DARE THE WILD WIND (15 page)

On the evening of the third day, news came that Prince Charles had gathered his scattered forces from the mountain strongholds where they had passed the winter.

"The Duke's army has reached Nairn," Morag told her, "and the Prince refuses to retreat another mile.  He means to fight the English on Drummoissie Moor."

Nairn lay on the coast, only a few miles from
Inverness.  Drummoissie Moor swept between, a great high plateau, wide and windscoured and treeless, ominously suited to the purpose of men set on hacking one another to death.  The Rebels and the English could be locked in combat even now.  News from Inverness took more than a day to reach them.  If the Prince destroyed Cumberland's army on Drummoissie Moor, he could march unopposed to the Thames.  And by tomorrow or the next day, she could be by Cam's side.

That night and through the next day, Brenna waited, struggling with her fear for
Cam, tensing at the sound of every cart and villager arriving at the gates.  But no message came.  Then, late in the afternoon, as pewter  dark clouds drove a cold sleet across the moor, a horseman galloped toward the castle, barely slacking to clatter over the wooden bridge that spanned the moat.

A hoarse shout rose up from the guards at the gate.  From her window, Brenna saw the exhausted rider slide from his horse and a clansman race toward the great hall.  In the warring bedlam of voices, Brenna could make out nothing said in the courtyard below.  But the battle must be over. 

Then, scant
minutes later, the thick oak door to her chamber burst open with a crash.  Malcolm strode across the threshold. 

"Dearest sister, I bring you news."  With a sick sensation, Brenna saw the malevolent elation written on his face. 

"The Duke's army has met the Prince's this morning on
Culloden Moor.  He's cut your fine Rebels to the ground.”

*****

Wearily, Drake Seton rode over the field of battle.  Bodies lay strewn in grotesque postures, men who had dealt one another mortal blows sprawled in an unseeing fatal embrace.  The stark waste of it appalled him.

The Duke of Cumberland had taken advantage of the Pretender's folly, but the Highlanders had paid the price.  For love of the Stuart cause, they had stood immovable under the winnowing fire of English cannon, while their Bonnie Prince refused for too long to give them the order to charge. 

Drake's private distaste for
Cumberland as a man didn't lessen his respect for him as a soldier.  By contrast, Charles Stuart had proved himself utterly incompetent.  Drawing up his forces the previous day on the high empty plain above Culloden House, the Prince ordered Scots already exhausted from their hasty march from the mountains to stand all day at the ready in a bone  chilling gale, without food or rest, waiting for the English assault.  But the Duke didn't oblige him. 

The Pretender dismissed his men for a few scant hours with their day's ration of one biscuit, then commanded them to their feet again, bent on a night march to surprise the Duke's army in the English camp at Nairn.  Luck, on the side of the Rebels at Prestonpans and
Falkirk, turned against the Scots at last.  The way to Nairn led through boggy Mackintosh country, forcing the Highlanders to move in single file, too slowly to mount the planned attack.  Weak from hunger and long exertion, they collapsed by the score on the march.  And with the sky lightening, they could only turn back. 

When the word reached the Duke, he moved swiftly.  An hour after the Prince's men returned to their camp to fall into a sleep akin to coma, the Duke of Cumberland's guns woke them.  The Rebels were trapped on an open plateau, the sea behind them and a swamp on one flank. 
Cumberland had no need to squander Loyalist troops throwing them into hand to hand combat with the savage, battle hardened Scots.  The Duke held his troops back.  For the first time, he subjected the Pretender's army to wave after wave of accurate and deadly artillery fire.  No army could endure such losses, and even from where Drake sat on his horse with the dragoons, he could hear the Rebels scream for the order to charge. 

When at last the charge came, the Scots swarmed in wild fury toward them.  Their bloodchilling assault had scattered the King's troops at Prestonpans and carved them to ribbons at
Falkirk, but this time the English line held.  At thirty yards, the Duke's regiments opened a running fire that dropped the Rebels as they came.  Even Drake recoiled at the slaughter.  But still they hurtled forward, leaping over their own dead, howling in inhuman voices as they broke through between the grenadiers.

Then Drake was in the midst of the battle, fighting with sword and pistol as the first Scots hacked through the English line.  Drake was no stranger to combat, but he had never encountered such a demented enemy.  Survivors of the withering fire severed heads with their swords and pierced necks with their dirks, dodging bayonets to quickly plunge blades deep into the chest of a new foe.  Despite obstinate resistance, a few took the Duke's cannon and tried to turn them on the English before they were overcome.

Drake fought for his life, his rank meaningless in the melee around him.  One of his aides fell only a yard from him, spattering Drake with his blood.  A sword ripped Drake's shoulder, but he stayed in the saddle and thrust grimly with his rapier to skewer the half
naked madman who lunged at him, claymore raised to lop off his head.     

Then, abruptly, it was over.  The carnage the Duke's artillery had wrought was too great.  Outnumbered to start, the Scots' ranks had been fatally thinned before they rushed the English lines.  Their charge was a last act of stubborn desperation.  The screaming clansmen fell back, and withdrawal turned to rout.  Within an hour of
noon, the Duke of Cumberland had shattered the Pretender's army.

Now, his shoulder stiff and bandaged, Drake guided Ares between the fallen bodies of Englishman and Scot.  Soldiers assigned to burial detail worked their way across
Culloden Moor, searching the pockets of the dead, Scot and compatriot alike, for coin and valuables.  And finishing yesterday's work with a bayonet if a fallen Rebel gave any sign of life. 

Only a handful of the officers made an effort to stop it.  Apart from soldiers wearing uniforms recognizably French, the Duke had given no direct order to take prisoners.  The fear the High
landers had struck condemned them now.  Cumberland coldly proclaimed there would be no more risings in Scotland.  Every man who had fought for Charles Stuart was marked, along with all his kin.  The Duke meant to lay waste across the Highlands, to torch and trample and destroy.

Drake wanted no part of it.  He had done his duty to George the Second.  He could retire honorably to his country house in
Surrey.  Drake would be glad to be quit of this brutal, barbaric country, where infants were ceremonially submerged in icy water the moment they were born, and most of the populace walked barefoot in the bitterest cold.  He had come to admire these hardy people as much as he pitied them.  And a beauty the like of Brenna Dalmoral was proof a rose could bloom in the rockiest ground.  But he had become far too entangled in the enmity between the defiant girl and her brother.  He would be glad to be quit of her and her devotion to her vainglorious Rebel.

Drake's reluctant sympathy for the defeated Sco
ts would count for nothing with Cumberland.  No argument would sway the Duke from an obscene and thorough vengeance.  Far better for Drake to take his leave, as soon as the Duke would grant him permission to go. 

The Scottish dead lay half
naked, common clansmen clad in nothing but their long  tailed shirts, hastily knotted between their legs for modesty when they cast off their plaids to fight.  Drake had seen them toss aside their muskets after firing one shot, resorting to the claymores they knew better.  On this barren windswept moor, they had been sheep to the slaughter in the sights of English guns, for all their primitive courage. 

Drake shook his
head to clear it.  He had gone morbid as a parson.  The Rebels had accounted for their share of English dead.  He was a fool to wander the battleground in the drizzling April chill when he could take his ease by a warming fire in camp.

Then, as he reined his horse to turn back, an oddly familiar flash of color ca
ught his eye.  A burial detail moved toward a heap of bodies by a boulder hurled by some giant hand onto the moor.  Scarlet coats mingled with the green and blue tartan of a high born Scot and his hand picked lieutenants.  The man who lay in the midst of the mounded dead had cut down half a dozen of his enemies before he succumbed, his attendants as many more.  With an unwilling shock, Drake recognized the plaid.  And the matted russet mane of hair above the white bloodstained face of Cameron MacCavan. 

As he wheeled his stallion toward the funereal mound, there was an abrupt macabre movement that stirred the arm of one of the corpses in the tangled pile.  The corporal swore to his sergeant.

"Bloody hell.  One of the dogs is alive."

The sergeant trod with booted feet over the twisted bodies.  Upending the butt of his gun, he raised the bayonet to impale the wounded man.  The sergeant stiffened at the crack of Drake's voice.  Bayonet lifted for its killing thrust, he froze to stare at the horseman bearing down on him.  Drake pulled up short in front of him. 

"Who gave you orders to kill defenseless men?"

"M'lord," he growled, "this murdering Rebel
is all but done.  He'll count my steel a kindness, if he feels it at all."

Barely conscious, his brow beaded with fever, Cameron MacCavan had rolled a little to one side under the body of the grenadier who lay half pinning him.  Drake saw only a faint ragged rise of his chest.  In truth, he looked near death.

"We're Englishmen, not assassins," Drake snapped.  "This man is a peer of the realm.  He'll be treated with all the respect due him.  Bury the dead, and take this man prisoner, along with any other Rebel you find alive."

Chapter 11

"My lady, help me."  The words tumbled from the slight, fair haired girl Morag admitted to Brenna's bedchamber.  "I've had word Iain fell in the battle, that he's sore wounded. I have to find him."

Brenna stiffened with dread.  In the fight, Iain would have been by
Cam's side.  "What of Cam?  He isn't...?"

Fenella Strath gulped back tears.  "Pray God not dead.  Hugh MacCavan reached
Cairn Creath Castle at dawn.  He could only tell his father Lord MacCavan and Iain didn't rendezvous with the rest of the clansmen who escaped.  He said Iain's horse was shot from under him, that he was pinned under it."  Her voice broke.  "He may still be lying there, with no one to help him."

And
Cam might be lying anywhere on the battlefield, alive or dead.  Shaking, Brenna willed herself to banish the thought.

"I can't turn to anyone else."  Fenella's pale oval face was tight with fear.  "I have to get to
Inverness, to Culloden Moor.  I haven't a shilling, and my father won't spare me even a copper.  He says Lord Dalmoral will turn him out of the parish if he does."

Malcolm might do exactly that to anyone who aided the Rebels, even in defeat.  Andrew Strath was the parish rector.  Brenna's father insisted Brenna be schooled as well as Malcolm, and Strath had taught Brenna and Fenella their letters and sums as children.     

"You've come to me for money?"

"I have go, and quickly.  If I don't, Iain could die."

Brenna hadn't known Fenella cared this way for Iain.  Fenella looked back at her with unwavering gray eyes. 

"I love him," she said simply.  "Before he rode off to war with Lord MacCavan, he asked for my promise to marry him."

Brenna felt a new kinship to Fenella.  The two lives they held most precious hung in the balance, one only they might be able to tip.  She had to help Fenella, and find
Cam.

"Malcolm won't allow me any coin," Brenna told her, "but I have something better."  She dashed to the clothespress. 

Hastily, Morag was at her elbow.  "My lady, you can't give the girl any of your mother's jewels.  Anyone she tries to trade them to will think she stole them."

Brenna reached in the wardrobe for the wadded
  silk petticoat she wore her last day on the moor with the Earl.  "I'm going with her.  This time Malcolm won't stop me.  You said yourself he's in haste to greet the Duke of Cumberland in Inverness. 

"I haven't left this room since the Duke's army marched.  Malcolm thinks he's barred every way for me to slip out of these walls, that without Gypsy I've lost the heart to try."

"My lady, the grooms will be whipped, or worse, if they let you have a horse," Morag argued. 
“
And the guards at the gate will never let you pass.  There isn't a disguise you can invent to trick men who've known you since you were old enough to walk."

"Then how did you smuggle Fenella in to see me?"

"No one takes notice of a simple lass carrying a warm loaf of bread from the kitchen.  But you're a different matter."     

"Perhaps not," Brenna said, thinking.  She turned to Fenella.

"We won't have horses.  We'll have to walk until we're well away from Lochmarnoch.  But my mother's signet ring and gold and ruby necklace should buy our way well past
Inverness.  We'll need coin to spare to get Cam and Iain to safety once we find them."