“You don’t have any reason to suspect our paintings may not be genuine?” asked Henry.
Sibley patted his moustache with his napkin and carefully replaced it on his lap.
“A most excellent repast. You must compliment Miss McHarg for me, young lady.”
Rebecca found this to be addressed to herself. Infuriated by what she perceived as a patronising presumption by this pompous little man, she was about to respond when Sibley abruptly diverted his attention to her uncle. In her present humour towards Sibley, Rebecca took this as a further slight. Anticipating a reaction, Henry raised his eyebrows pleadingly and Rebecca closed her mouth without saying anything.
“My years of experience in the field of antiquities has convinced me that it always pays to be, at first, suspicious. This has the hidden benefit of ensuring that all surprises may be pleasant ones.”
Rebecca did not join in the outbreak of loud laughter with which Sibley followed his joke and was pleased to see that Henry did not either.
The telephone rang. Henry rose and went into the Great Hall to answer it. Rebecca’s heart sank, fearing she would now be unable to avoid more unwanted conversation but, after a few seconds, during which, thankfully, Sibley did not look up from devouring a plateful of cheese and biscuits with the thoroughness of an industrial vacuum cleaner, Henry returned.
“It’s for you, Mr Sibley. Mr Gordon of Barradale.”
Sibley rose, simpering, to his feet and disappeared through the door which clicked shut behind him. Folding her napkin, Rebecca excused herself and quickly left the room, anxious to avoid further contact with Sibley. She decided to try out the bath she had discovered earlier before turning in.
She passed quickly behind Sibley, who was muttering into the receiver. Noticing her, he paused, placed his hand over the mouthpiece, smiled in what he doubtless considered a charming manner, and returned to his conversation once she was safely out of earshot.
Rebecca gave him one last look through narrowed eyes.
***
In the dead of night, Rebecca awoke with a start. She was convinced she had heard a noise. The clock on her bedside table showed just after three. A fox barked suddenly outside, making her jump. Shivering in the chilly darkness, she got out of bed, went over to the window and pulled back the curtain. The loch and grounds were lit up by a full moon, the trees and bushes casting long, dark shadows across the grass. It was eerily beautiful. She could see nothing immediately untoward. She strained her ears for any unfamiliar sound but everywhere seemed quiet. The fox barked again. But she was certain that was not what had disturbed her.
Rebecca was spooked. She was not normally given to imagining things going bump in the night. Drawing her dressing gown over her white nightshirt and stepping into her slippers, she opened her door quietly and peered out. There was no sign of anything odd in the passageway.
All at once, she heard a strange, mournful howling from somewhere high in the castle. What on earth could that be? Heart thumping, she stepped out, closing the door softly, and stood still. She shivered involuntarily in the unexpectedly chilly air. Moonlight was streaming in through the windows, sending shafts of ghostly, silvery light onto the walls. Black shadows lay in between.
There it came again, a long, melancholy note. It must be the wind, she reasoned, whistling through the old pipework. She looked out of a window. Nothing appeared to be stirring.
Moments later, she most definitely did hear a noise, of an altogether different sort.
A low thud, which seemed to come from somewhere on the same floor, a gap of a few seconds and then a metallic scraping sound … and nothing more.
The moon passed behind a cloud, throwing the passageway into darkness.
Rebecca swallowed hard, clenched her fists into tight balls and forced herself to inch quietly along, blocking her mind to the potential danger of discovering an intruder.
Just before the junction of two passages, Rebecca stopped and pressed herself against the wall, listening for any sound.
Everything seemed still. She poked her head gingerly round the corner. Nothing unusual. She stepped out, her eyes darting to either side to detect the first sign of movement. Edging carefully along, she passed the bathroom she had used a few hours earlier, finally reaching a large leaded window at the end. She leaned forward to look outside.
Not a soul about. The lawns were soft and velvet in the moonlight, the bushes and trees stilled. Just as she was turning away, Rebecca’s eye fell on a boat a little way off shore, directly in front of the castle. She frowned, certain there had been nothing there when she had looked out earlier. It was too dark to make out whether anyone was aboard. She watched but it did not seem to be moving, nor showing discernible signs of life.
Rebecca turned to be confronted by the door to the gun room. Putting her ear to it, she listened hard but could hear nothing. With every muscle taut and holding her breath, she closed her hand about the latch. It clicked easily and silently open. To her great relief, she found nobody lurking in either the antechamber or the gun room. There had been no further noises since she stood outside her own room.
Perhaps it had been the heating system, she thought, starting to doubt herself. In an old, draughty castle there would be any manner of odd, mysterious noises.
Her pulse slowing down again and relaxing, Rebecca began to make her way back along the passageway to her room. She was relieved but slightly disappointed not to have discovered something, although why there was now a boat in the loch near the castle was puzzling. She reached the turn and threw a quick look back over her shoulder.
This time she did see something at the end of the passage. It rooted her to the floor.
A face at the window!
Rebecca stopped dead in her tracks, uttering an involuntary gasp.
She quickly ducked around the corner and crouched down. Slowly, her heart in her mouth and steeling herself, she peered back round again.
The face was still there, pale and wraith-like in the moonlight, sharp, intense with dark, sunken eyes. There was not a wisp of hair on the head.
Rebecca hardly dared breathe.
Spidery fingers fiddled with a latch. If the window opened, Rebecca felt sure her thumping heart would be heard by anyone.
She was torn between a desire to wake the household and a fear that she might be attacked. In the end, events took over. In trying to shift her weight, she overbalanced. Reaching out to steady herself, she sent a tall flower stand crashing across the floor. Equilibrium lost, she followed it, sprawling into the corridor and staring straight up into the face only a few feet away.
The sunken eyes glowered with fury. Rebecca met their gaze. Thin lips parted, as if about to speak to her but no sound came. For the few seconds they stared at one another, the world went into slow motion.
Then, the eyes shot a glance to either side and gave one last burning look of anger down at Rebecca before disappearing below the sill. Rebecca shrank back, shaken by the ferocity of the expression and the suddenness of the incident. She put her hand to her chest and took some deep breaths.
Her wits gradually returned. She scrambled to her feet and hurried to the half-open window. She was just in time to see two shadowy shapes disappearing across the lawn into a bank of rhododendrons by the loch. They were dressed from head to toe in black. Rebecca wondered if they could have been wearing diving suits. She waited, hoping to see some disturbance in the water. The surface of the loch was still and the brightness of the moonlight such that she was sure to see anyone in or on the water.
She pushed the window wide to listen.
Rebecca convinced herself that what she had seen had a rational explanation. The shapes running across the lawn were definitely men. But there had been something really creepy about that face.
She waited ten minutes by the window without seeing anything more. It was now quite cold, the chilly night air in the passageway making her breath visible. She closed the window and returned to her room, uncertain
what to do. She crossed to her own window to watch the boat on the loch.
It had disappeared! She scanned both ways but could see only moonlight and shadows.
Footsteps stopped outside her door. Her heart immediately began to thump again, the blood rushing into her temples.
“Rebecca?” Uncle Henry’s voice called gently from the passage.
“Oh Uncle Henry, it’s you!” Rebecca flew to the door and flung it open. Her uncle stood outside in his dressing gown, clutching a torch. His face registered surprise as his niece suddenly clung to him.
“Are you all right? I heard some noise along here.”
“I’m fine, I’m fine but I saw a man trying to break in!” At a rush and realising she was gabbling, Rebecca tried to relate what had happened, pointing to where the boat had been out on the loch. “I bet that’s how they got here! It must have been! It wasn’t there when I went to bed.”
“Slow down, girl, slow down. Are you sure what you saw? If we have to call the police in the morning, we want to be certain. Did you actually see any men on the boat?”
“Well, no, of course, I mean I can’t be absolutely certain – but it’s a bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
“Coincidence is one thing. Look, come down to the kitchen and we’ll make some tea. You can tell me the whole thing from start to finish.”
***
Henry McOwan put the kettle on the stove and listened, not interrupting as Rebecca, now more measured, related everything she had seen and heard in the passageway. When she had finished, he looked thoughtful.
“The boat you saw was actually sent for Mr Sibley by his friend Mr Gordon of Barradale and is to take him and me to the Isle of Rum tomorrow. His phone call was from Mr Gordon, arranging this. It has probably moved just along the loch, out of the current.”
Rebecca raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“So you see why we have to be certain about statements we make. If you say that these intruders came from that boat, then you are implying that Mr Sibley and his associate may be somehow involved with them as well and that is rather dramatic, as you will agree? It is also, I am sure, very wrong.”
“Oh,” said Rebecca, the wind rather taken out of her sails by this unexpected revelation.
“Well I don’t like Mr Sibley and I just don’t trust him.”
“Why? It’s no reason to accuse him of being a criminal, is it? I don’t trust a lot of people and I like even fewer but that doesn’t make them all crooked.”
Rebecca sensed her uncle’s reproof quite keenly in these last remarks and felt a little ashamed. In the relatively short time she had known him, she had come to hold him in high esteem and did not wish to lose his good opinion. Henry saw her mortified look and put his hand on her shoulder.
“But hey, you’ve been through quite an ordeal tonight – and you’ve shown a lot of courage. At your age, heck, I’d have shouted the house down for help. And – you scared them off without their getting in. I’ll get the local copper to look into it. Not quite Sherlock Holmes, but the best we can muster here!”
He went over to the window and looked out, then turned, a mischievous smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “It’s good to be inquisitive. And if it’s any consolation, I do think Sibley is a plonker.”
Rebecca looked up quickly, half-shocked. Henry’s eyes twinkled.
“But he is our guest …”
CHAPTER 7 – The Flight Of The Bonnie Prince
Henry McOwan and Mr Sibley set off early for the Isle of Rum, to catch the morning tide. Opening her curtains, Rebecca had caught sight of them on the landing stage. A small dinghy was waiting to take them out to a boat in the loch, which had appeared this morning. Rebecca observed that the boatman who helped them on board had a full head of red hair and did not remotely resemble her intruder. She chewed her lip thoughtfully as she watched them depart.
“The laird has left you a written note,” said Miss McHarg, somewhat curtly, as Rebecca sat down to a cup of tea and some toast in the breakfast room.
“Quite why he should not have imparted to me the content and trusted to me to pass on the message, I do not know. But, that he did not, and I shall not question his intent, since it is not the housekeeper’s place to be questioning the laird. It’s there, by your cup.”
She made a dismissive gesture towards a small envelope and left the room. Rebecca grinned to herself, not altogether certain it would be advisable to be around when McHarg did question the laird. She seemed quite put out. Rebecca opened the envelope.
…Morning, Watson! Escorting ‘our Guest’ to Rum – back for supper. Local copper coming this evening – checked everywhere and nothing obvious missing. Don’t think they could have got in.
Drew has clear instructions that you are to enjoy yourself today! H.
Rebecca smiled, pleased at the conspiratorial, light-hearted tone.
She was nervous about telling her story to the police. She would confine herself to facts, rather than adding her own theories, for fear of leaving herself open to more of her uncle’s disapproval.
For now, though, there was much to tell Drew following the drama of last night and it crossed her mind that she was actually looking forward to his arrival. She chose not to pursue this line of thought since she might have to admit a thaw in her attitude to all things Scottish. She decided to wait in the library, where she had left Becca’s journal the previous evening. She was soon installed in the window seat and absorbed once again in the extraordinary life of her namesake in the eighteenth century. She resumed the story on the morning of Becca’s fourteenth birthday and the Battle of Culloden.
Becca’s father and two brothers perished in the fighting on Drumossie Moor.
The English had opened with an attack of awesome ferocity. Her father had been hit by musket fire in these initial skirmishes, while Davie and Andrew had fallen with wounds and died in the field in the hours afterwards. The battle had been so furious that it had been over in all but half an hour. The routed Jacobite army fled the field.
Becca and her mother had been brought word a few days later by clansmen running from the pursuing English soldiers.
The English Commander, the Duke of Cumberland, ordered the Jacobites to be hunted down without mercy. King George wanted to eliminate such uprisings for ever.
Together with their steward, Hector, Becca and her mother walked over a eighty kilometres to Inverness, to bring home the bodies for burial in the family crypt. On the way they met many, many people on similar journeys, weeping for lost sons, husbands, fathers and brothers. Becca described, in heart-rending detail, scenes of unbelievable sadness. She was very angry at how roughly and shamefully these grieving folk were treated by the English soldiers, who were searching high and low for the remnants of the Bonnie Prince’s army.
When the family at last arrived in Inverness, exhausted from days of walking and lack of food, they had been refused permission to take the bodies with them and told to return home. At this, Becca’s mother Mary had broken down. It had taken several days of constant pleading from Becca, together with the last of their money, to persuade an old Major to allow them to load the bodies onto their cart under the cover of darkness.
The Major had not been able to look Becca in the eye as he took her purse.
On the way home, Becca’s mother’s condition deteriorated and by the time they arrived at Rahsaig, she was very sick and babbling incoherently.
They buried their men the next morning in the beauty and tranquillity of the hillside overlooking the loch, a bitter contrast from the last place they saw in life.
The strain proved too much for Mary. She too died, a few days later.
Becca was convinced that her mother had simply died of a broken heart.
While Becca grieved, Robert, her eldest brother, burned for revenge. Despite Becca’s pleading and the fact that he had still not properly recovered from his wounds, he left to join up with a band of Jacobite rebels. From here, his life
became quite extraordinary.
In July 1746, with the English troops closing in on him, the Bonnie Prince was hiding out on a mountain called Sgurr nan Eugallt, just a few miles from Rahsaig.
To protect the man they believed had the rightful claim to the throne of Scotland, the Jacobites hatched a plan to throw the English off his scent. With his dark good looks and sturdy figure, Robert McOwan was of similar appearance to Prince Charles himself. Robert would pose as the Prince and attempt to lead the English astray, thereby clearing the field for Prince Charles to make his escape to France.
And thus it was that for a time, Robert McOwan lived the life of a fugitive in the hills and glens, making himself known as the Bonnie Prince and trying to stay one step ahead of the English. Most Highland folk had never actually seen the Prince and did not imagine, therefore, that they were encountering anyone other than the Young Pretender himself. For some months, the plan succeeded in causing great confusion among the English pursuers and gave heart to the Jacobite sympathisers. Despite her fears for Robert, Becca enjoyed this hugely, particularly the notion of her brother as the real ‘Pretender’.
But the adventure surely could not last and so it was that Robert McOwan was finally captured by the English while hiding out in rocky crags on the Paps of Jura, mountains on a remote island some miles off the mainland. He was taken to Edinburgh castle, where the English quickly realised they had an impostor. Robert was hanged for his support of the Jacobite Prince on October 1 1746 and Becca McOwan, at fourteen years old, born into a family of seven, was left orphaned and alone to look after her young brother Donald.
Rebecca’s eyes filled with tears. She put down the book and stared out of the window, unable to imagine the anguish and desolation that Becca must have felt. To lose almost your entire family in a few short months was a tragedy, the poignancy of which was almost unbearable. She thought of Alistair and her own parents for a moment, hoping they were safe.
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