by Karin, Anya
“Who is it that you think these people are? Your town’s esteemed visitors, that is.”
“The little red-headed Scot? Or the hundreds of people who’ve come for the festival?”
“The Moore girl, and the gang of ruffians she travels with. Who do you think they are?”
“I’m absolutely certain I haven’t any idea. But I’m equally sure you’re going to offer me advice on the topic. Really, Alan, we may have once worked at the same barrister’s office, but that’s as far as our love for one another goes. You needn’t play these ridiculous games with me. Just tell me what you want and what you have to say and remove yourself from my presence, sir.”
“I apologize if I’ve offended you, Councillor. It wasn’t my intent at all.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“The people you think are just hapless Scots wandering through your town on the way to some final destination are not. The girl you’ve kidnapped-”
“Guest.” The mayor snarled. “She’s my guest.”
“Right, your guest, she and the man playing at being her husband were responsible for the terrible happenings in Edinburgh. You’ve heard of Ramsay Macdonald’s shame? You’ve now got one of the five? Six? I forget how many, but you’ve got one of the perpetrators in your clutches. You have the ability to right a terrible wrong and bring a good man back from ruin.”
“Ramsay Macdonald is not what I’d call a good man, sheriff. He stole from his people and he plotted to buy...”
“Ah, the connection becomes clear where it was once clouded, does it not?”
“Say what you mean, sir.”
“You’re doing very nearly the same thing he did, though on an even grander scale. You’re the mayor, Councillor! You’re able to sink or float entire towns. Two of them anyway.” The sheriff grinned, very impressed with his cleverness. “You might not see what you’re doing as being bad. You’re within your rights to tax these mutts whatever you wish to tax them, but I’ll tell you right now, from one friend to another-”
“We’re not friends, Alan,” the mayor interjected.
“Be that as it may, I’m telling you that what you’re doing is going to land you in a whole mess of a situation, and the people who are going to do it to you are right here in Morland’s Cleft.”
“Mornay’s Cleft, sheriff. How could you live a half-day’s ride south of me and not have any idea where the grain that feeds Edinburgh came from?”
“I’m a person more interested in whisky than in grain and in money more than both, Councillor.” He stretched his short, skinny legs out in front of himself and intertwined his fingers behind his head. “It seems to me that you are too. So are you going to hear me out, or are you going to keep cutting in and telling me how badly you dislike me?”
Willard stiffened visibly, clenched his jaw and exhaled through his nose. “Speak then, Alan.”
“You pointedly don’t call me sheriff.”
“Talk.”
“Assuming you’re familiar with the story, the girl you’ve presently got kept, she’s the fiancée of one Gavin Macgregor. If you know anything of the clans from the highlands, you’ll know the Macgregors as a riotous bunch who stood by the usurping Prince Charles in the latest series of comically pitched wars that were fought over the past two years. As a reward for their obnoxious loyalty to a dead line of kings from a country which should be buried just as deep as Robert the Bruce, the Macgregor chieftain was outlawed, and so is their plaid.”
“I’m well aware of the danger of plaid, Alan. I’ve outlawed the wearing of Mornay patterns here for just that reason. Disobedience comes from disorder, I’ve found.”
“And yet, do you find that the wretches keep right on wearing it, perchance when your back is turned?”
“There was one man, a farmer from here, who chose to wear his great kilt to court the other day. I ought to have had him hanged.”
“Why?”
“Seemed out of place to shoot an old man dead in the middle of court proceedings. But yes, to answer you, I’m well aware of the dangers of allowing clannish people the right to behave in clannish ways.”
“And yet, that’s the very thing they want, isn’t it? To be allowed to behave in their savage ways and all the while, not be taxed too much.”
“Get to the point, Alan.”
“I’ll speak plain then.”
Willard drew a deep breath and seemed ready to say something, but reconsidered at the last minute, not wanting to give the sheriff any means by which to continue talking any longer than absolutely necessary.
“Please,” he said. “Go on.”
“Right, well, what I’m driving at is that Macgregor sees himself as a kind of Robin of the Hood. He spent two years in Edinburgh stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down and giving it off to poor Scots to live on. I chased that bastard from one end of King’s Road to the other, and since he was doing something everyone quite liked, it was impossible to catch him. At least, it was impossible until he started getting careless. And he started getting careless when there came to be a girl involved, as so often happens.”
“You mentioned a gang, Alan, what-”
“Isn’t just the two of them gallivanting around and stealing things. There’s a whole crew. They’ve got a fellow with two fingers, who happens to be a Hell of a knife fighter. Actually, those two were the first thorns in my side. Kenna didn’t come along until quite a bit later. Also to worry about is a woman called Lynne Stevenson, who I had in my employ for a short while, but she turned her back on me out of some prurient desire for one of the Scots. And then finally, there’s a damned foul Spaniard who betrayed me as well, after I’d paid his way through life for several years.”
“Seems as though you’re betrayed quite a lot. Perhaps there’s something to look at within yourself?”
Alan clenched his teeth and narrowed his gaze. “At any rate. In exchange for this information, and for my warning of danger and all the help I’m going to give you, I’ll be staying here until I’m ready to leave. I want to see them all dead.”
“What cause do I have to execute a bunch of Scots? Do you really think that’s the best way to go about this?”
“If you don’t do something, I promise you’ll regret it sooner than later. They’re not going to let you get away with anything that harms their precious chunk of this island.”
“But it’s my right to do-”
“No it’s not. At least not the way they see it. These people, Councillor, they’re not like us. You know that. You found it out when bandits killed your daughter, didn’t you? Scottish bandits, no less. These aren’t grateful people, nor are they reasonable ones.”
“She doesn’t look dangerous to me,” the mayor said, as he watched Kenna pass in front of his window, plucking flowers and smelling them. “In fact, she seems completely incapable of the things you say.”
“Harrumph,” the sheriff said. “You believe that, you’re in for a terrible pain.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Looks nothing like most of these women. Most of them rather resemble the sheep they tend.”
Alan grimaced and chuckled shortly. “I’m telling you to watch yourself. Macdonald fell into the same trap. Tried to marry her, and now he’s ruined. This is a game you don’t want to play. Figure out why they’re here, find out what they know, and if you’re not going to be wise and kill them, at least get them out of here before they cause problems you can’t fix. And,” he said with another of his irksome grins, “It seems to me that since you’ve not yet ejected me from where I sit, that you’re listening to what I say.”
“Seems to me I’ve no choice. I didn’t maintain this position for ten years by ignoring threats.”
“Ah, there’s a wise mayor,” Alan said, smiling. “Do you have a servant to lead me to my quarters?”
Glaring at the awful, round little man with the brown lips, Mayor Willard took up his bell and rang it to summon Rollo. When he appeared, the sheriff guffawed and p
ointed. “You’ve acquired a hunchback for a servant?” Neither Willard nor Rollo paid it any mind.
“Yes sir, what can I do for you?”
“This...fellow will be staying with us for a short while.”
“Yes sir,” Rollo said. “Follow me, please.”
Eleven
Mornay’s Cleft
August 18, Afternoon
“Ach,” Gavin said, pacing back and forth in front of Duggan’s bar and nursing his third whiskey of the day, “here we are past noon, and there’s no sign of Kenna. Am I allowed to start worrying yet?”
“You can worry if you like,” said John, “but you’ve got to remember that it was her what did the rescuin’ last time, no? She knows what she’s doing. And even if she is in trouble, remember, this isn’t some crackpot laird, or a sheriff with a mean tendency. Willard is a mayor, and has been for over ten years. He’s not going to be murdering some girl or locking her in a chamber or anything of the sort.”
“Aye, I know, it’s just-”
“Just nothin’ but you making problems for yourself. I know you’re worried, I know you are. But you have to let things be, Gav. We dinna leave there until past midnight and the party showed no sign of diminishing. Gold crowns to haggis pies, they were all there until some ridiculous hour, and then he offered her a room and is presently showing her proper hospitality of a morning. He’s a nobleman Gavin, they take that business seriously.”
“It’s the most important thing, Mister Gavin,” Olga said as she tromped down the stairs. “Manners, I mean. Without manners you’ve got nothing. And if you’re a noble, you’ve got very little else of interest anyway, so they become all the more important.”
Duggan laughed loudly, but Olga didn’t seem to understand what caused such boisterous excitement. “It’s true,” she said. “Manners are very important for the nobility.”
“Aye, it’s just...ach, nevermind, woman. Sausage?” Duggan stuck a fork through a juicy link, held it up and shook it a little. It quivered and it was John’s turn to giggle while Lynne shot him a sidelong glance.
“See here? It’s not only the rich who favor being hospitable. Look at Duggan, our new friend. Every morning we come down and he’s got a plate of food ready, and it’s always wonderfully delicious.”
Turning to John and speaking in a quiet whisper, Elena said: “The way that wiggles on the for, it look like-”
Cocking his eyebrow, John laughed loud.
“Right,” cut in Rodrigo. “What is it we should be doing while we wait for Kenna to return with whatever she’s learned? We know there’s some kind of collusion between the mayor and those scurvy dogs from the East India Company, but there’s little we can do with that until she brings us some further items to ponder.”
“Items to ponder, says the graceful Spaniard. Did you use your time off in Edinburgh to pursue a degree from the University?” John cocked a wide grin and Rodrigo looked at him squarely with a set jaw before breaking down.
“I am reading,” he said. “I’m trying these new phrases I find in books. My favorite is Benjamin Franklin and his funny little almanacs.”
“Ach, Dr. Franklin! The only way he could be more wonderful is if he was Scottish!” John’s wit just kept rolling. Gavin finally stopped pulling at the bottom of his kilt pin and seemed to lighten a bit.
“You know what I heard? Speakin’ of Franklin.” Duggan paused as he spoke, both for dramatic effect, and to wet his throat. “I heard there are a number of Americans what want to break away from the Crown.”
“You’re joking, how is that possible?” Gavin said, sitting up straighter. “The lot of them are British. They canna just up and leave King George.”
Slowly, Duggan nodded, but then pursed his lips and ran the back of his hand over them. “It not a serious threat, I dinna think. Not yet anyway. But there’s talk of it is all. How strange would it be though? They live an ocean away from London. Ruled by a gaggle of mayors and barristers and governors whose favorite activity is overtaxing and under-spending on the things the people need. Ach, it’s been a hundred years and a half since people started to filter over there. A full century since the Civil War that ousted Charles in favor of a rebel.”
As he spoke, a kind of somber darkness descended upon the men and women seated in Duggan’s inn. For the lot of them, life was not so simple as it had been only weeks before. Rodrigo was a thug working for a cruel bastard of a sheriff, Elena and Olga maids for Laird Macdonald. Lynne doing whatever she could to keep eating, and Gavin and John were common thieves, though thieves with big ideas.
But then the lot of them brought down a nobleman who wanted to buy up Edinburgh. They sunk a sheriff who would just as soon kill a Scot as protect him. And as Duggan spoke, as he talked of Americans and their problems with the crown and everything else, the valiant souls sitting around those tables in that sun-lit inn, with clouds of hazy smoke filling the air with the smell of their countryside burning for the profits of yet another self-interested Englishman, reality replace the morning’s earlier levity.
“We canna let this happen. This is our land,” Gavin said. “Not his. These fires have to stop. These people have to stop being tormented with taxes so high they canna pay. He knows what he does, you can be sure of that. Raise the taxes so high no one can pay, then offer to buy all their land when they’re broke.”
He looked around at all the faces staring back. A few were nodding, but all were stern.
“This isna just about Kenna, though she’s a part of it, no doubt. This is about injustice, cruelty, and righting wrongs.”
Duggan stopped wiping down his bar top and let the rag hang limp in his hand as he listened. Elena stopped rubbing Rodrigo’s hand, Olga put down her sausage, John spread his fingers out on the tables, and Lynne put down the knife she was using to clean under her nails.
“When we – Kenna and I – when we left Edinburgh, I thought we were done with all this sort of thing. I thought the thievery and the danger were behind us and I thought we’d go off to Fort Mary and have ourselves a whole brood of red-headed sprouts.”
“Aye and a fine lot they’d be too,” John said with a smile.
“That they would. But it has to wait. When we got here, and found out about the mayor and his taxes, Kenna insisted we stay and see what we could. I dinna want to. I wanted to leave, get back on the road, and pretend the problems of the world were behind us.”
“But you couldna do it,” Lynne said.
“Couldna do it. These people need my help. Our help. I hate asking this of you, since I know none of you have any stake in this. All that going on about Americans and the abuse they suffer, it just sparked a fire in me.”
“Gavin,” John said, without a shred of jocularity in his voice. “We’re your men. You’re our leader. I think I speak for everyone.”
A round of nods and a couple of grunted agreements met with what he said.
“I, uh...Gavin?” Duggan cut in. “If it isna a problem, I’d like to be counted in as one of you. At least this time. I’ve not seen such courage since I came back from the war going on twenty years past.”
“I couldna endanger you with what we do, Duggan. There’s no telling how it might end.”
“It’ll end the same way it’s been going for a year now, if no one does anything to stop it. Willard’s not a bad man he’s just lost his way. He’s become darkened with hate and anger.”
“I worry,” Gavin said. “That if you get caught up in what we’re doing, that something will happen later that hurts you.”
Duggan smiled grimly. “Nothing could hurt me worse than what he’s already done. Do you see my daughters here?”
No one responded. Gavin sucked his lip.
“They left. Everyone leaves. This place, Mornay’s Cleft, it used to be that this was the only place my daughters ever wanted to live. They used to talk of it, of finding their husbands and coming back here to spend their lives farming and raisin’ families like what their Ma and I did. But now?�
�� He shook his head. “Nay, no one’s to stay here if they’ve got any reason to leave or any place to go. As soon as they found husbands, Linnie and Molly, they left. Linnie moved as far away as she could. She and her man went all the way to Inverness. Molly and Douglas, they bought a plot in Duncraig, just down the road, and then not two years later – that would be last year, mind – they lost it when the mayor invented another tax or six for new farmers. He’s taken my daughters from me, and I want to make sure they can come back like they always wanted.”
When he fell quiet, and went to twisting his beard in his fist, Gavin stood up and clapped the man on the shoulder.
“Aye, then you’re one of us,” he said.
Duggan nodded solemnly.
A moment later, John broke the silence that descended on the room by thumping his glass against the table. “Gav,” he said. “There’s only one problem.”
“Aye?”
“Well, as you might’ve noticed, Kenna’s gone missing, though I’m sure she’s safe, and we’ve not the first clue how to do anything – or even what it is we’re wanting to do about the mayor. If we’re to tie him to corruption and all of that business, we’ve to get some proof that he and the Company are conspiring to enrich themselves at the cost of these two towns.”
“That’s a fine point,” said Rodrigo in his scholarly tone, “it’s against the oath of a mayor to damage his jurisdiction to line his own pockets. It’s hard to prove that to be the case, but I think in this instance, the damage done is fairly obvious, is it not? Clear cutting forests and selling the timber, then burning the left over? Letting vast swathes of field lay fallow while he plans to first build, and then run a plantation staffed by the farmers who he’s been tasked with serving, but who he has, in fact, pushed out of their land?”
“You’re sure you were a pirate before?” John asked with his grin coming back to his face, “and not a barrister?”
A smile crept across Rodrigo’s lips and then he chuckled before continuing, “but no, Gavin is right. This is a great wrong and it must be-”