The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  ‘I need no highland bitch to show me this road, missie. I’ve walked it many a night, while you and your gallant father slept like stones. I know my way here well enough.’

  ‘Then find your own road,’ she cried, angry at his trick and afraid of what lay behind it. She jerked backwards and fought free and stumbled and fled wildly down the path towards her father and brother. But his boot heels clashed behind her on the frozen ground, and he caught her in two long-legged bounds and flung his arm about her waist, pinning her to him. She bent her head, biting hard at his wrist, but then his sword was free from its scabbard and the star-gleaming length of it at her throat.

  She went highland and proud then, expecting to die and responding not with fear, but with anger. ‘Och what a brave soldier of King Geordie you are. Three men to fight with in yon house and ten of your own to defend you, and yet you choose a lassie. Would that Murdoch had come as he wished. You’d be now bait for the crows.’

  ‘Murdoch will have his day,’ the soldier said coolly. ‘We are not yet done with him. Nor with your father, missie. But you need not have wasted your words defending your pretty Frenchman. We have no interest in him.’

  ‘But you came …’

  ‘Antoine Sainte Marie-Ross, son of the Irish-French traders of Le Château Sainte Marie in southern France. Oh they are Jacobites. Or they were. But they have fallen in love with gold, of which they have much, and they will not risk it for any king. They are no threat to us.’ He relaxed his grip slightly and let Marsali turn to face him, but he held yet the sword at the ready.

  Realizing that murder was not the sole thing on his mind, she said quietly, ‘If you were knowing all about him, then why came you inquiring? Why came you at all?’

  ‘I came for you, Marsali MacKinnon.’

  ‘For me?’ she whispered. ‘What am I to you?’

  ‘Marsali MacKinnon, daughter of James, the Laird of Glentarvie, and Lady Margaret, now dead. Sister to Murdoch, fugitive from Culloden, and Norman who was hanged for treason in Carlisle. Marsali MacKinnon, once betrothed to Rory the son of MacLeod of Portree. A fine Jacobite lineage but not, I am told, a fine Jacobite lass.’

  ‘You are told?’

  ‘I am told a great deal, missie. You highlanders pride yourselves in grim silences, but in truth you talk a fair stream, the lot of you. There is not a gathering of two men or three where tales are not spun out and fancied up, and names flung about like chaff in the wind. Your mistake is always that you watch not for the winnower.’ He tapped her shoulder lightly with the sword tip. She was silent. ‘I, missie, am the winnower. I, and friends of mine, who you might a day think friends of your own. ’Tis a lonely world without friends, Marsali MacKinnon, but it is safer.’

  ‘I do not wish an English safety,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘Oh proud we are. You are indeed James MacKinnon’s daughter. But you share his blood only, and not his politics.’

  ‘How would you be knowing? Even my friends, traitor or no, are not knowing what is in my heart.’

  ‘Who cursed her father’s king over her mother’s grave?’

  ‘And how are you knowing that?’ Marsali cried out, for it was true. She said at once, ‘It was grief speaking.’

  ‘It was good sense speaking. You are a wise young woman, Marsali MacKinnon.’ Suddenly he sheathed the sword and said companionably, ‘Now let us see you use your wisdom.’

  ‘I am not understanding,’ Marsali said cautiously.

  ‘You will. We are going to make a bargain, Marsali of Glentarvie. First I will tell you what I offer.’ He paused a long while, his hand in the starlight just visible at his face. She imagined him stroking his moustache, as he’d done in the house. ‘And then, if you fancy my bargain, I will tell you what you can give me back. And do not blush, pretty missie, it’s not what’s under your dirty skirt. I have women of my own, sweeter and prettier, and with no dung on their feet.’

  Marsali swallowed her anger and said calmly, ‘And what do you offer then, their sweet English pox?’

  ‘Your father’s life, missie. And do not anger me.’

  The night came down at once on Marsali. She said in a desperate, small girl’s voice, ‘He is an old man. All talk, as old men are. Surely he is no threat to you …’

  ‘He has within the year exchanged five coded messages with the exiled court at Avignon. And one more with Rome. He is in constant contact with all the known Jacobite leaders of the district. Between them, he and MacLeod of Portree have collected upward of twenty signatures of treasonous chiefs, promising support of the pretender in yet another Rising. It is rumoured that he, and perhaps he alone, holds knowledge of a substantial quantity of contraband gold destined for the pretender’s forces. Is that enough, missie, or shall I go on?’

  Marsali shook her head. Denying it was nonsense; he knew far too much, in far too much detail. He had a true source, and he knew it. She said, ‘I will force him to quit. I can and I will. He is old, senile.’

  ‘He is as senile as I am. You cannot stop him, missie, I know, because if you could you would have done, long since. You’ve been against him for years. Besides, I do not want you to stop him.’

  ‘Then what do you want of me?’

  ‘That you go to Port Glasgow with your pretty Frenchman, and to the sea, and to Rome, just as your father wishes.’

  Marsali gasped. ‘Surely you have the Sight,’ she cried. ‘’Tis uncanny you are.’

  ‘’Tis a pagan peasant you are.’ He mocked her lilted voice. ‘Not the Sight, but good ears and a thin door. Oh I was lucky to come tonight, no doubt, though I’ve listened beyond your door before. “Och the doggie”,’ he mocked again, ‘ “he is howling. ’Tis the spirits aboot.” If ever a one of you had the courage to face your interminable ghosties, you might find the odd soldier on your doorstep.’

  ‘The dog always howls. It is deranged,’ Marsali said sharply, annoyed by his mockery and their own foolish failings.

  ‘Less deranged than some, missie. Oh I knew MacKinnon would try to use the Frenchman. We’ve watched you all from the day we heard of him. It was our intention to use him ourselves, for our own little purpose. You see we would have arrested him in Port Glasgow, with that paper, and then I think he would have bargained, with a little pressure. But you will do far better. We could never have trusted him. Once off our ground he would have nothing to lose if he betrayed us. But you, you have much. You have a father.’

  He laughed cruelly and reached and stroked her loose hair, tauntingly. ‘I could do anything, anything with you, and yet you would dare not betray me.’

  Marsali jerked her head back, pulling the hair free, but he caught her behind her head and drew her close and closed his mouth over hers. He kissed her with the sensual care of a skilled lover. Then he released her and wiped his lips and said, ‘Do not think I desire you. I do not. I only wish you to know your place. A servant’s place, missie. You will serve me.’

  ‘How?’ Marsali whispered weakly, hating him and herself, for his skilful kiss in the cold air had aroused her. He was so much more than any of them imagined.

  ‘You will go to Rome, or Avignon, or wherever it is now that he keeps himself.’

  ‘Wherever who?’

  ‘Charles Edward.’ He made then the English mimicry of their own Gaelic softening of his name. ‘Charlie MacShamus. Your bonnie Prince Charlie. You will find him, missie, for me.’

  ‘And if I do?’

  ‘Then you will kill him.’ He caressed her hair again as she stood without words.

  Finally she gasped, ‘Never. ’Tis murder you’re asking.’

  ‘No missie. The word is regicide. Murder is personal. This is political, a political convenience by which you will serve three countries at once: England, to whom he is a threat, and France to whom he has become an intolerable inconvenience, and Scotland, to whom he is a millstone of lead.’

  ‘Never. I would die first.’

  ‘No, missie. You will live. But your father will di
e tomorrow if you refuse me.’

  ‘You cannot do that. There are laws. He must be tried.’

  ‘And who, missie, will stop me in the wilds of Trotternish? Prince Charlie from some French boudoir? Or grey-haired old King James? We are the law today, missie, and these are troubled times.’

  Marsali knew then that she was trapped and there was no other course. ‘Oh cursed the day he came, and cursed the day he left,’ she cried out. ‘’Tis a high price we are paying for that red-headed boy.’

  The soldier laughed, much amazed and amused by her crying out so, a highland lament. Women did not speak with such passion in his own land. He said softly, ‘He is much in your debt then.’

  There was a rustling of cloth, as he reached in the darkness under his mis-wrapped plaid and into his heavy red coat and drew something out. With a flourish he handed it to her, and she felt the weight and shape of it, the cold metal and the figured bone handle beneath her small fingers. A pistol it was, the new small Italian pistol, but still heavy in her hand.

  ‘Here, then, missie,’ he said, giving her as well a soldier’s powder horn and leather pouch of shot. ‘These will settle all debts.’

  Then he turned his back on her and said softly as he began to walk away into the blackness, ‘If you are not gone with the Frenchman in a week’s time, I will settle instead King George’s debt with your father. But he will be reprieved, I promise you, the day Charles Edward dies. And, missie,’ he never turned, ‘lower the pistol, like a good lassie, and run and hide it away. You may use it on the prince, but not on me. You most surely could shoot me, as you are thinking, but my men are nearby in the night, and they too would settle the debt. Good-bye now, missie, and God Bless King George.’

  ‘The devil rot his foul foreign loins.’

  The soldier laughed and still did not turn, but climbed slowly up the hillside, his boot spurs jangling and the sword clattering and scraping against the prickly gorse. Marsali lowered the pistol she had aimed between his shadowed shoulders. She hated him as she’d hated little in her life, but she could not kill him. Not when he’d the courage to leave her armed and turn his back.

  As he walked further in the still night, outlined above her against the dim starlit sky, he began to sing, in a voice as soft and mocking as the sea of Trotternish,

  Tho’ Jenny, I my leave maun take,

  Bonnie lassie, Highland lassie,

  I never will my love forsake,

  Bonnie Highland lassie.

  Be now content, no more repine,

  Bonnie lassie, Highland lassie,

  The prince shall reign, and ye’s be, mine,

  Bonnie Highland lassie …

  Marsali turned her back to his on the road to Portree, and walked quiet as a ghost and with calm purpose back to the dwelling place of her father. But before she entered the house, with calmed face and guarded eyes, she crept through the dark of the byre and hid the pistol and shot and horn high in the rafters there, like the seal-wife’s magic cloak.

  Chapter Six

  James MacKinnon lifted Ishbel with his two great hands about her aproned waist, and set her, like a girl in her best blue homespun dress, on the side-saddle on the borrowed black garron.

  ‘Aye, then, wifie, a safe journey. You’ll be bringing me home a fine French coatie, all silver and gold.’

  ‘The like of you, in silver and gold,’ Ishbel laughed hoarsely, in scorn. ‘Away, the old highland beggar.’

  They looked at each other silently, she on the pony’s shaggy back, and he outside his open door; those two who had bickered for thirty years. And then Ishbel cried out aloud and flung her bony arms around his head and neck and laid her wet face on the coarse wild hair. ‘God grant, James MacKinnon, as fair a day when we meet again.’

  Little the chance of that, Marsali thought. A fair day it was, indeed, never so fair a sun had she seen in the raw early days of spring. For it was only March yet, a time of sleet-flailed hills, and sodden beast-stripped ground, eaten black bare by hungry mouths. Still, today a rare uncommon sun shone, and the far sea was blue, and the green gorse was blooming with yellow flowers. The air was soft, the wind from the gentle west and the sun on her plaid-wrapped shoulders was warm.

  Och, the bitter island, Marsali thought. To have mocked her for years with its hardship, and then transform itself on the day she must leave it and mock her once more with its beauty; time forever making its love-charm upon the land. So now she must weep for despised Trotternish, as she had wept for Glentarvie.

  If only she could run just once more to the glaistig’s secret stone, or the kelping pits where she had worked with Murdoch, or the ash-strewn hearth, a moment’s grasp of the dear harsh ugliness of home. Even the sour byre she could weep for, now that she must leave.

  But the ponies were at the door, the three borrowed riding ponies, and their own dun garron, with the peat creels heaped with the homespun gear of the four of them. For even Murdoch was going, though only as far as Port Glasgow. Marsali did not like to think of her father’s hearth that night, chill and alone, with but the old man and his dog. By then they would be far away, having ferried across the narrow Sound of Sleat to the mainland, and on the long hard way south, guests themselves then, at another hearth.

  So tight was their society that there were places of shelter strung out all the long way to the Clyde; houses where they would be welcomed as though they were the Dear Himself, in disguise. Each host would wish them health and drink to their roaming prince, and each hand that helped her would be a hand turned, unwittingly, against his life.

  Murdoch, embarrassed by emotion, leapt up on the back of the grey mare from Portree, with Duncan MacLeod yet holding its head. So it was to Antoine, not his own flesh, that James MacKinnon made a father’s farewell. They bowed to one another, laughing, in a mockery of the ways of the French Court, and then embraced and mocked at fighting one another, and then stopped, at once, together, and solemnly kissed on either cheek in the French way. Marsali was certain that her father was sadder at the loss of the sea man than of either herself, or Ishbel, or her brother. They were so much the same mould, Antoine and he, grand and elegant and useless as the haughty grey dog. James MacKinnon loved them both, man and dog, the same. Perhaps that was why the beast hated Antoine so, she thought, the only of her father’s friends the creature would not abide. Perhaps it was simply jealous.

  This morning she had heard it growling, low and bitter in its throat, as Antoine rose from his bed. He was away all the morning, as was his habit. He did not shun hard work, field work, but like James himself, he could not be bothered with the dull duties of the house. He left the chaos of loading and reloading the pony to Murdoch, who fussed half the morning to balance the awkward creels. Antoine came back with the sun high, his black hair sleek and wet, and she knew he had been swimming in the grey, icy sea.

  She had grown used to that, and it seemed quite natural now. She had heard the silkie-folk, challenging the birdsong of the spring dawn, barking lonesome in the cove. She half fancied he had gone to bid them farewell.

  He grasped the thick, black mane of the fourth pony and leapt up and turned, handsome in tight, dark britches and the white, loose-sleeved shirt she had sewn for him. He reached out his hand to Marsali. She would take turn and turn about, riding behind himself and her brother. The three small, tough beasts were all MacLeod of Portree could spare.

  Marsali hesitated and turned to her father, as if perhaps he, or some miracle, would free her of the need to go. But her father was laughing with Duncan MacLeod and, scarce looking at her, lifted her to the pony’s back. He was filled with the excitement of the future, building as always plans of triumph. He did not see the present leaving him behind.

  She wrapped her arms about Antoine’s waist and was minded suddenly of that first day, when she had found him and she had ridden so, and wondered how it was that the frail, dying creature she had sheltered then could now hold all the strength, as if he had taken it all, direct, from her. Now i
t was she who was helpless in every way.

  ‘Mind now, daughter, you treat the laddie well,’ her father said.

  Marsali laughed at last, like him, but bitterly. ‘And would you have me making the bed to him, and myself not even wed?’

  ‘Och weddings,’ her father said, displeased. ‘Weddings are women’s worry.’

  She knew then, for all his grudging submission to the church, he was a pagan at heart and would be nothing else all his days. Still she said, solemnly, ‘The Lord be with you, James MacKinnon.’ He did not seem to hear.

  ‘Health to you all,’ cried Duncan MacLeod, and James shouted out, ‘Aye, aye. Good health then, Slainte Mhath.’

  At once Antoine said, laughing, ‘Slainte Mhor,’ the secret, formal reply.

  Marsali shuddered. Like boys they were, when they chose to play at war. Slainte Mhor, the clever pun, Great Health, for Mhor was ‘great’; but Mhor was also ‘Sarah.’ Health to Sarah, and Sarah, Sarah was the prince. As if the disguise of a girl’s name would conceal their purpose from the Hanoverians. She thought of the English soldier, Lieutenant Percy, who had listened outside their door. Would games like that fool him?

  She said yet, numbly, Slainte Mhor, with the rest, and Duncan MacLeod’s piper, who had come just for that purpose, blew into his pipes, and the skirling sweetness of music began. But it was not health she was bringing to Sarah, but the pretty Italian pistol, wrapped away in her little wooden chest. But of that, and her hated promise, Duncan MacLeod and his piper would not be knowing.

  Two secrets she was carrying, the one of the English soldier, and the other her father’s own. That took the form of a scrap of parchment, inked with the signed names of nineteen chiefs, and stitched firm and canny into the folds of her petticoat. James had watched each careful stitch. Two secrets and two promises, and never a two more unlikely together, but like two threads, crossed, on a loom; pull either out, and the fabric would collapse.

  If she did her father’s will, he would die before she returned. If she did the soldier’s, his door would be as closed to her as heaven’s gates.