Dragonfly in Amber, Page 88

  “I doubt they’ll be missed for some time, if at all,” Jamie had said, discussing the plan with me beforehand. “Desertion is rife, all through the army. Ewan Cameron told me they’d lost twenty men from his regiment within the last week. It’s winter, and men want to be settling their homes and making things ready for the spring planting. In any case, it’s sure there’s no one to spare to go after them, even should their leavin’ be noticed.”

  “Have you given up, then, Jamie?” I had asked, laying a hand on his arm. He had rubbed a hand tiredly over his face before answering.

  “I dinna ken, Sassenach. It may be too late; it may not. I canna tell. It was foolish to go south so near to the winter; and more foolish still to waste time in beseiging Stirling. But Charles hasna been defeated, and the chiefs—some of them—are coming in answer to his summons. The MacKenzies, now, and others because of them. He’s twice as many men now as we had at Preston. What will that mean?” He flung up his hands, frustrated.

  “I dinna ken. There’s no opposition; the English are terrified. Well, ye know; you’ve seen the broadsheets.” He smiled without humor. “We spit small children and roast them ower the fire, and dishonor the wives and daughters of honest men.” He gave a snort of wry disgust. While such crimes as theft and insubordination were common among the Highland army, rape was virtually unknown.

  He sighed, a brief, angry sound. “Cameron’s heard a rumor that King Geordie’s makin’ ready to flee from London, in fear that the Prince’s army will take the city soon.” He had—a rumor that had reached Cameron through me, from Jack Randall. “And there’s Kilmarnock, and Cameron. Lochiel, and Balmerino, and Dougal, with his MacKenzies. Bonny fighters all. And should Lovat send the men he’s promised—God, maybe it would be enough. Christ, should we march into London—” He hunched his shoulders, then stretched suddenly, shrugging as though to fight his way out of a strangling shirt.

  “But I canna risk it,” he said simply. “I canna go to Beauly, and leave my own men here, to be taken God knows where. If I were there to head them—that would be something else. But damned if I’ll leave them for Charles or Dougal to throw at the English, and me a hundred miles away at Beauly.”

  So it was arranged. The Lallybroch men—including Fergus, who had protested vociferously, but been overruled—would desert, and depart inconspicuously for home. Once our business at Beauly was completed, and we had returned to join Charles—well, then it would be time enough to see how matters went.

  “That’s why I’m takin’ Murtagh with us,” Jamie had explained. “If it looks all right, then I shall send him to Lallybroch to fetch them back.” A brief smile lightened his somber face. “He doesna look much on a horse, but he’s a braw rider, is Murtagh. Fast as chain lightning.”

  He didn’t look it at the moment, I reflected, but then, there was no emergency at hand. In fact, he was moving even slower than usual; as we topped one hill, I could see him at the bottom, pulling his horse to a halt. By the time we had reached him, he was off, glaring at the packhorse’s saddle.

  “What’s amiss, then?” Jamie made to get down from his own saddle, but Murtagh waved him irritably off.

  “Nay, nay, naught to trouble ye. A binding’s snapped, is all. Get ye on.”

  With no more than a nod of acknowledgment, Jamie reined away, and I followed him.

  “Not very canty today, is he?” I remarked, with a flip of the hand back in Murtagh’s direction. In fact, the small clansman had grown more testy and irritable with each step in the direction of Beauly. “I take it he’s not enchanted with the prospect of visting Lord Lovat?”

  Jamie smiled, with a brief backward glance at the small, dark figure, bent in absorption over the rope he was splicing.

  “Nay, Murtagh’s no friend of Old Simon. He loved my father dearly”—his mouth quirked to one side—“and my mother, as well. He didna care for Lovat’s treatment of them. Or for Lovat’s methods of getting wives. Murtagh’s got an Irish grandmother, but he’s related to Primrose Campbell through his mother’s side,” he explained, as though this made everything crystal clear.

  “Who’s Primrose Campbell?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Oh.” Jamie scratched his nose, considering. The wind off the sea was rising steadily, and his hair was being whipped from its lacing, ruddy wisps flickering past his face.

  “Primrose Cambell was Lovat’s third wife—still is, I suppose,” he added, “though she’s left him some years since and gone back to her father’s house.”

  “Popular with women, is he?” I murmured.

  Jamie snorted. “I suppose ye can call it that. He took his first wife by a forced marriage. Snatched the Dowager Lady Lovat from her bed in the middle o’ the night, married her then and there, and went straight back to bed with her. Still,” he added fairly, “she did later decide she loved him, so maybe he wasna so bad.”

  “Must have been rather special in bed, at least,” I said flippantly. “Runs in the family, I expect.”

  He cast me a mildly shocked look, which dissolved into a sheepish grin.

  “Aye, well,” he said. “If he was or no, it didna help him much. The Dowager’s maids spoke up against him, and Simon was outlawed and had to flee to France.”

  Forced marriages and outlawry, hm? I refrained from further remark on family resemblances, but privately trusted that Jamie wouldn’t follow in his grandfather’s footsteps with regard to subsequent wives. One had apparently been insufficient for Simon.

  “He went to visit King James in Rome and swear his fealty to the Stuarts,” Jamie went on, “and then turned round and went straight to William of Orange, King of England, who was visiting in France. He got James to promise him his title and estates, should a restoration come about, and then—God knows how—got a full pardon from William, and was able to come home to Scotland.”

  Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. Apparently it wasn’t just attractiveness to the opposite sex, then.

  Simon had continued his adventures by returning later to France, this time to spy on the Jacobites. Being found out, he was thrown into prison, but escaped, returned to Scotland, masterminded the assembling of the clans under the guise of a hunting-party on the Braes of Mar in 1715—and then managed to get full credit with the English Crown for putting down the resultant Rising.

  “Proper old twister, isn’t he?” I said, completely intrigued. “Though I suppose he can’t have been so old then; only in his forties.” Having heard that Lord Lovat was now in his middle seventies, I had been expecting something fairly doddering and decrepit, but was rapidly revising my expectations, in view of these stories.

  “My grandsire,” Jamie observed evenly, “has by all reports got a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase. Anyway,” he went on, dismissing his grandfather’s character with a wave of his hand, “then he married Margaret Grant, the Grant o’ Grant’s daughter. It was after she died that he married Primrose Campbell. She was maybe eighteen at the time.”

  “Was Old Simon enough of a catch for her family to force her into it?” I asked sympathetically.

  “By no means, Sassenach.” He paused to brush the hair out of his face, tucking the stray locks back behind his ears. “He kent well enough that she wouldna have him, no matter if he was rich as Croesus—which he wasn’t—so he had her sent a letter, saying her mother was fallen sick in Edinburgh, and giving the house there she was to go to.”

  Hastening to Edinburgh, the young and beautiful Miss Campbell had found not her mother, but the old and ingenious Simon Fraser, who had informed her that she was in a notorious house of pleasure, and that her only hope of preserving her good name was to marry him immediately.

  “She must have been a right gump, to fall for that one,” I remarked cynically.

  “Well, she was verra young,” Jamie said defensively, “and it wasna an idle threat, either; had she refused him, Old Simon would ha’ ruined her reputation without a second thought. In any event, sh
e married him—and regretted it.”

  “Hmph.” I was busy doing sums in my head. The encounter with Primrose Campbell had been only a few years ago, he’d said. Then…“Was it the Dowager Lady Lovat or Margaret Grant who was your grandmother?” I asked curiously.

  The high cheekbones were chapped by sun and wind; now they flushed a sudden, painful red.

  “Neither one,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, in the direction of Beaufort Castle. His lips were pressed tightly together.

  “My father was a bastard,” he said at last. He sat straight as a sword in the saddle, and his knuckles were white, fist clenched on the reins. “Acknowledged, but a bastard. By one of the Castle Downie maids.”

  “Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem a lot to add.

  He swallowed hard; I could see the ripple in his throat.

  “I should ha’ told ye before,” he said stiffly. “I’m sorry.”

  I reached out to touch his arm; it was hard as iron.

  “It doesn’t matter, Jamie,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that nothing I said could make a difference. “I don’t mind in the slightest.”

  “Aye?” he said at last, still staring straight ahead. “Well…I do.”

  * * *

  The steadily freshening wind off Moray Firth rustled its way through a hillside of dark pines. The country here was an odd combination of mountain slope and seashore. Thick growth of alders, larch, and birch blanketed the ground on both sides of the narrow track we followed, but as we approached the dark bulk of Beaufort Castle, over everything floated the effluvium of mud flats and kelp.

  We were in fact expected; the kilted, ax-armed sentries at the gate made no challenge as we rode through. They looked at us curiously enough, but seemingly without enmity. Jamie sat straight as a king in his saddle. He nodded once to the man on his side, and received a similar nod in return. I had the distinct feeling that we entered the castle flying a white flag of truce; how long that state would last was anyone’s guess.

  We rode unchallenged into the courtyard of Beaufort Castle, a small edifice as castles went, but sufficiently imposing, for all that, built of the native stone. Not so heavily fortified as some of the castles I had seen to the south, it looked still capable of withstanding a certain amount of abrasion. Wide-mouthed gun-holes gaped at intervals along the base of the outer walls, and the keep still boasted a stable opening onto the courtyard.

  Several of the small Highland ponies were housed in this, heads poking over the wooden half-door to whicker in welcome to our own mounts. Near the wall lay a number of packs, recently unloaded from the ponies in the stable.

  “Lovat’s summoned a few men to meet us,” Jamie observed grimly, noting the packs. “Relatives, I expect.” He shrugged. “At least they’ll be friendly enough to start with.”

  “How do you know?”

  He slid to the ground and reached up to help me down.

  “They’ve left the broadswords wi’ the luggage.”

  Jamie handed over the reins to an ostler who came out of the stables to meet us, dusting his hands on his breeks.

  “Er, now what?” I murmured to Jamie under my breath. There was no sign of chatelaine or majordomo; nothing like the cheery, authoritative figure of Mrs. FitzGibbons that had welcomed us to Castle Leoch two years before.

  The few ostlers and stable-lads about glanced at us now and then, but continued about their tasks, as did the servants who crossed the courtyard, lugging baskets of laundry, bundles of peat, and all the other cumbrous paraphernalia that living in a stone castle demanded. I looked approvingly after a burly manservant sweating under the burden of two five-gallon copper cans of water. Whatever its shortcomings in the hospitality department, Beaufort Castle at least boasted a bathtub somewhere.

  Jamie stood in the center of the courtyard, arms crossed, surveying the place like a prospective buyer of real estate who harbors black doubts about the drains.

  “Now we wait, Sassenach,” he said. “The sentries will ha’ sent word that we’re here. Either someone will come down to us…or they won’t.”

  “Um,” I said. “Well, I hope they make up their minds about it soon; I’m hungry, and I could do with a wash.”

  “Aye, ye could,” Jamie agreed, with a brief smile as he looked me over. “You’ve a smut on your nose, and there’s teasel-heads caught in your hair. No, leave them,” he added, as my hand went to my head in dismay. “It looks bonny, did ye do it on purpose or no.”

  Definitely no, but I left them. Still, I sidled over to a nearby watering trough, to inspect my appearance and remedy it so far as was possible using nothing but cold water.

  It was something of a delicate situation, so far as old Simon Fraser was concerned, I thought, bending over the trough and trying to make out which blotches on my reflected complexion were actual smudges and which caused by floating bits of hay.

  On the one hand, Jamie was a formal emissary from the Stuarts. Whether Lovat’s promises of support for the cause were honest, or mere lip service, chances were that he would feel obliged to welcome the Prince’s representative, if only for the sake of courtesy.

  On the other hand, said representative was an illegitimately descended grandson who, if not precisely disowned in his own person, certainly wasn’t a bosom member of the family, either. And I knew enough by now of Highland feuds to know that ill feeling of this sort was unlikely to be diminished by the passage of time.

  I ran a wet hand across my closed eyes and back across my temples, smoothing down stray wisps of hair. On the whole, I didn’t think Lord Lovat would leave us standing in the courtyard. He might, however, leave us there long enough to realize fully the dubious nature of our reception.

  After that—well, who knew? We would most likely be received by Lady Frances, one of Jamie’s aunts, a widow who—from all we had heard from Tullibardine—managed domestic affairs for her father. Or, if he chose to receive us as a diplomatic ambassage rather than as family connections, I supposed that Lord Lovat himself might appear to receive us, supported by the formal panoply of secretary, guards, and servants.

  This last possibility seemed most likely, in view of the time it was taking; after all, you wouldn’t keep a full-dress entourage standing about—it would take some time to assemble the necessary personnel. Envisioning the sudden appearance of a fully equipped earl, I had second thoughts about leaving teasel-heads tangled in my hair, and leaned over the trough again.

  At this point, I was interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the passageway behind the mangers. A squat-bodied elderly man in open shirt and unbuckled breeks stepped out into the courtyard, shoving aside a plump chestnut mare with a sharp elbow and an irritable “Tcha!” Despite his age, he had a back like a ramrod, and shoulders nearly as broad as Jamie’s.

  Pausing by the horse trough, he glanced around the courtyard as though looking for someone. His eye passed over me without registering, then suddenly snapped back, clearly startled. He stepped forward and thrust his face pugnaciously forward, an unshaven gray beard bristling like a porcupine’s quills.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Claire Fraser, er, I mean, Lady Broch Tuarach,” I said, belatedly remembering my dignity. I gathered my self-possession, and wiped a drop of water off my chin. “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  A firm hand gripped my elbow from behind, and a resigned voice from somewhere above my head said, “That, Sassenach, is my grandsire. My lord, may I present my wife?”

  * * *

  “Ah?” said Lord Lovat, giving me the benefit of a cold blue eye. “I’d heard you’d married an Englishwoman.” His tone made it clear that this act confirmed all his worst suspicions about the grandson he’d never met.

  He raised a thick gray brow in my direction, and shifted the gimlet stare to Jamie. “No more sense than your father, it seems.”

  I could see Jamie’s hands twitch slightly, resisting the urge to clench into fists.
<
br />   “At the least, I had nay need to take a wife by rape or trickery,” he observed evenly.

  His grandfather grunted, unfazed by the insult. I thought I saw the corner of his wrinkled mouth twitch, but wasn’t sure.

  “Aye, and ye’ve gained little enough by the bargain ye struck,” he observed. “Though at that, this one’s less expensive than that MacKenzie harlot Brian fell prey to. If this sassenach wench brings ye naught, at least she looks as though she costs ye little.” The slanted blue eyes, so much like Jamie’s own, ran over my travel-stained gown, taking in the unstitched hem, the burst seam, and the splashes of mud on the skirt.

  I could feel a fine vibration run through Jamie, and wasn’t sure whether it was anger or laughter.

  “Thanks,” I said, with a friendly smile at his lordship. “I don’t eat much, either. But I could use a bit of a wash. Just water; don’t bother about the soap, if it comes too dear.”