Sophia's Secret (45 page)

Here Sophia stopped, and read that passage for a second time to make quite sure she’d read it right – for ‘Mr Johnstone’, she knew, meant the king.

So it was real, then. Moray
would
be coming, and he would be coming soon. Sophia sat to write her letter in reply, but she could not at first compose it for her hands had started trembling from no other cause than happiness – a happiness so pure and strong she sought not to contain it but to share it, so that when the trembling ceased she still wrote slowly, knowing Kirsty and her Rory would make good use of the extra moments she could give them. It was well beyond an hour before she gave the letter into Rory’s hand, and saw him ride again towards the north, and Slains.

In the days that followed afterwards, Sophia kept a closer watch upon the waters of the Firth, and woke each day in expectation, with her ears tuned to the sounds of running wheels and hoofbeats passing by the house along the road to Edinburgh.

The very wind felt different in those days, as though the smoke from some strange fire rode upon its currents, often scented yet unseen.

The baby fretted in her cradle and refused all comfort, while Sophia paced the chamber back and forth and back and forth until her slippers showed the wear. And still there was no word.

Then came the night when she heard cannon-fire.

Five shots, and silence. Nothing more.

When morning came she had not slept.

‘What is it?’ Kirsty asked her, waking.

But Sophia did not know. She only knew she felt a strangeness in the air this morning. ‘Did you hear the cannon?’

‘No.’

‘Last night, upon the stroke of midnight.’

‘You were dreaming,’ Kirsty told her.

‘No.’ Sophia stopped her restless pacing by the window, gazing out across the grey mist that was melting with the sunrise, touched with bands of gold and red that shimmered like the blood of kings. ‘It was no dream, I think.’

And she was right. For on the evening of the next day Mr Malcolm, who had been away from home for some few nights, returned in agitation.

‘Fetch me bread and clothes!’ he called. ‘I must away.’

His wife, surprised, asked, ‘Why? What is it? What has—?’

‘Christ, woman, cease your talk and make ye haste, else ye may see me hang with all the rest of them.’ And with that outburst Mr Malcolm sank despondent to the nearest chair and gripped his head with both his hands. He had not bothered taking off his heavy cloak, to which the salty dampness of the sea winds clung and channelled down in rivulets to drip upon the floorboards.

In worried silence Mrs Malcolm brought him wine, and haltingly his story came, in pieces, while Sophia stood and listened, though each word was like a stone cast up to shatter her own hopes.

It had begun so well, he said. Two days ago the first French ship, the
Proteus
, had sailed into the Firth, and he had met it two leagues in and gone on board with several pilots. There had been a storm at sea, the captain told him, and the
Proteus
had separated from the others, so they had expected they would find the other ships of the king’s squadron there before them in the Firth. Their appearance had excited those on shore, and those who had put out in fishing boats to welcome them, but though they waited all that afternoon and evening no more ships arrived.

So at the break of day the
Proteus
had turned again and ridden on the ebbing tide towards the great mouth of the Firth, to see if she could find the other French ships and convey the pilots to them.

What the
Proteus
had found still bothered Mr Malcolm so much that it took him some moments to collect himself before he could continue.

The French, he said, had gathered at the entrance to the Firth the night before and dropped their anchors, and so lost their chance to enter in the river on a flowing tide. By dawn the tide had turned, and they could do no more than wait. ‘And then the English came,’ he said. ‘Near thirty sail of them, and half of those had fifty guns or more.’ He shook his head.

The
Proteus
had not been well-equipped for fighting. She’d been fitted for a transport ship, the best part of her guns removed to make room for supplies and troops. She could do little more than watch the battle.

Mr Malcolm showed a grudging admiration for the tactics of the French commander, who though trapped had turned his ships against the English as if he intended to attack. From his position on the
Proteus
, Mr Malcolm had seen the French throwing whatever they could over the sides in an effort to lighten the ships, and as the English had responded to the challenge by shouldering into their battle array, the French had swiftly turned and steered a course towards the north.

A few French ships were left behind, and one had been engaged so heavily by English men-of-war that it had battled all that day and passed the night pressed by its enemies. But King James’s ship, at least, had escaped.

As had the
Proteus
which, having lowered Mr Malcolm to a waiting fishing boat, had steered its own course boldly out to sea, in hopes of drawing off a few more of the English in pursuit to give the king more time to find some safer harbour to the north.

Sophia said, ‘So then the king is yet alive.’ She could at least draw hope from that. For if, as Colonel Graeme had once said, no battle could be called a victory if the king were lost, then surely there could be no true defeat if the king lived.

‘He lives,’ said Mr Malcolm, ‘and God grant he comes ashore, for my own life will be worth little till he does. Even now the English soldiers search for those of us who went on board the
Proteus
, and in the road of Leith they now do hold the crew and captain of a captured ship, and he that claimed it for his prize is blackest of them all, for he was once the king’s own follower, and hearing of his deed today is like to break my Lady Erroll’s heart, for she did hold him dear.’

Sophia frowned. ‘Of whom, sir, do you speak?’

‘Why, of the English captain – for I’ll no more call him Scottish – of the English rogue who did this day betray his friends by turning his own guns upon that same French ship that had so long been under siege, and forcing its surrender. I do speak,’ he said, and spat the name, ‘of Captain Thomas Gordon.’

She stepped back as though he’d struck her. ‘I do not believe it.’

‘Nor would I, had I not seen it with my own eyes.’ His face grew bitter. ‘I’ve seen many things this day that I would rather not have seen. But as ye say, the king does live.’

Sophia hugged her arms more tightly round herself and wished that she believed in God enough to pray that Moray, too, was still alive. But even if he was, she knew that he had passed beyond her prayers, to waters much more dangerous.

‘Why did it fail?’ I asked from curiosity, and Graham, who’d been lounging on the other sofa, marking papers, glanced across.

‘What’s that?’

‘The invasion. Why didn’t it work, do you think?’

‘Ah.’ He set down the paper and rested his head back in thought.

I had never been able to write, before now, with somebody else there in the room. It distracted me. Even my parents had learnt to stay clear. But this morning Graham had come downstairs while I was still deep in my trance and had settled in without my even knowing he was there. It wasn’t until I’d gone three pages on and discovered that I was now drinking a fresh cup of coffee that I hadn’t made, that I had looked over and seen him stretched out on the opposite sofa, his own cup of coffee forgotten beside him, head bent to his papers.

And then, having noted his presence, I’d simply gone back to my writing, back into the flow of it, lovely, unbroken. I’d never have thought it was possible. But here I was at the end of the scene, and here Graham was, still in the room with me, quietly comfortable, thinking of reasons why young King James hadn’t succeeded in his first rebellion attempt in that spring of ’08.

‘The easy answer,’ he began, ‘is that it failed because the Stewarts never had much luck. I mean, from Mary, Queen of Scots on down, their history’s not a happy one. They didn’t lack for looks, or charm, but somehow they just never had it easy.’

‘Most historians would say they brought that on themselves.’

His sidelong look was inwardly amused. ‘Never trust a historian. Especially Protestant historians writing about Catholic kings. Most of history is only the tale of the winning side, anyway, and they’ve a motive for painting the other side black. No, the Stewarts weren’t that bad. Take James, for example – old James, who was father to your King James. Most of the books that say he was a bad king and cruel and the rest of it, all that came down from one single account that was written by someone just passing on rumours years after the fact. If you read what was actually written by those who were with James, who saw what he did, they have nothing but good things to say of the man. But historians went with the rumours, and once it’s been written in print, well, it’s taken as gospel, and then it’s a source for the research of future historians, so we keep copying lies and mistakes,’ Graham said, with a shrug. ‘That’s why I tell my students to always get back to original documents. Don’t trust the books.’

‘So the Stewarts,’ I steered him back round to the question, ‘just had some bad luck.’

‘That’s one answer. And bloody bad timing.’

I frowned. ‘But their timing was not all that bad in the ’08. I mean, with the English off fighting in Flanders, and the Union making everyone up here feel mad enough to fight, and—’

‘Oh, aye, you’re right in that sense. Aye, of all the Jacobite rebellions, the ’08 was the one that should have worked. They would have had to face the English fleet at any rate – you couldn’t send some twenty-odd ships sailing out of Dunkirk without tipping off the English you were coming – but you’re right, they did manage to get a bit of a jump on them, and on land they’d have met hardly any resistance at all. They nearly broke the Bank of England as it was, there was such panic when the word got out King James was coming. One more day and things would have been such a mess Queen Anne might have been forced to make a peace and name her brother as successor just to save her own position. But I didn’t mean that sort of timing. I meant their
specific
timing. First,’ he said, ‘the young king catches measles just as they get set to leave Dunkirk. That sets them back a bit. And next they have a storm at sea. And then they miss their mark and end up miles off course, just off the coast up here, so that they have to turn around and lose a day in getting back to where they should be. Then, when they do make it to the Firth, they don’t go in, but drop their anchors, wait the night and let the English catch them. History,’ Graham said, ‘is really just a series of “what if’s”. What if the French commander hadn’t gone off course? He would have made the Firth a whole day earlier, far ahead of the English ships. What if that first ship that went up the Firth, the…I forget the name…’

‘The
Proteus
?’

‘Aye, the
Proteus
. Good memory. What if that ship hadn’t got there first? The Scottish pilots all went out to board her, so there wasn’t anybody left to guide the king’s ship when it turned up later. If the pilots hadn’t been already on the Proteus, the French commander might have tried to make it further up the Firth that first night when the tides were good, and not just dropped his anchor. He could have set the king and all his soldiers down in sight of Edinburgh before the English ships turned up next morning. Mind you,’ Graham said, ‘I’m not so sure the pilots would have made a difference.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I’m not so sure the French commander wasn’t doing just what he’d been told to do.’

I caught his drift. ‘You mean that it was
meant
to fail?’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Jacobites had all along been asking for the Duke of Berwick to be in command of the invasion, but the French king gave them someone else. Berwick himself was furious, afterwards. Wrote nasty things in his memoirs about it, and said he’d have landed James safely on shore, and I don’t doubt he would have. And not everybody thought the French ships went off course by accident. Your Colonel Hooke once told the story that he couldn’t sleep that night, and went on deck, and saw that they were sailing just off Cruden Bay, far north of where they should have been. So he ran to tell the commander, who made a big show of being surprised, and said he’d correct the course at once, but later on Hooke saw that they were headed north again, and when he asked the helmsman he was told that was the order, so Hooke went to tell the king they’d been betrayed.’

‘I don’t remember reading that.’

‘It’s in Oliphant, I think. Oliphant’s
Jacobite Lairds of Gask
. I’ll look it up for you.’

There wasn’t much to do with Hooke I hadn’t read, but then there wasn’t much of Hooke that had survived. Most of his writings were gone. After the rebellion failed, all sides had done a massive cover-up that would have put Watergate to shame, and most of Hooke’s writings and notes were impounded. Only two small volumes had escaped the purge. What else he might have seen and known was lost to history.

My eyes must have begun to lose their focus because Graham smiled and rose and reached to take my empty coffee cup. ‘I’ll make some more. You don’t look like you’re done yet with your writing.’

I pulled myself back. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t have to, really, not if you were wanting to do something else.’ I saw his mouth quirk and I hastened to add, ‘What I meant was—’

‘I know what you meant.’ There was warmth in his eyes. ‘Write your book. It’s no bother. I’ve twenty more papers to mark, and I’ll not get them done if you let me keep talking about the invasion. Besides, it’s just talk. Just my theories. I can’t say for sure why it failed, why the French made the choices they did. No one can,’ he admitted. ‘It’s hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who’ve been dead three hundred years. They can’t come back and tell us, can they?’