White Rose Rebel (9 page)

When the dance ended, to much cheering, the couples lined up under the trees at the edge of the loch. Turn by turn, they joined hands, taking each other by the wrists, which Aeneas bound lightly together with plaited ribbon. Beside him, Anne gave each girl a corn dolly for luck. The ceremony was late that year, normally taking place after haymaking, delayed by the rains and the immediate need to salvage crops when the sun returned. When the dozen joinings were complete, the women sang an old Gaelic song of love, voices echoing across the water. Aeneas stood behind Anne, his arms wrapped around her waist, swaying together as she joined
in the singing. When it ended, the couples scattered to private places already chosen among the trees. Sun and summer were to be enjoyed. Come rain and winter, most of them would take their pleasure in crowded single-roomed family cotts.

Watching them go, Anne leant back against Aeneas, resting her head under his chin. Her arms were folded over his, palms resting on the backs of his hands, fingers entwined. The crackle of feet through trees became distant. Excited voices faded away. They stood for some time, feeling the warmth of the air, the slight pressure of each other, listening to the drone of insects, the peep of birds, hearing the water lap gently behind them. Aeneas moved his chin against the top of her head, and she turned her face into him.

‘We could do likewise,’ she said.

A white sail slapped in the wind, straining against ropes and mast as the boom swung. Out from Moidart, the boat turned towards Loch nan Uamh, heading in for Borrowdale. As the prow rose, cutting through the swell, a white wash trailed out behind it. On the deck, boxes of munitions were stacked. Seven men travelled on the boat. In the prow, leaning forward, sat a prince. He was tall, lean, with fine, aristocratic features, deep brown eyes and clear skin. Dressed in courtly fashion, he wore blue silk breeches and jacket, white stockings, a fine lace jabot at his throat. An eagerness enlivened him as the land rose green and purple mountains reared before them. He turned to the man standing beside him.

‘
L’Écosse
, O’sullivan,’ he announced. ‘I am come home.’

Anne woke with a start. Disorientated in the early morning light, she looked around the wood-panelled room. Then she remembered and stretched sensuously in the empty bed, smoothing the rumpled sheets with her legs, the last night’s lovemaking running over again in her mind. Beside her, the other pillow still bore the indentation of her husband’s head. She pulled it towards her, buried her face in it, breathing in the scent of him. If he did not come back to
bed soon, she would have to get up and find him or else pleasure herself. She wondered what he would do if he came back then. Would he take over or want to watch? The clash of metal on metal penetrated the room. Swords, and seriously engaged by the sound of it.

Instantly, she was off the bed, a robe pulled on, and over to the window. She pushed it up, leant out and looked down. Fear twisted her heart. It was Aeneas and MacGillivray in the yard below, broadswords flashing in the warm August sun. The fight was fast, vigorous and dangerous. Aeneas pushed MacGillivray away and the younger chief immediately swung at him again.

‘I hope you’re working up an appetite,’ Anne called down.

The men broke off and looked up.

‘Working against one,’ Aeneas called back, making it obvious what he’d rather be doing. MacGillivray lunged again with his sword. Aeneas stopped it above his head with his own. Faces close, the two men’s eyes met.

‘Too slow,’ Aeneas said. His dirk was drawn in his left hand, the point of it pressed just below MacGillivray’s ribs. MacGillivray grinned. Both men laughed. MacGillivray disengaged and sheathed his sword.

‘Every time,’ he complained.

‘Be glad you’re on the same side,’ Anne called.

Aeneas slid the dirk into his belt and sheathed his own sword. Then he put his arm round MacGillivray’s shoulder.

‘Never mind, little chief,’ he said, warmly. ‘One day.’

‘Aye,’ MacGillivray agreed. ‘You’ll be old first.’ They laughed again. Anne smiled down at the pair of them. Life was hard enough without animosity between kinsmen.

‘I thought you were home in Dunmaglas,’ she called to MacGillivray.

‘I was, until the MacDonalds raided my cattle last night.’

‘We were warming up while we waited for your agreement to raid them in return,’ Aeneas called up. ‘Come down and join us while we eat.’

As she turned away to dress, Anne felt rich indeed. Both were
skilled, MacGillivray brave and daring, Aeneas cool-headed, fast and deadly accurate. Together, they were invincible. They would have her permission for the raid. She snatched up the white pillow from her marriage bed and danced it around the room.

Blood leaked from a fresh incision in a cow’s throat, ran into a wooden dish. Old Meg held it. In her other hand, on the cow’s back, she held the dirk with which she’d made the cut. Beside her, a pitchfork stood propped against her cott. Behind her, a baby cried. A young woman, carrying the crying baby swaddled against her in a tartan shawl, came up from the next cott, her top loosened.

‘What can I do?’ She put her hand against her empty breast. ‘I’m dry of milk.’

‘Fetch some oats, Cath,’ Meg said, not turning from her task. ‘I’ll give you blood to mix with them.’

‘He’ll not manage that,’ Cath answered.

‘Not him. Yourself.’ Then, as the young woman went off to fetch a dish of oats, she shouted, ‘And drink water. Plenty water.’ Her attention was on the bowl as it filled with the cow’s blood, but she could see Anne walking over the rise towards her, following the path that led past the cotts, a covered basket heavy on her arm. Before the chief’s new wife had covered half the distance, Cath was back with her dish of oats. Meg stopped the wound on her cow’s neck, then carefully dribbled blood from her bowl into Cath’s as the young woman stirred it into the cereal. The sound of hoof-beats disturbed the quiet. Both women looked up towards it.

A man on horseback had come from behind the cotts on the same path Anne walked but heading towards her. He was clearly a stranger, his dress foreign. A few yards behind him, a woman on foot led her own horse by its reins. Anne nodded as the man passed her by without a glance, but as she reached the perspiring woman, she stopped, drew a flask from her basket and held it out.

‘Uisge?’
she offered, then realizing that would not be understood, tried the Latin.
‘Aqua?’

The exhausted woman grabbed the flask and, as the male rider
halted, turning in his saddle towards her, she gulped the liquid.

‘Helen!’ The man commanded, his voice and language revealing he was English. ‘Don’t drink that filth!’

‘It’s only water,’ Anne explained, using his tongue now she knew what it was.

The man swung his horse around, whip raised. Anne sat the basket at her feet, ready to protect herself. Back at the cotts, old Meg put the bowl of blood down on the grass and snatched up her pitchfork. The man swung his whip, aiming, not at Anne, but to knock the flask from his companion’s hands.

‘I said, Don’t drink it!’

As the whip came down, Anne caught and held on to the end of it, preventing the striking of its target. Old Meg ran up the path towards her. Cath, the swaddled baby slowing her, hurried behind. Anne glared at the man on the horse above her.

‘Servants are not whipped for drinking water,’ she said.

‘Servant?’ the man spluttered, incredulous. ‘She’s my wife!’

Anne let go the whip, shocked that he had no shame for himself. Meg arrived beside her. The Englishwoman held the flask out to Anne.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Meg went to the woman’s horse, running her hands expertly over its back leg. The man stirred in his saddle, clearly uncomfortable.

‘Move, Helen,’ he insisted. ‘These northern tribes are savages.’

As Cath arrived beside them, Meg looked up from her examination of the horse.
‘Tha e crùbach,’
she said, in her own Gaelic tongue. ‘It’s lame.’

Anne grabbed hold of the bridle on the man’s mount.

‘Among savages,’ she said, ‘wives don’t walk while husbands ride.’

‘Release my horse,’ the man ordered. ‘I am a servant to His Majesty, King George.’

‘Is that so?’ Anne smiled, keeping hold of the reins.

The man went for his pistol. Too late. Before his hand touched the butt tucked into his waist, old Meg’s pitchfork was aimed
squarely at his middle. Anne was amused that he thought loyalty to the usurper would impress anyone this far north.

‘And do you have a name, servant of King George?’ she asked.

‘James Ray,’ he snapped. ‘A name you’d do well to remember.’

His ugly manners did not dent Anne’s courtesy or cheerfulness. She was curious. They were far travelled, the English rare in these parts.

‘And you, my dear?’ she asked the woman.

‘Mistress James Ray,’ the man butted in. ‘Obviously!’

‘You have the same name?’ Anne frowned, still addressing the woman. ‘Are you not mistaken for brother and sister?’

‘Well, no. How else would a wife be known except by her husband’s name?’

‘I was sure he called you Helen.’

‘He did,’ Helen agreed. ‘For that’s who I am, but to be called Mistress Helen Ray I’d have to be widowed.’

‘Then you must hope it comes soon,’ Anne smiled, ‘Helen whoever-you-are.’ She translated the joke for Meg and Cath, and the three Highland women chuckled. But, whereas the Englishwoman quickly stifled a smile, her husband was incensed.

‘I may call my wife what I choose,’ he snarled, ‘but you will address her as Mistress Ray.’

Anne considered him. He seemed barely aware of his situation, so intent was he on asserting himself. Meg’s two-pronged pitchfork would aerate his gut with a flick of the old woman’s wiry wrist.

‘And you may address me as Anne Farquharson, the Lady M
^c
Intosh,’ she told him. ‘A name you might rather forget.’

‘Lady!’ Ray snorted. ‘I doubt it.’

Anne drew her dirk. Beside her, Cath shifted the baby into the curve of her left armpit and did likewise.

‘While you’re on our land, you’d do well to mind your manners,’ she informed Ray. ‘Now, would you care to dismount?’

The question was a politeness backed by cold steel. In moments, Ray was off his horse, his wife reluctant to mount it in his stead.

‘I should obey my husband,’ she said, glancing at him nervously.

‘What on earth for?’ Anne asked, amazed.

‘Because I’m bound to. You must’ve made the same vow.’

‘No Scottish wife would promise such a thing. Our men would think us daft.’ Anne turned to the cottar women. ‘Obedience to a husband?’ she asked.

They shrugged, mystified, the idea too strange to contemplate.

Helen was prodded to mount the healthy horse at dirk point.

‘Try to remember who you really are,’ Anne told her, then she handed Ray the reins of the lame horse. ‘Now your situation’s in better order,’ she said. ‘You may go. But be warned, you’ll be watched all the way to Inverness. Good day to you.’

Helen Ray clicked her husband’s horse forward, her expression bemused but carefully controlled. Her husband followed, leading the lame mount. Anne, Meg and Cath watched them go.

‘Sasannaich!’
Cath said, disgusted by the intruders.

‘Heathens!’ Meg spat on to the path.

Anne grinned at them and stuck the dirk back in her belt. It was her first visit alone to these cotts, but she had won their approval. She picked up her basket.

‘Some food we can’t use,’ she said as they walked towards the turf homes. ‘The clan is more than generous.’

‘Do the Farquharsons not care to honour their chief ?’ Meg snipped, the fragile camaraderie between them suddenly at risk.

Anne took in the tethered beast, the crusted scars on its neck, the bowl of blood tucked against a tussock of grass. These people were poor but they would be proud. A clan demonstrated status by its provision for the chief. Returning gifts could be taken as an insult.

‘They do,’ she said, carefully. ‘And they, too, would go without to fulfil that honour.’

Meg nodded, satisfied with the compliment.

‘Then you have no stomach for what is in the basket?’

‘Oh, I do,’ Anne smiled. ‘We’re so well provided for, there will soon be rumours I’m with child. But goodness shouldn’t go to waste. The meat should be used before it turns.’

Both cottar women considered this, their own need less apparent to them than the need of others.

‘Old Tom is sick, in the end cott,’ Cath offered.

‘And he has a wheen of grandchildren,’ Meg added.

Hooves drummed on the path at their backs. All three turned fast, half-expecting a pistol-waving irate Englishman to be bearing down on them. It was MacGillivray who rode over the rise, a roped black cow lumbering behind him.

‘So, this is a drove road for MacGillivrays now,’ Anne teased, as he reined in. ‘You’ve made thin pickings of your thieved beasts, Alexander, if one is all you’ve brought back.’

‘The others are up at the house,’ he explained. ‘This one is by way of interest from MacDonald.’ He tossed the cow’s rope to Cath. ‘Aeneas sent her down. You’ll want the milk.’

As Cath’s eyes lit up, Meg was already running expert hands over the animal. MacGillivray offered Anne a ride back to Moy.

‘Go on,’ Cath said, as Anne hesitated. ‘I’ll see the food goes where it’s needed.’ Anne handed her the basket, took hold of MacGillivray’s outstretched arm and was hauled up behind him. MacGillivray looked down at Meg, still appraising the cow.

‘Just the milk, mind,’ he said, then he trotted the horse away, Anne’s arms round his waist. Meg cast a knowing look at Cath.

‘Away,’ Cath rejected the suggestion. ‘That was over when she married M
^c
Intosh.’

‘Over?’ Meg cackled, enjoying the idea. ‘It’s under him I’d be.’

Over midday dinner in the dining room at Moy Hall, Aeneas and MacGillivray regaled Anne with the story of the raid.

‘They were still celebrating stealing from Alexander, drunk with success,’ Aeneas explained. He had enjoyed turning the tables. Cattle-raiding was a way of life. The shaggy, long-haired Highland beasts on the hills were native, but short-haired cattle were plundered from further south in Scotland or England, fattened in the glens then sold back to the Sassenach Lowlanders at their annual trysts. It was almost an arrangement. The prices paid by southerners for fattened clan beef reflected the extra weight but not the original beast. So it was hardly stealing to relieve a neighbour of some of their stock, though it was a matter of honour to fetch back what was taken.