What had he, Jack Hurry, got out of it, after all he had done?
‘You’ve not done your all yet, nor got your all.’
He could have sworn he heard the words in his General’s voice as the door swung open and a gust of keen air awakened the stuffy room. He looked up to see Montrose standing there, but he knew that neither himself nor his General had spoken. The hillside was black beyond him in the open doorway; in his dark cloak against it his form scarcely showed at all, only his face, grey in the murk of the peat-smoke, the hair roughened by the night wind (he was bare-headed), blown across his forehead, and the rushlight on the floor throwing the black shadows upwards, outlining the lean long lines of the jawbone and the hooked imperious nose. In their deep pits of shadow under the fierce peaked brows, his eyes scanned the two men sitting by the fire with the black-jack between them.
They sprang to their feet, Hurry trusting he was too old a hand to show his drink; he could hear his own voice answer the General’s greeting almost too precisely.
Montrose told them he had been taking a stroll round the camp and seen their light. ‘If all is still clear tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we’ll strike camp then and cross by the hill road to Alness and get south to the old road I know to the Spey.’
‘But the rest of my clan, sir,’ spluttered Monro, ‘they are on the march to join with you, and the Rosses with them.’
‘They have had plenty of time to do so,’ said Montrose dryly, ‘and are on the march, I know, but have not made their intention so clear as to be worth waiting any longer for them.’
‘My lord, I know their intentions, I’ve heard ‘em a hundred times from their own lips. Now that I and my three sons have shown them the way they’ll follow my example, I take my oath on it.’
‘I hope they will, sir, and they can do so on our march. I shall wish both you and Major Lisle to reconnoitre the ground again tomorrow morning before we start, so you’d best turn in now and get all the sleep you can. Goodnight.’
That was all. He would not, of course, show any displeasure to Hurry in front of a subordinate officer. He went out. There was the thick solid black of the closed wooden door in front of them, instead of that dark figure and the distant hillside. The face that had appeared so suddenly had vanished, yet their confused and guilty imaginations still felt his eyes quick and stern upon them.
‘Does he never go to bed?’ demanded Monro thickly, flopping back on the bench.
Hurry eyed unfavourably the sinking figure of the fat man, tugged at a large blue enamelled watch, a pretty bit of loot from the hideous sack of Tirlemont, and discovered it was close on two o’clock. Just his luck to be caught drinking with the scoutmaster.
Was he becoming a just-his-luck man? ‘A bad sign that, Sir John Jonah.’ He could imagine the young King’s ironic drawl to him. Curse him for that accursed nickname! He must be pretty drunk to be hearing voices in his head like this. No wonder Monro had twisted his tongue round his words a bit.
‘A pity you had to talk so much,’ he remarked unkindly.
‘I? I could talk as clear as a whistle after a gallon of this stuff. I’ve sopped it in through my skin all my life as frogs do water and never turned a hair under it. What does he mean by turning Lisle on to my job as well as me? An Englishman, a damned Southron, what can he know of this country? I know it, I tell you, I know it like the back of my hand -damnation!’
To illustrate his knowledge Monro had knocked out his pipe on the back of his hand and the red-hot ash made him jump violently, breaking the stem of the clay pipe. There was a strong smell of burnt hair as he ruefully sucked his hand and stared at the broken pieces.
‘Ay, you’re sober as a frog all right,’ said Hurry sourly, ‘and now you’d best take the General’s advice, if you can walk to your own billet.’
‘Walk?’ he hiccuped. ‘Do you think Robert Monro of Achnes can’t walk after a drop of whisky?’
He rose with great dignity, tripped over his spur and collapsed on the floor.
Hurry stretched him out by the fire with his cloak over him, loosened his belt and took off his spurs that he might lie comfortably. He’d have slept it off by the morning, and if he hadn’t, a can of cold water over his head would set him right. But Hurry was judging by his own head, which long practice in both drink and campaigning had made something tougher than a coconut.
It was not so with Robert Monro, who woke late the next morning with a forehead like hot lead, ears like a beehive, and a tongue like an ancient and insanitary blanket.
III
There was fresh hope of reinforcements the next morning. A scout came in with the report that a body of about four hundred of the Monroes and Rosses, from south of the Dornoch Firth, had forded the Carron and were making a circuit of Strath Carron, no doubt on their way to join them.
That was good news, for without them they would be a very weak little force to encounter the Covenanter garrisons in the Lowlands which had been strongly fortifying their resistance all these past months in dread of that ‘prodigious meteor of Montrose’. So it was best to push on in however weak a case and establish the base that had served Montrose so well before in the Badenoch hills.
But here was the morning gone, and still Robert Monro and his scouts had not returned from their reconnaissance, and Hurry had an uneasy feeling at the pit of his stomach as he thought of the night before and wondered how much that might be hampering Monro’s quickness of intelligence this morning.
They were striking camp and getting the Orcadians into some sort of formation for the line of march. Utterly raw, undisciplined levies, they went slowly and heavily about their jobs in the manner that showed them to have been farm lads and shepherds for generation upon generation.
‘Those slob-faced lubberly bastards will need blooding in two or three engagements before they can smell powder without sneezing,’ said Hurry to Menzies of Pitfoddels, who was hoisting the grim royal standard with the device of the severed head of Charles I on a black ground.
Hurry disliked that standard. Who wanted to be reminded of a head streaming with gore just before going into battle? He was under the same sentence of execution as Montrose, should he ever be careless enough to fall into the enemy’s hands.
The cavalry’s standard was black also, but with nothing more grisly than three drawn swords. He liked best Montrose’s own banner of white damask, the device, a lion about to leap across a rocky chasm, and the motto, ‘Nil Medium’. ‘No middle course’, however much the young King might try to steer it; for them that was true now as never before, that they must ‘win or lose it all’.
Major Lisle came back with a report from his scouts that a single troop of horse had been seen advancing up the coast, and that this time it was no dubious ally but their undoubted enemy, the Covenanters. It was, however, a small one, and he had neither seen nor heard of any movement of any other of the enemy, and begged leave to go and wipe it out now with his forty ‘gentlemen riders’ and clear their line of advance.
Young Lord Frendraught, a hot enthusiast for Montrose though his uncle, the powerful Earl of Sutherland, was a leading Covenanter, now eagerly seconded him in this.
‘Think of the encouragement to those haverers on the hill, my lord,’ he urged. ‘You said yourself that we have only to win the first brush with the enemy and the rest will be easy.’
The haverers were the Monroes and Rosses, who could now be seen on the western slopes and seemed to have halted there.
But Montrose would not act till Lisle’s report had been confirmed by Monro of Achnes, since the Englishman could know neither the ground nor the peasantry hereabouts as did the local laird.
When at last Monro appeared he confirmed Lisle’s report with blustering emphasis.
‘There’s but one troop of horse in the whole shire, my lord, and you see it away there before you, at your mercy. As for those gentry on the hill yonder, I had word from a cousin of mine that they are but awaiting Your Lordship’s movements.’
‘As we have awaited yours, Mr Monro,’ Montrose replied sharply, and the large consequential man seemed to shrink in size, as Hurry noticed unkindly, watching the sagging yellow cheeks that infuriated him the more for his responsibility for the fellow’s condition. The first cuckoo he had heard that spring suddenly shouted from a tree near by as Monro subsided; it was a relief to be able to echo it with a wink at Frendraught.
Montrose now gave the order for his whole force to advance down on to the level ground. It would greatly encourage the Orcadians to see Lisle’s horsemen clear off that troop, and with that accomplished he would himself go across to the ‘gentry on the hill’ and see if his personal influence would not do what it had done time and again before, and bring them in to his side.
‘Do you remember, sir, the five hundred stout fellows we met on the hill of Buchanty on their way to reinforce the Covenanters at Perth, and after a chat with their leaders they were marching with you instead of against you?’
It was Colonel Sibbald speaking as they started the foot on their line of march; he had been one of the three men who had ridden with Montrose into Scotland up through the armies that their enemies had posted all along the Border to intercept him at the beginning of that Year of Marvels, and the familiar dry grin on his swarthy face brought back to Montrose that summer evening nearly six years ago more vividly than his words. Now he was back on the hill again, starting out on his second great enterprise, the heather springing under his feet, damp with the late April frost that had melted since the morning, the air fresh and biting on his face, and the skirl of the pipes tingling up into the bright cold air.
‘Tastes like iced Rhenish,’ said Hurry to himself, opening his mouth to draw in great gulps of it and clean away the taste of stale whisky. Here was he following the greatest general of the day into action, and wasn’t that enough in itself to make a man drunk?
The level rays of the now slanting sunlight were flooding the whole scene with a pale dazzle. Even the long waters of the Dornoch Firth below, usually so deep a blue between their wide yellow sands, were washed to turquoise, and the strong dark purple currents in them now ran like twisted steel. All the lower ground that sloped towards the Firth was pricked out with bright points from the bursting buds of the whin that would soon be solid masses of heavy gold among the brown reeds, and the thick aromatic scent of it, like ground coconut, was already in the air. There was a shimmer too of fainter, more scattered flocks of yellow from the tall spears of the broom that grew as thick as a low forest all over that land.
The near hillsides, a brownish-pink from dead bracken, were streaked and smeared with that same gold, but further to the west were long white streaks of snow that could still be seen, though the great hills on which they lay were now invisible in the frosty mist of late afternoon, so that it looked as though the sky itself were scarred with those bleak traces of winter.
But here in the wood, from which their troops were moving, it was spring, with flecks of white blossom on the wild cherry trees mingling with the rose-flushed gold of their budding leaves and the feathery-green gold of the young oaks among the white twisted trunks of the birches and the grey crags of rock piercing up like sharp bones through the mossy earth.
The little tarn of black peat-water on the edge of the wood of Craigcoinichean glowed wine-dark beneath the snowy breast of a pair of mating swans that rose disturbed from their nest by the movement of the troops, rushed across the water and soared upwards with the long strong strokes of their wings creaking as loud as a baggage-wagon.
A throstle was singing shrill and loud close by, and Hurry whistled in answer to it with a few long notes which ended in the tune of a Dutch shanty:
‘Skerry merry vip and skerry merry vap
And skerry merry runke ede bunk, ede boor was drunk a.’
He was in the vanguard, cursing his subordinate officers for the slowness with which the Orkney recruits, shaggy, unwieldy and unmanageable as their own cattle, ere lumbering into the line of march, but his curses sounded very cheery, a mere necessary accompaniment to the work in hand. Thank God they had a sprinkling of German and Danish infantry to put some appearance of shape into this rabble, and some of their sergeants, dispersed among them, were doing their best to tidy up the mess.
Now they were all of them down on the lower ground where they could see nothing of the flats surrounding the Firth nor the high banks of the stream below. Lisle had advanced with his ‘gentlemen riders’, flanking the foot, who were still being pushed and shouted into formation, and guarding them from the small troop of enemy horses away down towards the Firth.
But there came a thudding of horses’ hooves along the ground, a thunder from below instead of above, bewildering as an earthquake, and Hurry saw Lisle swinging his men round to meet a large body of cavalry that was charging over the slope out of the low scrub and masses of whin and broom in front of them. At least a hundred horses clashed with Lisle’s forty, and the air was rent into shouts and yells, the clash of steel and the long whinnying scream of horses. Lisle’s horses looked like being overwhelmed, they were fighting furiously but were being pushed back and back by sheer weight.
‘The islanders will never stand this!’ and Hurry galloped to summon the Danish and German musketeers together to the support. But as he did so, a second troop plunged out hell for leather from the broom a little further round, and behind them musketeers and pikemen began to appear, while the troop below, that had been so cleverly used as a decoy duck, was fast coming up to the attack. There were now well over a couple of hundred horsemen swinging into Lisle’s little force, hurling the struggling remnant of it right in on top of their still unformed mass of raw infantry recruits.
‘My God, we’ve walked straight into an ambush!’ Where the hell had they all come from? That strutting cock Monro – had he and his scouts seen nothing? – or was he still sodden? – or a traitor?
Hurry was frantically trying to get the foreign non-commissioned officers together again, no use their being scattered now among those islanders who were breaking already; he had seen in the tail of his eye how their pikes were wavering like reeds in a storm, and some were throwing them down and legging it up the hill.
Montrose galloped into the midst of them, shouting to them to get back to their trenches, but the dazed Orkney lads scarcely understood what he was saying. They had never seen a dragoon before; they now saw a mass of them coming in on top of them, thicker and thicker, overriding them in hideous confusion. They broke and ran in all directions, flinging away their pikes, which trailed and caught in the heather, impeding their flight. Only the Danish and German infantry made some sort of a stand and attempted to carry out a retreat to the trenches above.
Lisle’s few remaining horses made a desperate effort to cover this movement, but the whole mass was being driven pell-mell up the hill into the wood and the horsemen were being cut down almost to a man. The great standard of King Charles’ head swooped and fluttered to the ground in the dying hand of Menzies of Pitfoddels. He was close to Montrose’s side, and so was Major Guthrie, who fell dead at the same moment. Now Lisle fell among the few survivors of his troop, and Douglas, and Ogilvy of Powrie.
The blood was streaming down Montrose’s face from a head-wound, but still he rode here, there and everywhere, keeping the men together as best he could, urging them back towards their entrenchments.
But they were driven back over the trenches and into the wood. Hurry’s horse plunged forward over the rocky uneven ground, swerved first from one tree-trunk and then another. This should make hard going for Strachan’s cavalry.
A queer lull fell for a moment on that nightmare rush and carnage as the still forms of the waiting trees received him into their midst. Some of the little force of Danes and Germans were with him; they at least had kept their heads enough to retreat in the right direction and in something like formation, though that was about all that could be said for them.
‘We are not accustomed to receive a caval
ry charge entirely unsupported,’ one of their officers, his face black with gunpowder, panted out in German and a stiff offended tone exactly as though he were lodging a complaint on some score of regimental etiquette.
They had made a brief stand and were firing on their pursuers, but it was a feeble volley, hampered by the trees, and seemed to be having no effect, for here was the enemy pressing their pursuit right into the wood, riders urging their unwilling horses in among the brushwood and the scattered trees, followed by more and more musketeers. They must have got their infantry up in support by now, and these stood far more chance in a wood than the baffled horses that were shying at the trees and stumbling in the sudden pitfalls.
That momentary lull had broken into a confused murderous scramble again, even worse than in the open, since one could not see whether the struggling, scurrying forms that ran or lurked behind the trees were those of friend or foe. The foreigners round Hurry kept breaking apart under the heavy fire of the musketeers; in one moment a band of the enemy foot rushed past him, crashing through the undergrowth like a herd of cattle, and one of them stuck his pike into the belly of Hurry’s horse and sent him staggering to the earth, only just missing driving his head into a tree.
He dragged his leg out from under the plunging beast and saw with horror that there was someone standing over him, unnaturally still and passive among all that hurly-burly. Then as he staggered somehow on to his legs, he saw that the man’s head had been transfixed by a pike that had pierced clean through the temples and nailed him upright to the tree.
Well he himself was not dead yet, but how soon would he be? Here he was caught in this wood like a rat in a trap – no use to surrender, he’d only be hanged, drawn, and quartered like his General, if those round Montrose were fools enough to let him be caught.
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