The Pretender's Lady

by Alan Gold

  They returned to the house, this time with a much greater sense of caution knowing that the English troopers were so close. As they entered the empty dwelling, a sense of deflation overcame the prince and Flora. They had anticipated rowing to freedom by now and putting land and the prospect of being caught well behind them. What they didn’t want was the reality of being cooped up together in a house for the entire day, with nothing to do but contemplate the danger of their situation.

  For the rest of that day, they sat quietly and ate and drank of the supplies they’d brought with them for the boat journey. Careful not to take too much of the food in case they were longer on the sea than they anticipated, they ate mainly berries and summer fruits that Flora enjoyed for their sweetness and also the sense of wellbeing they gave her.

  Neil, for his part, told them that he would secrete himself behind the large rock, and try to understand how crowded The Little Minch, the stretch of water that separated the Outer Isles from Skye, was with the boats of the English troopers.

  When he’d left, Flora and Bonnie Prince Charlie, as she now regularly called him, settled down to wait out the day. They talked, as though they were old friends about the differences in their lives; but although Prince Charles was heir to a throne, he assured her that he was far more fascinated in the life she led than she would be interested in the world of the European courts with their intrigues, their politics, and the perpetual nuisance of hangers-on and those trying to gain influence by attaching themselves to his coat tails.

  Flora couldn’t see how the life of a farming family in the Hebrides could possibly be as fascinating as that, but he told her, “I have no real idea of how my future people live, nor what they do. That’s why it’s of importance to me that you teach me the daily activities of my kingdom. And in terms of my own life, you must understand the constraints that courtly life brings with it. You imagine that because people like me are rich and powerful that we’re free to do and be what we want. But you couldn’t be more wrong, Flora my dear. I’m a victim of my history. My father made a few unsuccessful attempts to reclaim his rightful crown so that the monarchy could continue, as it should have been, as was ordained by God Himself when He instituted the divine right of kingship. My father’s failure placed an intolerable burden on my shoulders to right this wrong. Not only does my father and my family expect it of me, but the whole of Europe, especially France and Italy, eagerly awaits my success. Failure is unthinkable. Failure will destroy not just my family, but the hopes and dreams of the many supporters and followers of the rightful heir to the English and Scottish thrones.”

  “Forgive me, Charlie, but you’ve already failed. Culloden was a failure, and the past few months of escaping the Duke of Cumberland weren’t the hallmarks of a victor. I don’t mean to be cruel, but what else can you tell your father and your supporters when you return to France?”

  He nodded. Then he smiled. “You know, Flora, there should be people like you in the royal courts. People who see clearly and speak the truth without thought to consequences. Instead, we leaders are surrounded by sycophants and flatterers who seek only their own aggrandizement. What you say is patently the truth. But I can’t be as honest and straightforward as you. It’s called diplomacy, and truth and diplomacy lie at opposite ends of the bed. I will tell all of Europe that the reason for my failure was the lack of support I received from the king of France. Without any French army, I still managed to win many great battles, and I came within a stone’s throw of taking London. I shall tell them to imagine what a great victory I could have enjoyed, had I been supported by French troops. But you and I will know the truth.”

  “Yes, and a thousand Scottish widows and orphans.”

  “You cut me to the quick.”

  “Perhaps, Charlie, but no Scot would accept your coming here as a victory for my people. And if you do manage to convince your royal friends of how close you were to getting back the crown, and if the king of France sent his army, how would you have got them to leave England? Do you think they’d have let you sit on the throne without your paying the price for their work? My father always said to be careful about lying with dogs, because you’ll wake up with fleas. Once the French troops are on our soil, why should they leave?”

  He looked at her in bemusement, but then looked toward the floor of the house and for some time remained strangely silent. Embarrassed that she might have offended him by telling him a truth that he refused to countenance, she said, “Sir, I hope I haven’t said something which I shouldn’t have said. I’m only a simple woman, not used to the ways of courts and politics. If I have, then I apologize.”

  He smiled at her, stood, and came over to sit beside her on the chaise longue. He reached over and held her hand. “Dear Flora. You tell me both what I already know and what I refuse to see. Sometimes, one is so driven by the overwhelming desire to achieve a goal that one closes one’s eyes to other eventualities. I realized that the king of France was looking for a reason to control the Crown of England but my prayer was that he would do so through my proxy; his reason was only to return the nation to Catholicism, and I honestly believe that he would have been content to have a pact of amity between our nations.

  “But how else could I have won back the throne for my father? Look what I came so close to managing on my own, without the king of France’s help. Imagine what could have been done with twenty thousand well-fed, well-armed, and well-trained soldiers? But would I or my father have been masters in our own domain? That’s something which until now I’ve determined to confront when my family was again sitting on its rightful throne in London.”

  Once again, Flora was shocked by the circumstance in which she found herself. A Prince was sitting on her chair and holding her hand. A Prince! And she nothing but a Highland girl who lived on a farm. Yet for a reason she simply couldn’t come to terms with, she felt comfortable, alone in a strange house, both dressed like women and holding hands. For even though he’d finished talking with her, he continued to hold her hand. It was a warm and gentle moment. Not a passionate moment, but a time of sharing.

  And she recognized something in him that she had not seen previously. She saw now that he was a man. Ordinary, confused, worried, and in desperate need of the love and comfort that a wife could provide. He wasn’t even looking at her as he held her hand, but instead was sitting beside her as she reclined on the chaise longue, staring at the floor, lost in the conflicting images that were swirling around in his mind.

  Softly, as though not wanting to awaken a sleeping baby, she gently pulled him toward her, reaching up with her other arm as his body reclined upon hers. She held him in her arms. His head was on her breast. She stroked his face. He allowed her to envelope him in her embrace. He didn’t question or refuse but submitted to her arms and allowed her to protect him against the enormity of the events that threatened him every moment of his waking and sleeping life.

  She sang a lullaby to him, something that she’d been taught by her mother Anne when she was a child, and which, now that she was engaged to Alan, she eagerly waited to sing to her own bairns.

  Sitting in the depths of the boat, he was already seasick as it breasted the waves and plunged into the troughs, but he was determined to pull his weight. The Scotsman, though, wouldn’t have it.

  “No, sir, you will not row,” said Neil MacEachan, feeling freer to speak at his normal tone of voice now that they were a league or more away from the land. “Unless you’re an experienced rower, you’ll only confuse my rhythm and increase the work I have to do.”

  “But Mr. MacEachan, surely four hands are better than two.”

  “Not when the hands haven’t held an oar before. Half of the work of rowing is in the strength of your arms, but the other half is in the technique of how you dip an oar into the waves and maintain a constant pressure, letting the weight and momentum of the boat and the flow of the water do some of the work. You have not learned the technique, and all you’ll do is cause me to row round in ci
rcles. No, young man, you sit in the stern and relax and by mid-day tomorrow, I’m hoping that the tide and the currents will have helped me row to within sight of Healaval Mhor on Skye.”

  Flora heard the interchange, but because it was so dark, she could barely make out the two men who were talking. When they’d left the Island an hour earlier, pushing the boat out into the waves and scrambling aboard in constant fear of gun fire from the shoreline, they’d lain in the bowels while Neil had pulled and heaved against the battering of the waves. But as they’d left, the sky was still gleaming with the light of the stars and the crescent moon even trailed its tendrils in the water. And as they rowed further and further from the land, the nighttime fires lit by the troopers on the cliff tops diminished until they became no more than pinpricks of light to the north and south of the point from which they’d departed. But soon the Isle was out of sight, buried five leagues into the horizon.

  Neil looked up and was concerned about the disappearance of the stars behind the blackening of the sky. Huge thunderclouds were starting to roll in toward Scotland from the Western Atlantic Sea. Hard though they were to see against the already dark sky, natives of the Islands recognized the intensity of a coming storm from the smell of the air and the shape and dimension of the clouds. And these clouds worried Neil as he rowed toward Skye.

  Facing him and looking forward to the horizon out of which Skye would eventually loom, the prince had his back to the Island of South Uist and the ocean from where the rapidly forming storm was approaching and didn’t understand why Neil and Flora had fallen silent. When he offered to help row the boat and when his offer had been refused, he felt it was Scottish Highland self-reliance or churlishness and sat back to enjoy the journey as much as he could. Unlike on the land where the Duke of Cumberland’s army could suddenly be everywhere, on the high seas, his small rowboat could detect the sail of a ship many miles away and could take evasive action to be enfolded in the arms of the waves and hidden from his enemy.

  Settling into the dimensions of his Betty Burke dress, cloak and bonnet, the prince was lulled into a light doze by the swell as the rowboat rode gently up and down the peaks and troughs. But he was rudely awakened when the troughs suddenly became much deeper, and he was thrown around inside the boat.

  “What’s . . .”

  “There’s a storm coming,” said Neil, having to speak louder over the increased noise of the wind.

  “But Hugh assured us that in summer . . .”

  Neil laughed. “Hugh can say what he likes, but the Almighty decides what weather we’ll have. And right now, He’s determined that we’re in a wee open boat on the high seas with not an inch of canvas to protect us from a downpour. You offered to row the boat, Charlie. Now you can do something far more important and that’s bail out the water which’ll collect when the rain starts to sheet down. Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” said the prince.

  “So shall I,” said Flora and began to fuss around in the bottom of the boat, amidst all the ropes and anchors, to find two buckets that she and the prince could use.

  Neil nodded and continued to pull on the oars, more strenuously now that the seas were so much greater than when they’d set out. The wind was rising in tempo and beginning to scream past the distant island as though a thousand ghosts were moaning and flying into the air toward them.

  “We’re going to be blown off course by the wind and the waves,” Neil shouted. “I can determine roughly where we are if I can get a glimpse of the moon and the stars. But we need a break in the clouds. Even so, with no compass to guide us, we’ll be miles out when we make landfall on Skye. I hope you haven’t got somebody waiting for you at a particular point, Charlie, because we could be fifty miles to the north or the south by the time we reach land. Or we could be pushed so badly off course we’ll miss Skye altogether. Then . . .”

  He let the words hang in the wind. And then it began to rain. They were already wet from the splashing of the oars and the waves, but now solid sheets of rain began to fall from the lowering black clouds scudding across the sullen sky. Peals of thunder and vast explosions of lightning turned the black night into brilliant day for just an instant.

  The first sudden colossal flash of light shocked Flora who screamed and buried her face in her hands. It was so vast, so overwhelming, and the surprise was so great, that for an instance, she reverted to the terrified child who would hide under her blanket in a thunderstorm. On land, she could protect herself from the violence of a storm by hiding in buildings. On the sea, she was in the midst of nature at its most violent.

  Prince Charles immediately moved over to where she was sitting and threw both his arms and the seamstress’s cloak he had been wearing around her, holding her into him as she had done earlier in the day.

  “I’m all right. Truly, Charlie. I’m all right. I wasn’t expecting it and it was so close and so sudden. I was shocked by the brilliance,” she shouted. “It felt as though I was inside it.”

  He maneuvered his cloak over her head, but she said, “We haven’t got time to try to stay dry. We have to start bailing before the boat fills with water and becomes too heavy for Neil to row.”

  They looked at Neil, and although it was pitch black except for the illumination from the lightning, they knew that he’d be straining with all his might against the mounting seas.

  The rain and the ferocity of the wind increased with every minute. From a journey that started off as a simple row between islands over an undulating sea, only hours later they were in the middle of a terrible Atlantic storm with stinging rain hurtling down and filling the boat, boding their death by drowning at any moment. The prince couldn’t believe his bad fortune.

  The mountainous distance between the peaks and troughs of the waves threatened to overturn the rowboat with every pull of the oars. It was pitching and tossing like a leaf in a windstorm and in danger of breaking in two, its spine creaking as the waves reached enormous heights, three or four times that of a man. Flora whimpered in terror but forced herself to remain silent and not to display her fear in case it spread to the other two, for then they would truly be lost. Instead, to prevent herself from vomiting in the swells and to stop herself from crying out aloud, she concentrated her mind on bailing out the rapidly filling water. Neil was intent on trying to ride the waves so that the craft didn’t suddenly find itself at the top of a peak, for he knew all too well that in these seas, a plunge down into a trough could break a boat into a dozen fragments. The lightning told him all too menacingly that it was a good twenty or thirty-foot drop from top to bottom, and no rowboat could survive that kind of a fall. He braced his feet to ensure that he wasn’t tossed hither and thither.

  Only Prince Charlie tried to keep up the spirits of the other two by singing a French song, followed by one in Italian. It was fortunate that neither Flora nor Neil spoke Italian, for the words were superbly vulgar. He only rarely got to perform it, for normally he was restrained by the etiquette of the courts, and could only sing these songs in a drinking party of his male friends. When he came to the part about the size of a man’s member and the look on a lady’s face as he exposed himself to her, he sang the words with much greater gusto as though daring the Almighty to take offense, come down to earth in person, and do something about it.

  Time meant nothing to them as the storm maintained its intensity and the seas grew ever more ferocious. They were starting to suffer exhaustion, but rest was a luxury they couldn’t afford, for any let-up from bailing or rowing would lead to their certain death. They were in the epicenter of nature at her most violent and unforgiving. The music of the moment was a cacophony of vast thunderclaps that shook the very sea itself, blinding lightening that illuminated their terror, and the rolling and pitching of their boat that threatened to toss them into the deadly waves as though they were mere puppets.

  The continuous thunder and lightning lit the surrounding seas and the light showed the fear in all of their faces. They knew in their hear
ts that they were going to die at any minute, and for an instant, Flora welcomed death in place of the fear she was feeling. Her arms were like lead, her clothes were soaked and heavy, and her face stung from the constant spitting of the waves. The water’s spume against her skin was like somebody throwing sand at her.

  The violent sea, whipped up into a frenzy by the wind, was topped with white foam and spume, flecks of which were swept up into the air and carried in the wind like snowflakes. All three of them were completely covered in white as though they were exposed in a winter’s blizzard. The near and distant ocean was a vision of hell itself. Wildness was everywhere, as was its sister, tumult. The thunderclaps rent the air as though a giant was beating on a huge drum, followed by growls from the belly of the most hideous monster in the depths of the ocean.

  Not one single portion of the sea or sky was calm. When lightning enabled them to see beyond the confines of their boat, they felt they were in the clutches of a demented ogre; everywhere they looked, the waves towered above them and threatened to engulf their flimsy craft; the sea was a witches’ caldron, and the very sky itself galloped as pendulous clouds raced across the firmament. They were in the midst of a nightmare, yet the awful ache caused by the bailing of the water just to keep afloat and alive, and the stinging pains in their arms and legs and bodies told them that they were very wide awake.