The Chieftain (19 page)

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered, sick with shock, her voice trembling. She watched the supple beloved mouth, the mouth that had met hers once with warmth and passion, tighten further into a bitter line.

‘Hugh is dead.’ The words fell one by one, sharp-edged, like deadly arrows piercing her heart. ‘Dead because of you! They blew his head to pieces with musket shot as he ran to set you free. My brother—dead for
you!’

She had not thought it was possible for one word to contain so much venom.
‘
You!’
he said, as if she were utterly beneath contempt, as if she were some loathsome insect fit only to be crushed underfoot. She backed further against the tree, recoiling from the hate that was destroying her piece by piece as no violence could ever do. From somewhere within her shaking frozen body she found her voice.

‘I did not ask him to save me,’ she whispered, her eyes imploring him to understand. ‘I think he did not even like me.’

‘No, he did not, and God knows he had reason! It was not for you he did it, never think that—It was because you are my wife, though I curse the day I ever saw you. Why did you come back? Why did you not stay with your own kind where you belong?’ His anguished bewilderment moved her even as it crushed her spirit.

‘Because... because...’ she faltered, the words ‘I love you’ withered and dying, unspoken, beneath the cold hatred of his eyes. She pressed her palms against the rough bark of the tree, as if to seek strength from its ancient lichened trunk, but she could think of nothing to say.
 

And then she realised for the first time that another Highlander stood a few paces away, awed into silence until now, when he heard what Hector and Isobel were too distracted to notice. He grasped Hector’s arm.

‘Soldiers!’ he whispered hoarsely, and Hector raised his head, listening.

The crash of feet through the undergrowth, a distant flash of scarlet glimpsed through the trees, warned them the soldiers were after them still. With icy urgency Hector pulled Isobel from against the tree and gave her a little push.

‘Run, quickly—! Lead the way, Duncan.’

Isobel saw that he drew his dirk from his belt as he turned to follow them. It seemed to be the only weapon he had left.

The other man ran first, slipping neatly between the trees, light-footed, sure of his path. Isobel alone made much sound as they passed through the bright dappled sunlight of the green spring wood, slithering on the steep slope, torn by brambles, tripping on fallen branches. Once, Hector’s hand grasped her elbow, steadying her as she crossed a stream where the ground fell sharply with no trees to break a fall. But the hand was withdrawn as quickly once the danger was past, and she knew that only practical necessity had driven him to touch her.

Behind them their pursuers were no longer in sight and before long silence fell over the wood, but for their own quiet progress, and they knew they were out of immediate danger. But they kept on at the same unflagging pace, until a soft grunt of satisfaction from Duncan indicated that they had reached their goal.

Here a vast jagged outcrop of rock ran steeply down the cliff face to the sea, which was just visible through the trees far below. Moss and fern and a few thin trees covered it, and at its steepest point a narrow split gaped black in the grey-green of the rock. Isobel watched as Duncan slid into the space and signalled to her to follow.

It was too small to be termed a cave, a horizontal fissure just wide enough for three people to lie cramped and huddled behind a delicate veil of ferns. Isobel followed Duncan’s example and crouched forward on her elbows with knees drawn up, gazing out over the steep drop to the sea, Duncan on one side and Hector on the other.

They lay panting and silent as the cold and damp of earth and rock cooled them and stiffened cramped limbs, and the wood settled into tranquillity about them.

Isobel was aware of every bone of Hector’s body against hers, thinner and more angular than she remembered from the last time she had felt its closeness, though now the plaid softened its sharp lines. She longed desperately to turn her head and brush shoulder or cheek with her lips, to make some little gesture of tenderness, but one glance at his expression, dark and grimly impenetrable, defeated her. She guessed what his response would be, and what that would do to her.

To keep herself from thinking, to dull the ache in her heart, Isobel began to look about her, as far as was possible from her uncomfortable vantage point. Duncan, on her other side, was, she realised, as haggard and unkempt as his chieftain, though his square build masked his state a little. She could not remember him clearly, but thought she had seen his face once or twice among Hector’s followers. Now, as the hours passed, his burly shoulders and brown bearded head became as familiar to her as the delicate lines of the ferns growing before her face, the vivid green of the moss at the cave mouth, the silver-grey line of a birch stem a little further off.

They spoke scarcely at all as they crouched in their uncomfortable hiding place. Clearly, talk overheard would give them away, were the soldiers to search the wood, but Isobel sensed that neither Hector nor Duncan had much to say. Hector at least was lost in some gloomy thoughts of his own, and she dared not intrude. And when he did speak at last he revealed clearly enough what was uppermost in his mind.

‘When it grows dark,’ he murmured in an undertone, ‘I shall go back to Ardshee.’
 

Isobel gave a low protesting cry; and then wished she had not when he turned those burning hate-filled eyes on her again.

‘What is it to you if I do?’ he retorted. ‘I cannot leave my brother to lie there with no one to close his eyes and say a prayer over him. And you do not know what the soldiers did to the bodies of the dead on Drummossie Moor.’ He spoke as if her ignorance on that score only increased her guilt.

‘But they will kill you!’ she protested.
 

‘And what if they do? You will be free, will you not?’ The cruel irony of his tone hurt her the more for its echoes of John’s words a few hours before. ‘I must know, too,’ he went on more calmly, ‘what has become of the people. God grant the soldiers have left them alone.’

‘Did you not see?’ Isobel asked, and then regretted the question, because of the inevitable response.

‘Did I not see what? Tell me!’ he commanded.

It was not easy. To find the words was hard enough, for her months at Ardshee had not taught her the Gaelic for ‘rape’ and ‘murder’, and she could not bring herself to lapse into English, as if to do so would only underline the horror of it all. Worse still was to see the growing pain in Hector’s eyes as he listened, and to know that his suffering had been almost past bearing without this. When she had finished, he bent his head in silence to the ground so that his face was hidden by his arms, and only the whiteness of his clenched knuckles showed what he endured. She knew there was no comfort she could offer.

She heard Duncan’s murmured exclamation at her other side, and remembered that he, too, must have loved ones at Ardshee. She turned her head and saw that his blue eyes were full of unshed tears, in a silent anguished appeal for help.

‘My woman...’ he whispered brokenly, ‘and the little ones...’
 

Isobel laid her hand over his and held it, glad that even so small a gesture seemed to bring him a measure of comfort. At least here she was not helpless. But she knew how inadequate a response it was to what had happened today.

There was no more talk, and the day wore on. The sun disappeared and a cold wind rustled through the trees and stirred the ferns over their hiding place. Hector remained as he was, motionless and silent, and at one point Duncan fell asleep, though how he could sleep in so uncomfortable a position Isobel did not know. She knew that Hector’s immobility was not that of slumber.

Much later, gazing down at the water below, grey as the rocks that edged it now that the sun had gone, Isobel watched idly as a heron stood fishing and then rose, suddenly startled, and flapped its slow way out of sight. It was a moment or two before she realised that what had disturbed it was the approach of a file of men along the shore, their scarlet coats gleaming against the slate-colour of the sea.

‘Hector!’ she whispered urgently.

He raised his head, but she had no time to be shocked at the new greyness of his face.

‘Look!’ she said, pointing below.

He nodded, and said nothing, narrowing his eyes to watch them more intently. They both kept absolutely still, and beside them their alertness communicated itself somehow to Duncan and he awoke and watched too, motionless in his turn.

The soldiers, about a dozen of them, marched untidily along the shore away from Ardshee, and were lost to sight.

Hector lay still for a moment longer, listening for any warning sound, and then relaxed a little.

‘I think they’ll not trouble us,’ he commented softly after a pause. ‘Perhaps they hope to find other prey along the shore—May the Evil One send a wave to drown them!’

‘Could they be going to search the wood from the other end?’ Duncan suggested.

For an instant all three had a clear mental picture of themselves in their hiding place in the middle of the wood as the soldiers advanced from either end, trapping them irrevocably. And then Hector began to question Isobel as to how many soldiers she had seen at Ardshee this morning, and to calculate how thoroughly they would be able to search the woods.

‘I think they will not be able to cover the ground well enough to find us,’ he reassured them at last. ‘And they are noisy searchers. We should hear them coming a long way off, and could climb out that way.’ He pointed above their heads, and Isobel hoped fervently that there would be no need to scale that slippery rock face. ‘They have the ship keeping watch from the sea, but they will not have men enough to surround the wood as well as search through it. We shall be safe, God willing.’

They fell silent again, straining for the first warning sounds of an approaching search party. But none came. The birds sang on, small animals rustled through the undergrowth, the wind stirred the slender branches above them. Distantly the waves swished and lapped on the shore. When they did hear a new sound, it was not the one they had expected and feared.

Isobel’s attention was caught first as Hector raised his head higher, suddenly alert. Far off, faint and indistinct, she thought she could hear an odd crackling sound. She could not be sure which direction it came from, nor what caused it. There was something familiar about it, but she could not think what.

‘Smoke!’ whispered Duncan, when they had listened for some time longer. They sniffed, and the smell was brought clearly on the wind, the acrid fragrance of burning wood.

Hector slid from the hiding place and stood up, gazing back in the direction of Ardshee from which the wind carried the smell.

‘They’ve set the trees alight,’ he told them, bleakly matter-of-fact.

Duncan and Isobel joined him, gazing in horror at the dark haze of smoke distantly visible, coming steadily nearer, shot with crimson tongues of fire licking at the trees, setting them spitting and crackling and shrivelling to blackness.

‘We’ll have to go that way!’ cried Isobel, turning towards the east. She had already taken several steps when Hector grasped her arm.

‘Look!’
 

That way, too, the flames leapt among the branches, progressing less quickly because the wind was against them, but the cliff face curved a little there, shutting out the force of the breeze, and the soldiers had done their job well.

‘So they need very few men,’ commented Hector. ‘Just enough to watch from above, and some stationed on the ship, with guns perhaps.’ Again he spoke without emotion, as if nothing he said was of any importance.
 

Fighting a growing panic, Isobel cried out: ‘What are we going to do?’

He turned to her in surprise. ‘There is only one thing we can do. You do not swim, I think?’ She shook her head. ‘Then we go that way.’

He gestured upwards. Isobel felt the colour drain from her face.

‘But you said they’d be watching,’ she objected.

‘We have no alternative.’
 

She knew he was right, but she was not comforted by the feeling that he did not care very much either way.

At least they did not take the most difficult route over the rock face. Hector led the way this time, a little to the east of the rock, and Duncan came behind, ready to help Isobel should she need it. But though they had branches and grass to help their climb, and some reassurance in the thickly growing trees below them, the cliff face was almost vertical at times, and even the sure-footed Highlanders found the climb slow and difficult.

And all the time the flames crept steadily closer.
 

Above, Isobel guessed, the soldiers would be watching the pall of smoke, estimating when they could expect to see the fugitives run into the open, caught like rabbits at harvest time. And this time she knew John Campbell would make sure of his prey.

It was a terrible climb for Isobel, her legs trembling and aching with the unfamiliar exercise, slithering on smooth grass, struggling to find one foothold and then another, her weight dragging on arms that reached out for this branch or that rock, or for Hector’s hand stretched down to pull her to safety. And all the while knowing that a greater danger awaited them at the end.