White Rose Rebel (17 page)

‘I could have killed a man,’ Anne said grimly.

‘Maybe,’ MacGillivray was not sure what had happened between them and Aeneas on the battlefield. ‘Maybe you saved one, or two.’

A rider in a red uniform galloped towards them, bent forwards, head down, hand holding on his cocked hat, but recognizing the bloodied, battle-worn people on the road, he pulled himself erect and slowed to a walk. He was a portly man, jacket buttoned askew, the braid and style giving his rank away. As he clopped in stately fashion past MacGillivray, the chief tipped his bonnet.

‘Fine morning for a dip, General,’ he said.

It was Cope, hurrying to the battlefield. He guided his horse past the pallet.

‘Shouldn’t we take him prisoner?’ Anne asked.

MacGillivray shrugged.

‘Somebody should tell the English they lost,’ he said, and screwed round in his saddle. ‘If you ride fast, General,’ he called, ‘you’ll be in Berwick in an hour!’

Cope spurred his horse on and galloped rapidly away down the road towards England. Anne grinned at MacGillivray. He smiled
back. They both began to laugh. Behind them, the others joined in. It was over. They had won.

In the Duke of Cumberland’s hand was a rough sketch of a massive, ugly, Amazonian woman with bulging biceps and monstrous thighs, her face twisted in a snarl, sword raised in her great fist as she rode a white horse down a slope to do battle against cowering English redcoats. He thrust the picture at Cope.

‘Beaten by a woman leading bare-arsed banditti!’ he raged.

Cope said nothing. He hadn’t seen any woman like this. He hadn’t seen the battle.

‘Anne Farquharson,’ he read, ‘the Lady M
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Intosh.’

General Hawley, his rejected request that he be sent to deal with the Scots now vindicated by Cope’s ineptitude, leant over his rival’s shoulder. He smiled thinly.

‘Not much of a lady.’

Cumberland slapped the caricature portrait. ‘These –’ he was apoplectic, eyes bulging ‘– these are all over London. We are a laughing stock! Do you hear that noise, Johnny? It is the French breaking out. Breaking out in fits of laughter!’

‘It’s a fiction,’ Cope ventured. ‘There is no such woman.’ He put the drawing down. It made him feel nauseous.

‘That’s to be hoped,’ Hawley said.

Cumberland thumped the table.

‘A few loutish Scots?’ he railed. ‘I want my cousin stopped. I want
her
stopped!’

‘To be fair –’ Cope started.

Hawley laughed. From his skinny frame, the noise sounded like breaking glass.

‘Fair, to the first commander in history who arrived home without troops to announce his own defeat?’

‘The vigour and prowess of their army,’ Cope went on, undeterred, ‘is such that the next commander who goes against it will suffer a similar defeat.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ Hawley sneered.

‘I would,’ Cope said. Through the window, across the table, he
could see the spires of London. Outside, barges sailed lazily up the Thames. The September sun was still warm and the world seemed a peaceable place to be. But he had seen the terrified remnants of his army and heard their tales. He knew the devastation that had been wrought and his losses compared to theirs. ‘In fact, I’d bet £10,000 on it.’

‘You must think highly of these half-naked savages,’ Cumberland said. The sum was massive, comparable with the caricatured harridan’s thighs.

‘I do,’ Cope admitted. ‘And even more highly of their command.’

‘What!’ Cumberland shouted. A tremor rippled his jowls.

‘Lord George knows his force’s capabilities well.’ Cope stuck to his guns. ‘But he also knows his ground and how to use it to advantage.’

‘I will take that bet,’ Cumberland said. ‘You will regret making it. Hawley, I’m dispatching you to Fort George, to take command there.’ He sat down and began to draw up the orders. ‘You will move to engage the enemy when your army is fully assembled. With what forces are available there and these commissioned here –’ he handed Hawley the paper ‘– you will have seven thousand troops. Will that do it?’

Hawley snatched the order paper greedily.

‘It will, Your Highness.’ He turned to Cope. ‘Unless you want to retract, Johnny, I’ll take your bet too.’

Cope considered him. He loathed this evil, half-starved, poisonous spider of a man. At the same time, he would never lay off £20,000. It could ruin him to accept.

‘Changed your tune?’ Cumberland asked, smiling.

Hawley leered and sucked his cheeks in. It was meant to demonstrate his superiority but did more to expose the poverty of his soul.

‘Not at all,’ Cope said. That size of force would, like his, have many untrained conscripts. He glanced at the picture on the table in front of him. He rather hoped there was such a woman and that Hawley would meet her. But he recognized what it represented, the
power and fear of what had come against them. ‘You’re on, Henry. May I wish you the best of luck.’

Back in Edinburgh, the city bells rung for days in celebration, varying their peals and order so as not to drive the residents mad. Anti-Unionists declared themselves openly. Waverers abandoned doubt. Hardline Hanoverians began to waver. At the Mercat Cross in the centre of the city, the Prince had the Glenfinnan Manifesto, written by his father, James Stuart, read again to eager crowds:

‘We see a nation always famous for valour, and highly esteemed by the greatest of Foreign potentates, reduced to the condition of a province, under the specious pretence of an union with a more powerful neighbour.’ The consequences of that pretended union with England were detailed. Severe taxation resulting in dire poverty, Highlanders prevented from bearing arms, garrisons installed and military government introduced as if in a conquered country. And it promised pardons for enemies, freedom of worship, the protection of fishing and clothing industries, and to call a free parliament, ‘so the nation may be restored to that honour, liberty, and independency, which it formerly enjoyed’.

The Prince then proclaimed his father, James VIII, the rightful King of Scots and announced the Act of Union repealed. Apart from the isolated garrisons trapped in Edinburgh and Stirling castles and in the three Highland forts, Scotland belonged to the Jacobites. The nation was free.

Braziers were lit in the dingy city streets. Pockets of music sprang up wherever there was room to dance. Pipes and drums competed with fiddlers. A Jacobite farmer from Haddington had already penned a song now being heartily sung:

A spout of ale poured into Donald Fraser’s mouth, him on his back, a city woman bending over with the flask. His son was in hospital, recovering. Nearby, old MacBean and Ewan M
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Cay sword-danced to the bagpipes to the delight of residents more used to righteous floggings than sinful pleasures for entertainment. Old Meg propped her pitchfork in a doorway and leered at a stocky Edinburgh trader, beckoning him to dance. It was Duff, the shoemaker, who had failed, miserably, to guard the Netherbow gate.

‘Eh, naw,’ he declined. ‘Ma shoes nip.’

Meg’s bony hand shot out. Duff screeched. She had him by the balls.

‘Nì sinn dannsa, a Shasannaich,’
she said, dragging him by the testicles into the whirling group. Duff got the message.

Walking past, Anne and MacGillivray stopped to watch. The excitement of survival was contagious. Greta, skipping out from her husband in a pass, bent down and twirled a crippled beggar on his wheelie board. At the far edge of the dancing, Jenny Cameron arm-wrestled Provost Stewart over a barrel. He made a good showing until she leant over, put her mouth against his, parting his lips with her tongue. Then she slammed his hand down, broke off the kiss and grinned. Those watching cheered. Several men leapt forward to volunteer for the next bout.

Duff stumbled out of the dance, bumping against MacGillivray, who put a companionable arm round him.

‘Duff, old friend,’ he grinned, ‘did you not hear the Prince? The dead were his father’s subjects too. No celebrating, he said.’ Then he pushed the escaping shoemaker back towards the waiting Meg, who clacked her heels and drew him, again, into the dance.

Anne took MacGillivray’s hand.

‘Maybe it’s time we didn’t celebrate too,’ she said.

They joined the dancers, stamping and turning to the beat. They swung each other out and back, then turned around one another, all the time gazing into each other’s eyes. The glow from the brazier lit red fire in MacGillivray’s hair, his eyes shone, his lips parted in a slow smile. Anne’s heart thudded, her breath caught. She reached out, gripped his belt, drew him towards her until her breasts pressed
against the hardness of his chest and his hips were against her. He hooked his arms behind her back, drawing her tighter to him, and they turned and turned and turned. She didn’t realize they had spun out of the dance until they were into the shadows and a wall pressed against her back. She reached up, pushing her fingers into his long, tangled hair and, as his head came down to hers, parted her lips for his kiss. She wanted him now, how she wanted him.

She eased them sideways a step or two, into the dark shelter of a close mouth, still kissing, tongue seeking tongue, tasting, touching as a desperate desire built in them both. It was she who loosened the front of her dress, pushing his plaid aside, his linen shirt up, so that her naked breasts rubbed against his skin. It was she who tugged the front of his kilt up to his waist, reaching under it to take his erection in her hands as he raised her skirts, put his hand between her thighs, into the wetness of her, pushing his fingers inside her, stroking and caressing her as she with him until they were both lost in the daze of feeling, until they were half-crazed with it. It was she who put her arm round his neck to help as he put both his hands under her buttocks and lifted her up till her hips were at the height of his own. And it was she who remembered the way Aeneas had looked at her, over the body of the shot redcoat, on the battlefield at Prestonpans.

MacGillivray felt the change in her as soon as it happened, his breath hot against her ear as he spoke.

‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice deeper and thick with arousal.

She moved her hands to his biceps, letting them rest there. He let her go till her feet were on the ground again, though their bodies still pressed close, skin against skin, flesh against flesh. He looked at her, head tilted, his eyes darker than shadows.

‘I didn’t fire my pistol,’ she said. ‘It was Aeneas. He saved your life, not me.’

MacGillivray bent his head down so his brow rested on hers.

‘But you would have,’ he said.

‘Yes, I would have,’ she agreed. ‘But I didn’t. It was Aeneas.’

He tipped his head back, gazing up at the starless, black roof of the close above them. Then he raised his arms, pressing his palms,
one on either side of her, against the rough stone, and looked down at her again.

‘I have never loved a woman in a city street before,’ he said. ‘Maybe this is not a good time to start.’ He pushed against the wall, straightening his arms so his body moved out from against her. His kilt and her skirts fell back down between them.

The sun had just gone down when Aeneas reached Fort George with the remnants of his war-torn company. It had been a harrowing week-long march through some unfriendly parts of the country. There had been many times, too many, when they were spat on, harangued, pelted with excrement, human or beast, and other, harder, missiles. Jacobite sympathizers abused them because they were government troops. Government supporters abused them because they’d been defeated. Among random acts of kindness from strangers who gave food, ale, bandages, the rare instances of pity and succour came equally from those of either camp or none. Friends were thin on the ground.

Even in Inverness, there was scorn, cat-calling and dark threats muttered against them by locals. As they stepped out the last few weary streets to the fort gates, they heard the pipes calling them home. Now those gates swung open, the drums beat out a roll. A guard of honour presented arms, slapping their muskets to their chests. Two straight, perfectly formed lines of Scottish soldiers paid their respects to comrades returning from war.

Behind Aeneas, sobs and sniffles began as the boys broke down. His own eyes started with tears. It would not do. He turned, halted the rag-bag company.

‘You’re not mothers’ boys now, lads,’ he said. ‘You’re warriors. Brave men I am proud to lead.’ He had set out with a hundred of them, eager young lads, barely whelped boys a kitten could have shaved with its tongue. Thirty-nine were left, some bandaged, some limping, their numbers swollen by stragglers from other units picked up on the road and one horseless English dragoon with an ear missing. All of them were shocked by what they’d seen, their faces hollow-eyed and haunted. ‘You left here with pride you hadn’t
earned. Now you have the right to it. So let’s put some ramrod in those spines. Attention!’

They tried, all but the half-carried wounded jerking upright.

‘Aye, Chief!’ they shouted back.

‘Now let’s try that again,’ Aeneas said, more kindly, with the flicker of a smile. ‘Atten-shun!’

‘Aye, Captain!’ The salutes were snapped out, almost in unison.

‘Better,’ he approved. They’d do. He turned around and marched ahead of them, through the two lines of honour guards, past the drums and piper, into the fort, sixty-one men short. Dead, wounded, captured, or simply run away. Tomorrow, he’d sit down with them, do a reckoning. Who they saw fall, with what injury, which wounded were alive when they left the field. Tonight, he was just getting them home.

He marched them straight to the mess and banged on the hatch for the cooks. It slammed open, something smelled good. One of the cooks poked his head out.

‘Supper’s in an hour, sir.’

‘Supper is now,’ Aeneas said, quietly. ‘They’ll eat what you have, ready or not.’ He had no notion of how crazed he himself looked, blood crusted on his plaid, face expressionless, his eyes bleak.