Midnight Honor (40 page)

Fully half of Blakeney's men were English. They suffered from the cold and the damp; they thought the food loathsome and the townspeople hardly less barbaric than the savages they had been sent to fight. The other half were Scots, a goodly number raised by the chiefs who supported the Hanover monarchy, yet they were not eager to fight their own kinsmen. Names like Cameron and MacDonald held a special terror for them; they knew the swords of these impassioned warriors cut deepest into Highlanders who wore the black cockade, and would show no mercy.

“Why have ye stopped the column now?” demanded Ranald MacLeod. Like his father, he had square, blunt features and found it difficult to keep the mockery out of his voice when he spoke to the English officers. “Are ye seein' mair bogle-men in the bushes?”

Some of the Scots laughed, though the notion of taunting ghosts and spirits did not sit comfortably with them. The moon was not yet up, and it was black as sin despite the crust of snow on the ground. The same sun that had warmed them through the day had melted the caps off the trees so that the forest crowding them on both sides looked like solid black walls—walls behind which things rustled and moved, where twigs snapped and the mist slithered from one branch to the next. The men leading the column carried hooded lanthorns, the glow restricted to a few feet on either side of the winding road; the men in the rear saw nothing but darkness, and had to trust that the men in front were not leading them straight off the edge of a cliff.

“We should be nearing the fork that takes us down toward Loch Moy,” Blakeney said, his voice carrying over the heads of the soldiers. “I suggest we split into two columns and enter the glen on both sides, then converge on Moy Hall in force.”

“Aye.” MacLeod tilted his head, listening to the echo of the colonel's words ripple from one end of the column to the other. “Start the drummers beatin' while ye're at it; there might be some as haveny heard us comin' yet.”

Blakeney ignored the taunt. “Check your powder, gentlemen. Be sure your charges are dry and full.”

The command was an unnecessary waste of noise, for there was not one man among the fifteen hundred who had not checked and rechecked his weapon already. Their palms may have been damp and their tongues stuck from lack of spit, but a soldier's weapon was his life and if he came to battle unprepared, that life was forfeit.

Something—or someone—screamed up ahead. Any faint murmurs of conversation stopped and fifteen hundred pairs of eyes strained to see ahead in the darkness. The scream came again, this time identifiable as a voice.

“Rebels! Rebels up ahead! They be in the trees, in the bushes!” A forward scout from one of the Highland regiments came stumbling out of the darkness, his bonnet gone, his hair flying wild around his face. “They be everywhere, sar, an' they're formin' up tae attack. It's an ambush! It's an ambush!”

The news set the men buzzing and cringing tighter together, their muskets pointed into the black wall of trees.

“Hold your positions,” Blakeney screamed. “How many, damn you! An advance guard? A company? A regiment? Speak up, Corporal, what did you see?”

“I dinna ken how many, sar. They were all around us, that much I could tell just by listenin'. They were swarmin' through the trees, thick as bluidy flies in June, but all quiet-like. Settin' up f'ae an ambush, I'd say. They already killed Jacobs—cut his t'roat like it were a gob o' lard—an' would hae done f'ae me, too, if I'd been a hair slower.”

Two hundred yards ahead, Robbie Farquharson took his cue from the distraught “corporal,” and discharged his pistol into the air. The smithy and his two apprentices did likewise, followed by the rest of the men scattered along the verge of bushes. They fired and reloaded as they ran, darting from bush to bush in the hopes of giving the impression of more men, all the while hollering and shouting the names of the clans, giving battle orders, screaming at invisible gunners to ready the artillery.

“Christ a'mighty!” screamed “Corporal” Jamie Farquharson, clutching the reins of Blakeney's horse. “That's Lochiel himsel'! They were waitin' on us! The bluidy bastards were waitin' on us!”

“They were waitin' on us!” MacLeod echoed the cry, his voice infected by Jamie's fear. He drew his broadsword and cursed in Gaelic. “Waitin' tae take us in our own trap!”

Blakeney's horse reared—no surprise, thanks to the point of the dirk Jamie jabbed in his withers. A musket ball whizzed by the colonel's leg and struck one of the infantrymen in the throat. The man staggered back, spraying his comrades with blood, his scream reduced to a liquid gurgle. The column started to split and men began to shrink back. More shots began to whistle into their midst and they turned like a school of scarlet fish and began running back along the road.

“Fall back!” Blakeney shouted. “Fire at will, and for God's sake, do not let them outflank us!”

“Fall back!” Jamie screamed. “Fall back! Run, ye bastards! Run all the way back tae Inverness!”

The barrage continued, an army of phantom clansmen created out of the frenzied screams of a dozen brazen men. Their efforts were spurred on by the lunatic Farquharson
twins from Monaltrie, who chased after the stampeding Englishmen until they had expended all their shot, emptied all their weapons. It had been an insane idea concocted out of desperation, and they were under no illusions the ruse would work farther than the first bend in the road. There the colonel and his men would draw up, realize there was no army in pursuit, and turn back with a vengeance, but at the least it might have bought Anne the time she needed to spirit the prince away to safety.

Robbie stood in the middle of the road, swaying on his feet. Jamie was beside him, peeling off the scarlet tunic he had taken from the forward scout the smithy, Colin Fraser, had startled in the bushes. The unfortunate corporal and the soldier who had been throat-shot were the only two casualties until Jamie hauled back and punched his brother hard enough on the jaw to send him sprawling.

“That could ha' been me ye shot, ye bluidy daft beggar!” Robbie didn't care. He stayed on his knees, where his twin joined him a moment later for an apologetic bear hug, both of them praying to whatever gods were left to watch over them when the English came back.

When Anne rode up the road fifteen minutes later, her cousins were still huddled on the road with the other men, only they were not praying. They were laughing.

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“I swear it, Annie,” Jamie said, gasping for breath. “One o' the lads followed and said they didna stop runnin' until they were back on the main road. The stupid bastards just turned an' ran! We fired our guns, shouted a few names, an' they ran like the sin-eaters were after them.”

Anne stared down the road. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear. The moon was just starting to crest over the distant mountain peaks, painting the topmost branches of the trees silver, giving texture and substance to the shadows below. The faintly acrid tang of exploded powder hung suspended in the mist—mist that thickened with her own disbelieving breaths.

“I cannot imagine they would have just
gone,”
she said, and no sooner were the ominous words out of her mouth than
the muted rumble of approaching hoofbeats sent her swinging sharply around in her saddle. They were not coming from the direction of the Inverness road, but from the moor!

“They have circled around,” she gasped. “They have come up behind us!”

Robbie ordered the men to scatter into the bushes, fearing what was most probable: that Blakeney had split his force in half and these were the reinforcements.

“We've no more powder or shot,” Jamie said. “If it's the English, we're done for. Come along, Annie. We'd best get intae the woods, out o' sight.”

His prompt came a moment too late. Anne had barely kicked her foot out of the stirrup when the darkness exploded with horses and men. They came from all sides, the road, the trees, easily five score or more, all bristling with muskets, driving the small band of erstwhile defenders out of the bushes in front of them.

But Anne's men were not cringing in fear, they were dancing with joy, and it took a further jolt of astonishment for her to recognize the tarnished brass locks of John MacGillivray as he reined his beast to a rearing halt beside her.

“We heard shootin',” he said. “We saw the lobsterbacks runnin' down the road an' thought mayhap we'd missed the fight. Did Lord George make it back, then?”

She could barely do more than gape at him, at his men for seeming to have appeared out of nowhere. “No,” she managed. “No, it's just us and now you.”

“The prince?”

Anne's relief had barely begun to register when she remembered Douglas Forbes's warning about the young English soldier who had volunteered to escort Charles Stuart up into the hills. Conveying this new crisis to MacGillivray with a minimum of words, she turned The Bruce around and urged the gelding into a full gallop back to Moy Hall. No sooner had they streaked across the glen and organized armed parties to ride up into the mountains than Charles Stuart himself came riding into the torchlit clearing.

He was grayer than death, but unharmed. The same could not be said for Robert Hardy, whose tartan-wrapped body was draped over the saddle of his horse.

“What happened?” Anne asked, the tears building at the back of her throat as she watched the body of the beloved valet gently lowered to the ground.

“He threw himself in front of a lead ball intended for me,” the prince said, sober and utterly humbled for the first time in many long weeks. “For his bravery and noble sacrifice, be assured that both he and you have the gratitude of an unworthy prince.”

Anne did not know where to look, what to say, and when she glanced over the royal shoulder, her eyes widened at yet another shocking sight. The prince turned to follow her stare and nodded. “Yes, just so. The Lady Catherine was also injured in the exchange, but she lives. The wound is in the arm, and her brother—”

Damien Ashbrooke rode quickly past without deferring to the prince or anyone else in his haste to carry his sister to the house. Catherine rode before him, cradled against his chest, her face pale in the moonlight, her arm limp and bloody across her lap. For Anne, it was too much.

A wave of nausea swept through her and she had to grip The Bruce's reins tightly to keep from sagging to her knees in the snow. She was thankful for MacGillivray's solid presence by her side, and only dimly paid attention to the prince as he told John and the others how they had reached the safety of the caves up above, only to discover the treacherous spy in their midst. Corporal Peters had been prepared to kill him, and likely would have if Hardy had not intervened and if Damien Ashbrooke had not fought him to the death, sending his body over the edge of a steep, rocky promontory.

Anne felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice herself. The nausea and sense of standing on a tilt was getting worse, not better, and now there was a sticky rush of heat between her thighs.

“Are you all right, lass?”

She tried to focus on John's face, but he would not stand still long enough. He swayed side to side and split in two, then four. And just when she was about to shout at him to stop playing the fool, he reached out and punched her hard in the midsection. The blow took all the air out of her lungs and she
doubled over with the pain. She heard someone screaming and felt hands reach out to grab her, but it was when she was falling, fighting the dancing spots in front of her eyes, that she saw the bright red stain of blood spreading down from the crotch of her trews.

Chapter Twenty-One

M
oy Hall quickly took on the aspect of an armed fortress, with lights blazing in every window, torches sputtering every ten feet outside. Patrols of MacGillivray's men crisscrossed the glen, the roads, the tree-lined slopes. Fires were lit to give the appearance of a fully occupied camp, and every man not dispatched elsewhere was placed in a position to give an alarm should a mouse stray within a mile of Loch Moy.

It was not mice but men who arrived with the dawn light: Lord George Murray rode in with the vanguard of his army. Hearing of the astonishing rout of fifteen hundred government troops by a handful of clansmen and servants, he brooked no arguments from the prince, who for once did not offer any, but whisked him away to the abandoned and more easily defendable Culloden House, there to be surrounded by three thousand of his own men.

When they took their leave of Moy Hall, there was no rider sitting tall in the saddle of her gray gelding to wave and cheer them on. There was only the hollow echo of the wind and the bleakness of a gray sky to mark the passing of the long day into night.

Anne heard whispers in the background. One of the voices belonged to her maid, Drena, and she was weeping. The other
was not instantly recognizable, but a vaguely familiar Irish lilt brought a small frown to her brow.

“I think she's waking.”

That voice she knew, and it inspired her to struggle against the pressure of the iron weights that were holding her eyelids shut.

“Aye, she's back with us,” MacGillivray said, leaning forward in his chair. “Stop that caterwaulin', lassie, an' fetch the doctor.”