The Adventurer (14 page)

“ ’Tis the spoils of war, miss. Calum, he’s got a letter of marque from the Bonnie Prince himsel’, designating him a privateer in the Jacobite navy. ’Tis sure, we get to enjoy some of it, but most of it is kept here for the day when the Bonnie Prince will return as the rightful holder of the Crown of Scotland. And he only takes from the same men who are molesting the Scottish countryside. Look there.” He pointed to two paintings that hung from the kitchen wall. They were framed in gilt and looked completely out of place amongst the pots and pans that lined the wall beside them. “Those were to be delivered to a Lord William Blakely, a decorated Hanoverian commander who had given his troops free rein to plunder their way across the glens around Fort William. He bought those paintings with the money he made selling off Scottish cattle and sheep that he stole from innocent crofters like mysel’.”

He turned her attention to an elegant rosewood sideboard that stood against the far wall. “That pretty piece there was making its way to Monkston Hall.”

Isabella recognized the name. “The Earl of Monkston?”

“Aye. The same Earl of Monkston who begged, bribed, and outright threatened to ensure the passing of the Act of Union forty years ago, thereby stripping Scotland of its independence. There are brandies imported for the Duke of Hartley; spices and teas and chocolates from Holland bound for St. James Palace.” M’Cuick’s eyes lit up then. “Aye, but the true gem isna to be found in this kitchen.”

Isabella looked at him. “It isn’t?”

“ ’Tis a bonnie Trakehner stallion that had been given as a congratulatory gift to the Duke of Cumberland, from his cousin, Frederick II of Prussia. He’s seventeen hands of pure elegance and strength he is, black as the devil with a blaze of white slashed from forelock to nostril.”

“I read about that horse,” Isabella said, remembering the headlines in her father’s copy of the
London Evening Post.
“Some even accused Louis of France of having masterminded the theft of the horse when it was reported he had been riding a new mount very similar in color in the Bois de Boulogne.”

M’Cuick chuckled. “Aye. Wonder wha’ that butcher Cumberland would say if he knew that his prized Prussian pony is now grazing on Highland pastures, wandering brae and burn, and enjoying the company of a rather appreciative troop of pretty Highland mares, eh?”

Isabella fell silent as she tried to take in everything she’d just learned. It was not at all what she’d expected when she’d first set out to question Malcolm about Calum Mackay. In fact, it was just the opposite.

“So tha’s it, eh?” Malcolm said several moments later, pulling her thoughts back. “Tha’s the stone they’re all talkin’ about?”

Isabella simply nodded.

“ ’Tis a wee bit smaller than I expected. A pretty thing it is, though.” He paused, then added, “They say ’tis enchanted.” Malcolm took a sip of his tea. “They also say that you’re a mermaid come to bring the stone back.”

He was testing her, she knew. Isabella looked at him. She didn’t reply.

“Are you a mermaid, lass?”

In the short amount of time Isabella had spent with him, she’d found she liked the man immensely. It made it difficult for her to lie to him. So instead she said, “What do you think, Malcolm?”

M’Cuick looked at her, searching her eyes. Then he simply smiled. “I think”—he took another sip of tea—“I think that I’ve seen naething yet to suggest that you cudna be a mermaid. And until I do, I’m for thinkin’ who am I to say tha’ you aren’t?”

Night was falling fast as Calum made his way back to Castle Wrath.

The rendezvous that had called him away that morning had taken longer than he’d expected. There had been details to go over, plans to make. Though the weather had held fair throughout the day, the skies had thickened steadily along the ten miles he had crossed along the journey back, threatening rain.

Even now the wind off the North Sea bullied the empty stretch of moorland he traveled, brisk and biting against the cover of the belted plaid he had drawn up around his shoulders. His hair had been harassed from the tie that held it and was now blowing about his face and shoulders. Deer-hide
cuarans
wrapped around his feet and lower legs, lacing from toe to just below his knees. They, and the plaid, would be his only protection should the skies above him suddenly decide to break with the downpour that so often buffeted this part of the Highlands. There were no trees, not a one, beneath which he might take cover, only empty moorland and rolling hills that in the coming months would be splashed red and violet with the sweetly scented carpet of Highland heather.

Calum paused for a moment on the last rise, called Dunan Mór, to take in the landscape that stretched out before him. It was a breathtaking country. He had traveled to lands afar, had sailed the seas, and had himself stood in the presence of a prince among the most palatial surroundings. Yet to him no place had ever approached his homeland in comparison.

To the north there were stark awesome cliff sides that plummeted to the sea as if cleaved by a giant claymore. To the east, mountains watched over valleys boggy with rainfall, cut through by rushing burns whose waters ran clear as glass. The ancient Reay forest lay to the south, where clan chiefs for centuries had hunted for deer and other game, and where legends of witches and otherworldly folk abounded.

But it was at its farthest point, to the north and to the west, that Cape Wrath awaited—ancestral fortress, birthplace of warriors past ...

... Calum’s home.

It had been his father’s legacy, left to him by his father, who’d been given it by his father before him, the former clan chief. It was the place Artair Ros Mackay had always intended to revive. It had been his dream, Calum had been told by those who had known him, to return the castle to the glory it had held generations before.

It was a dream that had never been realized.

Artair Ros Mackay had not been born with a warring spirit. He’d had a scholar’s heart and had spent his childhood years poring through the pages of his country’s history, reading of the great patriots like Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Andrew de Moray. It was in those very studies that a rebellious seed had first been planted.

He’d fallen, Calum had been told, in 1715 at the battle of Sheriffmuir, leaving his wife with her belly swollen with his heir. He’d never returned to Cape Wrath. Artair’s body had been thrown into an unmarked grave with all the other Jacobite casualties that day. And from then on, the Mackay stone had simply vanished.

Until now.

As Calum stood on that windswept bluff, he couldn’t detect so much as the flickering of a candle coming from the shadowy, almost imperceptible silhouette of the castle ...

... the castle where
she
waited.

The one who’d returned the stone.

The lass who called herself a mermaid.

In truth, Calum had thought of little else but her all the day.

He refused to acknowledge any truth to her tale of who she was and where she’d come from. She was no more a mermaid than that Hanoverian usurper sitting in London was his rightful sovereign. It was naught but a fabrication—how could it not be? Even if she did seem to know things she shouldn’t, Calum was reasonably certain that if his ancestors ever were going to send him a mermaid, it would not be in the form of a Sassenach, no matter how lovely a lass she might be.

Och, and lovely she was.

In fact, if he was ever to envision his mythical mermaid, the one he used to dream of as a lad,
she
would be it.

It was the contrasts he saw just in looking at her, her hair, black as night, wild as the north wind, and thick against fair, fair skin that looked untouched as the newest snow. Even in those few short moments he’d spent with her, looked at her, her image had been burned into his memory. He was unable to deny the suggestion of the mysterious that seemed to surround her. It was her eyes, he decided along that lonely stretch of a peat cutter’s path he walked, more so than anything else about her. For they were indeed a mermaid’s eyes, blue as the sea depths, and turned just slightly aslant, giving her the look of the faerie folk.

But she wasn’t any faerie.

She was a Sassenach, and she was playing at some sort of game.

Somehow, Calum couldn’t quite say how, the lass had known who he was without his even saying. Thus she could identify him, could identify all of them. He couldn’t allow her to leave. Were they to set her free, she could have the whole of the Hanoverian army beating at his doorstop within weeks, days even. The best reason for their success thus far in raiding the English’s ships had been due to the fact that they were all of them unknown. Without a name to give the enemy, the Crown was hard-pressed to pursue them. And as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Calum and the other members of his crew had either been left for dead on a battlefield or banished from the kingdom ...

Forgotten.

Ghosts.

And Calum meant to keep it that way, even if it meant holding the lass against her will. She had the stone. And now that it was back among the Mackays, he had no intention of allowing it to vanish again.

For as long as he could remember, Calum had been fascinated by the
Clach na MacAoidh.
Legend had it that the charm had foretold the fortunes, both good and bad, of the clan chiefs, and that just the dipping of it into water would cure any sickness. It was said to change color to predict the outcome of an impending battle, and Calum often wondered if his father had consulted it that final fateful day. Throughout his childhood he had imagined himself one day bringing the stone back to the clan, in honor of his father. It was as if he’d always known deep down that the day would come.

Which only made Calum wonder just how the lass had come by the stone.

It was a question he intended to find an answer for that night.

Calum slipped easily along the crumbling stone wall that had once stood as the castle’s curtain wall, where guards had walked the parapets many a long-ago night. The entrance to the castle was along a narrow stretching pathway that wound its way up a rise on its southern side. In days of yore, access to the castle compound had been through a single opening that was defended by both portcullis and numerous gun ports. Over the past half century since the castle had been abandoned, the original guardhouse had fallen to neglect, the portcullis gate long removed and taken elsewhere.

Surrounding the courtyard, inside, there was a scattering of smaller buildings set about the two central towers. In its heyday, Castle Wrath had been more a separate walled city than a castle. Its remoteness had made it necessary for self-sufficiency. There had been gardens, stables with a blacksmith’s forge where tools and pots for the kitchen had been cast along with great Scottish claymores, even shoes for the chief’s horses. In the middle of the courtyard, ringed in stone, was the cistern that provided the castle with its fresh water by way of a well dug deep into the cliff side. There were storehouses, a brewery, a mill for grinding meal, and a chapel whose arch yet stood in sacred defiance of the north winds.

Calum crossed to the main tower where he took the small tin lamp that awaited. They used smuggler’s lamps to light their way, enclosed on all but one side, to shield the light from being seen outside. Ahead, in the hall, he could already hear the others, conversations droning, disagreements breaking out and then fizzling just as quickly. A fire would be blazing in the great stone hearth and ale would be flowing from wooden kegs as swiftly as the waters of the River Naver.

When he reached the doorway, Calum saw that a company of some fifty of his men, of all ages and from all across the Highlands, had gathered. They were there to collect their portions of the spoils.

After that first mission when Calum had commandeered the HMS
Osprey,
he had set about establishing a network of operatives in both London and Edinburgh. It was how he was informed when a ship carrying the convicted was preparing to set sail for the Colonies. A messenger would arrive, like earlier that day, and they would prepare for another mission. They certainly couldn’t save them all, but those they did save would often ask to join Calum’s crew. They had so little left at home to return to.

If they didn’t take a place on board the
Adventurer
or one of the other ships they’d turned to the prince’s service, the men would return to various posts throughout the countryside to work as clandestine scouts or informants. For those who sought to join the crew of his ship, Calum had imposed a foremost rule. They could have no wife, and no children. There would be no exceptions.

It was not that he had anything against a man having a family. What they undertook was a dangerous mission. They could, any of them, be overtaken at any moment, and Calum could not bear the possibility of having to tell any child that his father had been killed because of their association with him.

Thus far they’d been fortunate. In the past ten months, they’d lost just one, and that had been due more to the lad’s own rash stupidity than anything else. He’d been young. He’d been priming for the fight, not fighting for the cause. And because of it he’d ended up with an English soldier’s musket ball imbedded in his temple. Yet, even though he knew there was no way he could have prevented it, the lad’s death had not sat easily with Calum.

“Laird!”

M’Cuick called out to Calum from across the room when he saw him standing in the doorway. From the tenor of his voice and the spark in his eye, it appeared he’d been imbibing from the wine kegs for some time.

“Come, join us! There’s French wine and tobacco weed from the Colonies. And you should see the silver pissing pot our boys got! Engraved and everything ... can you believe tha’? They have made a fine haul this time, they have!”

As Calum came into the room, nodding in greeting to the men just returned from
The Adventurer’s
latest foray, he saw that indeed they had made rather an impressive haul. In addition to the ship carrying Belcourt’s belongings, they had raided two other English vessels. There were furnishings in elegant mahogany, imported silks and laces, expensive cellars of salt, and casks of highly taxed teas. The men would divide most of it amongst themselves, and sell whatever they didn’t wish to keep. Calum rarely took any of the pieces for himself, unless they came across something that was of particular value either to him or to the cause, such as Cumberland’s stallion—or the personal traveling trunks of Lord Henry Belcourt.