The Enchantress (Book 1 of The Enchantress Saga) (35 page)

All day Lord George Murray had been aware of enemy activity. They were in the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and knew that the Duke of Cumberland was expected there. Lord George sent to the Prince at Penrith to ask for assistance, but Charles sent word that he was proceeding to Carlisle and Lord George should follow him there.

Brent could see the distress on Lord George’s face at the latest difference between the Prince and his commander. Lord George was a tall robust man, legendary for his bravery; but the weeks of marching, the indecision and unrest had wearied him. He was said to be aloof and haughty, to dislike receiving orders but now his face looked worn and his uniform was bespattered with mud like everyone elses’. The rain came down in a seemingly endless stream and the news of the enemy’s whereabouts was conflicting. Some said they were a cannonshot away on Clifton Moor drawn up in two lines, and others said they had dispersed and were heading towards Penrith after the Prince.

As night fell Brent, who had remained close by Lord George, taking his commands and issuing them down the line, was sure that they would not engage the enemy who could now clearly be seen on the moorside. Some dragoons dismounted and came down the hill ready for action, their swords drawn. Lord George conversed closely with Colonel Cluny MacPherson, then a signal was given to the men to align themselves in the shelter of a hedge. Brent lay shivering on the ground, listening to the exchange of gunfire, his clothes sodden, his eyes caked with mud. He gripped his sword in his hand and prayed to God, aware of the blood pounding in his head. The smell of battle was all around and he knew for sure that for the first time he would engage the enemy.

At a signal from Colonel Macpherson the Highlanders from his clan uttered their blood-curdling cry that was said by some to freeze the hearts of an enemy before battle commenced, to frighten them to death in advance. With one accord the force leapt over the hedge and fell on the dragoons who, taken completely by surprise despite their drawn swords, put up little resistance.

Brent could hardly see for the rain and the dusk that had fallen so quickly. The blade of his broadsword flashed about him and as he felt it encounter solid flesh he experienced a feeling not of pity for his victim, but of exultation that at last he was drawing blood for the Cause. Maybe after all the tide would turn; maybe ...

Suddenly Brent felt a stab of pain in his arm and was aware that he had been hit. He put his hand in the spot and felt it warm with blood; but, though painful, the arm was still usable, and he continued advancing plunging his good broadsword to the right and to the left, echoing the savage cries of the Highlanders.

The rain began to lessen and, in the intermittent moonlight which appeared through the clouds, Brent could see that the enemy, outnumbered and terrified by the ferocity of the Highlanders were in flight.

Around them on the sloping moorside the dead and wounded lay, men of both sides, but many more dragoons than Jacobites. The stench of sweat and blood engendered even by the brief skirmish was overwhelming and the cries of the injured pitiful to hear. The broadswords did terrible damage, limbs and heads were hacked off and bodies disembowelled.

Yet in all the carnage, his own arm bleeding freely, his stained sword still in his hand Brent felt a joyous, fierce elation. The fact that here were dead men who moments before had lived and breathed disturbed him not at all.

As the retreat sounded he saw the Highlanders creep over the scrub putting the injured enemy unceremoniously to the sword and moving their own wounded to the shelter of the hedge. Brent placed his sword on the ground and, bending down, tore the shirt from the still warm body of a dragoon and began to bind his wound with it. The blood would not staunch and the bandage was soaked. But Brent did not mind. He had been bloodied in battle; he had killed or maybe wounded fellow men. He was no more a talker, a plotter. He was a doer, a man of action. This was a war and he was a soldier, and war was about valour and courage and indifference to death.

Brent knew that life and his attitude to it could never be the same again. More than all the riding, fencing and athletics, all the womanizing, smuggling and heaving huge smelly barrels of fish in rough seas, the skirmish at Clifton had made him a man.

15

Analee opened her eyes and saw it was dawn. Usually birdsong awakened her, but this day it seemed as though the very birds themselves were too chilled to warble. Nelly still lay asleep pressed up against her for warmth, but even in her sleep her slender frame shook with cold. They had found a large overhanging hill beneath whose shelter they had bedded down for the night, making a screen with loose stones and branches to protect them from the wind and rain.

In all her years on the road Analee never remembered such biting cold, such pitiless weather. And the countryside was alive with other dangers; wandering soldiers who had deserted from the Jacobite ranks and who told of disease and defeat. But not only this; they also had to combat the hostility of the population who had so readily turned against them once the Prince’s cause was lost.

Some were trying to make their way to Scotland, others to slink back to their Lakeland homes before the terror that was sure to follow the ultimate Jacobite defeat which they knew could not be long delayed. The men were hungry and savage. Rape as well as looting was on their minds as Analee well knew, as she and Nelly hid in a ditch or under the bare hedgerows as the angry, hungry soldiers passed by. Since the Prince had crossed the border and war had been on everyone’s mind there was only one thought which drove her on: to reach the Buckland camp which lay directly in the Army’s route, to see her baby safe.

For Morella was all Analee felt she had in the world now that she had lost Randal and given up Brent. For she could have had Brent; she knew it. It would have been so easy to have said ‘yes’, and to have slipped out of the house with him and ridden away. But the sight of the two lovers embracing in the grounds at the grange had decided her. Brent and Mary did love each other and they should have a chance to enjoy that love. It was shocking for Analee, dreaming as much of Brent as she had after leaving the camp, to see that it was
he
who was the betrothed, the object of Mary’s love. And then it seemed inevitable – of course he had told her he had cousins in Derwentwater; the sick man nursed to health; the family likeness which she had perceived only too late ...

... Until she saw him wait for her in the corridor and knew from his eyes that his love, his true love was not for Mary. It was still for her. It always would be; the gypsy in Analee knew that. But Mary whom in such a short time she had come to love and admire, who had suffered for so many years ... to deny Mary that happiness would be evil and Analee had made up her mind and acted accordingly.

Many times she had regretted it as they tramped along the rough uneven paths to Carlisle or left the road altogether and climbed over the mountain ranges, either to shelter from the weather or the bands of marauding soldiers who passed by.

Her baby. Yes she was going back to get her. She should never have left her; that one comfort to her life, that sole memento of her love for the aristocratic
gadjo.
And how beautiful he’d looked that day with the shimmering lake in the background, tall and bronzed, with his fair hair turned golden in the sun and his massive frame and his arms encircling another woman! It had been too much as she’d looked down and seen the tenderness of their embrace, the smile on Brent’s face as he’d gazed into Mary’s eyes. Analee knew that smile too ...

No, she must put the memory from her mind. It was not intended; it was not to be. Besides this was a country at war and Brent had meant to go to the war too. What would happen to him and the Allonbys now that their glorious Prince was so near defeat?

Nelly opened her eyes and saw that, as usual, Analee was gazing at some distant spot on the horizon. Analee daydreamed a lot these days; her mind was always far away. There was a sadness in her that distressed Nelly, who loved her and wanted to protect her from the harshness of the world. She had begged her not to leave the
gadjo
when she had found him again, to think of herself, to take the happiness owed to her. But no. All Analee could think of was the joy of the young girl, Mary, when from her room she had seen Brent ride into the grounds; the tearful happiness of her brave young face turned trustingly upwards to his.

‘I cannot build my life on destruction,’ Analee had said turning from the window; and that had been that. Nothing that Nelly could say, no arguments she could put forward, could convince Analee otherwise.

In a way it made Nelly love and admire Analee more. Such nobility, such sacrifice had convinced Nelly that Analee was more than a mere gypsy; she was someone very special, a queen among women. And she had understood Analee’s reason for abandoning her plans to go to the coast and wanting to get back to her baby. Analee should never have given the baby up at all, never been forced to. Nelly could not easily forget the sight of Analee and the expression on her face as the baby suckled so contentedly at her breast.

Now Analee was pinched and cold, her thin bones stuck out from her rags; but her beautiful lustrous eyes remained the same and her body was still round enough to attract the men as they roamed about looking for plunder. There was something about the way Analee held her head as she walked; something disdainful yet provocative, and no man failed to turn his head or quicken his step, however leaden it had been, as he passed by.

Analee smiled at Nelly clinging to her against the cold.

‘Come, let us start walking and get the blood going again. Today we should reach the camp.’

‘We have been so long on the road and you keep saying that. How do you know this time for sure?’

‘Because I know. There are more soldiers heading for the border and Carlisle is very near Scotland; besides, I recognize some of the landmarks.’

They had come a long way; a long roundabout way, since leaving Keswick. They had kept away from the road and skirted Skiddaw and the Lonscale Crags, Saddleback and Bannerdale by bridle paths. They had sight of the River Calder at Tarn Crags and then followed it, saying goodbye to the Lakeland mountains which had provided them with some hard climbs, but also given them shelter in its warm caves protected from the icy blasts of midwinter.

The valley of the Calder was flat, though lush pasture-land had afforded more food than the bleak high peaks over which they had come. But as she walked Analee would often glance back at those magical hills which grew smaller as, just before Carlisle, they reached the busy road which ran down to Penrith.

Analee got up and shook herself like a dog. It was hard to stand, as though her limbs had been petrified by the cold. Indeed she could hardly feel one leg at all and she shook it to make life return to it again. She still wondered that she and Nelly were alive, having slept out every night in this terrible winter except for the mountain caves and the barn they’d once shared with some soldiers. She wondered if they owed their lives to the fact that they had each other through the long cold nights?

Already there were one or two carts on the road, although it was not yet dawn, and groups of people mostly hurrying southwards. Analee and Nelly set off on their way north aware of the rumbling in their bellies and wondering when they would get something to eat. There were no berries at this time of year, and cold and damp had long deprived them of wild animals. Sometimes a family eating by the roadside would give them a crust; but this morning everyone seemed in too much of a hurry, people with carts and sometimes horses, seemingly laden with all their possessions, appeared to have no time to stop and share bread.

Analee was puzzled. As the morning advanced the numbers seemed to increase, only they were all going in one direction and she and Nelly in another. Finally she stopped by a group who had paused to try and straighten a crooked wheel on a cart. The whole family clustered anxiously about the cart on which were piled bedding, eating utensils and even small pieces of furniture.

‘Pray,’ Analee said to the woman who looked like the mother of the family ‘could you tell me why there is all this activity on the road to Penrith?’

The woman looked nervously at her husband mending the wheel bidding him to hasten, before replying to Analee.

‘Have you not heard? The Jacobite army is abroad plundering and looting; it has already entered Carlisle and plans to lay waste to the city. We are some of the last allowed out of the gate. They entered after nightfall and terrible tales of pillage are told. The Prince has lost all interest or all control over his men, and a more savage band of murderers you never saw.’

‘Then Carlisle is not safe?’

‘Nay, the gates are shut and bolted. You will not be allowed in. The Hanoverian army is chasing the rebels and people fear a long battle. We are bound for Keswick in the hope of escaping destruction. You had best turn back.’

The wheel was given a final knock into place and the harassed looking family set off at a brisk pace along the road. Nelly tugged at her skirt and looked wistfully after the departing family, but Analee shook her head, her heart already cold with fear.

‘We cannot turn back. Did you hear them? Pillage and plunder. What will happen to the gypsies who are right in their path? Maybe we are already too late.’

What was left of the Buckland camp still lay smouldering despite the rain. Everything was blackened and no single tent, cart or hut remained standing. The few who had survived the slaughter had fled in all directions and now only the bodies of the dead littered the field: men, women, children, sheep, cattle and even horses.

It was such a terrible sight that Analee had frozen in her tracks on seeing it; even when she felt she could move she did not. Nelly walked around, braver than she, knowing that her family would have moved on long since, though God knew what had happened to them. Slowly Analee walked through the field to join Nelly, not wishing to see what she knew she must see.