The Adventurer (9 page)

Isabella took up the chain and cupped the stone in the palm of her hand. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and willed the stone to respond the way it had the first time she’d held it at Versailles. She opened her eyes. A moment later, the stone began to glow.

“Och, Fergus ... d’you see tha’? It’s just like—”

“Of course I see it, you bluidy eediot. I’m not blind.”

The men who had gone belowdecks had returned. They were hauling crates and trunks, taking them from the
Hester Mary
onto their own ship.

One of them, Isabella noticed, was carrying her portmanteau.

“Wait! What are you doing? That is my satchel.”

Fergus, who was looking at her strangely, simply smiled. “Well, then, that is grand, lassie. You’ll be needin’ it. I’ve decided that you’re to be coming with us.”

Cape Wrath, Scotland

A sea wind keened softly through the room, fluttering the frayed edge of a worn tapestry that hung over the arrow slit cut into the castle’s stone wall.

The air was cool for summer, and the breeze chilled the slumbering figure lying on the shadowed bed. Outside, dawn was just breaking, and the echoing call of the kittiwake, carried on the wind, slowly roused the man from sleep.

Calum rolled onto his back amidst the rustling of the heather and bracken that stuffed his bed’s mattress. He lay still for several moments, his legs twisted in the bedclothes as he listened to the sound of the surf pounding its unrelenting rhythm upon the shore far below the castle walls. He blinked, focusing on the oaken beams that crisscrossed the ceiling above his head. His sleep had not been at all a restful one, and he waited for his senses to come fully awake, sluggish as the break of day after a night that had been filled with visions ...

A dark-haired merlass ...

... and a stone that swirled with the misty colors of the sea.

It was a dream he’d not had since he’d been a lad.

At one point he’d woken, certain he was no longer alone, had even risen from his bed to check the shadowed hall outside his chamber before he’d told himself he was imagining things, that this sleeplessness was due more to the peculiar “savory” sauce M’Cuick had given him with supper the night before than any ridiculous vision. Those “spices” they’d gotten off the galley they’d boarded near Berwick Point had probably been some Far Eastern form of morphia.

Yes, that was it. That had to be it.

Throwing off the bed woolens, Calum stood and stretched on bare feet against a cold stone floor. The chill air blew across his bare body as he pulled on his loose shirt and then wrapped and belted himself in the thick folds of his plaid. He walked to the corner washbasin, pausing to stare at the reflection that met him—

—and wondered at the stranger who he found staring back.

With his long hair tangled about his bearded face, a face that was weathered by the sea, all he needed was an eye patch to make the masquerade complete. He’d been playing the part of the outlawed pirate so long he’d begun to lose sight of the Calum Mackay of old, the Calum who had once believed in clan legend, who had watched that quiet stretch of shore, day after day, secure in the knowledge that a mermaid would one day appear to him.

Where was that lad now?

Blinking away his weariness, Calum poured chill water into the basin, cupped it in his hands, and doused the remnants of sleep from the foggy corners of his brain. His skin tingled from the cold as he finger-combed his hair into some semblance of order, then bound it with a slender strip of leather at his nape.

He left the room, making his way along the shadowed corridor and down the dim, derelict stairs, crossing floors that had once sported rich woven carpets, but were now cracked and sprouting naught but weeds. He walked through a chamber whose roof had collapsed some years before, leaving it open to the morning sky. The stone walls were green and slick with sea moss, and a family of storm petrels had taken to nesting on the window ledge that had once served as vantage for hopeful Mackay maidens. There were no tapestries to grace the stone walls, no warm and welcoming hearth, only ruin and neglect, and the echo of what had once been one of the great Highland fortresses.

Castle Wrath was the place of legend, where the kings of Scotland had once come for protection, and where Highland warriors had fought, often to the death. An ancient Mackay stronghold, the castle had been abandoned by the clan and its chief some centuries before for more civilized ground some miles to the east. Since then no one came any longer to Castle Wrath. Neglect and the harsh sea winds were its only occupant.

Surrounded on three sides by a dozen miles of empty moor, the castle stood on a rocky promontory that faced the mighty waters of the Minch. There were no lights ever lit at night that might be discerned by a passing ship, and any who looked upon the place would only see the same decaying ruin that Calum had found when he’d returned there a year before.

It was the perfect hideaway for a pirate.

Calum knew every stone, every underground passageway, for he had played amongst the derelict chambers as a child. There was a rabbit warren of tunnels that stretched all throughout the battered cliffside. With his foster brothers, Fergus and Lachlann, Calum had spent his youth conquering the world at Castle Wrath, using branches of driftwood for broadswords and anything else they could find for targes, muskets, and the occasional lochaber ax. Lachlann, being the youngest, was relegated to the role of the English, and thus was always defeated by the mightier Scots. Calum always played the role of his father, only in his imaginary kingdom, Artair Ros Mackay never died.

He conquered.

And he lived forever.

By all accounts, there hadn’t been a Scotsman truer than Artair Ros Mackay. He’d been in line for the clan chiefship when he’d made the decision to come out with the Jacobites back in 1715. He’d intended to lead his clan to glory, to restore Scotland’s stolen independence. Instead he’d fallen on the field of battle, leaving behind a young wife whose belly was already swollen with the next generation of Mackay warrior.

Reared on Jacobite tales of righteousness and honor, Calum had always known that the day would come when he, like his father, would be called to defend that which must be held most dear. That day had come late the summer of 1745 when news had reached them of the Stuart prince’s landing.

Calum hadn’t hesitated a moment in joining the rebellion, despite knowing that his clan, acting on the orders of his uncle the chief, had refused to come out officially for the prince. It was with an unfathomable shame that in the space of just three decades a clan that had for centuries been proudly, fiercely loyal to the royal Stuarts, even earning a peerage for it, had cartwheeled completely to the opposite side.

Now the Mackays claimed support for the Hanoverian usurper. And Calum stood alone. But he wasn’t fighting for his clan. He was fighting for Scotland, just as William Wallace, just as the Bruce, just as his father had done before him.

For seven legendary months Calum had marched with the Jacobite rebels, proudly wearing the white cockade in his bonnet. They’d been on the very brink of victory, taking first Prestonpans and then Falkirk in a routing of the Hanoverian forces. They’d marched all the way to Derby, within one hundred twenty miles of London. The Elector who styled himself George II had ordered his household readied for a swift evacuation.

Then had come Culloden.

For a battle that had lasted less than an hour, it shouldn’t have turned the very tide of the rebellion. But it had. It had left the rebels stunned, with little choice but to scatter to the hills with the government troops pursuing on their heels. For over a fortnight Calum and his kinsmen managed to elude capture, camping out in caves, hiding away in the heather, fully expecting to rejoin their regiment.

Fully expecting to fight again.

They had been near to Loch Carron on Scotland’s western coast, on their way to the isles where they had heard the Bonnie Prince was in hiding. Tired, hungry, and with little else but the clothes on their bodies to protect them from the harsh Highland conditions, they’d scarcely put up any fight when they were set upon by a company of English soldiers.

Calum had been away from the camp, foraging for anything he could find for them to eat. He’d bagged a hare, caught a salmon with his bare hands, and he’d returned just as the soldiers were dragging his brethren off, tied one to the other like beasts in the field.

He’d trailed them to Inverness, helpless to do anything as they were beaten and taunted, denied any but the barest minimum of dry meal on which to survive. A couple were killed. Others died from the severe conditions before they were ordered to Edinburgh, held in the hulk of a prison ship where they were to draw the lots that would determine when they would be put on trial for their lives.

But Calum had no intention of waiting that long.

He’d scoured the city taverns, the dark alleys, and the out-of-the-way wynds, gathering a crew of loyal countrymen. Then, in the name of the prince, Charles Edward Stuart, they stormed the government brig, HMS
Osprey,
where the Jacobite prisoners—where his brothers—were being held. Under cover of a moonless night, they overpowered the guard, and set them adrift in a small skiff on the sluggish waters of the Firth of Forth. It would have taken them till morning to reach the shore. By then, Calum and his men and the English
Osprey
had vanished into the mists.

Many regarded Culloden as the end of the rebellion. While the
battle
had indeed been lost, for Calum and a good many of the Jacobites who’d survived, it had never meant that the
war
had been lost as well. The rebels simply needed to regroup, to assemble their troops and plan their next strategy. They had beaten the English before and they could surely do it again. But they needed their men, who’d been scattered to the four winds, taken prisoner by the Hanoverians.

It was for this reason Calum had decided to take to the seas. To find them, those Highland heroes, and to bring them back to fight again. He’d started with the very man who had set them all on the road to rebellion that fateful summer before.

He’d gone to see the Bonnie Prince, Charles Edward Stuart.

It had been late autumn the year before when Calum had sailed the
Osprey,
now renamed
Adventurer,
for the coast of Calais. Leaving his crew to attend her, he went on to Paris where he found the prince, along with various Jacobite officers who’d fled Scotland, Lords Ogilvy and Elcho, Glenbucket, and the Lochiel heirs. As hoped, they were already preparing for a return to the Highlands. All they needed was the funds and the men to fight. When Calum told them his intentions, and offered himself and his crew in their service, they very swiftly awarded him a commission as a Jacobite privateer.

Calum’s mission was twofold. He was to hunt down and attempt to overtake any Hanoverian vessel. He was to free any prisoners, take on those who might want to join his crew, and seize any vessel that could then be put into service for the prince. English captives were to be set free, preferably in a place that would take some effort to return from. And a portion of the spoils were to be divided up amongst the crew, the rest held in reserve for the sovereignty. Thus, the
Adventurer
and any ships they seized became an unofficial fleet as part of the Jacobite navy.

The Elector George, however, hadn’t agreed.

He had declared the crew of the
Adventurer
naught but a “true and wicked scourge of the seas.”

Pirates.

Marauders.

Traitors to the Crown.

Though the authorities didn’t know Calum’s true identity, in absence of a name, they had begun calling him simply “The Adventurer.” Because of his success in slipping in virtually unchallenged, the reward for his capture had climbed to a prize of some twenty thousand pounds, second only to the Bonnie Prince himself.

Calum read the reports of his exploits, both real and imagined, with a mixture of amusement and utter disbelief. Somehow he had never likened himself to the lawless, godless brigands who had pillaged and plundered their way through the stories of his childhood. True, they raided ships and did indeed rob them. Yet, to their credit, they had never taken another life unwarranted and they always adhered to the honor and the code of the rules of war.

The Hanoverian forces could ne’er make that same claim.

In an attempt to quash the Scots into complete submission, a writ of “no quarter” had been issued by the government against any who had taken part in the rebellion. They unleashed the Elector’s own son, William, Duke of Cumberland, upon the Highlands in a mission that would earn him his nickname of “The Butcher.”

Homes were ravaged, castles that had stood since the days of William Wallace were pillaged and burned with nothing left behind to attest to their history but crumbling blackened shells. Innocent lives were put to the sword without benefit of trial, and any who dared to speak out against these injustices was immediately silenced, taken prisoner, and banished from their homeland.

It was those helpless thousands for whom Calum had taken up his cause, sailing the
Adventurer
to overtake the prison ships and liberate the condemned. If he died doing it then he would die with honor. During the past year, he had saved more lives than he could count, delivering some to safety in France, others back to their homes in the Highlands.

There was, however, a more personal motive for Calum as well.

When he had been born some six months after the death of his father, Calum’s uncle, who had been named clan chief in the interim, had ordered Calum given in fosterage to a Mackay clansman. It was a tradition deeply seated among the Scots. A lad, after all, needed a father, and since Calum’s own had been taken from him, Uilliam Bain had been appointed to take on the role.

Uilliam was a good man, a hardworking crofter, and a stalwart Scot. He had raised Calum as a brother to his own two sons, Fergus and Lachlann, and had instilled in him such qualities as Highland honor and Scottish virtue. They were traits that Uilliam Bain had worn proudly that April morning in 1746.