The Jacobite Trilogy. D. K. Broster

to draw back without loss of honour. Yet, unlike Macleod’s, his engagement only pledged his support in the case that the Prince came with French assistance—and he had come without it. The fate of his whole clan lay on Lochiel’s shoulders—more, the fate of every man in the rising, for if he had held back the spark would have been quenched at the outset for lack of fuel. That knowledge was a heavy burden to be laid on a man who, far from being a freebooting chief, had striven all his life for the betterment of his people.

      “Yes,” he was saying for the second time, “if we can reach and hold the pass over the Corryarrick before Cope——”

      At that moment there was a rapid step behind the two men, Lochiel heard his own name uttered in sharp accents, and, turning quickly, beheld the young commander of the baggage convoy in a state of high discomposure.

      “My dear Ewen, what is wrong?”

      “He’s gone!” And so agitated was Ardroy’s tone, so black his brow, that Lochiel’s own colour changed. “Who—not the Prince!”

      “The English officer—my prisoner . . . he’s escaped! His parole expired at half-past six this evening, and I, fool that I was, had forgot it over this business of the escort. He’ll go straight to Fort William with information of our numbers and our arms. . . . Oh, I deserve you should dismiss me, Lochiel! He’s been away near an hour, I suppose. Shall I ride after him? . . . No, I cannot, unless you give the convoy to someone else—and truly I think I am not fit——”

      Lochiel broke in, laying a hand on his arm. “ ’Tis not worth while pursuing him, my dear Ewen, nor any very great loss to be rid of him. I doubt not, too, that they have already at Fort William all the information that Captain Windham can give. But how, with that uniform, did he get away?”

      The enraged young man ground his teeth. “He was not wearing his uniform. He stole some clothes from me—a philabeg and my plaid. And he left me a damned impertinent letter . . . and these.” He unclosed a hand and held out three gold coins. “Isn’t that the final insult, that he must leave so much more than the things were worth, as though to——” He appeared unable to finish the sentence. “If ever I meet him again——” Back went his arm, and Captain Windham’s guineas hurtled violently into the shrubbery of Fassefern House.

      II

       FLOOD-TIDE

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      “To wanton me, to wanton me,

       Ken ye what maist would wanton me?

       To see King James at Edinburgh Cross,

       Wi’ fifty thousand foot and horse,

       And the usurper forced to flee,

       Oh this is what maist would wanton me.”

      —Jacobite Song.

      CHAPTER I

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      The dusk of early October had fallen on the city of Edinburgh, that stately city, which for some three weeks now had been experiencing a situation as odd as any in its varied and turbulent history. For Prince Charles and his Highlanders held the town, but not the Castle, secure on its lofty and impregnable rock; this they could neither storm, owing to its position, nor, from lack of artillery, batter down, while King George’s military representatives in the Castle were, for their part, unable to regain control of the city below them. The stalemate thus established was perfectly in harmony with the spirit of unconscious comedy which had reigned throughout these weeks, beginning with the ludicrous indecisions and terrors of the city fathers on the news of the Highland advance, and the casual method by which the city had suffered itself to be captured, or rather walked into, by Lochiel and his men. For the opening of the Netherbow Port very early on the morning of the 17th of September, just as the Highlanders outside were preparing to withdraw disappointed, was due to nothing more momentous than the exit of a hackney carriage on its way to its stable in the Canongate—though it is true that it was the carriage which had just brought back the discomfited envoys sent to interview the Prince at Gray’s Mill.

      Yesterday only had come to an end the latest (and not entirely humorous) episode, of some days’ duration, when, the Prince having ‘blockaded’ the Castle, in other words, having cut off daily supplies, the garrison had retaliated by firing on the town, killing some innocent inhabitants, striking terror into them all, and making it very undesirable to be seen in the neighbourhood of the Castle in the company of a Highlander. Violent representations on the part of the city to the Prince, embodying ‘the most hideous complaints against the garrison’, had brought this uncomfortable state of affairs to an end by the raising of the ‘blockade’—itself originated, so the story went, by the discovery of smuggled information in a pat of butter destined for the valetudinarian General Guest, for whom milk and eggs were permitted to pass daily into the Castle. Yet the old gentleman’s treacherous butter was only one of the many whimsical touches of the goddess Thalia, who had devised, during these weeks of occupation, such ingenious surprises as the descent of a soldier from the Castle by means of a rope into Livingston’s Yard, where he set a house on fire, and returned in triumph, by the same method, with a couple of captured Jacobite muskets; the discomfiture, by a sudden illumination from above, of three Camerons sent experimentally to scale the Castle rock under cover of darkness, and—perhaps the most genuinely comic of all—the solemn paying out to the cashier and directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland, within the very walls of the Castle, and in exchange for Prince Charles’s notes, of the ready money which had been taken there for safety, but the lack of which inconvenienced the Edinburgh shopkeepers as much as anybody. This transaction had taken place, under the white flag, during the blockade itself.

      But to-night, the guns being silent, and General Joshua Guest once more in possession of his invalid diet, the lately terrified citizens in the high, crammed houses with their unsavoury approaches were preparing to sleep without fear of bombardment next day by their own defenders. Those outposts of the invading foe, which always kept a wary eye upon the Castle and its approaches—and which had not passed through a very enviable time the last few days—the Highland guard at the Weighhouse, the West Bow, and elsewhere, had received their night relief, and Mr. Patrick Crichton, saddler and ironmonger, was writing in his diary further caustic and originally spelt remarks anent these ‘scownderalls’, ‘scurlewheelers’ and ‘hillskipers’. Inside the walls all was quiet.

      But at the other end of the town Holyrood House was lit up, for there was dancing to-night in the long gallery under the eyes of that unprepossessing series of early Scottish kings due to the brush of an ill-inspired Dutchman . . . and under a pair of much more sparkling ones. For the Prince was gay to-night, as he was not always; and though, following his usual custom, he himself did not dance, it was plain that the growing accessions to his cause during the last few days had raised his spirits. For, besides all those who had joined him soon after Glenfinnan—Stewarts of Appin, MacDonalds of Glengarry, Grants of Glenmoriston—two days ago had come in fierce old Gordon of Glenbucket with four hundred men, and the day before that young Lord Ogilvy, the Earl of Airlie’s son, with six hundred, and Farquharson of Balmoral with two hundred, and his kinsman of Monaltrie with more. And others were coming. Whatever the future might hold, he was here as by a miracle in the palace of his ancestors, having defeated in a quarter of an hour the general who had slipped out of his path in August and returned by sea to the drubbing which awaited him among the morasses and the cornstubble of Prestonpans.

      So there, at the end of the gallery nearest to his own apartments, in a costume half satin, half tartan, stood the living embodiment of Scotland’s ancient dynasty, and drew to himself from time to time the gaze of every lady in the room. But it was to those of his own sex that he chiefly talked.

      At the other end of the gallery, which looked out on to the garden and the chapel, Alison Grant, very fine in her hoop and powder, her flowered brocade