Sophia's Secret

by Susanna Kearsley

  As had the Proteus which, having lowered Mr Malcolm to a waiting fishing boat, had steered its own course boldly out to sea, in hopes of drawing off a few more of the English in pursuit to give the king more time to find some safer harbour to the north.

  Sophia said, ‘So then the king is yet alive.’ She could at least draw hope from that. For if, as Colonel Graeme had once said, no battle could be called a victory if the king were lost, then surely there could be no true defeat if the king lived.

  ‘He lives,’ said Mr Malcolm, ‘and God grant he comes ashore, for my own life will be worth little till he does. Even now the English soldiers search for those of us who went on board the Proteus, and in the road of Leith they now do hold the crew and captain of a captured ship, and he that claimed it for his prize is blackest of them all, for he was once the king’s own follower, and hearing of his deed today is like to break my Lady Erroll’s heart, for she did hold him dear.’

  Sophia frowned. ‘Of whom, sir, do you speak?’

  ‘Why, of the English captain – for I’ll no more call him Scottish – of the English rogue who did this day betray his friends by turning his own guns upon that same French ship that had so long been under siege, and forcing its surrender. I do speak,’ he said, and spat the name, ‘of Captain Thomas Gordon.’

  She stepped back as though he’d struck her. ‘I do not believe it.’

  ‘Nor would I, had I not seen it with my own eyes.’ His face grew bitter. ‘I’ve seen many things this day that I would rather not have seen. But as ye say, the king does live.’

  Sophia hugged her arms more tightly round herself and wished that she believed in God enough to pray that Moray, too, was still alive. But even if he was, she knew that he had passed beyond her prayers, to waters much more dangerous.

  ‘Why did it fail?’ I asked from curiosity, and Graham, who’d been lounging on the other sofa, marking papers, glanced across.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The invasion. Why didn’t it work, do you think?’

  ‘Ah.’ He set down the paper and rested his head back in thought.

  I had never been able to write, before now, with somebody else there in the room. It distracted me. Even my parents had learnt to stay clear. But this morning Graham had come downstairs while I was still deep in my trance and had settled in without my even knowing he was there. It wasn’t until I’d gone three pages on and discovered that I was now drinking a fresh cup of coffee that I hadn’t made, that I had looked over and seen him stretched out on the opposite sofa, his own cup of coffee forgotten beside him, head bent to his papers.

  And then, having noted his presence, I’d simply gone back to my writing, back into the flow of it, lovely, unbroken. I’d never have thought it was possible. But here I was at the end of the scene, and here Graham was, still in the room with me, quietly comfortable, thinking of reasons why young King James hadn’t succeeded in his first rebellion attempt in that spring of ’08.

  ‘The easy answer,’ he began, ‘is that it failed because the Stewarts never had much luck. I mean, from Mary, Queen of Scots on down, their history’s not a happy one. They didn’t lack for looks, or charm, but somehow they just never had it easy.’

  ‘Most historians would say they brought that on themselves.’

  His sidelong look was inwardly amused. ‘Never trust a historian. Especially Protestant historians writing about Catholic kings. Most of history is only the tale of the winning side, anyway, and they’ve a motive for painting the other side black. No, the Stewarts weren’t that bad. Take James, for example – old James, who was father to your King James. Most of the books that say he was a bad king and cruel and the rest of it, all that came down from one single account that was written by someone just passing on rumours years after the fact. If you read what was actually written by those who were with James, who saw what he did, they have nothing but good things to say of the man. But historians went with the rumours, and once it’s been written in print, well, it’s taken as gospel, and then it’s a source for the research of future historians, so we keep copying lies and mistakes,’ Graham said, with a shrug. ‘That’s why I tell my students to always get back to original documents. Don’t trust the books.’

  ‘So the Stewarts,’ I steered him back round to the question, ‘just had some bad luck.’

  ‘That’s one answer. And bloody bad timing.’

  I frowned. ‘But their timing was not all that bad in the ’08. I mean, with the English off fighting in Flanders, and the Union making everyone up here feel mad enough to fight, and—’

  ‘Oh, aye, you’re right in that sense. Aye, of all the Jacobite rebellions, the ’08 was the one that should have worked. They would have had to face the English fleet at any rate – you couldn’t send some twenty-odd ships sailing out of Dunkirk without tipping off the English you were coming – but you’re right, they did manage to get a bit of a jump on them, and on land they’d have met hardly any resistance at all. They nearly broke the Bank of England as it was, there was such panic when the word got out King James was coming. One more day and things would have been such a mess Queen Anne might have been forced to make a peace and name her brother as successor just to save her own position. But I didn’t mean that sort of timing. I meant their specific timing. First,’ he said, ‘the young king catches measles just as they get set to leave Dunkirk. That sets them back a bit. And next they have a storm at sea. And then they miss their mark and end up miles off course, just off the coast up here, so that they have to turn around and lose a day in getting back to where they should be. Then, when they do make it to the Firth, they don’t go in, but drop their anchors, wait the night and let the English catch them. History,’ Graham said, ‘is really just a series of “what if’s”. What if the French commander hadn’t gone off course? He would have made the Firth a whole day earlier, far ahead of the English ships. What if that first ship that went up the Firth, the…I forget the name…’

  ‘The Proteus?’

  ‘Aye, the Proteus. Good memory. What if that ship hadn’t got there first? The Scottish pilots all went out to board her, so there wasn’t anybody left to guide the king’s ship when it turned up later. If the pilots hadn’t been already on the Proteus, the French commander might have tried to make it further up the Firth that first night when the tides were good, and not just dropped his anchor. He could have set the king and all his soldiers down in sight of Edinburgh before the English ships turned up next morning. Mind you,’ Graham said, ‘I’m not so sure the pilots would have made a difference.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’m not so sure the French commander wasn’t doing just what he’d been told to do.’

  I caught his drift. ‘You mean that it was meant to fail?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Jacobites had all along been asking for the Duke of Berwick to be in command of the invasion, but the French king gave them someone else. Berwick himself was furious, afterwards. Wrote nasty things in his memoirs about it, and said he’d have landed James safely on shore, and I don’t doubt he would have. And not everybody thought the French ships went off course by accident. Your Colonel Hooke once told the story that he couldn’t sleep that night, and went on deck, and saw that they were sailing just off Cruden Bay, far north of where they should have been. So he ran to tell the commander, who made a big show of being surprised, and said he’d correct the course at once, but later on Hooke saw that they were headed north again, and when he asked the helmsman he was told that was the order, so Hooke went to tell the king they’d been betrayed.’

  ‘I don’t remember reading that.’

  ‘It’s in Oliphant, I think. Oliphant’s Jacobite Lairds of Gask. I’ll look it up for you.’

  There wasn’t much to do with Hooke I hadn’t read, but then there wasn’t much of Hooke that had survived. Most of his writings were gone. After the rebellion failed, all sides had done a massive cover-up that would have put Watergate to shame, and
most of Hooke’s writings and notes were impounded. Only two small volumes had escaped the purge. What else he might have seen and known was lost to history.

  My eyes must have begun to lose their focus because Graham smiled and rose and reached to take my empty coffee cup. ‘I’ll make some more. You don’t look like you’re done yet with your writing.’

  I pulled myself back. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t have to, really, not if you were wanting to do something else.’ I saw his mouth quirk and I hastened to add, ‘What I meant was—’

  ‘I know what you meant.’ There was warmth in his eyes. ‘Write your book. It’s no bother. I’ve twenty more papers to mark, and I’ll not get them done if you let me keep talking about the invasion. Besides, it’s just talk. Just my theories. I can’t say for sure why it failed, why the French made the choices they did. No one can,’ he admitted. ‘It’s hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who’ve been dead three hundred years. They can’t come back and tell us, can they?’

  Handing him my coffee cup, I thanked him and sat back and gave the spaniel’s floppy ears a scratch and counted myself lucky that he’d asked that question in a general sense, and hadn’t been expecting me to answer.

  XVIII

  The harbour at Leith was a maze of great ships and small vessels, some anchored, others moving between and around them at various speeds and in varied directions, so that the oarsman seated opposite Sophia in the rowboat had to choose his course with care and change it often. This was Edinburgh’s harbour and would at any time be crowded, but today the traffic was so thick it seemed that one could almost walk from oar to oar across the deep green water to the cheers of those who called to one another from their passing craft, in hearty voices made more boisterous with drink.

  Sophia wrapped her hood more closely round her face and made an effort not to look beyond the oarsman to the crippled hulk of the French ship that rode nearby at anchor, marked with scars of heavy fighting, and its rigging all in tatters. She had seen it from the shore and been affected by it then, and it was worse to be this close and see the charred and jagged edges of the holes left by the cannon blasts, and know the men who had been standing where the holes now were would have been killed.

  There were no scars that she could see upon the ship they were approaching. It rolled languidly upon the water like the great cat that it had been named for – the Leopard – and it seemed to overlook the harbour as a wild leopard might when resting from a recent hunt, self-satisfied, content to let the smaller prey pass by. Yet there was something predatory in its shadow as it fell across Sophia, and the scraping of the two hulls growled a warning as the oarsman brought the rowboat alongside. He reached to take hold of a hanging rope ladder and called to hail a crewman on the deck above.

  ‘Here is a lady for your captain,’ he said with a smirk that plainly showed what purpose he believed she’d come to serve.

  She did not seek to change his mind – her own was set so fixedly she did not care what others thought. She landed steady on her feet upon the creaking deck, and bore the crewman’s leering scrutiny with patience, only seeking to remind him when it seemed he had forgotten that the captain would be waiting for her.

  She felt the stares as they passed by, and heard the voices of the other men call out and laugh and speak in rude suggestive language, but she took no more notice of them than she did of the ship itself, of the great rising masts and the knots of the rigging and wet canvas scent of the slumbering sails. She had wondered for so long just how it would feel to set foot on a ship and to walk on its decks, and now here she was walking upon one and none of her senses took note of the fact. She might have been walking the road of a town, and the steps to the door of the captain’s cabin might have been but the steps to a house. All that mattered to Sophia was the man inside, and what she’d come to say to him.

  The cabin had a bay of casement windows curving round its farther end, through which the afternoon’s strong light poured in to warm the panelled walls and spill across the smooth edge of the desk at which the captain sat.

  He had not looked up at the crewman’s knock, he’d only said a curt ‘Come in’, and gone on looking at the spread of papers that so held his interest.

  ‘Your visitor, sir,’ said the crewman, and coughed, and discreetly withdrew.

  And the captain raised his head then, faintly frowning, and seeing Sophia he stopped short as though he’d been struck.

  ‘Captain Gordon,’ she greeted him levelly.

  Recovering himself, he rose and came across to take her hand and raise it to his lips, too much the gentleman to cast aside formalities in even such an unexpected circumstance. But clearly her appearance had surprised him, and he did not try to hide it. ‘How the devil came you here?’

  ‘It was not difficult,’ she lied. She did not tell him the excuses she had made to Mrs Malcolm and to Kirsty of her need to come to town, nor of the earliness with which she had set out by hired coach, nor of the trouble it had caused her to negotiate her way around the busy port. ‘I asked which ship was yours, and found a boatman who would carry me.’

  ‘I meant how came you here to Leith? Why are you not at Slains?’

  She drew her hand away from his. ‘The countess thought a change of air might do me good. I have been staying some few weeks with friends of hers, not far from here.’

  ‘Oh, aye? What friends would those be?’

  Once Sophia might have told him, but not now. ‘I do not think that you would know them.’

  Captain Gordon fixed his gaze upon her face, and took her measure. Then he said, ‘Come, let us sit.’

  The cabin was a man’s space, but was not without its luxuries. The chairs had been upholstered in a rich red fabric, and a silver tray upon a table gleamed beneath its strange assortment of small porcelain cups and dishes ringed around a central covered pot. ‘You have good timing,’ said the captain. ‘Yesterday there’d not have been much I could offer you by way of a refreshment, but my cook today has done a bit of trading with a Dutch ship lately come from the East Indies that is forced to wait in harbour here, and chief among his prizes was a box of china tea, to the drinking of which he is trying to convert me.’ Picking up the porcelain pot, he poured a clear brown liquid into one of the cups. ‘I must confess I do prefer my whisky still, but I am told that drinking tea will be the coming fashion. Here,’ he said, and handed her the cup. ‘It is still hot, I think.’

  She held the cup and looked toward the windows, through whose glass panes she could see the battered French ship framed as though it were a painting done in honour of the victory of the battle that had stained this same sea red with blood just days before. The drink was bitter on her tongue.

  She said, ‘I am surprised to find you on a new ship.’

  ‘Aye, the Edinburgh did not survive the strain of my last voyage. You’ll recall I had my doubts about its worthiness,’ he said, and smiled in the manner of a man who means to share a private joke.

  She felt a surge of anger at that smile, and could not keep it in. ‘I do recall a great deal, Captain. Tell me, do you think King James will yet make you an admiral when he comes?’ She flung the question at him, challenging, and pointed to the windows and the French ship. ‘Do you think that he will honour you for that?’

  He did not answer her, which only flamed her temper more.

  ‘How could you? After all you told the countess and the earl, how could you do a thing like this? How could you so betray us?’

  In a quiet tone he said, ‘It was my duty.’

  ‘Duty might demand you keep the English side, and even fire upon the French, but it does not excuse you everything. No other English ship but yours did take a prisoner, and that,’ she said, ‘I do not think was done because of duty.’

  He was watching her with eyes she could not fathom. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘That was not done from duty.’

  Rising from his chair he exhaled hard a
nd turned away and crossed to stand before the windows, looking out. He did not speak for some few minutes, then he said, ‘Were any man to ask me, I would tell him that I am more proud of what I did that day than I have been of any other thing I’ve done in all my life.’

  There was a quality about his voice, a passion in his words, that made her anger start to fade. But still she did not understand.

  Until he told her why.

  A man in his position, he explained, had little chance to chart his own course in these times, but he had done what he could do. He’d kept the Edinburgh from being fit to sail and kept himself on land as long as he was able, in the hope the king would use that time to make good his return. The king had not, and in the end new orders came for Captain Gordon to assume a new command, and bring the Leopard north.

  ‘And even captains,’ he informed Sophia, ‘must obey their orders.’

  On arrival at the entrance to the Firth, he’d found the French ships already engaged and under fire. He’d kept the Leopard back as best he could, and had managed with seemingly clumsy manoeuvres to block some of his own side’s fire against the fleeing Proteus to let it get away.

  ‘But there was nothing to be done for them,’ he said, gazing across at the ravaged French ship. ‘No way to save the Salisbury. She was an English ship once, did you know? The French did capture her from us, in their turn, some while back. She’s seen her share of war. And when the French commander wheeled his squadron round and headed north, she had the rearguard.’

  She had done what she’d been asked to do, protecting the retreating squadron so the king might make good his escape, but she had done it at a sore cost to herself and her brave crew. They had not stood a chance.

  The English ships had caught her up, and though two other French ships had turned back to try to help her, it had been no use. The battle had raged fiercely all that afternoon and evening till the other French ships too had finally slipped away and left the struggling Salisbury alone, to face her enemies as night fell.