Jack Randall eyed me with dislike, but he was good as his word.
“Hawley has succeeded Cope, as I told you earlier that he would,” he said. “Hawley has little gift for leadership, bar a certain blind confidence in the men under his command. Whether that will stand him in better stead than did Cope’s cannon—” He shrugged impatiently.
“Be that as it may, General Hawley has been directed to march north to recover Stirling Castle.”
“Has he?” I said. “Do you know how many troops he has?”
Randall nodded shortly. “He has eight thousand troops at the moment, thirteen hundred of them cavalry. He is also in daily expectation of the arrival of six thousand Hessians.” He frowned, thinking. “I have heard that the chief of clan Campbell is sending a thousand men to join with Hawley’s forces as well, but I cannot say whether that information is reliable; there seems no way of predicting what Scots will do.”
“I see.” This was serious; the Highland army at this point had between six and seven thousand men. Against Hawley, minus his expected reinforcements, they might manage. To wait until his Hessians and Campbells arrived was clearly madness, to say nothing of the fact that the Highlanders’ fighting skills were much better suited to attack than defense. This news had best reach Lord George Murray at once.
Jack Randall’s voice called me back from my ruminations.
“Good day to you, Madam,” he said, formal as ever, and there was no trace of humanity on the hard, handsome features as he bowed to me and took his leave.
“Thank you,” I said to Alex Randall, waiting for Jonathan to descend the long, twisting stair before leaving myself. “I appreciate it very much.”
He nodded. The shadows under his eyes were pronounced; another bad night.
“You’re welcome,” he said simply. “I suppose you’ll be leaving some of the medicine for me? I imagine it may be some time before I see you again.”
I halted, struck by his assumption that I would go myself to Stirling. That was what every fiber of my being urged me to do, but there was the matter of the men in the Tolbooth to be considered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But yes; I’ll leave the medicine.”
* * *
I walked slowly back to my lodgings, my mind still spinning. Obviously, I must get word to Jamie immediately. Murtagh would have to go, I supposed. Jamie would believe me, of course, if I wrote him a note. But could he convince Lord George, the Duke of Perth, or the other army commanders?
I couldn’t tell him where I had come by this knowledge; would the commanders be willing to believe a woman’s unsupported, written word? Even the word of a woman popularly supposed to have supernatural powers? I thought of Maisri suddenly, and shivered. It’s a curse, she had said. Yes, but what choice was there? I have no power but the power not to say what I know. I had that power, too, but dared not risk using it.
To my surprise, the door to my small room was open, and there were clashing, banging noises coming from inside it. I had been storing the recovered arms under my bed, and stacking swords and assorted blades by the hearth once the space under the bed was filled, until there was virtually no floor space left, save the small square of floorboards where Fergus laid his blankets.
I stood on the stair, amazed at the scene visible through the open door above. Murtagh, standing on the bed, was overseeing the handing-out of weaponry to the men who crowded the room to overflowing—the men of Lallybroch.
“Madame!” I turned at the cry, to find Fergus at my elbow, beaming up at me, a square-toothed grin on his sallow face.
“Madame! Is it not wonderful? Milord has received pardon for his men—a messenger came from Stirling this morning, with the order to release them, and we are ordered at once to join milord at Stirling!”
I hugged him, grinning a bit myself. “That is wonderful, Fergus.” A few of the men had noticed me, and were beginning to turn to me, smiling and plucking at each other’s sleeves. An air of exhilaration and excitement filled the small room. Murtagh, perched on the bedstead like the Gnome King on a toadstool, saw me then, and smiled—an expression which rendered him virtually unrecognizable, so much did it transform his face.
“Will Mr. Murtagh take the men to Stirling?” Fergus asked. He had received a whinger, or short sword, as his share of the weaponry, and was practicing drawing and sheathing it as he spoke.
I met Murtagh’s eye and shook my head. After all, I thought, if Jenny Cameron could lead her brother’s men to Glenfinnan, I could take my husband’s troops to Stirling. And just let Lord George and His Highness try to disregard my news, delivered in person.
“No,” I said. “I will.”
43
FALKIRK
I could feel the men close by, all around me in the dark. There was a piper walking next to me; I could hear the creak of the bag under his arm and see the outline of the drones, poking out behind. They moved as he walked, so that he seemed to be carrying a small, feebly struggling animal.
I knew him, a man named Labhriunn MacIan. The pipers of the clans took it in turns to call the dawn at Stirling, walking to and fro in the encampment with the piper’s measured stride, so that the wail of the drones bounced from the flimsy tents, calling all within to the battle of the new day.
Again in the evening a single piper would come out, strolling slow across the yard, and the camp would stop to listen, voices stilling and the glow of the sunset fading from the tents’ canvas. The high, whining notes of the pibroch called down the shadows from the moor, and when the piper was done, the night had come.
Evening or morning, Labhriunn MacIan played with his eyes closed, stepping sure and slow across the yard and back, elbow tight on the bag and his fingers lively on the chanters’ holes. Despite the cold, I sat sometimes to watch in the evenings, letting the sound drive its spikes through my heart. MacIan paced to and fro, ignoring everything around him, making his turns on the ball of his foot, pouring his being out through his chanter.
There are the small Irish pipes, used indoors for making music, and the Great Northern pipes, used outdoors for reveille, and for calling of clans to order, and the spurring of men to battle. It was the Northern pipes that MacIan played, walking to and fro with his eyes shut tight.
Rising from my seat as he finished one evening, I waited while he pressed the last of the air from his bag with a dying wail, and fell in alongside him as he came in through Stirling’s gate with a nod to the guard.
“Good e’en to ye, Mistress,” he said. His voice was soft, and his eyes, now open, softer still with the unbroken spell of his playing still on him.
“Good evening to you, MacIan,” I said. “I wondered, MacIan, why do you play with your eyes tight shut?”
He smiled and scratched his head, but answered readily enough.
“I suppose it is because my grandsire taught me, Mistress, and he was blind. I see him always when I play, pacing the shore with his beard flying in the wind and his blind eyes closed against the sting of the sand, hearing the sound of the pipes come down to him off the rocks of the cliffside and knowing from that where he was in his walk.”
“So you see him, and you play, too, to the cliffs and the sea? From where do you come, MacIan?” I asked. His speech was low and sibilant, even more than that of most Highlanders.
“It is from the Shetlands, Mistress,” he replied, making the last word almost “Zetlands.” “A long way from here.” He smiled again, and bowed to me as we came to the guest quarters, where I would turn. “But then, I am thinking that you have come farther still, Mistress.”
“That’s’true,” I said. “Good night, MacIan.”
* * *
Later that week, I wondered whether his skill at playing unseeing would help him, here in the dark. A large body of men moving makes a good bit of noise, no matter how quietly they go, but I thought any echoes they created would be drowned in the howl of the rising wind. The night was moonless, but the sky was light with clouds, and an icy sleet w
as falling, stinging my cheeks.
The men of the Highland army covered the ground in small groups of ten or twenty, moving in uneven bumps and patches, as though the earth thrust up small hillocks here and there, or as though the groves of larch and alder were walking through the dark. My news had not come unsupported; Ewan Cameron’s spies had reported Hawley’s moves as well, and the Scottish army was now on its way to meet him, somewhere south of Stirling Castle.
Jamie had given up urging me to go back. I had promised to stay out of the way, but if there was a battle to be fought, then the army’s physicians must be at hand afterward. I could tell when his attention shifted to his men, and the prospects ahead, by the sudden cock of his head. On Donas, he sat high enough to be visible as a shadow, even in the dark, and when he threw up an arm, two smaller shadows detached themselves from the moving mass and came up beside his stirrup. There was a moment’s whispered conversation; then he straightened in his saddle and turned to me.
“The scouts say we’ve been seen; English guards have gone flying for Callendar House, to warn General Hawley. We shallna wait longer; I’m taking my men and circling beyond Dougal’s troops to the far side of Falkirk Hill. We’ll come down from behind as the MacKenzies come in from the west. There’s a wee kirk up the hill to your left, maybe a quarter-mile. That’s your place, Sassenach. Ride there now, and stay.” He groped for my arm in the darkness, found it, and squeezed.
“I shall come for ye when I can, or send Murtagh if I can’t. If things should go wrong, go into the kirk and claim sanctuary there. It’s the best I can think of.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. My lips were cold, and I hoped my voice didn’t sound as shaky as I felt. I bit back the “Be careful” that would have been my next words, and contented myself with touching him quickly, the cold surface of his cheek hard as metal under my hand, and the brush of a lock of hair, cold and smooth as a deer’s pelt.
I reined to the left, picking my way slowly as the oncoming men flowed around me. The gelding was excited by the stir; he tossed his head, snorting, and fidgeted under me. I pulled him up sharply, as Jamie had taught me, and kept a close rein as the ground sloped suddenly up beneath the horse’s hooves. I glanced back once, but Jamie had disappeared into the night, and I needed all my attention to find the church in the dark.
It was a tiny building, stone with a thatched roof, crouched in a small depression of the hill, like a cowering animal. I felt a strong feeling of kinship with it. The English watchfires were visible from here, glimmering through the sleet, and I could hear shouting in the distance—Scots or English, I couldn’t tell.
Then the pipes began, a thin, eerie scream in the storm. There were discordant shrieks, rising unearthly from several different places on the hill. Having seen it before at close hand, I could imagine the pipers blowing up their bags, chests inflating with quick gasps and blue lips clamped tight on the chanters’ stems, cold-stiff fingers fumbling to guide the blowing into coherence.
I could almost feel the stubborn resistance of the leathern bag, kept warm and flexible under a plaid, but reluctant to be coaxed into fullness, then suddenly springing to life, part of the piper’s body, like a third lung, breathing for him when the wind stole his breath, as though the shouting of the clansmen near him filled it.
The shouting was louder, now, and reached me in waves as the wind turned, carrying eddying blasts of sleet. There was no porch to give shelter, or any trees on the hillside to break the wind. My horse turned and put his head down, facing into the wind, and his mane whipped hard against my face, rough with ice.
The church offered sanctuary from the elements, as well as from the English. I pushed the door open and, tugging on the bridle, led the horse inside after me.
It was dark inside, with the single oiled-skin window no more than a dim patch in the blackness over the altar. It seemed warm, by contrast with the weather outside, but the smell of stale sweat made it suffocating. There were no seats for the horse to knock over; nothing save a small shrine set into one wall, and the altar itself. Oppressed by the strong smell of people, the horse stood still, snorting and blowing, but not fidgeting overmuch. Keeping a wary eye on him, I went back to the door and thrust my head out.
No one could tell what was happening on Falkirk Hill. The sparks of gunfire twinkled randomly in the dark. I could hear, faint and intermittent, the ring of metal and the thump of an occasional explosion. Now and then came the scream of a wounded man, high as a bagpipe’s screech, different from the Gaelic cries of the warriors. And then the wind would turn, and I would hear nothing, or would imagine I heard voices that were nothing but the shrieking wind.
I had not seen the fight at Prestonpans; subconsciously accustomed to the ponderous movements of huge armies bound to tanks and mortars, I had not realized just how quickly things could happen in a small pitched battle of hand-to-hand fighting and small, light arms.
The first warning I had was a shout from near at hand. “Tulacb Ard!” Deafened by wind, I hadn’t heard them as they came up the hill. “Tulacb Ard!” It was the battle cry of clan MacKenzie; some of Dougal’s troops, forced backward in the direction of my sanctuary. I ducked back inside, but kept the door ajar, so that I could peer out.
They were coming up the hill, a small group of men in flight. Highlanders, both from the sound and the sight of them, plaids and beards and hair flying around them, so they looked like black clouds against the grassy slope, scudding uphill before the wind.
I jumped back into the church as the first of them burst through the door. Dark as it was, I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized his voice when he crashed headfirst into my horse.
“Jesus!”
“Willie!” I shouted. “Willie Coulter!”
“Sweet bleeding Jesus! Who’s that!”
I hadn’t time to answer before the door crashed against the wall, and two more black forms shot into the tiny church. Incensed by this noisy intrusion, my horse reared and whinnied, pawing the air. This gave rise to cries of alarm from the intruders, who clearly had thought the building unoccupied, and were disconcerted to find otherwise.
The entrance of several more men only increased the confusion, and I gave up any idea of trying to subdue the horse. Forced to the rear of the church, I squeezed myself into the small space between altar and wall and waited for things to sort themselves out.
They began to show signs of doing so when one of the confused voices in the darkness rose above the others.
“Be QUIET!” it shouted, in a tone that brooked no opposition. Everyone but the horse obeyed, and as the racket died down, even the horse subsided, backing into a corner and making snorting noises, mixed with querulous squeals of disgust.
“It is MacKenzie of Leoch,” said the imperious voice. “Who else bides here?”
“It is Geordie, Dougal, and my brother with me,” said a voice nearby, in tones of profound relief. “We’ve brought Rupert with us, too; he’s wounded. Christ, I thought it was the de’il himself in here!”
“Gordon McLeod of Ardsmuir,” said another voice I didn’t recognize.
“And Ewan Cameron of Kinnoch,” said another. “Whose is the horse?”
“Mine,” I said, sidling cautiously out from behind the altar. The sound of my voice caused another outbreak, but Dougal put a stop to it once more, raising his own voice above the racket.
“QUIET, damn the lot of ye! Is that you, Claire Fraser?”
“Well, it isn’t the Queen,” I said testily. “Willie Coulter’s in here, too, or he was a minute ago. Hasn’t anyone got a flint box?”
“No light!” said Dougal. “Little chance that the English will overlook this place if they follow us, but little sense in drawing their attention to it if they don’t.”
“All right,” I said, biting my lip. “Rupert, can you talk? Say something so I can tell where you are.” I didn’t know how much I could do for him in the dark; as it was, I couldn’t even reach my medicine box. Still, I coul
dn’t leave him to bleed to death on the floor.
There was a nasty-sounding cough from the side of the church opposite me, and a hoarse voice said, “Here, lass,” and coughed again.
I felt my way across the floor, cursing under my breath. I could tell merely from the bubbling sound of that cough that it was bad; the sort of bad that my medicine box wasn’t likely to help. I crouched and duck-walked the last few feet, waving my arms in a wide swathe to feel what might be in my way.
One hand struck a warm body, and a big hand fastened on to me. It had to be Rupert; I could hear him breathing, a stertorous sound with a faint gurgle behind it.
“I’m here,” I said, patting him blindly in what I hoped was a reassuring spot. I supposed it was, because he gave a sort of gasping chuckle and arched his hips, pressing my hand down hard against him.
“Do that again, lass, and I’ll forget all about the musket ball,” he said. I grabbed my hand back.
“Perhaps a bit later,” I said dryly. I moved my hand upward, skimming over his body in search of his head. The thick bristle of beard told me I’d reached my goal, and I felt carefully under the dense growth for the pulse in his throat. Fast and light, but still fairly regular. His forehead was slick with sweat, though his skin felt clammy to the touch. The tip of his nose was cold when I brushed it, chilled from the air outside.
“Pity I’m no a dog,” he said, a thread of laughter coming between the gasps for air. “Cold nose … would be a good sign.”
“Be a better sign if you’d quit talking,” I said. “Where did the ball take you? No, don’t tell me, take my hand and put it on the wound … and if you put it anywhere else, Rupert MacKenzie, you can die here like a dog, and good riddance to you.”
I could feel the wide chest vibrate with suppressed laughter under my hand. He drew my hand slowly under his plaid, and I pushed back the obstructing fabric with my other hand.
“All right, I’ve got it,” I whispered. I could feel the small tear in his shirt, damp with blood around the edges, and I put both hands to it and ripped it open. I brushed my fingers very lightly down his side, feeling the ripple of gooseflesh under them, and then the small hole of the entrance wound. It seemed a remarkably small hole, compared to the bulk of Rupert, who was a burly man.
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