One Man's Love (2 page)

Scotland
July 1746

I
’m giving you a command, Colonel, one almost as vital as your mission. Stamp out this damnable insurrection. Execute every one of those miscreants if you must, but deliver the Highlands to me in peace.

The Duke of Cumberland’s words echoed in Alec Landers’s mind as he neared Fort William. Behind him rode five handpicked men who’d accompanied him from Inverness. Their conversation mingled with the jangle of harness, the clop of horses’ hooves on the thick grass, and the moan of wind, forming a backdrop for his thoughts.

On the crest of a hill not far from his new post, he
stopped and raised his hand. His men halted, remaining in position. Not one of them questioned his delay or why he dismounted and walked a few feet to the edge of the road. It would never have occurred to them to do so.

He stood staring down at the scene before him, memory furnishing the quiet moment with details.

For six years, from the time he was five until his eleventh birthday, their coach had stopped in exactly the same place. His mother would lean out of the window beside him in order to view her childhood home. Gilmuir sat like a welcoming beacon, a wondrous world that might have been created solely to grant her every wish. She would begin to smile in a different way than she did in England, as if she, too, threw off all constraints.

What would his mother think now, all these years later, to discover that Fate, or a vengeful God, had sent him back to her native country? A foolish question to ask because he’d never know the answer.

For most of the year this land was covered by a stark, inhospitable grayness, a monochromatic hue that announced it was Scotland. But now heather and thistles and wildflowers bloomed riotously over the hillsides, casting shadows among the green grass and clover. Loch Euliss was deeply blue, surface waves stirred by the sudden fierce wind.

A storm loomed, as if to greet him. The sunlight, diffused through the curtain of clouds, bathed the castle in an otherworldly light. It was a strange welcome to this place of memory.

The promontory was a place ideally suited to repel invaders. But the builders of the castle had not been prescient about English cannon or the anger of the Empire as they extracted revenge against the recalcitrant and rebellious Scots. Gilmuir had evidently
been bombarded into submission and now nothing more than a roofless shell.

Will Gilmuir last forever, Grandfather?

As long as the sea, Ian. As long as the sea.

But it hadn’t. Instead, it had fallen and now lay broken and shattered, a skeletal companion to the newly constructed Fort William.

Cumberland himself had chosen Alec among the cadre of officers in Flanders to accompany him back to Scotland to quell the rebellion. For his ability to stay alive in battle and for his greater capacity to remain silent and obedient, Alec had been given command of Fort William.

He’d wanted to protest, to give the duke some rational refusal of the post, but it would not be wise to tell Cumberland of either his heritage or his reluctance. The first could get him hanged; the second would only result in the duke’s displeasure.

A mist was blurring the horizon, tinting the mountains blue. The glen was heavily forested on the western side, but on the east was cropped as cleanly as if sheep grazed on the grass. Below him, in a secluded corner of the glen, was the village he knew almost as well as Gilmuir. A clachan, the Scots called it. He had been a visitor to many of those houses, almost a third son in the place Fergus and James called home.

The stones of the cottages were tinged with green, moss having added its own hue over the years. Each was alike, a long rectangular structure intersected in the middle by a door and flanked by two tall windows. The thatching on the roofs had matted over the years until they appeared like crisp brown crusts on freshly baked bread loaves.

Yet another place of memory, one he would do well to avoid.

He mounted again, gave the signal, and began to ride toward Gilmuir, banishing all thoughts of the past. It was easier to concentrate upon his task, and the duty given him.

The sky was darkening even as the wind increased, the gusts blowing bits of leaves and grasses past the open door of her cottage. Leitis glanced outside. A beam of light suddenly speared a menacing cloud, brushing its outline in gold as if announcing the presence of God in the oncoming storm. Sadness seemed to linger in the air as if the earth prepared to weep.

Leitis closed her eyes, hearing the murmur of the threads beneath her fingers. The sounds became, in her longing mind, teasing conversation between her brothers. The wind, laden with the scent of rain, was not unlike the subdued laughter between her parents. The gentle kiss near her ear was not the air brushing a tendril of her hair, but a touch from Marcus as he bent close and whispered endearments.

Above the sound of the oncoming storm she could almost hear the music of the pipes. The tune pierced her heart, reminding her of times of welcome. In her mind, her younger brother Fergus waved to her from a nearby hill. Beside him, her older brother James grinned, glad to be home once more. Marcus, the man she was to marry this spring, walked with them, as did her father. He made a jest and all four men laughed, their heads tipped back, the sound of their merriment lost in the sound of the wailing pipes.

Spirits. All of them nothing more than spirits, summoned to her on this storm-filled summer day to wet her eyes once more.

The loom was a comfort. She had learned this skill when she’d been barely tall enough to sit on the
carved bench. All of the memories of her life were entwined with the acts of her fingers and the touch of the threads. She’d been weaving when news had come of the prince landing at Loch nan Uamh. She’d finished a plaid just in time to drape over her father’s shoulders as he led his sons off to bring Scotland’s rightful king to the throne. Here, too, she’d been occupied when word had come of Culloden and the loss of life there.

The cottage had never seemed as large as it had this past year. The interior rock walls had been whitewashed years ago, the earthen floor tamped down by generations of feet until it was smooth as stone. The furniture was simple but built for wear—a large table of oaken boards surrounded by six chairs, a tall bureau that held her mother’s treasure, a fine porcelain ewer, and a basin adorned with a pattern of purple flowers. In the corner, beyond the two partitions built by her father, was her parents’ bed, and farther still her own. Her brothers had slept in the space above, reached by a ladder propped in the corner.

She was the only occupant of the cottage now. Her father, Fergus, James, Marcus, all gone. Her mother had died almost in relief only weeks after her sons and her husband had been lost.

The sound of the pipes grew, punctuating the far-off sound of the thunder. The MacRae Lament swelled, the music seeping into her bones and her very soul. She blinked open her eyes, suddenly realizing that the melody was too clear to be a memory. Too dangerous to be anything but foolish.

Not Hamish again.

She abruptly stood, pushing the bench beneath the loom. Walking to the open door of her cottage, she stopped for a moment, one hand upon the frame, the other tightened into a fist and resting in the folds of
her skirt. The sound was not a dream, nor a fancy, but her uncle daring the English.

Perhaps the soldiers had not heard, and the people of Gilmuir would be safe from the consequences of Hamish’s defiance. Even as she had the thought, she chided herself for the foolishness of it. The music of the pipes carried well over glen and hill.

Reaching for the shawl hung on a peg by the door, she covered her head and walked quickly from the cottage, cutting in front of Malcolm’s puny garden and up the cleft created between two gentle mounds of earth. A well-worn footpath led to the hills above her, a journey she knew well.

The wind pressed her dress against her body and blew her hair back. Nature was a lover in that moment, caressing her ankles and wrists and throat, bathing her in a kiss that tasted of moisture and sunlight in one.

A flash of lightning taunted her, reminding her that it was not the wisest thing to be climbing a hill in a thunderstorm. Still, there was less to fear from nature when mankind was loose on the earth. A lesson she had learned this past year.

She climbed up the rolling earth, past the gathering of flowers. The primrose with its yellow center and bright pink blossoms bobbed in the gusting breeze as if welcoming her. The thistles were proud things, tall and spiky, their large-headed blooms a bright yellow or purple. The harebell had a delicate stem and pale blue nodding blooms and was her favorite of all the flowers. It was hardy and thrived despite its fragile appearance.

The glen was bordered on one side by dense forests, thick pines crowning a knoll that provided a commanding view of the countryside. It was there she sought out her uncle, knowing that it was a fa
vorite spot of his. She followed the path upward, ducking beneath low-hanging limbs and pushing her way through the undergrowth.

The hillock was bared of trees like a bald man’s pate. Once, a giant pine had stood here, sentinel for the forest. But it had been struck by lightning years before and had fallen to the ground so hard that the earth had shuddered.

To her right was Gilmuir. Veiled in the morning mist, it looked whole again, and if she squinted, she could almost pretend that smoke emerged from its four chimneys and the courtyard was filled with people all going about their business. Lively ghosts crafted by her wishes.

The squat fort beside it could not be ignored, no matter how much she wished it away.

To her left the forest stretched up over rounded hills, then undulated down into a neighboring glen. Ahead was the loch, and beyond it the firth leading to the sea. A vast place, she’d been told, where a ship might travel for weeks without viewing land. But the reward was the sight of places that sounded mystical and almost frightening—Constantinople, China, Marseilles.

She pushed a few branches out of the way to see Hamish standing there defiantly, dressed in his kilt. Nestled in his armpit was the deflated bladder of his bagpipes. His back was to the newly constructed Fort William. A mischievous breeze blew the rear of his kilt up, but he didn’t appear at all concerned that he bared his arse to the English.

“It is a foolishness you do, Uncle,” she said with asperity.

He frowned at her, his fierce expression reinforced by the fact that his brows, white and furry like overfed caterpillars, grew together over the bridge of his nose.

“I’ll not be scolded by a slip of a girl,” he said fiercely. “Especially not about the pipes.”

“I’ve not been a slip of a girl all these many years, Uncle, and you know it,” she said. Placing her fists on her hips, she glared at him. “And playing the pipes is outlawed now, or have you forgotten that?”

“An English law. Not mine.” He drew himself up to his full height and stared up at her.

It was difficult to see him at that moment. Once a broad bull of a man, he’d shrunk in the last two years. His beard had whitened to match his hair. But he still bore a look of stubbornness about him.

“There are young ones in the clachan, Uncle, who do not deserve to suffer.” The English would enforce their laws despite Hamish’s defiance and bluster. The soldiers at Fort William were never going away, a fact she regrettably understood, but one Hamish did not yet comprehend.

“Come away,” she said kindly, reaching out for his arm. But he had ceased to listen to her. Instead, he had turned and begun to play his pipes again. She glanced at him, then beyond to Fort William. The soldiers spilled out of the fortress like a determined column of red ants. A foolish wish, indeed, to hope that he had not been heard.

“The English are coming,” she said, resigned to another visit from Major Sedgewick. Another threat, another act of cruelty. What would he do today? Take away their livestock? It was gone, all the cattle and sheep. Trample their crops? Already done. Take their possessions? He’d already stripped the village of all those valuables not concealed in the neighboring caves.

“You should hide the pipes,” she said, biting back a more severe retort. It was worthless to be angry with him. In some ways he still lived in the past, when the
MacRaes had been kings of this land. “Hide yourself as well, Hamish,” she cautioned.

She left him without turning to see if he took her advice. Hamish would do as he wished, regardless of what she said.

By the time she’d descended the hill, the English soldiers had reached the village. Those people who were not quick enough to gather were roughly pulled from their cottages. Twenty-seven of them left, where once there had been over three hundred. But that had been in her youth, when the only English troops in Scotland had been General Wade with his eternal road-building.

She walked swiftly to the gathering place in the middle of the village. Major Sedgewick sat upon his horse, his officers similarly mounted and surrounding him. He was dressed in his usual fashion in a square-cut red coat, the lapels pinned back. His breeches were blue, his boots and belt of buff leather. His hair, golden and clubbed in the back, was lit by a last gleam of sunlight spearing through dark, boiling clouds.

She reached up with one hand and gripped her shawl tightly, engaging in a tug-of-war with the fierce wind, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Instead, it was the look in Sedgewick’s eyes as his gaze rested on her.

“What will they do, Leitis?” Dora asked from beside her. The older woman’s face was tight with worry. Leitis only shook her head, uncertain.

“What else can they do?” Angus asked. He leaned heavily on his cane and frowned at the English soldiers.

The major reminded her of a rat, with his narrow face and pointed teeth. He had carried out his orders
with great zeal. A lesson, then, about the English notion of victory. Keep people hungry and they will have no will to rebel. Watch as they bury first the old and then the young, and soon enough they will obey without question.