Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  “I did,” she said. “We are finished with him forever.”

  “I hope not, Selena,” Father cautioned. “We must still rely on him for passage to America in the spring.”

  Liverpool! In her anger, she had forgotten about the proposed rendezvous.

  “Well, I am finished with him, even so!”

  she declared. She believed it, at that moment. But her body did not.

  The Highlander dropped anchor off the town of Pittenweem, on the north coast of the Firth of Forth, and the davits strained as the small boat was lowered into the sea. Selena did not look back. She heard the wind in the rigging, the taut smack and slap of the sails, and felt beside her, rolling easily in the swells, the heavy power of the great Campbell ship. She did not look up, nor look back, but in her mind’s eye she saw Royce Campbell there on the bridge. You can’t be right, she argued with him in her mind. If you are cynical enough to believe that life and love are things that can be bought and sold, you are already defeated, already lost.

  Aren’t you?

  The other side of the argument came crashing down. Sean was the one who had loved, and where was he now? Father was a patriot, and so were she and Brian. And they were fugitives. But there aboard the Highlander stood Royce Campbell, money in his pocket, with neither man nor God to strike him down, neither love nor patriotism nor mercy to weaken him.

  “I hope I never become like that,” she said aloud.

  None of them heard her, with the wind and the creaking of the oars, and the sailors struggled to bring the boat in close to shore. The boat rose and fell. Surf beat against the rocks along the coast. Sailors cursed and raged. Finally, just once, she turned and looked back at the Highlander. The distance was too great for her to discern Royce Campbell, even if he stayed on deck to watch the MacPhersons put ashore. Probably he had not, she thought. There in the tossing dinghy, Selena was poised between two worlds, as clear a division of past and future as there was likely ever to be. She steeled herself against the future, and made a private vow to survive, to endure, to do whatever must be done. The past was almost too painful to confront, but she inflicted upon herself one moment of raw, searing truth. Back there, safe upon his great ship, was the man who had lived within her mind and heart for an entire year. Father and Brian would call it infatuation, silly dreaming, the mooning of a girl, but Selena knew it had been more than that. Far more. Because that man, Royce Campbell, had evoked in her a passion greater than any feeling she had known. What would become of that passion she did not know, and the flurry of movement about her forced it from her mind. But it was there, and, like underground fires that smolder on and on, its future was as unpredictable as it was certain.

  The worried sailors were in a rush to get them out of the boat as soon as possible, and carelessly tossed their few pathetic bundles of luggage down on the wet, windy shore, almost manhandling Selena over the gunwales. One of them slipped, and she spun sideways, regaining her balance, but not before plunging knee-deep into the icy surf, and she cried out as if she had been struck. Royce Campbell might stand for all that was heinous and deceitful, or all that was passionate and tender, and the future might lie before her like a parchment on which to write her will, but, oh, it would be lovely to be safe and warm.

  “Good luck,” called Lieutenant Fligh, who leaped back into the dinghy and pushed off. Merchandise delivered; assignment complete. The small boat moved with great difficulty back toward the shelter of the mother ship.

  “Well,” Lord Seamus said, picking up a ragged bundle, “let’s get going. We’ll freeze to death if we stay here. Worse, McGrover’s bound to have deduced by now that we’re not taking the west road out of Edinburgh.”

  He hoisted the bundle over his shoulder, bent beneath the weight. There was a look of doom about him, the vanquished refugee, a plight the more bitter for his having been a lord.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s a long way to the Highlands.”

  It was a vastly different Scotland upon which Selena set foot, and she was different, too. Something had begun to change in her, which she did not fully understand, and over which she had little control. But she did have two things: life and time. These are of the greatest value, because of all things known, they cannot be replaced. But it is difficult to appreciate them fully, after the rest of your world has been destroyed.

  On the Run

  Two weeks later they huddled in a cave in the Sidlaw Hills, northwest of Dundee, still several hundred miles from safety. Lord Seamus lay shivering, wrapped in his wet cloak near a feeble fire that Brian was trying to rouse.

  “We’ve come but forty miles in a fortnight,” Brian worried. “The whole of Scotland is alive with McGrover’s fiends, I vow.”

  God, get me through this, Selena prayed. Let me never be hunted again.

  Hunted. And on the run.

  Lord Seamus was seized by a coughing spell. He shook convulsively, and tried to stop. The noise was as dangerous as the fire, beacons to the searching ears and eyes out there in the dark hills, coming for them.

  “You’d best leave me,” their father gasped, recovering from the spasm. Selena bent to pull the cloak more tightly about him, and he seized her forearm. The grip was weak, shuddery, and his eyes were distorted by fever. “Just let me keep the pistol,” he insisted. “I do na wish t’ fall beneath the tender mercies of the Secret Offices. Gi’ me the pistol, and you and Brian flee.”

  Outside the cave, far away, there came a faint, steady sound, like fine rain on glass.

  “Hoofbeats,” Brian said, like a curse. He stood up and kicked dirt and ashes over the puny blaze. “I guess we have to forget about this. We can’t risk the light, and being cold is better than being dead. Aye, maybe! God almighty, I was sure we were at least a day ahead of McGrover this time.”

  Without speaking, Selena gently pried her father’s fingers from her arm, and walked quietly to the mouth of the cave. Twilight was dying, red on the icy hills. To the south, a file of horsemen rounded the bend in the river, slowed, and came to a halt. She saw the white, frozen breath of the panting horses against dark trunks of trees, the horses themselves dark shapes against the snow. She watched intently as the minutes passed and the horses did not move, until the sun dropped down behind the hills and the horses and riders, too, became part of the darkness.

  “What are they doing?” Brian asked, stepping up behind her.

  Lord Seamus broke into another spasm of a horrible, clattering coughing.

  “Listening,” Selena said.

  The coughing echoed and reechoed across the valley.

  “All they must do is guess where it came from.”

  “Oh, leave me,” Lord Seamus groaned, trying to sit up. “What’s the use of all three of us dying?”

  “What are we going to do?” Selena asked. “We’re ended, sure as dawn, when morning comes.”

  “There’s a village aboot two miles from here. Cargill. For all the good that’ll do us.” Brian worked in the darkness, trying to load the pistol. “One shot at a time, we have, and they out there have muskets. MacPhersons were not born to be rabbits under the gun.”

  “That’s right!” exclaimed Selena. “And we’re not going to be trapped in a hole like rabbits, either.”

  “Now, ye didna ’ear me say I wouldna be listenin’ to other ideas,” Brian said, after a moment, “an’ as for you, Father, forget this business aboot the pistol. We’ve but enou’ rounds for the Britishers.”

  “What are you thinking, Selena?” Lord Seamus rasped.

  “That if we can’t see them, they can’t see us either. And by tomorrow morning, they won’t be any farther away than they are now. Father, can you walk at all?”

  Her boldness had served to raise his spirits slightly.

  “Aye, that I can. Aboot ten feet, as the crow flies. Don’t be a fool. Leave me the pistol and the two of you…”

  “No,” Brian said. He took Selena’s hand and they crouched beside their father on the cold floor of th
e cave. “Selena is right. We shall make one last attempt. Perhaps there is someone in Cargill who will help us. Father?”

  “I do na think so, son. The Rob Roys, most of us, were of the upper orders of society, or of the cities. In a town so small, I doubt we’ve many friends, or even people who’ve heard of us. Peasants who sense nobility on the run will waste no time in smelling the reward money.”

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “Father, can’t you walk at all?” Selena pleaded.

  “It’s no matter. I’ll carry him,” Brian decided. “And we should separate. Selena, you wait here for a while after we leave, and…”

  “No. I can move faster. If I’m seen at all, they will follow me. You would stand a better chance of evading them.”

  “All right.” Brian stood up.

  “Have you the pistol?” Lord Seamus asked.

  “Yes. And loaded.”

  “Then give your sister the knife.”

  “Why?”

  “Come down to me, both of you,” Lord Seamus said. They complied, and he reached for their hands. “Now you join hands, also,” he told them. They did, the three of them a circle now. “What I must tell you now is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it is necessary. It comes from love. You have heard of the things that happen when a fugitive is captured, and what is done to one. That must not happen to either of you, or to me. Even dead, I would weep should such suffering come to either of you. So you must make me a promise now. Are you ready?”

  Brian nodded.

  “Selena?”

  “Yes, I’m ready.”

  “First, let us remember the good things,” their father said quietly. “Remember your mother, and how sweet she was, and how it was with all of us when you were young. Pick out a special day, one that warmed you so much and in a manner so fine, the heat of it can reach across the years and touch you now in our misfortune…”

  Selena thought back over eighteen years that now seemed to have passed with terrible swiftness. She was about four or five, playing in the summer garden at Coldstream, building out of vines and sticks, grass and flowers, her own miniature castle, to be peopled by phantoms now long forgotten. For hours she worked away at that castle, the tiny girl she had once been, and then—she couldn’t remember exactly—something had happened. The wonderful structure was destroyed, tom down, or perhaps fallen in upon itself. In response to her tears and cries, Father came out into the garden, viewed the disaster, and pronounced it less than the ultimate tragedy it seemed. And, for the rest of that lost, golden afternoon, he sat beside her in the warm grass, with the perfume of flowers in the air, and together they built a castle, of love as well as grass, that reached up to where he said the sky began. “Right here, Selena,” she remembered him saying, as he touched the castle top. “Can you touch it? This is where the sky begins.”

  “Do you have that memory?” he asked now, rasping in that lost cave in the hills.

  “Yes,” she answered, squeezing his hand in her own. “Yes,” said Brian hoarsely.

  “Then, one more thing. Remember Coldstream. Think of it now. Not as it looks when you ride down toward it out of the Lammermuir Hills, but the way it looks when you come up to it from the sea, with the clouds moving in the sky beyond, and Coldstream riding against the sky like a great ship. Carried us for centuries, it has, across…” His voice broke, and he coughed again, to hide his emotion. When he spoke again, he was in control. “Remember it that way, and the way it will always be to us, no matter what happens.”

  “Yes,” they said together.

  “But that is not the promise,” he said. “Brian, have you given Selena the knife?”

  “No.”

  “Do it.”

  In a moment, Selena felt the cold steel against her flesh, and took it.

  “This you must promise,” their father commanded. “If you are to be taken by the police, or officers of the Crown, fall upon that knife. Put it to your breast and fall upon it, before their arms are on you. Do you promise that?”

  She said nothing.

  “Selena, the pain of the blade will be nothing compared to the pain they will inflict upon you, and even that will be nothing to the humiliation of a MacPherson in chains…”

  “I promise,” she said, and with her finger she felt the sharp blade of the knife.

  “Brian, you and I will be together. You must promise to obey me, as you always have. Will you do this?”

  “Yes,” Brian said, and Selena imagined the two of them encircled and helpless, and what would have to happen then…

  She shut it out.

  “All right,” Lord Seamus said. “I love you both, as I always have. Long live Scotland.”

  Without another word, Selena made her way to the mouth of the cave, and slipped out into the snow.

  The night was colder than it had been; the sky was clearing. Across the valley, patches of fast-moving, wind-driven clouds alternately shrouded and revealed a cold wafer of moon. Pressed up close against the rocky hill, she looked down to the bend in the river where the horses had been and saw, in a flash of moonlight, a circle of the animals and what appeared to be the figure of a man standing nearby, possibly on watch. She waited until clouds welled up again, and slipped away in the momentary darkness.

  Dismal as the sailor’s uniform was in appearance, it did offer protection against the icy air, and the rope-soled shoes seldom betrayed her by slipping on the snow. Quickly, taking advantage of the cloud cover, she ran about a hundred yards beyond the cave, and then began to climb over the hills, beyond which lay the village of Cargill.

  Climbing carefully and fast, Selena felt exhilarated in spite of the circumstances, felt a keenness from the clear air, the decision to run, the activity itself, an intensity mitigated only by the knife she had wrapped in a length of tarpaulin and tied to her belt.

  Near the top of the hill, she rested, turning to look down. Far below was the jutting rock where the cave was, and the ribbon of river winding through the valley, and the dark patch of horses and men down at the bend in the river. She saw it all in a pattern of darkness and light, chiaroscuro fashioned by the cloud-veiled moon. Then a wind rose, high and sudden, out of the Highlands. The last of the clouds shot away into the sky, bathing the valley in light. She saw it all in a terrible, frozen moment. Brian at the mouth of the cave, carrying Lord MacPherson on his back. The heads of the horses jerking upward, as the man on watch cried out, and she herself outlined dark against the gleaming white crest of the hill. The last thing she saw before turning to run again was Brian trying to run for cover. Then she heard the blast of the first musket, and the dull echo of the report rolling through the valley.

  She was halfway down the opposite side of the hill—in the distance she could already see the few flickering lights of what must be Cargill—when she heard the thin crack of the pistol. She stopped and waited, not breathing, not daring to think, for at least a minute. Men were shouting, and horses neighed.

  But the second pistol shot was as clear as the first.

  Then she was running again, not remembering—trying not to remember—the day in the garden long ago. Her eyes blurred with tears which ran down on her cheeks and froze there, to be melted and refrozen as more tears ran down. The knife banged against her as she ran. Someone in the village would help her! There must be someone who would!

  Breathless and panting, Selena came to the bottom of the hill. A small stream, lined with brush and thin willows and old, gnarled tree trunks, ran along this side of the village, and a wooden bridge crossed it. Making toward the bridge, she looked back to see, at the top of the hill over which she’d fled, the figure of a man on horseback, scanning the valley below. Deciding instantly, she forgot about the bridge, and dived, sliding on the embankment, down onto the frozen ice. The ice burned her hands, clung to the wool of the uniform. And, crouching there, she saw the horseman start down after her.

  The bridge would have led directly into the town, a tiny hamlet of steepled
church and low huts, which seemed to huddle together in the cold. Candles flickered in a few of them, the light slanting in evanescent planes through chinks in the planking. The horse was picking its way down the slope now, and more horsemen had appeared at the top of the hill, dark messengers of her demise. But not yet! Not yet! Everything was forgotten now except the possibility of deliverance, the desire for a few more moments of this night, this life, however bad it was. Feeling the knife against her body, she pulled her way out of the bed of the stream, and raced through a stripped thicket, approaching the village from the back.

  The first hut she reached was dark, and so was the next. But the third, which faced on the road that ran through the town, showed the wavering light of a fire in the one small window. If someone would let her in…

  Cautiously, she made her way through a putrid alley between two of the huts, and paused at the corner. And knew she was lost. Because to enter the hut, she would have to go out in front of it, onto the road. And, from one side of the village, she heard the sound of hoofbeats battering across the bridge even before she saw the rider, cape flaring behind him. While, from the other side, another half-dozen horsemen galloped toward her, the moon stark and ghostly on their faces.

  Hoofbeats on the roads of Scotland, nine long years ago. There had been death then, too. But perhaps there was another moment to be savored, even in fear, even in flight. No longer caring if they saw her—with luck, they might not—she slid along the rude planking of the hut, pressed tight beside the door, reached for the latch, prayed, and felt the door give way. She leaped inside, slammed the door. Hoofbeats came up the street from the direction of the bridge, and slowed in front of the hut. The other horses drew nearer. Knife in hand, she turned to face the desperate, frightened eyes of a woman huddled beneath a blanket on a pallet next to the waning fire, and the startled, then puzzled look of the man under the blanket with her. The three of them looked at one another for no more than an instant—there was no time for words—and then the door crashed open again, and a huge, raw, black-bearded man stood against the moon, his riding cape draped down to his spurs. Outside, the rest of the horses drew up, halted. Men were shouting.