1
Near Ballachulish, the Scottish Highlands, 1755
The red-coated soldier was a bloodstain against the dull sky and drab scrub on the hill.
It had a name, this desolate lump above the waters, a heathenish Scotch concoction of sounds, but he was damned if he could pronounce it. To him it was little more than a pox-ridden mound of dirt that drew the elements like a hedge whore did corny-faced beard-splitters.
The waters of the lake shivered as a chill breeze weaved its way up the hill to find his solitary figure standing post. Private Harry Greenway huddled deeper into his coat, watching the small ferry being rowed across the narrows. He wished he was in his billet, a cup of hot grog in one hand and a mutton pie, warm from the oven, in the other. This was a pointless duty, a punishment for not taking proper care of the Brown Bess he now crooked loosely in one arm. His sergeant would be displeased to see him cradle the gun so carelessly, except there was no one here to bear witness, except the blasted elements and the one he guarded, who was beyond caring, Greenway wagered. Why the musket required to be pristine was beyond him. They were not in a field of battle, for these heathens were a beaten people. Yet here he stood, on this God-rotting windswept hill overlooking two lakes—Private Greenway refused to think of them with the Scotch term loch, even if he could manage the necessary guttural rasp, which to his ear sounded like someone trying to hawk up a gob of phlegm.
The sunrise had barely lightened the grey skies, and despite the thickness of his coat he feared he was in very real danger of freezing off his tallywags. That would not do, as he had hopes of deploying them soon with young Eilidh, the daughter of an innkeeper near their barracks who was known to wag her tail in return for a penny or two. She was a pert little doxy and he fully expected to dance the goat’s jig before the week was out.
He thrust the vision of her firm roundness from his mind and stamped on the hard ground to bring some sensation back to his feet, frozen in his square black boots, and also to somehow stem the burgeoning bulge under his breeches. The islands anchored in the
water were but black lumps, the one they called the Isle of the Dead seemingly darker than the others. It also had a name in their guttural tongue but he remembered only the proper English version for where the heathens buried their clan chiefs. Seeing it rise from the waters, hump-backed and sinister, reminded him of that which stood behind. During the bleak hours of night it had been a simple task to avoid gazing upon it. He had paced to and fro in order to ward off the infernal, eternal cold that seemed the norm here in Itchland, as his comrades referred to Scotchland. He had also ensured his face was turned away lest the sight be suddenly illuminated by a stray beam of moonlight. Though there was little chance of that, for a shroud of clouds buried any heavenly glow. Now that the day had dawned, dull and lifeless as it was, he endeavoured to keep facing the waters below and the hills beyond. He had no need to cast eyes upon the object of his charge, for he—it—was not going anywhere.
It had been a man once, but it was a man no longer. The flesh was gone, picked clean by the hooded crows and the ravages of the Scotch weather. Now it was but a frame of weathered bone on which had once clung muscle and sinew, hanging on a gibbet these three years. It had slipped from its bonds at least once, he had been informed with some relish by a corporal who claimed to have been present, but it had been strung together and rehung. A warning, the corporal had said in his strong West Country accent, to them Scotch who might still fancy a bit of rebellion.
Greenway knew not what the man had done to deserve such a fate—apart from being a treasonous Jacobite, which Greenway supposed was enough—but he cared little. Standing sentinel over a dead man’s bones was merely a duty, a reminder to take better care of his weapon in future. And yet, he was unnerved. His old mum back in Spitalfields had filled his head with tales of ghosts and revenge from beyond the grave, and in the black Highland night he had imagined he heard those bones clattering as they climbed from the gibbet to repay whatever wrong it believed had been done.
His thick coat notwithstanding, the breeze seemed to cut through him as if he was not there, then swirl around the wooden gibbet like an old friend come to pay its respects. The chain creaked against the
post like a cry for attention and, despite himself, the young soldier turned, if only to ensure that his night terrors had not become real.
He saw the old woman for the first time.
She was standing at the foot of the gibbet, gazing up as if in supplication. He had not heard her ascend the hill, and thus startled he swung his Brown Bess to a more ready position.
‘Step back there,’ he commanded, putting as much authority into his voice as he could muster, despite the chill rippling his words. Nonetheless, they were weak and fearful, and they wilted in the waft of the breeze.
The old hag neither acknowledged his words nor in turn paid heed. She continued to stand at the foot of the skeleton, staring at it as if it were Christ on the Cross and not some filthy rebel who defied his king. The young private considered this. Did not their saviour defy authority in the Holy Land? Was he not himself a rebel? Such thoughts were for scholars, though, and not a conscript raised in the stews of London, so he thrust them from his mind. He took a few paces closer to the woman, endeavouring to avoid gazing upon the bones swaying in the breeze. His weapon was braced across his chest, ready to level should he feel the need, the very act stiffening his resolve and injecting steel into his voice.
‘D’you hear me, woman? Step back there.’
Her head turned then and he saw how old she was. Her face, framed by the tattered woollen shawl, was criss-crossed by lines that cut deep into flesh made leather by the attentions of too many winters. As her eyes fell on the musket he held across his chest like a shield, she gave him a small smile that was little more than the gaping of a small black maw, yet when she spoke her voice was strong but as cracked as her face.
‘Are you feart, brave soldier?’
‘No, mother,’ he said gently as he lowered the weapon, his own mother’s constant admonishments to show all women respect having nestled deeply in his soul. Peggy Greenway had not enjoyed much respect in her life, having been turned out at fourteen by her mother to service the culls of Southwark. ‘You just cannot stand too close,’ he warned. ‘It is not safe.’
She glanced back at the gibbet and her smile became sad. ‘Seumas would never harm me. Not in life and never in death. We are bound by blood, him and I.’
Greenway had been in this wretched land long enough to know that Seumas was Scotch for James. The man who had once walked in those bones was named James Stewart, a traitorous murderer. He cared little about the man that was, but that much he knew.
‘You are kin to this man?’
A gnarled hand, the joints bulging and distorted, tenderly caressed one bleached foot of the hanged man. ‘Aye, I am kin, as many are here in Appin. Kin by blood and by marriage. But even if we were not we would still have loved him, for he was a good man. Unlike those who led him to this end—and those who left him here to rot.’
Greenway was ill-equipped to debate the justice of the matter.
‘Even so, I cannot have you stand so close. The gibbet is not secure and I have orders that no one must approach the . . .’ He paused, his mind reaching for the correct word. ‘Remains.’
The woman’s laugh was as sharp as the back of his mother’s hand. ‘Would that your people were so concerned for my kinsman’s well-being when your kind treated him so cruelly.’
Greenway could not help himself from saying, ‘Justice has been done.’
Her head whirled to face him with a speed he would never have thought possible from one so aged. ‘Justice, you say? Justice?’ She spat something thick and rheumy at the ground between them. ‘I give that for your English justice.’
She made the word English seem like something she would not feed even to pigs.
‘Mother, I must caution you.’
She waved her claw-like hand at him. ‘Ach, away, my lad. I am too far gone for your words to have meaning. What punishment can they deliver to an old woman who speaks her mind? An old woman who saw her sons and grandsons dead in the Rising? And a daughter pining for her child, left to freeze on the road from England? A boy of sixteen summers, dead from a fever caught on a fool’s errand for
a drunkard and a wastrel who cared nought for the country from which he would flee like a scalded pup.’
Greenway had not borne arms for his king in the rebellion of 1745, but he knew of whom the old woman spoke. Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The Young Pretender, who had fomented revolt among the clans and had led his army south to seize the throne. They had reached Derby before they turned for home. It was only through sheer force of numbers, the cunning of His Royal Highness Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, and the inbred cowardice of Charles Stuart that the insurrection died on moorland near Inverness. Greenway kept his tongue still, for he sensed silence was the most prudent path to take. His eyes, however, darted about the open hilltop to ensure no one in authority had arrived to overhear her—or to witness him not taking her to task for her treason.
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