Midnight Honor
Page 1
“JOHN MACGILLIVRAY AND I HAVE KNOWN EACH OTHER ALL OUR LIVES.”
“Yes,” he said, tracing his fingers along the soft skin of her forearm. “And I have envied him that privilege before.”
Anne felt the heat of his breath against her wrist. “You have?”
“I have envied every man who has known you longer than I have.”
His lips were on her wrist again, and now they were following the tingling path already conquered by his fingertips. The cuff of her sleeve had fallen below her elbow, and when he reached the chenille barrier, he turned and pressed his lips into the curve of her neck.
His mouth was warm, his tongue hot and moist where it swirled up to flirt with her earlobe, then scrolled a provocative path down to the collar of her robe. Anne could barely hold her head steady. The seduction would end before it had even begun.
“Jealousy,” he murmured, “can be a terrible thing. Almost as terrible as pride.”
She might have had the wit to think of a response but for the thrill of his lips on her.
“Stop,” she gasped. “You must stop. I cannot bear it.”
“You can. And you will, for I have not even begun.”
PRAISE FOR MARSHA CANHAM
AND HER PREVIOUS NOVELS
Swept Away
“EXCITING, SEXY AND FUN…filled with spies, intrigue, danger, swordplay and a grand passion… a writer whose talents know no bounds.”—Romantic Times
Pale Moon Rider
“CAPTIVATING…Lush and sensually explicit… Canham has written a grand adventure full of heroic men and dastardly villains, and with a beautiful heroine who has spirit and determination, and even saves the hero on more than one occasion.”—Booklist
“This gripping tale kept me up well into the morning. Tyrone will steal hearts and haunt dreams. Renee is enchanting and full of fire. Don't miss this new arrival by Marsha Canham.”
—Affaire de Coeur
The Blood of Roses
“Completely enthralling!…A powerful love story… Written like a well-played chess game, the reader is everywhere and becomes one with the scenes.”
—Heartland Critiques
“Marsha Canham sweeps you into Catherine's love story with characters that leap from the pages.… She completely captures the essence of this era with an emotional intensity that will stun and thrill readers.”
—Romantic Times
The Pride of Lions
“AN ELECTRIFYING LOVE STORY with characters that leap from the pages, breathtaking descriptions of Scotland's awesome beauty, superb dialogue and fascinating details.”
—Romantic Times
“A TENSE, HIGHLY EXCITING ROMANCE… [that] travels from the opulent ballrooms of England to the Scottish highlands.”
—Affaire de Coeur
The Last Arrow
“ROUSING ACTION, A STRONG SENSE OF MEDIEVAL LIFE, A SATISFYING LOVE STORY and intriguing spins on historical events as well as the familiar Robin Hood characters should bring readers back for more.”
—Publishers Weekly
“FABULOUS… Her version of the legendary Prince of Thieves and his Merry Men is as unique as her writing.… Ms. Canham's skill at recreating legend is unparalleled.”
—Romantic Times
Dell Books by Marsha Canham
The Blood of Roses
The Pride of Lions
Across a Moonlit Sea
In the Shadow of Midnight
Straight for the Heart
Through a Dark Mist
Under the Desert Moon
The Last Arrow
Pale Moon Rider
Swept Away
This is for my husband, Peter, who, after twenty-eight years of marriage, has learned to tread lightly and duck fast during those heady days and nights known as Deadline Hell. For my son, Jeffrey, my daughter-in-law, Michelle, and my Munchkin, Austin: Even though there are no palm trees in town, the days are warmer when you are around.
To the Intrepids, the Loopies, and the readers/cyber-friends at A2R and RBL, my thanks for keeping me company at two and three in the morning when my characters keep me awake and pounding at the keys.
Special thanks to Ruth Mounts for giving me a title that inspired so much more angst than just “Book Three.” And to Adrienne Ball, friend and publicist, who threatened to pout for another year if I did not mention her somewhere in this book.
Author's Note
The phrase “labor of love” has been used so often, I think it sometimes loses its meaning, but in this case, with Midnight Honor, there is no other way to describe it. I actually started writing the story ten years ago, right after I had finished The Pride of Lions and The Blood of Roses. I had met Colonel Anne while doing research on the Jacobite Rebellion and knew she was a strong enough character to carry a story of her own. No, she deserved a story of her own. I started it, but put it aside after a hundred pages or so because I knew I had been in Scotland too long and needed to distance myself from Culloden for a while in order to do Anne justice. Nearly every year after that, I took out the folder and leafed through the pages I had written, but each time I put them back again knowing I wasn't ready, that I still retained too much from the first two books to enable me to look at Anne's story with a fresh eye. Okay, I'll admit it: I was more than a little afraid I had used up all the emotion and impact of the rebellion in the pages of The Blood of Roses.
Three years ago, Marjorie Braman offered me the chance to revise and update both The Pride of Lions and The Blood of Roses for reissued editions. I had just finished writing one Regency, Pale Moon Rider, and was contracted for a second, Swept Away, but retyping the two Scottish books in the computer made all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The story was there in my mind, the characters kept nudging their way into my thoughts even as I was chasing coaches through the streets of London. The only question remained: How do I write a story about a woman in love with two vastly different but inherently similar men? How do I make the challenges and sacrifices of all three characters as believable and as heart-rending for the reader as they are for the characters themselves? And how do I make the gentle readers who lambasted me at the end of The Blood of Roses understand that the real tragedy isn't in the loss, it is in the forgetting?
Anne and Angus Moy, John MacGillivray, Gillies MacBean, even Fearchar Farquharson, were real, living, breathing people; heroic figures out of the past who, I hope, will allow me my poetic license in weaving my story around them. I have been warmly rewarded by correspondence from the descendants of Lochiel and Alexander Cameron; I can only hope the MacKintoshes will be as kind.
“These deeds, these plots, this ill-conceived folly born of midnight honor …”
—UNKNOWN
Prologue
Inverness, May 1746
The fear was like a blanket, smothering her. Having witnessed and survived the obscene terror of Culloden, Anne Farquharson Moy thought she could never be truly frightened again, yet there were times her heart pounded so violently in her chest, she thought it might explode. Her mouth was dry; her hands shook like those of a palsied old woman. The slimy stone walls of her cell seemed to be shrinking around her, closer each day, and the air was so thin and sour she had to pant to ease the pressure in her lungs.
And then there were the sounds….
They were as bone-chilling and piercing as the screams that haunted her dreams day and night. She had watched the prince's army die on the blood-soaked moor at Culloden, had seen the rounds of grapeshot fired by the English ranks spray into the charging Highlanders and cut them down like the pins in a child's game of bowls. She had heard the dreadful, unimaginable agony of fathers cradling fallen sons, brothers dragging themselves on mangled limbs to die beside brothers.
And she had heard their cries for mercy as the English completed the slaughter by stabbing and mutilating those wounded souls they found alive on the erstwhile field of honor.
The sounds she heard in her gaol cell were the soft, barely audible groans of a dying faith, of crushed pride, and of the utter, complete hopelessness that permeated the walls of the old stone courthouse in Inverness.
She was alone in her cell. Cumberland had called it a luxury, for there were easily a hundred half-starved men crowded into an area that normally held no more than twenty, some with festering wounds who were too weak or feverish to roll out of their own waste. An oatcake and small tin cup of water were the daily ration. Pleas and prayers went unheeded. The weak eventually grew too frail to squander their strength on such futile measures and simply died in silence. The stronger ones clung to their rage and sat huddled in dank corners, showing their defiance the only way they could: by continuing to live.
How, indeed, could they show any less courage than the tall and straight-backed Lady Anne Moy, who had spat her contempt in the porcine face of Butcher Cumberland with such magnificent defiance? He had come to the prison three times over the past six weeks offering to free her in exchange for giving king's evidence against the Jacobite leaders. All three times she had sent him away spluttering German oaths under his breath.
It was a heavy burden to carry on such slender shoulders, and Anne had come closer to accepting his offer on that third visit than she cared to admit. But he had made it in the open courtyard, below windows filled with the strained, haunted faces of the brave men who had already lost so much in a cause that had been doomed from the outset. If all she could do was give them this last shred of pride and honor to cling to, then it was little enough. It was also a sacrifice that grew pitifully smaller in importance with each day that passed, each hour that saw another rack of Jacobites hung for treason, each minute that brought the inevitability of her own death closer and closer.
Her once lustrous red hair was dull and matted with filth. Her skin was gray and the flesh had shrunk from her bones, leaving her body gaunt and always cold in spite of the spare blanket one of the kinder guards had smuggled through the bars. Deep purple smudges ringed her eyes, and her hands were stained black, her nails cracked and torn from repeatedly pulling herself up to the narrow window cut high in the cell wall.
She held one almost transparent hand up to the murky light and could not entirely stifle the sob that rose in her throat. She was so thin she could no longer wear the ring Angus had given her on their wedding day. It had fallen off one night, and she had become nearly frantic groping through the straw and filth that littered the floor until she had found it.
That was the closest she had come to weeping since her arrest. The closest she had come to screaming out an oath to the devil himself if he would take her away from this place.
She did not even know if Angus was alive or not. Cumberland assured her that he was, miraculously clinging to a thread to be sure, yet Anne had no reason to believe him, certainly none to trust him. The royal toady had said himself that belly wounds were the quickest to mortify despite all the skills a surgeon could bring to bear.
Anne curled her fingers into a tight ball and pressed them against her lips.
A gleaming, fat tear squeezed between her lashes and streaked slowly down the length of her cheek to her chin. It hung there a moment, glistening like a liquefied diamond before a tremor shook it free and it dropped unnoticed among the other stains that darkened the bodice of her dress. The once lovely gown was filthy, the silk rendered colorless and torn in a dozen places. The layers of ruffled linen petticoats she had discarded after the first week of confinement now served as her bedding. Her cloak had gone to ease the fevered chills of another prisoner. Over the weeks, she had bartered her shoes, her gloves, even the tiny rosette buttons that had adorned her bodice for a taste of cheese or an extra crust of black bread.
When she had nothing left to trade, one of the Sassenach guards had suggested other ways of earning favors, but the first time he came into her cell at night, he left doubled over, his ballocks damn near kicked into his pockets.
She had expected him to come back, with friends, but she never saw his ugly face again, and one of the men in a nearby cell whispered a reassurance that she would not. No one would ever see him again for the insult he had paid to their valiant Colonel Anne.
They did not know that the cruelest insult had already been delivered by Cumberland himself. Nor did they know it had been Anne's own blade that had pierced her husband's belly.
Chapter One
Invernesshire, December 1745
The track was narrow and deeply rutted, slushed with puddles of melted snow. The two riders kept their horses on the frozen deer grass wherever possible, and several times abandoned the road entirely to cut across a field, or shave the corner off a moor in order to shorten the journey from Moy Hall to Dunmaglass. Anne Farquharson Moy was dressed for the hard ride and wore plaid trews, a warm woolen shirt, and a leather doublet. A long length of tartan was wrapped around her waist and draped over her shoulders to further blunt the icy effects of the wind. Her bonnet was pulled low over her forehead, stuffed full of her long red hair. In her belt she wore a brace of Highland dags, the heavy steel pistols loaded and primed, and she was comfortable with the knowledge that she would use them without hesitation should the need arise.
Riding beside her was her cousin, Robert Farquharson of Monaltrie, also dressed for the bitter cold, swaddled in plaid. When the wind snapped at his kilt, his legs were bare beneath, the skin red, but he was accustomed to withstanding the raw weather.
Robert had been waiting in a grove of trees close by Moy Hall at the appointed time. When Anne had joined him, they had exchanged but a few frosty whispers before setting out across the frozen landscape.
Great care had to be taken when traveling from home these days. There were three battalions of government troops stationed in nearby Inverness, Highland regiments formed up under the command of John Campbell, earl of Loudoun. Patrols were regularly sent out from Fort George to scour the countryside day and night, and anyone could be arrested or taken away to prison without benefit of either a warrant or a trial. Several local clansmen had been dragged from their homes just this past week, their only crime being the sprig of thistle worn in their bonnets to show support for Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
Anne glanced up as a thick blanket of cloud crawled across the moon. She could smell more snow on the way and was grimly thankful for it. Snow—the driving icy crystals that were indigenous to the clear Highland air—would make the night safer for her, safer for everyone.
Her grandfather had sent an urgent message to her earlier in the day. Despite the terrible risks involved to both parties, he had requested a meeting at the home of John Alexander MacGillivray, a laird of some considerable influence who possessed a reputation fearsome enough to keep Lord Loudoun's patrols at a wary distance. Anne strongly doubted that even the news of Fearchar Farquharson's presence at Dunmaglass would inspire the lobsterbacks to venture too close, though she had heard recently the reward had been doubled for the old gray fox's capture.
At one hundred and thirteen years of age, Fearchar Farquharson was a spry walking history of Scotland. He had seen six kings take the English throne since the Restoration and had endured each one's particular remedy for the “Scottish problem.” He had fought his first battle nearly a century before when James Graham, the Duke of Montrose, had raised an army of Highlanders in an attempt to save the doomed Catholic monarchy. He had fought for the Stuart cause again in 1689, when England had first dared to invite a German Hanover to wear the crown, and he had played a major role in the failed uprising of 1715. Some reverently referred to him as the “wee de'il in plaid,” but to Anne, he was simply Granda', a stubborn old warrior who had reached his venerable age on the assumption that he was destined to survive as long as it took to see the Stuarts restored to their rightful place on the thron
e of Scotland.
His best hope for victory had landed in the Hebrides in mid-July. Charles Edward Stuart had embarked from France equally determined to reclaim the throne of England and Scotland in his father's name. In August, he had raised the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan and proclaimed himself Regent. To the astonishment of nearly every arrogant-minded Englishman who thought their army invulnerable, he had led his Highlanders to Edinburgh and recaptured the royal city, then dealt the government troops a resounding defeat at Prestonpans. Capitalizing on his victories, the prince had secured the Scottish borders and marched his army deep into the very heart of England.
Derby was one hundred and fifty miles from London; upon hearing that the Stuart prince had ventured unchallenged to within striking distance of the throne, the English king had ordered his household packed and loaded into waiting boats, prepared to flee at a moment's notice.
Fearchar—indeed, all of the Highland clans loyal to the Jacobite cause—had raised such a resounding cheer at the news that it was said to have echoed the length and breadth of the Great Glen. He had been all for setting out, on foot if need be, to join the brave and courageous army, even at the unthinkable cost of breaking the oath of fealty that bound the entire Farquharson clan to the will of their laird Angus Moy, The MacKintosh of Clan MacKintosh, Chief of Clan Chattan.
To Fearchar and others like him, the shame was nearly untenable that Angus Moy had not called out the clan and marched to Glenfinnan in support of their valiant prince. Instead, Angus had been one of a dozen influential lairds who had taken commissions in the government army and thereby bound their clansmen to remain at home—some even to take up the Hanover colors—while their prince marched bravely forth to meet his destiny. Fearchar had been one of the most outspoken dissenters; as a result, there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, as well as for the arrests of Anne's three cousins.