White Rose Rebel (50 page)

Returning home should have been joyful. After the ball, Anne was the toast of London, envied, admired and sought after. But, as the carriage wheels spun through the dust, dancers whirled again in her head. All that bowing and scraping instead of simple courtesy, women flirting and wheedling to manipulate men because they were powerless without them. Even Helen, desperate to regain some status, had simpered with suitable swains. That could be Scotland’s future, always the cowed and beggared spouse in a mismatched union. Those customs and habits would increasingly impinge on Scottish society, changing it until the people forgot who they were, what they had been.

Anne had not expected to bring it home with her. Her innards knotted. Anger flickered and grew. Her own situation had been forgotten. Aeneas had complete power over her. Like those English wives in thrall to their husbands, she was still his prisoner.

He pulled the carriage to a halt in the yard, jumped out and came round to help her down.

‘I can get myself down,’ she snapped.

‘Hey!’ He stepped back as if stung. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘Don’t patronize me.’ She struggled with her skirts, stumbling to the ground.

‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘Go on up; I’ll bring wine.’

‘To soften me up, is that it?’

He caught her arm, drew her back against the side of the carriage. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I said once I was no English wife to be owned and ordered. But listen to you. Behave yourself. Don’t speak. Speak English. Be yourself. Go to bed.’

‘That’s not how –’

‘No doubt you want to fuck with me as well!’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I’m no man’s pet,’ she raged. ‘Even the miserable Calvinist kirk says husband and wife are equal between the sheets. So do not come to my bed until we are. I will not be the spoils of war!’ She pushed past, stormed off inside.

Aeneas turned, hand raised, mouth open to call her back. The door slammed shut. He let his arm fall to his side, expelled a long breath. His mouth twitched. He shook his head. Chuckling, he turned to see to the horse.

Up in her room, Anne banged the bedroom door behind her, touched a spill to the peat glowing in the fireplace, lit the candles, threw off her clothes, put on a wrap and sat at her dressing table to unfasten her hair. As it tumbled loose about her shoulders, she brushed it out. As she brushed, holding the length of it up to tug tangles from the ends, her fury calmed to indignation. They both spoke with Cumberland. She sought Nan’s freedom. Aeneas hadn’t even thought about his wife’s. Let him work it out. He could sleep in his study until he had. She knew how to be alone now. Her nation might go cap in hand to its lord and master, begging favours, learning shame. She would not.

The bedroom door clicked open and he came in. He had removed his weapons and plaid, was dressed only in his shirt and kilt. In his hand he held the scrolled order which consigned her to his custody.

‘Anne, I will never be equal to you,’ he said.

‘And that will be the truth of it,’ she snapped.

‘I made a mistake.’

‘A big mistake,’ she agreed.

‘The answer is yes,’ he said.

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, I want to fuck with you.’ He shut the door, walked over to her.

Involuntarily, she stood. No piece of paper would allow him to dominate her. If he wanted a fight, he could have it.

‘But, as you are my wife –’ that infuriating half-smile played on his mouth ‘– and my prisoner –’ he loosed the tie that held her wrap ‘– and I am your chief –’

He couldn’t do this to her. She couldn’t do this.

‘Are you pulling rank on me?’

His eyes shone, reflecting the candlelight. ‘– I’ll settle for you pleasuring me instead,’ he finished.

‘Aeneas,’ she groaned.

‘You invented this game, my lady.’ He stroked her neck with the edge of the scroll, parted the front of her wrap with it. ‘And, as I remember, when it was in your favour, I served you well.’

She remembered. A wave of desire rushed through her body as it remembered. He drew the scroll lightly down to trace the line of her breast.

‘When I saw the Duke, he passed the progress of this order to me.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I wanted to be here, in our home. That’s what the wine was for, to celebrate.’ He moved closer, his body almost touching hers. ‘So,’ he offered, the glint of fire deepening the darkness in his eyes, serious now, ‘if you please me well enough tonight, you can burn this in the morning.’

She could hit him. She might snatch the order from his hand, throw it on the fire. But it meant nothing to him. He offered himself, vulnerable. She could refuse, mock him, belittle or berate him, have her revenge. She did none of those. Something deeper
would be honoured here. Tilting her head, she raised her chin a little. A smile curved her mouth.

‘The pleasure, husband,’ she said, ‘will be mine.’

Outside, the moon rose high above the loch. Greylag geese settled themselves on the water. Slender shadows of roe deer moved through the woods. Up on the scree of the higher slopes, a wildcat hunted alone. Above the trees, wings beating like breath, an owl hovered. Over among the ruins of the north-west cotts, a peat glowed in the one remaining hearth as old Meg turned in her sleep on the pallet beside the fire. In the stone cottages, the scarred side of her face against the pillow, Ewan’s daughter slept, dreaming of tomorrow. On the horse-hair mattress of the kitchen box-bed, reassured now her chief and his wife were safe home from the heathen south, Jessie drew the cover round her shoulders and settled for the night. There would be work to do come morning.

Long before morning, grey ashes crumbled in the grate in the master bedroom at Moy. The last flame flickered from the parchment. Anne and Aeneas lay in each other’s arms, talking softly, caressing, making plans. She could feel her heart beat against him, steady as a drum. So many of those they cared for were gone, but not all. The way of life they valued was lost, yet love remained. The delicious irony of the Duke dancing to the rebel tune did not constitute a victory. But it raised hope, hope that there was still a spark to be lit that might blaze into tomorrow. A nation did not die while its spirit lived. She had won small concessions. In them, the tide turned. Life would not be stopped. Laws could be repealed, new ways found to live. Freedom was an idea. It could not be destroyed.

‘Woman is half the world’

Margaret Oliphant, 1828
–
97

Colonel Anne Farquharson, the Lady M
^c
Intosh, transferred her political activities to civic life. In 1763, she was elected as a burgess freewoman and guildsister of the burgh of Inverness. When her husband died in 1770, she moved to Leith, Edinburgh. On her death, in 1787, she was buried in St Ninian’s churchyard on Coburg Street, where a plaque, erected in 2001, commemorates her contribution to the Rising of 1745. Beside it, a rose bush is planted, the white rose of Scotland – the Jacobite rose.

White Rose Rebel
is a work of fiction. Only tantalizing scraps of Anne’s story survive. I found the first in Rennie McOwan’s
Stories of the Clans
and searched out more from F. Macdonald’s
Colonel Anne: Lady Anne MacKintosh
, in first-hand accounts and from the many other histories. Rising out of the reduction of later opinion was a recognizable woman, an historical character who sounded like most Scotswomen, a bonny fechter, a genuine ancestor. History generates a myth that men make the world and women suffer for it, patently false and a disservice to both genders. Men and women make history together, co-operating with each other to uphold whatever society they create. The women of the ’45 were not victims but perpetrators, active participants in a British civil war which was ended by genocide. To tell that story meant simplifying it. Time is compressed at the beginning and end, the campaign condensed to main events, secondary characters merged.
White Rose Rebel
takes a Jacobite stance, but the actions of Anne, and others, echo those ascribed to them by the government at the time.
The need for self-preservation combined with British guilt over brutal acts of pacification meant involvement was soon rewritten. Period accounts and later histories are all contradictory. But the Duke of Cumberland reports Anne’s capture, naming her among ‘four of their principal Ladies’. Colonel Anne,
la belle rebelle
, the heroine, a very pretty woman, the heavenly Lady M
^c
Intosh, that bloody rebel, a masculine spirit, traitor, a damn’ rebel bitch – she was all that, a hero of the ’45.

In 1747 an amnesty was passed. Monaltrie was pardoned after twenty years. Some never were. The proscription against Highland clothes was lifted in 1782. Acts abolishing the bearing of arms and heritable jurisdictions remained. The clan system was destroyed, replaced by capitalism. The status of women was reduced, the Highlands emptied, the people scattered.

In 1997 Scotland voted overwhelmingly to regain its own parliament, which sat in 1999 for the first time since 1707. Perhaps the nation might also recover its own history.

Janet Paisley
August 2006