Gentleman Captain (34 page)

We rode on further up the hill a little way, and then he said quite suddenly to me, 'I am not your enemy, Matthew.' His directness unnerved me, and I made no reply. 'I had to be discreet when you and Captain Judge were at my tower. I had to be discreet until I was certain of ... well, no matter. Let us say, of a number of things.'

'I have not looked on you as my enemy, sir,' said I, dissembling with some awkwardness.

Glenrannoch smiled. 'Perhaps not, Captain, though I have little doubt that the king has. But there are many matters of which Charles Stuart is unaware. Of these lands he has always been profoundly ignorant, for his northern kingdom is of but small concern to him as he sits in his Palace of Whitehall, surrounded by sycophants and mistresses. I can understand this in some part, for my cousin of Argyll treated him abominably while he was here. Perhaps our sovereign lord can be forgiven for remembering Scotland with detestation. But there are other matters that he should know better.' He looked away from me, gazing out over his territory. 'In my experience, Captain,' he said quietly, 'wars are made when clever men act stupidly, or when stupid men think they are clever. They tell me King Charles is a clever man.' He turned and looked intently into my eyes. 'But believe me, Matthew, in the business that you are now about, he has acted more stupidly than I would have imagined possible.'

Nowadays, every street urchin speaks of our illustrious German George in such terms, or worse. Thus far has the divine mystery of royalty departed from Britain. Back then, though, I was not accustomed to hearing the king spoken of in this way, even by those who, like my brother-in-law Sir Venner Garvey, privately despised him.

I was still groping for the right words to defend His Majesty against Glenrannoch's unforgivable words as we breasted the hill; a second later, all was forgotten. I reined my horse to a halt, astonished at the sight that lay before me. There, on the level ground below, stood an army. Two, perhaps three thousand men, all at attention, all armed. Many had the great basket-hilted swords of those parts, but whole regiments bore pikes, others muskets. All wore Highland garb, and most were in colours that I recognized from Glenrannoch's retainers. The same colours adorned the black-and-yellow flags that flew proudly before them.

The general looked at me. 'The host of Clan Campbell, Captain,' he said, and turning his horse he began to pick his way down the slope towards his remarkable private army.

I sat for a moment, my heart hammering in my chest. I could hear the others clattering up the track, then a sharp intake of breath from Le Blanc. With mounting trepidation, I urged my horse on down the steep track towards Glenrannoch, a slight figure dismounting before his men. There were no cheers, no movement. This was not a rabble of wild clansmen; this was an army, trained and disciplined.

The general was waiting for me. I dismounted, and we turned to walk in review along each line.

'As you see, Captain, I have no need to wait for an arsenal from Flanders.'
Then he does know.
'If I so ordered, this army could be in Edinburgh in days. Nothing under Charles Stuart's control could stand against me. Certainly not poor old Willie Douglas and his regiment–who spent last night under the walls of Kilchurn Castle, incidentally. I pray they didn't suffer more desertions overnight. Twenty-three since setting out,' said Glenrannoch, and frowned. 'But, Matthew, you must understand one thing: that whatever His Majesty may think of my loyalty, he has it; without precondition, and in full degree.'

I wished to believe this quiet, plausible man. I wished to trust him. But the silent army seemed menacing and unnatural. And, too, I recalled how quiet and plausible Lucifer had seemed to Eve when he took the form of the serpent in Eden.

We moved to the head of the second line. Glenrannoch straightened one man's pike and spoke to another about the state of his sheiling. As we walked on, he turned to me once more.

'I've witnessed enough of war, Matthew Quinton. I have seen horrors that would turn the stomach of any man. I witnessed the Sack of Magdeburg, and in my day I have ordered atrocities that were almost its equal.' He looked away, over the hills to the east, as though seeking a glimpse of the blood-drenched graves of Germany. In that quiet, almost timid voice, he continued. 'I vowed that I would never lead another army, nor order more young men to their deaths in pointless wars decreed by idiots. But fate forces me to march one last time, to fight one last battle.'

We reached the end of the second line and turned to review the third. I now knew, or thought I knew, the enemy against whom Glenrannoch would fight. But if I was to believe this man, and trust him, I had at last to know the answer to the question that had haunted me since our first meeting in his Tower of Rannoch.

'How is it, General, that you know my mother?'

He stopped to chide the next soldier in line. Only then did he turn his scarred face directly toward me. 'Your mother, and her mother, and your father, and his father and mother. I knew them all. It was a different age, Matthew. A better age. We old people are too prone to say such things, I know. But perhaps few young men would dispute my case, after all these years of war and death.' He smiled faintly. 'And there are others of your family that I have come to know, that would surprise you.'

As we walked, Glenrannoch began to speak of himself and I listened with equal measures of apprehension and anticipation. He had come to England, he said, in the winter of the year '24, when he was the same age that I was. A faction at court wished to set up a new favourite to bring down the king's great love, and the young Colin Campbell was to play the part.

'But although I looked comely enough in those days, as most young Scots do before the whisky takes hold, old King James favoured a different breed. Long legs, above all. How height and looks can change history, Matthew.'
The portrait in the hall of the Tower of Rannoch
: the handsome young courtier, unscarred and bright of countenance, would be the young Colin Campbell himself. 'My rival remained unassailable, although he soon became a good friend to me. He had the height and the legs, did Geordie Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham.'

A faint memory stirred.
Remember his grace...
the mysterious note found upon the dead Harker. Vyvyan had been convinced that it referred to the Duke of Buckingham–himself most foully murdered in a Portsmouth tavern–and that it served as a warning. A warning Harker ignored with fatal consequences. Or was there more to it? Could there have been a link between Harker's death and Buckingham's? They had known each other, once–and Glenrannoch, too ... I thrust the thought away impatiently. This was neither the time nor the place to dwell on Vyvyan's mad delusions, nor on deaths long ago. I had fresher prospects of death before me, my own among them.

The general was oblivious to my thoughts and continued the story of his youth. The young Colin Campbell stayed on at the English court, he said, even after the old king died. Buckingham, at once royal favourite, chief minister and Lord High Admiral, identified a military streak in him that he had never known existed, and found him a useful adjutant in the campaigns he was planning against France and Spain. It was in this way that Campbell came to know my grandfather, almost a demigod to the military men of those days, as were all those who had fought with Drake and against the Armada. I eagerly asked him for his memories of the grand old earl. He smiled then, and told me he remembered a large, lusty man, always quick to laugh off the pomposities of the court.

Glenrannoch had also come to know my father. They were of the same age. My father had been about to fight his first campaign on the disastrous Cadiz expedition. A good man, Glenrannoch said: firm and steady, less extravagant in all things than my grandfather; a man who favoured the book and the sonnet over the sword.

And my mother? I asked then. Yes, he said, he did indeed become acquainted with the woman my father was courting: the Lady Anne Longhurst, one of the many daughters of the Dowager Lady Thornavon. I asked him to describe her to me as she was in those days, but Glenrannoch would say only that she was a paragon of that court, an intelligent beauty who attracted the ardour of any man with blood in his veins.

'Your father was away for some months. I had few other friends at Whitehall, so many hundreds of miles from this, my home. Your mother was ... she was good. Sympathetic. Do not misunderstand me, Matthew,' he said, carefully. 'Nothing on which the scriptures frown passed between us. But if on the day of judgement, when the last trump sounds and the dead rise to face the east...' He paused, closed his eyes. 'If on that day the archangels asked me to name one person on this earth whom I trust and love, I would name your mother.'

Then everything changed, he said. My father came back from the war and married my mother. But that brief and hopeless campaign, the fiasco that was Cadiz, had changed the then Lord Caldecote, my father. He had seen enough good men die and enough incompetent men in government order yet more war; and so he vowed never to take up the sword again. My mother, who even then believed that those who fought and died for their king were exalted for all eternity, found this a strange and alienating belief, and for a time, Glenrannoch said, there was an estrangement between them.

Meanwhile the new king, Charles Stuart, who was only a little older than my father and Glenrannoch, was also newly married–to the French princess, Henrietta Maria. Theirs, too, was a cold and uncertain union in those days, for Charles was still too much in awe–or more, perhaps–of his father's late favourite and his own closest friend, the Duke of Buckingham.

All men err, Matthew Quinton, and I erred more than most. The new queen was frightened and alone, in a strange country. I understood more than a little of that. We became close companions, she and I, for a time. But at a court, nothing is private. There are eyes and ears everywhere, and mouths that are incapable of staying closed, and soon our friendship was laid before the king. I was banished the court. Many spoke up for me, your grandfather and your mother at the head of them, for their word counted mightily with that king in those days. But nothing availed.' He turned to me, at last. 'All Europe was at war, Matthew. I had Buckingham's recommendation to get me a commission in any army I chose, and I had learned during my work for him that I possessed a certain aptitude for war. The next spring, I was campaigning as a raw captain in the Rhineland, and my course was set. Soon Buckingham himself was dead at an assassin's knife, and my only patrons were the Dutchmen and Germans who paid me to do their killing for them. I have not seen your mother since those days. I often think how, if fate had taken a different turn, I could so easily have been...'

At that, the general fell silent. He said no more as we started back toward our small mounted party. Le Blanc was slumped in his saddle looking ineffably bored. Simic, the giant Croat, was receiving a message from a Highland man mounted on a garron. Just before we reached them, Glenrannoch turned to me. His eyes, always cold and impassive, were alive for once, and full of emotion.

'Matthew,' he said, and his tone was imploring, 'for all that passed between myself and those whom you love, and who have loved you, I ask you, once again, to trust me in this one thing. I am not your enemy.'

He wanted an answer, that much was apparent; but my heart was a labyrinth of confusions, and I could not speak. I turned away.

We began the ride back to the
Jupiter.
There were only four of us, for the two Campbells who had accompanied us on the outward journey had stayed behind. I was sombre, playing over the general's words in my head and setting them against what I knew–or thought I knew. Glenrannoch, too, seemed preoccupied, his eyes turned inwards. Le Blanc rode at our rear, idly studying the rough country around us. Simic, the Croat, was a little way ahead.

We were making our way through a narrow defile when Le Blanc rode up to my side and bent close to my ear. 'We are being followed, Captain,' he said, very quietly. 'Five men, maybe six. I think some of them have ridden round to our right—'

Just then, Glenrannoch called out. 'Simic, why this route, man? We would have been better taking the Kilverran road—'

The Croat turned. He had a dagger in his hand. Without a word, he raised it back over his shoulder and then hurled it at the general.

Glenrannoch's horse reared and that saved him. The blade struck his left shoulder. I wheeled around, came to his side, and reached for his horse's reins. He clutched the dagger with his right hand and pulled it from his flesh. 'A scratch, man, no more,' he said. 'Look to our flank!'

Three men were scrambling down the side of the defile. They were armed with dirks, the deadly short sword of the Highlands. Two others, mounted and armed with claymores, entered the defile behind us. Up ahead, Simic was drawing his sword.
They could finish us more easily with muskets,
I thought, though of course the roar of flintlocks would have brought half the Campbell host down on them in minutes. They needed a swift, silent killing, the traitor Simic and his men. I unsheathed my own blade, the sword that my father had wielded at Naseby. With blood-soaked fingers, Glenrannoch drew his. Two blades against six...

Le Blanc reached inside his large knapsack. He pulled out a glorious jewelled epee, and grinned at me. Then he turned to face the two riders behind us, brandishing the blade with a wicked laugh.

I turned to the men scrambling down the steep bank. Before they could reach the floor of the defile, I charged. There was little space, and they could only leap aside to avoid the crushing weight of my horse. But now they were free to attack, while in so confined a space my beast was slow to turn. I lashed out, down and to the shoulder, but struck nothing. Then one seized my reins from the left. He tried to unhorse me, but I elbowed him in the nose. The one to the right stabbed at me, but he was wary of my whirling sword arm and missed. I had my horse fully around now and slashed at him again. He ducked away from my blade and ran behind to join his fellow.
They would attack together on my weak flank.