The Adventurer (3 page)

“But how do you know, Bess? How do you know when you’ve met the man you really, truly are meant to be with? It’s not as if there are scores of happy husbands and wives running about, all joined by fate and happy for it. Just look at our parents’ acquaintances. There are just as many who are miserable as there are those who are contented. Even when you first met Douglas you had no idea he was
the one.
As I remember it, you thought him naught but some poor dim-witted farmer ...”

“Bella, please, don’t remind me. I was the one who was dim-witted.”

“But you found him, Bess. Through circumstances that were almost unbelievable, you found the one you were meant to be with. You were one of the lucky ones. You always have been.”

Elizabeth had taken Isabella’s hand and squeezed it. “And so will you be, Bella. So will you ...”

So will you ...

“Bella? Bella, dear?”

A voice called from inside the house, breaking Isabella from her thoughts.

“Bella, are you there?”

Isabella turned toward the door. Only then did she realize that her eyes were wet with tears.

She quickly swept a hand over her face, blinking them away. She straightened her shoulders. “Yes, Aunt. I’m here. In the garden.”

There came the responding swish of a heavily brocaded skirt. “Ah, there you are.”

Lady Idonia Fenwycke was the elder sister of Isabella’s father, although they looked nothing at all alike, except perhaps in the roundness of their faces and a slight squaring of their chins. On her father, this feature only lent to the overall impression of ducal strength. On her aunt, however, it gave an appearance that was unfortunately mannish, contrasting with her small stature and the soft tuft of white hair that frizzed from beneath her linen cap like the tail of a rabbit.

Somewhat empty-headed (Elizabeth often referred to her as “dim”), Lady Idonia had passed her time in Paris accompanying her niece and reminiscing about the days when she had been to the French capital city before, back when her husband, Lord Fenwycke, had still been alive, during the splendid reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

At times, she even convinced herself she was back in that time.

“Here you are, dear,” she said, handing Isabella a folded and sealed parchment. “ ’Tis a letter just arrived for you.”

Isabella took the letter, noticing immediately that it was addressed to her in her mother’s hand.

Her heart gave a little jump as she stared at it in the light of the morning sun. “It comes from Drayton Hall.”

The duchess had promised she would write to Isabella before she left Paris to tell her their decision of a husband for her. She would detail his name, rank, and any other pertinent information she could offer, allowing Isabella to spend the few days it would take to make the crossing considering their choice.

When the letter hadn’t come during the previous weeks, and when Catherine had made no mention of it in any of her letters, Isabella had begun to wonder that the duke and duchess hadn’t been able to settle on anyone suitable at all.

Until now.

Even as she turned the letter over to break the wax seal, Isabella knew that as soon as she opened the page and read its contents, her life would never again be the same.

So she hesitated, staring at that seal, the impression of her father’s ducal crest, as if it had taken on the form of a Pandora’s Box.

“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”

Isabella looked up. “Hmm?”

“The letter, dear. Are you going to read it?”

Giving it a last glance, Isabella tucked the letter inside the pages of her journal to mark her place. Then she turned to her aunt with a small shake of her head. “Not just yet, Aunt. Perhaps later. It is our last day in Paris and I wouldn’t wish to waste the daylight. Besides, isn’t it time for our stroll along the river?”

Isabella wasn’t ready to give up on Paris just yet.

There is a corner of Scotland far beyond the Highland line, some ninety miles as the gannet flies northwest from Inverness. It is a restless, lonely place, the sort where the ghosts of the past seem a handsbreadth closer to earth than to heaven. The winds of the north and the west and the east converge upon this spot in a swirling contest of wills, and the sun rarely succeeds in shining through the heavy shroud of murk and mist that seems ever intent upon cloaking it.

To the fleet of the Norse king Haco who came to this land back in 1263, it was called simply the
Hvarf;
to the ancient Gael it was known as
Am Parbh.
Both names, translated from different lands, designated the “turning point” at which seafarers for centuries had marked their way along Scotland’s northern coast, to the south in one direction and to the east in the other. It was the Sassenach, however, whose unschooled tongue so often corrupted the languages of others, who was to give this place its present and more widely known name. In this particular instance, it was surprisingly fitting.

The place was called Cape Wrath.

Calum Mackay stood on that spot, at the very edge of the ancient land of Caledonia, on a red rock promontory that jutted out above an untamed sea. Cormorants circled far below him like leaves swirling on the breeze for he stood some four hundred feet above the level of the sea. He was alone on the windswept cliff, watching the sails of a retreating ship through the lens of his spyglass. The wind changed, pulling at the ends of his plaid and whipping his hair wildly about his face and neck. But he did not move, did not so much as shift his weight until the sails had disappeared into the mists of the east.

Were he to see himself reflected in the lens of that glass, Calum almost wouldn’t recognize himself. He looked a good deal more like some ancient Gaelic warrior than the gentleman’s son who’d attended university in Edinburgh little more than a decade before. His dark hair was long, longer than even he would have preferred to wear it, and the lower half of his face was covered by the scruff of a beard he used to conceal himself. His face around his eyes and nose was tanned from the sun and burned from the harsh sea wind against his hazel eyes. His mouth, set in a firm line, bridged a stern jaw beneath its bearded cover, a jaw that marked him as stubborn most of the time—and utterly uncompromising others.

This was a man who didn’t often relent. Once decided, he could almost never be swayed from his course. This inherent defiance showed even in the clothing he wore for beneath his coat, he wore the kilt in shades of dark green, black, and blue, and he carried his father’s broadsword, its basket hilt strapped around his waist alongside a brace of flintlock pistols that he kept loaded and primed should he be called upon to fire.

The English hadn’t yet outlawed them, although it was said they soon would. But Calum wasn’t concerned. For as long as he had a breath left in his body, the skirl of the bagpipe would be free to wail upon the wild wind, and the blade of the broadsword would forever flash and sweep to determine the line between right and wrong.

The laws of the Sassenach simply did not extend to Cape Wrath.

“They’ve gone?”

The winds had blown in so fiercely off the sea, Calum hadn’t heard the other man’s approach on the path behind him.

He turned, nodded, then checked the spyglass one last time to reassure himself the ship had truly gone. “Aye, just past Whiten Head. With a sturdy wind they’ll be ready to meet Belcourt’s ship afore it is in sight of the firth.”

Malcolm Mór MacCuick stood like a venerable Highland oak, reaching a height that approached seven feet. His hair was a mixture of dark and silver and long enough to just brush his great shoulders. His face was obscured by the bristly growth of a beard beneath eyes that had seen more misery than anyone should ever have to endure.

In the muscles of his arms alone M’Cuick held a strength that could crush the breath of life from a man. Calum knew this because he’d seen the man do it. Couple that with the steely swing of a broadsword and the man was a veritable weapon of war.

Calum first came across M’Cuick on the deck of an English frigate out on the English Channel. He’d been in the midst of taking on a half dozen Hanoverian soldiers who were of a mind to clap the man in irons. He’d pitched the first of them overboard, the second through the door of the hold. Before Calum had been able to blink, M’Cuick was through the next three and was dispensing with the sixth by way of a head butt that surely had cracked the poor man’s skull through.

It was only later that Calum would discover M’Cuick should never have been there at all. The ship had been a prison frigate transporting Jacobite prisoners to the Colonies. And M’Cuick had been no more a Jacobite rebel than that fat Hanoverian sitting on his stolen throne in St. James.

Malcolm MacCuick was a farmer, a father and a husband, who had made his simple living on a croft just outside Inverness. His crime had been nothing more than his proximity to the battlefield of Culloden, and a turn of events he could never have avoided.

It had been a frostbitten morning that sixteenth day of April the year before. M’Cuick had been with his son working the fields of his farm, struggling to force the plow through a sleety rain, preparing for the growing season not far ahead. He’d heard the report of the cannon echoing across the moor, caught the distant shouts of charging men. But M’Cuick had been determined to stay clear of any involvement in the troubles. The Crown, after all, had promised to spare those of its Highland subjects who refrained from joining the rebellion. No matter his political leanings, M’Cuick had a wife and young daughter at home, and his son not yet thirteen. His family needed him far more than the intrepid but wholly outnumbered Bonnie Prince.

The conflict, however, hadn’t been content to leave Malcolm M’Cuick in peace.

The first wounded had begun arriving shortly afore mid-afternoon, hobbling on legs that had been splattered with grapeshot, some carrying, others dragging those who’d been too weak or injured to walk on their own. M’Cuick had always been what one would call a kindhearted giant, and he could no more turn away the injured rebels than he could resist the beseeching eyes of his six-year-old daughter, named Mary for her mother, when she’d asked, “We’re going t’ help them, aren’t we, Da?”

By the time the company of pursuing government troops had arrived, M’Cuick and his wife had nearly twenty rebel wounded lying on beds of soft straw in their byre. The English captain, mad from the massacre he’d just left, didn’t hesitate long enough to listen to M’Cuick’s explanations. They simply peppered them all, he and his wife and children, with a volley of musket fire before setting the byre aflame, burning the wounded alive.

But musket fire hadn’t been enough to fell Malcolm Mór MacCuick.

He’d lain there, bleeding from a wound in his side, and listening to the screams of the rebels as they burned, listening, too, to the last struggling breaths of his son and his daughter, and then finally his wife who lay fallen beside him. He heard the laughter of the English soldiers as they’d looted his meager home, killing his small stock of sheep and cattle while smashing the dishes one by one that had been his wife’s most precious belongings.

He’d been found two days later by a band of rebel soldiers who had tended his wounds and fed him from what few provisions they had. A week later, as they’d tried to cross the River Ness, they’d been overtaken by a government detachment who were out scouting for Jacobite stragglers, taken and thrown in a prison to await their sentencing and transport as criminals.

But M’Cuick’s ship had never made it to the Colonies. As it had rounded Rattray Head on Scotland’s eastern coast, it was overtaken by another ship, a ship the English crew later swore had to be a ghost ship, painted a ghastly gray and parting the mist with the call of the pipes echoing on the wind like the wail of a
bean sidhe.

That ship, the
Adventurer,
was the same ship Calum had just stood to watch vanish into the east.

“Once they’ve got Belcourt’s ‘bibles,’ we’ll have that last piece we need,” Calum said to M’Cuick as he turned from his vantage and started back down the path.

“All we can do now is wait.”

The Palace of Versailles

Isabella stood at one end of the
Salon de l’Oeil-de-Bœuf
amid a mélange of posing courtiers—ducs, vicomtes, and painted comtesses, emissaries, liveried footmen, and palace guards. They all postured about trying very hard to be noticed, some voices droning in a cacophony of French and English, others in Italian, and still others in Portuguese.

Broad panniered skirts in colorful silks and satins caromed one into the other. Elbows, dripping lace, prodded unsuspecting backsides. Even the air was congested by a miscellany of scents—human perspiration at battle with bergamot, neroli, and ambergris—while hair powder drifted about velvet-clad shoulders like the first dusting of a winter’s snow.

With each turn of the clock, the mob seemed to swell, until very soon Isabella found it difficult to simply breathe.

“I do hope it doesn’t take much longer,” she murmured more to herself than to anyone else, as she struggled with the cumbersome box she held. It was a gift for the king from her father, and it had been no easy task carrying it there.

She caught a glimpse of the palace gardens out a nearby window and found herself longing to step out for some air, even as she knew she daren’t risk missing her name when it was finally called.

They had arrived at the palace some three hours earlier, handing the guardsman who met their coach the letter that would hopefully grant them an audience with the king. They’d been shown to the salon to wait ...

... and wait ...

... and wait some more while the crowd had only swelled, to the point that Isabella seriously questioned whether another person could possibly fit inside the room.

Just then she noticed the imposing figure of a lady, her skirts at least five feet in breadth, pushing her way through the overcrowded doorway like a beribboned battleship.

Apparently another person
could
fit into the room after all.