s life,” he said. “The Macallans do not forget.”

  “Nor do the Dunbars,” said Josie, and Alan nodded at her response.

  So we became neighbors and lasting friends, and many was the night we’d sit round the fire drinking and telling tales of the old country. We recalled our daring exploits and narrow escapes: how Alan carried me up the crag and how I saved him from the soldiers at the still, how I caught him out burying Josie’s statues and he nursed me through the fever, though the exploits grew with each telling. And then we all sang songs that had been passed down since the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the prince whose gift had made our life in America possible. We’d found a new world, sure enough, but we still carried the Highlands in our hearts.

  We are clansmen still, with only the tales and songs and kilts to show for it. And the memories of the brave times. Ah, yes—the memories.

  Nothing is ever forgotten.

  WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS STORY

  The Kindarry estate is fictional, but the McRoys who rule it are based on a real family. Bonnie Josie was Mary Chisholm, the spirited daughter of the laird of Strathglass, and when her father died, the lands passed to his half brother, William. Mary and her mother retained part of the estate for themselves and were the champions of the poor folk, resisting the new laird’s efforts to drive them off the land. The sufferings of people like Roddy and his family during the Highland Clearances were all too real.

  The seeds of the Clearances began after the disastrous battle of Culloden, when the English defeated the Scots and took away their tartans, their bagpipes, their powers to raise armies, and their Scottish language. When the lairds lost their powers, it led inexorably to losing any parental interest in their clansmen. No longer allowed to raise individual armies, the lairds no longer needed to let their poor relatives farm their lands in exchange for service in battle.

  The lairds became more and more like the English who had conquered them. They bought English estates, sent their sons to English schools and tried to fit into English society.

  Then they discovered that they could lease their glens and braes to sheep farmers from the Lowlands and England, which was much more profitable than keeping crofters on subsistence farms. So the lairds began to clear the land of men, women and children, using soldiers and the local constabulary when necessary.

  Were the Clearances brutal? In some cases even more so than we have portrayed here. For example, John Prebbles reports in his book The Highland Clearances, that five constables from Dingwall and Fort William “broke the skulls and kicked the breasts of the women of Strathcarron.”

  Were the Clearances thorough? In one season, two thousand people were cleared off the land of the islands of Barra, Benbecula, and Uist. They were cleared by bayonet, truncheon and fire, driven from the only homes they’d ever known and replaced by sheep.

  In the earlier Clearances, before the 1720s, many people were simply removed to other parts of Scotland. For example, the Countess of Sutherland and her husband, Lord Stafford, removed six thousand to ten thousand people from their inland homes to settlements on the coast, where they were supposed to find work in kelp farming or fishing. On paper, this seemed a remarkable experiment in social engineering. In practice, it was a brutal and inhuman move. Later, well into the 1780s, the people removed from their homes were put on board ships and sent to Canada, Australia and America—particularly the Carolinas.

  As a writer of the time, Donald Ross wrote of the eviction of widower Allan Macdonnell and his four children. It tells brilliantly all one really needs to know about the Clearances. “Allan Macdonnell now has no value at all. Had he been a roe, a deer, a sheep, or a bullock, a Highland laird in speculating could estimate his ‘real worth’ to within a few shillings, but Allan is only a man. Then his children—they are of no value, nor taken into account in the calculation of the sportsmen. They cannot be shot like hares, blackco
cks, or grouse, nor yet can they be sent to the south as game to feed the London markets.”

  But the Highland poor, cast off the land in one place, became the backbone of their adopted countries. Frugal, hardworking, inventive, they were stunning additions to the New World. Consider some of these statistics:

  • Thirty-five U.S. Supreme Court justices have been Scots.

  • Nearly half of the secretaries of the U.S. Treasury and one-third of the secretaries of state have been of Scots origin.

  • Of the fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence, nine were directly or indirectly descended from Scots.

  • Nine out of thirteen governors of the newly created United States were Scots or of Scottish descent.

  A Personal History by Jane Yolen

  I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

  We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

  When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

  I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

  And I am still writing.

  I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

  The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.

  These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.

  And I am still writing.

  Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!

  Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.

  And yes—I am still writing.

  At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.

  Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)

  Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.

  Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.

  Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.

  Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.

  A Personal History by Robert J. Harris

  I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1955. From a young age, I was writing stories, drawing comics, and making my own board games. It was while at university in St. Andrews that I met my wife, Debby, who had grown up in Florida and had come to Scotland to further her studies in English.

  Shortly after we married and settled in St. Andrews, Debby had her first fantasy novel published, and I created my board game Talisman, which was based upon a game I had originally created in high school. Thirty years later, Talisman is still produced and is being played all over the world. In one television episode of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, the characters are playing Talisman.

  It was a few years after I created Talisman that our friend Jane Yolen prodded me into doing some serious writing. I have written eight novels with Jane: the four Young Heroes books and the Scottish Quartet. I have written novels of my own concerning the boyhood adventures of Leonardo da Vinci and Will Shakespeare, which have been published widely across Europe. I have also written comedy scripts for BBC radio. I have a new novel, a comic fantasy, being published in Scotland later this year.

  In the course of an interesting life I have worked as a nurse, a bartender, a salesman, and an actor. I have traveled to the United States several times, and have made epic journeys across Europe, ending up in Greece, where I have visited many of the sites featured in the Young Heroes adventures.

  My wife and I have three sons: One is training to be a health worker, one now lives in Michigan with his American wife, and the third is an aspiring writer and a musician. We also have a dog named Kyra who loves to eat cheese and chase sticks.

  To learn even more about my life and my books, visit my website: www.harris-authors.com.

  With the boys from my class at Clepington Primary School in Dundee, Scotland, in 1966. I’m in the front row, seated second from the right.

  Playing my homemade version of Talisman in London, England, in 1982, with the guys from Games Workshop, who turned the game into a global phenomenon. I’m in the upper left.

  Playing on a beach in Florida in 1988 with my son Matthew, who was one year old.

  With my wife, Debby, and our sons Matthew, Robert, and Jamie in Prestonpans, Scotland, in 2000.

  At the Morgan Academy High School Reunion in Dundee, Scotland, in 2002.

  At the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Glasgow, Scotland, with my wife, Debby, and my friend and co-author Jane Yolen. They don’t seem to care that I’m being attacked by a fake parrot. (Photo courtesy of Stella Paskins.)

  Surrounded by the games, books, and CDs of radio shows that I have created, in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2006.

  Holding a copy of my game Mythgardia in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2008. Some friend
s and I produced a limited run of these games, illustrated by my wife, which we sold as special collector’s items.

  Our dog Kyra, who is around six years old, in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2013.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris

  Cover design by Jesse Hayes

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2156-2

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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