Midnight Honor (46 page)

Angus staggered back, the realization of what he had just done striking him like a blow to the chest. He backed up until he felt the edge of the cot against his knees, then sat down hard, the knife red and dripping in his hand.

He looked at it, looked at the major, and was grateful he had not had anything to eat all day. Even so, his stomach heaved upward and seemed to lodge at the base of his throat, remaining there until several deep gulps forced it down again.

Puking would accomplish nothing. He had just killed an officer in the king's army. Not just any officer, either, but the protégé of William, Duke of Cumberland.

“Aye,” he whispered disgustedly. “I shall avoid Damocles like the plague, my love.”

Jesus God, what was he to do now? If the body was discovered …

If the body was discovered, and if the Jacobite army succeeded in its surprise ambush of the camp, it would simply be assumed that Worsham had died in the clash! No one else knew what had happened tonight; their voices had not been raised; no one knew there had been a confrontation.

Except for Hugh MacDugal, the tracker who had followed him to the Stuart camp. But would he have said anything to anyone else? Or would Worsham have insisted on keeping it between the two of them until he had incontrovertible proof and could drag Angus in chains in front of his peers?

Proof.

Worsham was a meticulous note-taker despite his difficulty with the written word. His notes were marked in his own strange code, but if he had kept a record of Angus's movements tonight, and if someone was able to decipher his scratches, it could prove incriminating.

Angus pushed himself off the cot and forced himself to roll Worsham over onto his back. The eyes were fixed and staring, the centers dilated so that it looked as if two holes had been bored into his skull. Quickly, Angus opened the top three buttons on the bloody tunic and searched the inside pockets. He found nothing there, but when he lifted the flap of the leather belt pouch, he discovered several documents and a small notebook filled with scratched notations. Flicking briefly through the latter, he was able to read enough to know his suspicions were confirmed. Anne's name was there, as was his.

He opened one of the folded documents, dismayed to see his hands were shaking so badly he could scarcely hold it
steady. It was an official copy of the company's battle orders, and he almost refolded it and returned it to the pouch, except that when he looked again, he saw it was dated that day, April 15, and signed by Lord George Murray.

It was a copy of the Jacobite battle orders, only there again, something was not quite right. He had seen this same document in the tent at Culloden just a few hours ago; it had been lying on the table with the maps. Angus had read it casually enough, for he had seen a dozen such battle orders over the past few months of military service. Most were worded almost identically—so identically the company commander rarely had to consult the page before reciting the contents aloud.

Angus read the document a second time, then a third before the hairs on his neck started standing on end.

It is His Royal Highness's positive orders that every person attach himself to some corps of the army, and remain with that corps night and day, until the battle and pursuit be finally over, and to give no quarter to the Elector's troops on any account whatsoever. This regards the Foot as well as the Horse. The order of battle is to be given to every general officer…

He did not have to read any further. These were not the orders he had seen on Lord George's table, nor did he believe, when he held the document up to the lamp and turned the wick higher, that it had been signed by his wife's cousin. It was a damned good forgery, but Lord George Murray was left-handed and wrote with a distinct slant—a slant that increased drastically for his signature.

There were several other folded papers in the pouch and Angus found what he was looking for in the third attempt. It was a copy of the original orders as he had seen them, noticeably absent the unconscionable phrase: …
and to give no quarter to the Elector's troops on any account whatsoever
.

The first sheet contained a forged order to take no prisoners, to slaughter without consequence even those who fell wounded on the field. To an English soldier, this would give
rise to the vision of a screaming hoard of Highland savages falling on them, hacking them to bits whether they had surrendered or not. If copies of these false orders were given to every officer, and he in turn read them aloud to every man in his company, they would believe the prince had issued a command to show no mercy on the battlefield. It would inspire them to return the favor in kind, without reservation.

Angus withdrew his pocket watch. It was one-fifteen. He returned it to his sporran, along with the documents he had taken from Worsham's pouch, then rolled the body again, moving it to the far side of the tent against the canvas wall. Luckily Worsham had not been above average height and he fit beneath the camp cot with only a minor bending at the knees. When the blanket was draped over the side, it completely covered the fact there was a body beneath.

It was not brilliant, but it was the best he could think to do on the spur of the moment. Something dripped on the blanket while he was still bent over, and he remembered the cut over his temple. A quick glance in the shaving mirror was met by a reflection of charnel horror, for his scalp had bled profusely, adding to the stains that were already on his shirt and coat from the neck wound.

He stripped and cleaned himself as best he could, using the widest neckcloth he could find in the scattered contents of his kit, then winding it an extra turn around his throat to serve as both stock and bandage. The cut on his head was swelling by the minute, the skin was blue and ugly, but at least it was hidden by his hair. He fetched a clean shirt and donned his kilt and tunic. At the last, he remembered the white cockade Lord George had given him, and this, too, he tucked into his sporran after checking his timepiece again.

One-forty.

The Stuart army had to be close enough to smell the garbage burning behind the butcher's tents.

Chapter Twenty-Four

W
hat's that godawful stench?” Robbie Farquharson asked, his nose wrinkled up almost to his eyebrows.

“The shite o' the forty horses ahead o' us, mixed with the muck an' slime o' every fish what ever died in this bluidy river.” Jamie, calf deep in the mire, struggled to free his left leg so he could sink it in front of the right. He'd lost his brogues a mile back, not clever enough or quick-thinking enough to have tied them on a string around his neck like most of the other men had done, and was barefoot. The wind that had blown earlier in the day was gone, its abrupt departure encouraging a heavy fog to creep up from the riverbank. The farther east they walked, the thicker the fog became, until it was difficult to see the man in front and impossible to know if there was better ground ten feet on either side.

Lord George Murray had led the first column of men out of camp at eight o'clock. With him were Lochiel's Camerons, his Athollmen, and the MacDonalds from Clanranald, numbering some nineteen hundred in all, guided by John MacGillivray and Gillies MacBean.

The prince and Lord John Drummond commanded the second column of two thousand, comprising mostly Lowlanders and French volunteers, and by the time they had struggled over the same trackless paths, marshes, and quagmires, the gap
between the two columns had widened too much to ever hope to launch the simultaneous attack they had planned. By two o'clock in the morning they had covered only seven miles, and the conditions were worsening.

“Dear God!” Anne gasped as Robert the Bruce skidded in the mud for the fourth time in as many minutes. The valiant beast was doing his best to keep his footing, but she was afraid each time that the next slide would result in a broken ankle. Twice already she and her cousins had prevented the column from following the wrong branch of the river in the soupy fog. Thus far, she had managed to stay on her mount, but now she swung her leg over with a final curse and slid out of the saddle, instantly sinking calf deep in the churned mud. The Bruce must have sensed he had failed his mistress in some way, for he instantly began to tremble.

“'Tis not your fault, my fine hero,” she murmured, rubbing the velvety nose. “'Tis the fault of all that snow melting down from the mountains and the ground still too frozen to suck it up.”

“Weel, it's sucked me,” said a man nearby. He threw himself down by the side of the tract, his arms splayed wide like a crucifix. “I canna go anither step. I canna catch ma breath. I canna hear f'ae the bluid poundin' in ma ears. I'd crawl the way if I could, but I canna. I simply canna.”

An echo of his words rippled back through the ranks, some of the grumbles voicing sympathy, some anger. They were all exhausted and cold, and still as starving as they'd been that morning when they'd cursed over their ration of one small biscuit. The slowest clansmen, those who were lost well back in the fog and darkness, had simply stopped and turned around.

“It's no' possible, Annie,” said Eneas, gasping for breath like an old man. “It's taken us five hours to cover seven miles, an' we've anither five to go.”

She held her finger to her lips, for the prince's group was just ahead of them. “He'll hear you.”

“I dinna care who hears me. The men are fallin' over on their feet. If they're expected tae go on, an' then tae fight, I can see disaster ahead even if he canny. What's mair, if he was hopin' tae surprise Thomas Lobster, he's lost that chance
too, f'ae we've already found one o' Willy's scouts creepin' along the bank watchin' us. Lomach MacDugal. Do ye ken the name?”

It sounded as if it should be familiar, but Anne shook her head.

“He an' his brither Hugh have been trackers f'ae the
Sassenachs
since Loudoun took command o' Fort George. They're as close as oor Jamie an' Robbie, an' if Lomach were in the neighborhood, ye can bet yer kirtle Hugh is no' far ahind.”

“Did you question him?”

Eneas frowned. “He would have had a mout o' difficulty answerin' through a slit throat.”

Anne supposed she should react to the brutality, or at the very least ask if it had been justified, but she simply could not rouse either the effort or the sympathy. She could not find fault with Eneas's anger, or his sense of foreboding either. She was just as tired, hungry, and dejected as the men who struggled forward out of blind obedience. Her bonnet had fallen off somewhere back along the way and her hair hung over her shoulders in dark, tangled hanks. She had to speak through clenched teeth to keep them from chattering, and now she could swear she heard buzzing in her ears.

The buzzing grew louder; it was coming from up ahead. They walked without torches, but some of the guides carried hooded lanthorns and as she and Eneas strained to see through the mist, the dull glow cast by one of them appeared and swayed closer. The man carrying it was one of the guides who had been with Lord George's column and Anne recognized him as Colin Mor, the clansman whose bothy they had stayed at the night MacGillivray had oiled her legs to rid them of saddle cramps.

He saw The Bruce and veered across the sucking mud. “We've turned back, Colonel. The general an' the chiefs decided it were f'ae the best.”

“Och, thank the good Lord above f'ae that,” Eneas sighed. “It's over, then, is it?”

“All but the shoutin',” Colin said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. Even before the words were out of his mouth they could hear the prince's voice rising in protest, screaming that he had been betrayed yet again.

“Where is Lord George?” Anne asked in a hushed voice.

“'Bout a mile ahind. He'll only go as fast as the slowest man, though now they've been told they can go back an' find their beds, they're movin' a fair speed.”

“MacGillivray?”

“He an' The MacBean were no' very far ahind me. If ye stan' here, he'll see yer horse, like as I did, an' he'll find ye.”

He saw another man coming past with a lanthorn, and gave his to Eneas before he set off back through the muck and trampled sod.

“Shall we go forward an' wait?” her cousin asked.

“No. No, we can hear the fuss well enough from here. I'd rather not enjoy it any closer.”

“Aye. I'll leave the lamp wi' you, then, shall I?”

“Where are you going?”

“Just over ayont a bit where it's drier. I just need tae sit f'ae a wee minute. Catch ma wind. It were seven miles o' hell gettin' here, it'll be seven miles o' hell gettin' back.”

Anne nodded, almost guilty she had ridden The Bruce as long as she had.

The feeling intensified a few minutes later when she saw MacGillivray and Gillies MacBean walking toward her. John didn't notice her at first; it took a tug on his arm from Gillies for him to lift his head and look in the direction his clansman pointed.

They both looked terrible, splashed head to toe in mud. Anne had never seen big John MacGillivray with his shoulders drooping, and she caught only a glimpse now before he pulled himself straight and walked toward her. “Ye've heard, then?”