Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  Runners were scurrying, back and forth between the front line and the commanders at the rear, yet nobody seemed to be in control. Wedderburn watched with rising horror. ‘Dùinibh a-steach!’ he heard again. But tightening the ranks only made them more vulnerable. Why were the men not ordered to advance? Were they all to die without striking a blow?

  The Jacobite artillery had now ceased firing entirely. Briefly the enemy’s guns also fell silent. But then they began again, this time loaded with grapeshot, withering sprays of lead pellets that ripped through the clans like scythes through a field of oats. To stand and take this, after everything else, was intolerable. First the MacLeans, then all the Highlanders still surviving in the centre and right, threw off their plaids, gripped their claymores and staggered forward through the bog, screaming into the grapeshot gale as they went. They left behind them a carpet of bodies and body parts. When they were halfway across the moor the Government infantry’s muskets opened up on them.

  The Angus men waited in reserve, helplessly watching the carnage. Young John Wedderburn’s terrified mare was stamping and snorting, and in bringing her under control he let her run a few paces. He glanced back through the drifting lines of smoke to see if he could spot his father. A hundred yards away a group of horsemen seemed to be moving away from the battle. John Wedderburn screwed his eyes against the smoke. He could see, he thought, the Prince among them, but not his father. He could not see him anywhere at all.

  There followed a dream of flight, stretching over days. The retreat his father had hinted at did not exist, only a stream of men and horses fleeing south in total disorder. John Wedderburn was carried along by this current. Shame barely crossed his mind: his only thought was to get away. He saw many of his own Glen Prosen company running in the same direction, showing not the least concern for his ignoble behaviour. This did not relieve the sickness in his stomach. Somewhere in the last minutes of the battle he had let go the colours and had not seen them since, but the sickness was not guilt, it was fear. By the time he reached Moy the men were straggled for miles along the road, some barely able to keep moving, others asleep where they had sat down for a minute’s respite. The ground was littered with discarded weapons and uniforms, forgotten bonnets, broken shoes. John paused to rest his horse, which was lathered and unsteady from being ridden too hard. He knew he should let her walk unburdened for a while, but when more riders came up and reported that the redcoats were slaughtering any male they caught – fit, wounded, young, old, armed or weaponless – he remounted and whipped the beast south again.

  Twenty miles on, as night fell, he found himself alone. Fording the pounding, numbing Spey, the mare collapsed in midstream and John had to abandon her, then fight his way across on legs like blocks of stone, bawling out animal noises of rage and exhaustion. He had not eaten since dawn, was completely drenched, frozen, shattered, frightened, friendless, and now without a horse.

  He stumbled on through the gloom towards the great hulks of the Cairngorms; knew he must stop and find shelter. Not far from the river he came across a huddle of houses crouched low as dogs and every one in darkness. He knocked at the first. He was sure there were people inside but there was no answer. He pushed; the door was barred. He tried the next one: the same. At the last house, despairing, he did not knock but leant against the door, and it opened under his weight. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him.

  A woman’s voice said, ‘Cò tha siud?’ – Who’s there? – and something else fast and challenging, he could not make out what: ‘Ma ’s ann a thoirt an èiginn orm a thàinig thu, tha mi cho cruaidh ri cloich; ma ’s ann dha mo spùinneadh, chan eil càil agam ach seann phoit.’ ‘Tha mi le Teàrlach,’ he said, not caring any more. I am for Charles. The voice muttered something else; it was coming from a recess at one end of the room and sounded like an acceptance, if not exactly an invitation. The room was warm, the air thick with the smell of peat, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a bank of glowing red a few feet away. He went towards it, dripping at every step, and lay down in front of the fire. In a minute, he thought, I will take off my wet things, but just for now … Seconds later he was asleep.

  He woke, his joints seized, still stretched on the dirt floor of the house. The fire was blazing now; steam poured from his clothes like hill mist. Stiff and shivery, he slowly pulled himself upright, began to feel the blood in him again. There was a bed set into one wall, and in it, watching him intently, was a very old woman.

  John Wedderburn’s Gaelic was sparse – learned on the march to Derby from soldiers who had laughed good-naturedly at his efforts while appreciating the fact that he made them – and the woman had a rapid and almost impenetrable intonation. By slowing her down, he gathered that he had slept the better part of a day, that she was too old now to get out of bed except to feed the fire, which she had done before he woke up, and that so long as he fetched more peats from behind the house he was welcome to eat what little food she had, as she would die before him. He went out for the peats – there was not a flicker of life in the other houses – brought in several loads and stacked them in a corner, as if by prolonging the fire he could prolong the woman’s life and thus maybe his own, but there appeared to be nothing to eat in any case. He took off his boots and stuck them almost in the fire to dry them out, hung his tunic over the back of the one wooden chair in the place. When he tentatively asked about food, the woman signalled him nearer, and pulled from beneath the bedding a small poke, at the bottom of which were a few handfuls of oatmeal. He shook his head – not if that was all she had – but she insisted, again saying that she would die before him. Then she laughed, a toothless rasp, and added something that he had to get her to repeat three times. By the time he understood, there was no joke left in it: she would probably die before him, unless the redcoats arrived before he left.

  He mixed some of the meal with water in her one blackened pot and put it on the fire. She would not take any of the porridge when it was ready, so he ate it all: a dozen mouthfuls. Nor was she interested in the money he offered her – one or two of the few coins he had in a purse slung round his neck beneath his shirt – but she did gesture to him to pass his tunic over to her. He laid it across her lap as she sat up in bed, and she felt the brass buttons with crooked fingers. Then she indicated to him to look under the bed.

  There was an old wooden kist there. Opening it, the first item he came upon was a grey shepherd’s plaid, filthy and matted as a sheep’s winter coat. She nodded eagerly, apparently having given up trying to speak to him: he was to take it. She proceeded to pull the buttons of his tunic with surprising strength, and they disappeared under the blankets to join the meal poke. She signed that he must throw the tunic on the fire. He did so, watched it smoulder, then catch and blaze. With a stick he stabbed at it, a cuff, a sleeve, the collar, till the evidence of his visit was all gone. He put on more peats. Knowing it was time to move on, not wishing to go, wishing somehow he could stay in the cottage for years, he sat staring into the flames for a while, then stood and turned to the old woman still sitting in the bed. ‘Tapadh leibh,’ he said. She nodded. ‘Tapadh leibhse.’ Thank you. He put on his boots, hot and white-stained, wrapped the plaid around himself, and stepped back out into the world.

  Nothing after that but walking and sleeping. That first night he managed perhaps six miles before stopping, not wanting to get deep into the mountains without seeing roughly where he was. He slept in the plaid among the roots of a huge pine tree, and the night, though cold, was at least dry. Early next morning, hungry again, he followed a track that headed south-east, rising steeply alongside a burn in spate. By instinct rather than knowledge he believed this to be the northern end of the pass known as the Lairig Ghru. He had stood at the other end, more than twenty miles away, while his father pointed out the route, but he had never walked it. Part of him feared travelling in daylight, but the ache in his belly told him he must risk it: it would take a day, and beyond it he still had another full day at least, probabl
y two, to get into Glen Isla. If he travelled only at night, hunger would beat him. Also, the morning was sunny and dry, but the weather might change at any moment. He fixed his mind on the Reverend Arthur, and pressed on.

  Huge, bleak, snow-covered hills rose on either side of him. The path faded and often disappeared altogether. The sun vanished behind clouds. Sleet, heavy rain and brief patches of sunlight succeeded one another. As he climbed higher, he entered the cloud itself, and the moisture enveloped him, lying greasily on the plaid. If he heard a sound that might be another traveller, he left the path and hunkered behind a rock. But nobody came. There were others in these hills, he could sense them, but they were all moving as discreetly as he, and all in much the same direction. He wondered if his father was one of them.

  On Deeside there were more people in evidence, country folk going about their daily business, also many ragged men, of varying ages but all in some kind of distress, on their way to somewhere. The atmosphere was oppressive. It was as if a veil of some indefinable material had been dropped over the Highlands, clinging invisibly to everything: everybody knew what had happened; everybody knew that, whether they had been involved or not, they would suffer for it.

  The cottars were wary but not unkind. John got half a thick oatcake from one wife, an egg from another. Information about the battle was cautiously sought in return: nothing so direct as ‘Were you there?’ – although it was obvious that he and the other men had sprung from somewhere – but what news he might have heard about this or that person who seemed against their will to have got caught up in that affair in the north. He could not help them, thanked them for the food, wandered on. Soon his boots cracked and split: they had been wet too often, and dried too fast. The sole of each foot was a mass of blisters. He crossed the Clunie Water, limped into Glen Shee, met a shepherd who pointed out to him the drovers’ track known as the Monega Road over the next set of hills, and started to climb. The weather turned foul again. He slipped on mud and rock, dragged himself through wet, treacherous snow, nearly fell off a cliff, screamed his despair to the relentless sky. He found the path, lost it again, walked through the night because it was too cold to stop, and in the morning came like a ghost to the head of lovely Glen Isla. There he sat down and he wept. There were still several miles to go before he reached the manse, but at last he was in a place he recognised.

  Edinburgh, May 1746

  To say that the Reverend William Arthur was nervous would be something of an understatement. He was terrified. A respectable, law-abiding man of the cloth – admittedly from an Angus parish full of Episcopalians, a fact which placed him in a proximity to the rebels that many of his kirk brethren found disagreeable if not downright suspect – here he was in Edinburgh, at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as by law Established, not a month after the crushing of those same rebels, in the company of a young man who had been, who still was, out! He was, in short, harbouring a criminal, a boy who had been present at Culloden and the earlier engagements, and whose unhappy father was languishing in custody at Inverness, or perhaps by this time even in London, awaiting trial. Should it be revealed that John Thomson, the minister’s footman, was not John Thomson at all – and was that not too obvious, too ordinary, a name for a footman? – Glen Isla would be deprived of its pastor and the pastor of his living, if not his life.

  The Reverend Arthur did not take pleasure from rubbing shoulders with trouble. He had obligations to the family, of course; he sympathised, even, but he had been thinking uncharitable thoughts about the Wedderburns all week. Between times he had been praying hard: for forgiveness if he had done wrong; for strength if he was doing right; but most of all, he was praying that John Thomson would quickly leave his service, go to London, and never come chapping at the door of his manse again.

  The spectral figure, in an astonishingly filthy shepherd’s plaid, had barely been able to speak when it appeared just before dinner on that chilly April day. Young John had managed only a few words about the battle, his uncle Robert Wedderburn, and his hope of sanctuary. By the time Mrs Arthur and a maid had bundled the lad indoors, stripped him, bathed him and put him to bed in the attic, away from prying eyes, dinner had been quite spoiled. An urgent discussion had ensued about what to do with him, always supposing he did not die of his ordeal.

  It had been Mrs Arthur, more moved than her husband, more seduced by emotion, who had thought of the General Assembly, which would be taking place in little over a fortnight. The Reverend would be setting out early, as he had other business in the capital. He would not normally go to Edinburgh without a servant, but old Tam Tosh, who might have accompanied him, was so arthritic these days that he dropped anything heavier than a comb: now here was a young fellow ready made, and quite plain-looking too. Busy Edinburgh would be safer for the boy than these glens into which inquisitive soldiers would soon be marching. Reluctantly, Mr Arthur had agreed. On the road between Angus and the capital, John Wedderburn had been lost and John Thomson born.

  They were lodged in the Canongate, and when the minister went out he preferred it if John Thomson went too. This was because the lad would not stay in their room alone, but wandered the streets speaking to God knew who. Worse, he wrote letters to his mother in a clumsy code that a spy would crack on the first page, asking for news of his father, and rounding off with requests that she, Lady Wedderburn, send him, John Thomson, more clothes, and that she remember him to his aunt! Mr Arthur felt it necessary to regulate his servant’s supply of paper and ink, and to keep him by his side as much as possible.

  The only consolation was that Edinburgh, which barely half a year earlier had been swooning at the feet of the Chevalier, was now so fervently back in the Hanoverian fold that nobody thought any rebels in the town – for of course everybody understood that plenty were there – posed any great threat to national security. How conveniently, for example, certain non-combative poets and booksellers, famed for their Jacobite sympathies, had absented themselves from the capital during the occupation, and how easily they had returned to resume a peaceful life and, tentatively at first, to write songs of heroism and betrayal.

  In spite of this, Mr Arthur was less inclined to break out in a cold sweat if he could keep John Thomson under his close personal observation. He had him attend him to St Giles’ for the General Assembly, which venerable body humbly composed a thank-you letter to His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland. The letter praised the Duke’s generous resolution in delivering the Scottish Church and Nation from the Jacobite army; acknowledged the many fatigues he had endured and the alarming dangers he had run in pursuing that ungrateful and rebellious crew; expressed the Church’s great joy in the complete victory he had now obtained by the bravery of his Royal Father’s troops, led on by his own wise conduct and animated by his heroic example; and, finally, prayed that the Lord of Hosts, Who had hitherto covered his head in the day of battle, might yet guard his precious life, and crown him with the same glorious success, and that his illustrious name might be transmitted with still greater glory to latest posterity. This was approved, applauded and dispatched by His Royal Highness’s most obliged, most obedient and most humble servants, the ministers and elders of the Kirk: a letter so nauseatingly obsequious that it made Mr Arthur feel quite ill as he voted for it.

  Fortunately for the minister, his purgatory did not extend beyond the duration of the General Assembly. John Thomson, a half-hysterical, frozen, wasted child a fortnight past, had come back to life in the miraculous way of youth, and intended to set off at once for London. There, according to information contained in a note from his brother James to their mother, and communicated by her to the minister (a paper trail that made Mr Arthur shudder), a ship had docked bearing such prize captives as the Earl of Kilmarnock, the Lords Balmerino and Cromartie, Sir James Kinloch and Sir John Wedderburn. The prisoners had been distributed to jails as yet unknown, to await the gathering of evidence against them. Clearly, the eldest unincarcerated male Wedderburn’s place w
as at his father’s side, or as close to it as he could get without being detected and put there literally. Greatly relieved, the Reverend Arthur returned alone to Glen Isla. John Thomson boarded a vessel at Leith, and worked his passage south to the English capital.

  London, June – November 1746

  In London young John, now neither Thomson nor Wedderburn, was given safe lodging and subsistence by a relative, a Mr Paterson, through whom he was also reunited with his brother. James, just fifteen years old, as one who had not been out, was at liberty to travel where he wanted throughout the kingdom. As soon as he had heard of his father’s capture he had mounted his favourite pony and headed south, putting up in byres and stables on the way. Anger and the snorting of cattle had kept him awake most nights: anger at not having been at Culloden, anger at his father’s capture, at his father for having been captured, at John for not having been; this burning rage had driven him all the way to London. There he had found that his father was in the new jail at Southwark along with a number of other Jacobite gentlemen. They were being treated, all things considered, with the courtesy their social status demanded. In the Highlands, meanwhile, poor men were being shot on sight, their wives and daugters raped, their cottages burnt and their cattle slaughtered. Large numbers of destitute peasants, brought out on pain of death by their chiefs, were being condemned to transportation. Now, with John’s arrival, James’s anger began to settle like the bed of a fire, his character to harden into something new and purposeful.