The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  When no more redcoats loomed from the mist to challenge him, Alex thought of refuge, a place to lay his uncle, tend that gaping wound. At once he saw it, a dip in the moorland where the fighting had passed. He made out a blur of green farther along: pines, scrawny and wind-stunted. Shelter enough.

  Strands of his uncle’s hair whipped Alex’s face as he grappled for a better hold. Pain tightened Rory MacNeill’s voice as his hand clamped his thigh. “I’ll manage, lad—dinna slow yourself on my account.”

  Alex drove his heels into the muddy turf to stay upright. “Wheest, Uncle. Let me help ye.”

  Rain had collected at the depression’s base, along with bodies. Red-stained water gushed icy through Alex’s cracked shoes as they wove their way, Rory cursing Charles Stuart with every step. As he ought to have been cursing Alex.

  Surrounded by the fallen, plaids blending with moor grass and heather, he kent his uncle had been right to abide by the MacNeill’s will. Their chief had dithered away the months of the Stuart campaign to retake the English throne for the exiled King James, neither lending the Jacobite cause support nor openly censuring it. Thinking himself wiser at twenty-two than Rory at nine-and-forty, Alex had crossed to Skye, joined his father’s MacKinnon clan, and marched away to restore King James to the throne. Without the blessing of uncle, chief, or any saint he’d ever prayed to.

  At Inverness, days ago, Rory had found him, tried again to persuade him from his course, knowing the ill turn the campaign had taken. Alex had given his oath to the House of Stuart. Men depended upon him. Did his uncle expect him to do other than hold to his word, having raised him to count it his bond?

  Rory had thinned his lips, said no more, and stayed to fight beside him, but devil take him now if Alex meant to let the man die beside him too.

  They made it to the pine thicket before Rory’s knees buckled.

  With his towering frame a throwback to the raiding Norseman who had been his several-times great-grandfather, Alex MacKinnon was no wee man, but Rory MacNeill shared his blood and the older man was a deal heavier. He slipped from Alex’s hold and landed hard. The blood snaking through the fingers clutching his thigh thinned in a spate of freezing rain.

  From the pines a corbie’s cry erupted like a pistol’s crack, a warning Alex was too slow to heed.

  Needled boughs swept aside as a wall of scarlet coats burst from the thicket. He’d no time to raise his sword before pain burst at the back of his skull. There came an instant of blinding light, then darkness closed like a tunnel, at its end his uncle’s face, twisted in pain and helpless fury, blood on the hands reaching for him.

  2

  JULY 1747

  CAPE FEAR RIVER

  Alex jerked awake aboard the flatboat, poled upriver now against an ebbing tide. The sun hung above the towering trees through which the river snaked, its light falling aslant. He still smelled the salt marsh of the river’s mouth, but stronger now on the humid air hung the tang of pine resin. Iridescent dragonflies darted at the river’s edge. Mosquitoes clouded its surface. Some had landed on his sweating flesh and stuck there, sprinkled in the blond hairs of his forearms.

  “Awake again?” the Englishman, Reeves, asked, stepping into view between a row of crates and the flatboat’s cabin. “May I trust to your docility?”

  Alex’s hands had been freed while he slept, but the African hovered near, dark face gleaming. Rubbing at his wrists, Alex jerked a nod. Reeves held out another canteen. Alex took it and drank, getting his bearings. Along the craft’s side two men drove poles into the river and pushed against the current. Voices issued from the cabin, sounding as men did when gaming. Reeves, the former seaman, had them on watches. The bell for Alex’s own would soon be sounding aboard the Charlotte-Ann, if he was any judge of time.

  Accepting the canteen once Alex drank his fill, Reeves took a seat on the bench beside the cabin. “It’s a fine forge where you’ll be trained, a well-appointed smithy,” he began, continuing their earlier conversation as if there’d been no pause. “Though the work is limited to Severn’s needs, that’s plenty to be getting on with.”

  Alex stared at the riverbank sliding by. They were passing a plantation now. A break in the trees revealed a stretch of land planted in what must be Indian corn, leaves like sword blades waving. Nearer was a dock intended for craft smaller than their laden vessel. Against his will, curiosity kindled.

  “What manner of plantation is—Severn, did ye call it? Rice? Indigo?” He’d heard those crops were grown in the Carolinas.

  Reeves flashed a gratified smile. “Neither. Captain Carey manufactures naval stores—tar, pitch. Lumber too. Most of Severn’s acreage is long-leaf pine, but close by the Big House, corn is grown, tobacco, flax for Miss Carey’s weavers.”

  “Miss Carey?”

  Reeves’s smile twitched. “She’s the captain’s eldest daughter. Stepdaughter, to be precise. Though Miss Carey is mistress of Severn, Charlotte is the captain’s true daughter.”

  “Charlotte? Has she yellow hair?”

  Surprise brightened Reeves’s eyes. “How could you—ah, of course. The Charlotte-Ann’s figurehead bears her likeness. A pretty girl, Charlotte. Everyone adores…” Reeves shifted a glance at Demas, then picked up smoothly, “Severn isn’t the largest plantation on the Cape Fear, but it is of respectable acreage. Three slave gangs work the forest. A smaller gang runs the lumber mill—have I mentioned the mill? There are carpenters and coopers, a groom and some stable lads. Between the house, kitchen, and the weaving sheds, Miss Carey oversees twenty or so, women and girls, those too old to work elsewhere. I’m kept occupied overseeing the captain’s business interests.”

  “What, then, does he do?” Alex interjected.

  “Captain Carey? I suppose he oversees me.” Reeves hesitated, then waved an apologetic hand. “An egregious oversimplification. There’s much for a man of Captain Carey’s station to manage. He cannot daily run hither and yon across the breadth of occupation Severn encompasses.”

  Alex raised a brow. “It’s ye does the running hither?”

  Reeves’s mouth curved, as though the question amused. “It is. And I’d do more than that for the man. I owe Captain Carey everything. He took me in a year ago when I had next to nothing, treated me better than I merited…”

  “Oh, aye?” Alex asked, catching another shift of those hazel eyes.

  Reeves hesitated. “It’s only…He isn’t the man I knew aboard the Severn. He’s also recently retired as a justice of the peace for the New Hanover court. It may be his years in that capacity showed him too much of human nature’s less desirable aspects. Such is bound to leave a man jaded.”

  Never mind this Captain Carey, generous and jaded; Alex was having trouble enough taking Reeves’s measure. The man talked too much. Was it fear motivating this chatter, fear that Reeves would feel the brunt if the new indenture he’d chosen failed to fall agreeably in line with his master’s designs?

  Perhaps so; Reeves chose that moment to produce a document from inside the coat he’d laid on the bench. The indenture.

  MAY 1746

  INVERNESS, SCOTLAND

  The surface beneath him heaved. His belly echoed the motion, spewing forth the oat gruel they fed those condemned to hell—and hell it must be. He’d spent his life on the sea in boats and never felt such a ruckus in his innards. God have mercy.

  Memories surfaced. The shivering torment of naked stone—was that a kirk, where they put them after the battle? The dark and dank of a ship at anchor. Crowded flesh unwashed and festering. His uncle’s face swam through the fractured images. Like Alex, Rory MacNeill had been stripped to his shirt—plaid, belt, shoes, sporran, anything of value confiscated. His uncle’s wound was never stitched, the gash held closed by a strip of soiled shirting. He could lend Alex no support, struggling himself to remain standing when forced to it.

  “Come, lad. T
hey’ll have us on our feet again. Let’s show these Lobsters they canna best a Barra man.” His uncle’s voice lapped across his mind like waves on a shingle. “A minute more on your feet. Feel the sea air. Breathe it in. Clear the cobwebs, does it?” It hadn’t. Still, he’d clung to the voice like a drowning man and shuffled forward. Light as bright as blades. Gulls screeching fit to pierce his skull. The shove of strangers’ hands. Groans of suffering. The roiling. The thirst. “Rest ye now. I’m here with ye, Alex…”

  Alex MacKinnon. His name. His father’s clan, though he’d lived all but his first years among the MacNeills of Barra, harvesting the fish, pasturing the cattle, riding with his uncle to collect the quit-rents for their chief. He was twenty-two…no, it must be three-and-twenty now, an unworthy nephew to the man who took him to hearth and heart, orphaned at three.

  “Uncle?”

  A clink of metal beside him. “Aye, lad. They’ve kept us together.”

  Together in the stench and chill of a ship’s hold. He could barely see the contours of his uncle’s face, high in the cheek and brow as his own, beard grizzled with an old man’s gray though he was now but fifty.

  “We’re alive, then?”

  A low dry chuckle, familiar as sight. “Looks to be we are. Though I’ll not argue if ye wish to call this hell.”

  Guilt weighed like a cairn. “I’m sorry.”

  His uncle’s hand, rough and cold, closed over his arm. “Ye did as your conscience bid ye, lad. Ye’ve always had that about ye, a need for a purpose beyond yourself. ’Tis the Almighty knit ye so. Besides, ’twas I chose to stand with ye at the end.”

  A groan rose somewhere near. The wheeze of labored breathing. They weren’t alone. Alex moved his legs, felt the pull of chain; his ankles were manacled to the timbers enclosing them in near darkness. “How long since the battle?”

  “Tomorrow marks Beltane. We lie at anchor, still at Inverness.”

  A fortnight. He absorbed that as Rory bridged the gap for him. After the redcoats came boiling from the pines and bashed his head, they’d been trussed and tossed into a cart bound for part of the field where the measured crack of gunfire bespoke execution. Then, for no reason Rory could fathom, the driver had taken a turn in the track. They’d left the moor to jostle over miles to Inverness. There, forced inside a kirk crowded with shivering, wounded Jacobites, they’d languished for two days lacking food and water, another eight without doctoring.

  “Why did they not shoot us on the field? Some soldier’s notion of mercy?”

  “Nay,” croaked a stranger’s voice. “None but a blackhearted cur would have spared ye a quick death to rot in this hold.”

  If it was a jest, no one laughed.

  “Ye’ve been in and out of the mist all this while,” Rory told Alex in lower tones. “I’ve been that afraid ye’d never come full out.”

  Hip and shoulder as well as head throbbing, Alex sat up. His own stench overpowered. Humiliation washed him in a foul wave. He flinched when Rory touched him again. “What mean they to do with us?”

  “Hang and quarter us,” someone from the shadows replied. “Bring us to trial first, o’ course. They mean to take us to London.”

  Bones aching, Alex drew up his knees as far as the chains allowed, put his back to dank timbers, tried to make out the men around him, their sufferings marked by shuffles, clanks, groans. “How many are we? What is our number?”

  A suspended moment passed, then out of the dimness came a response. “We numbered twenty-six together when put aboard. We’re one-and-twenty now. Elsewhere on this ship are more.”

  Alex searched the dim forms huddled in the hold but could make out no man distinct. “Who speaks?”

  “Archibald MacKenzie, of Inverness.”

  “MacKenzie,” Alex echoed, putting name and voice to memory. “Tell your names, all. And d’ye wish, that of brother, father, or son that fell beside ye. Let us name our dead.”

  “My name ye ken,” said MacKenzie. “I saw three cousins fall. Dougal, James, Duncan. Sons of my mother’s sister.”

  “Duncan I am,” said another. “Duncan Ross of Cromarty. My auld da—Hector Mor—fell to the cannons in the first rush.”

  “Ross,” Alex said. “Who else?”

  “Adam Cluny,” a creaky voice answered. “An elder brother I lost. He was seventy-six winters, still hale.”

  “Aye, Cluny. And how old are ye?”

  “Only seventy-three!”

  A murmur—not quite laughter—rippled through the dark.

  Out of the shadows, one by one, men made themselves known. Alex echoed back their names, putting all he could into them of respect, until it came round at last to Rory.

  “Me ye well ken, but for any who cares, I’m Rory MacNeill, tacksman to my chief, the MacNeill of Barra, and this beside me is my sister’s son, Alastair MacKinnon. Alex, he’s called.”

  “MacKinnon,” said MacKenzie, who’d spoken first. “A right wee giant ye are. I havena yet seen an English guard with gall enough to devil ye. We’ve vied for the honor of hauling your carcass about at muster.”

  “I’m gratified to have afforded ye the service.” Alex waited, but there was no more. “Besides my uncle I counted only eighteen. Who’s yet to speak?”

  “That would be me,” a voice said, younger and haler than Alex expected. “Hugh Cameron of Glendessary. Beside me fell my father, Alexander Cameron, and my brothers, Iain and Archie. I’ve but the one wee half-brother left, too much a bairn to take up arms for the Stuarts.”

  “Cameron. May your wee brother live in whatever freedom we’ve left him.” A few weak amens arose, but Alex didn’t add his own. His head was throbbing again. “I’ll rest a bit, Uncle, I think.”

  “Aye, lad. Ye’ve earnt a wee lie-down.”

  “Earnt it, have I?”

  “Listen.”

  Alex cast the net of his hearing past the drumbeat in his skull. The men around him were speaking to one another. Talk of battles, aye, but more of home, of kin.

  “Ye gave them back a bit of their dignity. ’Tis more than I’ve managed in a fortnight.”

  Alex slipped away and left them to it.

  JUNE 1746–MAY 1747

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  The river was the Thames, the fortress on its shore, Tilbury Fort. The prison ships that had plied the passage from Inverness anchored there. The Jacobites were transferred to new quarters, crammed within the fort. More ships lay at anchor, ready to receive the overflow into yet another foul pit. For Rory MacNeill and Alex MacKinnon, the name of the pit was the James & Mary.

  June was waning. Those who would die of wounds taken at Culloden had likely done so. The rest had made it to London, where surely the waiting would be swift. But summer passed into autumn without word of the promised trial. Bowels griped. Skin broke open in sores. Flesh fell away to gauntness. Rage was a hot knife in the brain.

  Alex clung to sanity, casting his mind like a greedy net back to his life before, to clean wind rippling over machair pastures where his uncle’s cattle grazed; to open seas beyond their ketch’s bow, at his shoulder the white sands and scattered islets hemming Barra’s coastline like a tattered cloak; to clouds lying low on the rounded head of Ben Tangaval; seals barking their eerie chorus in the mist; burns rushing through sheltering glens. Sometimes it was hearth and home his mind caressed—the croft built in the shelter and with some of the stones of an ancient crumbling broch; a fire of peat turfs filling it with their smoked-earth smell; a table laden with the simple fare of men without wives to do for them; thick walls snug against a lashing sea-wind.

  He talked of it all to the men in the hold and listened while they spoke of their places and people, guarding his mind against rumors that reached them through their taunting guards—of Highland farms razed, widows and orphans turned out to starve, weapons surrendered, glens trodden under Eng
lish boots.

  Five months after Culloden, old Adam Cluny ceased his suffering, having marked his seventy-fourth year in darkness. English hands hauled him from the hold, a sack of bones wrapped in oil-cloth, as Cluny’s fellow prisoners stood in his honor and Alex besought their guards for better rations. The current half-pound of meal per day would see them all follow Cluny soon enough. Hugh Cameron stood beside him. Together they petitioned for clothing, some manner of bedding against the river’s deepening chill. They were told to be grateful it wasn’t yet winter.

  God…someone…have mercy.

  It was a black day when Rory MacNeill woke drenched in fever-sweat. The gash to his thigh hadn’t healed as he’d feigned. In the weeks past, some foulness had reopened it and it had festered. “Why didna ye tell me, Uncle?”

  “The way ye try so hard to lift these men…I didna have the heart.”

  They half-carried his uncle up to the deck when they were marshaled out, as once they’d half-carried Alex. It was at that time they heard of the lottery. “We’ll not all be tried,” he told Rory when the man was lucid enough to comprehend. “One in twenty will stand trial, chosen by lot. The rest will be granted the king’s mercy.”

  “King’s mercy, is it?” Rory said dryly. “And which will be the lucky ones, those of us who hang or those who dinna?”

  His uncle did neither.

  Two days after Rory MacNeill’s body was taken to be buried in English soil, Alex learnt his own fate: not death but exile and transportation to the American Colonies, there to serve out a seven-year indenture. The news gutted him less than had his last words with his uncle.

  “I wish ye hadna come after me, Uncle. I wish ye’d loved me less.”

  “Never wish it. I couldna be prouder of the braw man ye’ve made. I shall tell my sister so when I see her.” Taking weak hold of his hand, Rory MacNeill added, “If Almighty God grants His grace, ye’ll survive King Geordie’s mercy.”

  Not until his uncle expelled his final breath had Alex dared whisper what he’d come to believe since Culloden. Mercy. “It’s but a word, Uncle. There isna mercy to be granted, by king or God.”