A moment passed, then Moray’s hand released its grip and moved instead to take the pebble on its cord and slide it over his own head with care before he gathered it into his palm and closed his fingers round it in a small act of possession. With his gaze fixed on the surgeon’s face, he said, ‘Your voice is English.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Only Gordon saw the hand of Moray’s wounded left arm move against his thigh as though he’d hoped to find his sword still there. ‘What ship is this?’
Lord Griffin answered, ‘You’ve no need to worry, my boy. We are on board the Leopard, and safe among friends.’
The sound of Lord Griffin’s voice clearly caught Moray off guard and he turned his head sharply towards it, but Gordon was standing between them. The ship rolled and the lanterns swung and in the shifting bars of light and shadow Moray’s gaze met Gordon’s in a hard unspoken challenge. ‘Among friends.’ He did not sound convinced.
‘Aye,’ Gordon told him. ‘For the moment. But I cannot keep you hidden here for long.’ He aimed his next words at the surgeon. ‘Do you think he will be well enough to leave by nightfall?’
Moray’s face grew wary. ‘Leave for where?’
‘I mean to take advantage of the victory celebrations of this day. They will increase the great confusion of these waters,’ Gordon said. ‘With so many ships and vessels and so many drunken men it should be possible to get you both aboard the fishing-smack that waits prepared to carry you across to France.’
Lord Griffin said, ‘And what then of the men who saw you bring aboard two prisoners this morning from the Salisbury? Will they believe we simply disappeared?’
His voice was dry, and his expression made it plain that while he did admire the plan he had his doubts about its chances for success.
‘My crewmen saw me bring two wounded prisoners aboard,’ was Gordon’s answer. ‘They will see me, on the morrow, hold a proper Christian burial at sea for those same prisoners who, sadly, were beyond our surgeon’s aid. We sew the bodies into sheets, and none will know that there are ballast weights in place of men inside. They will be satisfied, and both of you will have escaped the English.’
‘No, not both of us.’ Lord Griffin shook his head. ‘You simply cannot kill the both of us, my boy, they’ll not believe it. And besides, what would that say about the skill of your poor surgeon?’ With a smile he settled back, arms folded. ‘No, you get the young lad off, and I myself will stand tomorrow at his burial and weep, and back your story with my own.’
Moray raised himself upon the table, to the protests of the surgeon who had not yet finished bandaging his shoulder. ‘My Lord Griffin, if there is to be but one of us escaping, I insist—’
‘Oh, save your breath, my boy. You are but young, you have your life ahead of you, and mine is near its end.’ He said to Gordon, ‘I have told you, there is nothing to be feared if I am taken. I have known Queen Anne since she was in her cradle, I was in her father’s Guards. She will not see me come to harm.’ He smiled again. ‘Besides, the prospect of a room within the Tower from which I may look on London in my last years does not seem at all unpleasant.’ And he paused, his words grown heavy with the weight of memory. ‘I have been so long away from home.’
Moray had been stubborn in his arguments against Lord Griffin staying, but the Englishman had not relented, and in the end the matter had been settled only after Gordon had exploded, ‘Christ, man, I may turn you in myself and claim the ransom if you do not let it lie.’ And then, recovering his temper, he’d reminded Moray, ‘You once told me it was not a soldier’s place to ask who gave an order, but to follow it. Cannot you follow this one?’ Low, he’d added, ‘For her sake, if no one else’s.’
Like combatants locked in equal battle both the men had held each other’s gaze in silence for a moment. Slowly, Moray’s hand had lifted and he had replaced the small black pebble on its cord about his neck, as though it were the only armor he had need of. And he’d given one brief nod.
Sophia stared at Captain Gordon as he stood, still with his back to her, against the curving bay of windows in the Leopard’s cabin. She had not said a word through all his tale, so tightly gripped had she been by her own emotions.
Gordon said, ‘We got him off all right. With all the rum that flowed upon our decks that night my men were in no state to notice anything besides their own debauchery. He should by now be well into the crossing.’
Sophia knew that there was nothing she could say that would be adequate, and yet she felt the need to tell him something. ‘Captain Gordon…’ But she faltered as he turned, and only asked, ‘Do you still have Lord Griffin in your care?’
‘No. He was taken by the soldiers just this morning. I can only pray that he was right to think the queen will show him mercy.’
Looking at his face, she felt ashamed that she had thought that such a man could turn a traitor. ‘Captain Gordon,’ she began again, ‘I hope you can forgive me for—’
He raised a hand to cut short her apology. ‘It is forgotten.’ Glancing one more time across the harbor to the ruin of the Salisbury, he said, ‘At any rate, you were quite right on one account.’ His eyes came back to hold her own, intent. ‘The things I did that night were not all done because of duty. They were done for you.’
She was silent for a moment in the face of that admission. It was hard to know a man could care so much for her that he would risk his whole profession, risk his life, while knowing that she did not, could not, answer his affection. In a quiet voice Sophia said, ‘I am so sorry.’ And they both knew she was speaking of much more than her unfounded accusations.
Captain Gordon, still the gentleman, released her with the words, ‘You have no need to be.’ He paused, then in a lighter voice remarked, ‘In truth, I do admire your courage coming here to challenge me. I do not doubt you would have found the means to travel all the way from Slains, if you’d been called to do it.’
She smiled faintly at the charge. ‘I might have done.’
‘But I am glad that you are not now in the north.’ He crossed to pour them each a glass of claret. ‘And not only for the fact it has afforded me the pleasure of this visit, but because I fear the English will demand a heavy price for what has happened here.’
She drank, and tried to wash away the bitter taste of tea. ‘The king escaped,’ she said. ‘It may be that his ships will take him north where they may find a better landing-place.’
‘Perhaps.’ His eyes were older than her own. ‘But if he fails, there will be evil times ahead, and it will be as well for you,’ he said, ‘that you are not at Slains.’
Graham turned his head towards mine on the pillow, half-asleep. ‘Lord who?’
‘Lord Griffin. He was on the Salisbury, I think. An old man, English, who had been at Saint-Germain…’
‘Oh, him.’ He placed the name and rolled more fully over to his side so that his arm slid round my waist, a now familiar weight. I liked the way it felt, just as I liked the rumble of his voice against my neck. ‘What did you want to know?’
‘What happened to him after he was taken by the English? Was he ever tried for treason?’
‘Aye, and sentenced for it.’
‘So he was beheaded, then?’ The penalty for treason in those times was inescapable. I didn’t know why that small fact should bother me so much—I’d read reports of countless executions in the course of researching my novels, and I knew that it was just another end result of wars and royal intrigues. But I couldn’t think of this one without seeing in my mind that old man sitting with his back against the Leopard’s slanting wall, and saying he would stay, that he would not be harmed, Queen Anne would never—
‘No,’ said Graham, cutting through my thoughts. ‘They didn’t kill him. There were some of Queen Anne’s ministers who argued for it, but she wouldn’t listen. Oh, she kept him captive, but she let him keep his head, and in the end he died of plain old age.’
That made me somewhat happier. I hoped he’d had his chance to have a view of London from his window, as he’d wanted. Certainly King James, I knew, had never seen his hopes fulfilled. His ships had been pursued along the northern coast until bad weather finally made them give up altogether and set back to open sea, and France. And those on shore, who’d waited for his coming for so long, had been left hanging in the wind to face those evil times that Captain Gordon had predicted. ‘Graham?’
‘Aye?’
‘Was anybody else killed for their part in the rebellion?’
‘Not that I recall.’ His voice was very sleepy now, and had I known him less well I’d have half-suspected he was ‘not recalling’ with a purpose, in the hope that I’d stop asking questions.
‘But the English rounded up the Jacobites and put them into prison.’
‘Oh, aye. Most of the Jacobite nobles and gentry were thrown into prison, then taken in chains down to London. Paraded around for the mob.’
I was silent a moment, imagining this. Then I asked, ‘Was the Earl of Erroll with them?’
Graham nodded, and even that effort seemed great for him because his voice had begun to grow thicker, less clear. ‘Supposedly he got so out of temper as a captive that he pitched a bottle at the Earl of Marischal, and nearly took his head off.’
‘Well, the Earl of Marischal must have deserved it, then.’
I felt Graham’s mouth briefly curve on my skin. ‘You’re defending your own, are you?’
There was no way to explain that I knew the Earl of Erroll’s character better than any historian could—that he wasn’t a figure on paper to me, but a flesh-and-blood person held whole in my memory. All of them were. I remembered their faces. Their voices.
I was silent with my thoughts a moment. Then I ventured, ‘Graham?’
In reply he nuzzled closer to my neck and made a muffled sound of enquiry.
‘What happened to them when they got to London? I mean, I know they were eventually set free, but how?’
No answer came this time except the deep sound of his breathing. He had gone to sleep. I lay there for a while longer thinking in the dark with Graham’s arm wrapped safe around me and the warmth of Angus sprawled across my feet, but in the end the question would not let me rest, and there was only one way that I knew to get a proper answer.
XIX
THESE DAYS SHE WAS not often out of doors. Although two months had passed and spring had smoothed the sharper edges of the breezes from the sea, she kept inside with Mrs Malcolm and with Kirsty and the baby and she did not leave the house except on those rare days when her own restlessness consumed her and she felt that she must breathe the outside air or else go mad. Even then, she stayed as far as she could stay from the main road, mindful always of the fact that this was still a time of danger.
Mr Malcolm had not yet been heard from and they did not know how he had fared. At the beginning it had seemed that every day more men were taken and imprisoned, and from the single letter that the countess had been able to send down Sophia knew it was no better in the north. Indeed the only comfort in that letter had come from one small piece of news the countess had relayed, that she’d had in a message from the Duke of Perth, her brother, at the Court of Saint-Germain: ‘Mr Perkins,’ she had written to Sophia in her careful code, ‘does tell me that he recently did call upon your husband Mr Milton and did find him well recovered of his illness, and impatient to be up again.’ From which Sophia knew, to her relief, that Moray had managed to get safely back across the Channel, and was healing from his wounds.
That knowledge made it easier to cope with the uncertainty surrounding her, just as the sight of baby Anna sleeping in her cradle, small and vulnerable and trusting, gave Sophia every morning the resolve and strength of spirit to conduct herself with caution, so her child would be protected.
She would not, in fact, have been upon the road today at all if it were not for Mrs Malcolm’s housemaid falling ill, so that somebody else must go to market if they were to have the food to keep them fed the next few days. Kirsty had offered, but as she had been recovering herself from that same illness and was weakened still, Sophia would not hear of it. Nor would she hear of Mrs Malcolm setting out for town, when Mrs Malcolm had already been accosted twice by soldiers who were searching for her husband.
‘I’ll go,’ Sophia had announced. She’d started out before the dawn, and for some time she was the only one upon the road, which made her feel more free to take some pleasure in the coolness of the wind upon her face and in the spreading colors of the sunrise. It was early in the morning yet when she first reached the outskirts of the waking town of Edinburgh and houses started rising close about her, but there still was not much movement on the road.
So when she heard the sound of hooves and wheels approaching from behind she turned instinctively, not thinking of concealment, only curious to see who might be passing.
It was clearly someone of importance, for the coach itself was an expensive one, the coachman richly dressed and driving horses who were sleek and black and so disdainful that they did not even turn their eyes as they drew level with Sophia.
Inside the coach a sudden voice called out and bade the driver stop, and in a swirl of dust and dancing hooves the horses halted. At the window of the coach appeared a face Sophia knew.
‘Why, Mistress Paterson!’ said Mr Hall, with obvious surprise. ‘Whatever are you doing here? Come in, my dear, come in—you should not be upon these streets alone.’
She had been worried, setting out, that she’d be recognized as being Mrs Milton, from the house of Mr Malcolm, and that somebody might question her on that account. It had not for a moment crossed her mind that she’d be recognized by anyone who knew her as herself. This was a complication she had not foreseen, and she was not sure how to manage it, but since there was no way she could refuse the priest without it stirring his suspicions, she had little choice but to reach up and take his hand and let him help her up the step into the coach.
Inside, she found that they were not alone.
‘This,’ the Duke of Hamilton remarked, in his smooth voice, ‘is quite an unexpected pleasure.’ Dressed in deep blue velvet, with a new expensive wig that fell in dark curls past his shoulders, he assessed Sophia from the seat directly opposite.
The coach’s rich interior seemed suddenly too close for her, and lowering her face to fight the feeling of uneasiness, she greeted him, ‘Your Grace.’
‘Where are you walking to this morning?’
‘Nowhere in particular. I had a mind to look about the market.’
She could feel his eyes upon her in the pause before he said to Mr Hall, ‘The market, then,’ and Mr Hall in turn leaned out to call up to the coachman to drive on.
The duke said, nonchalant, ‘I did not know the countess was in Edinburgh.’
Sophia, well aware that she was out of practice with his dance of words, stepped carefully. ‘My Lady Erroll is at Slains, your Grace.’
‘You are not here alone, I trust?’
‘I am with friends.’ Before he could ask more, she raised her gaze in total innocence and said, ‘I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see that you are well, your Grace. We heard that you were taken by the English, and have feared the worst.’
She saw his hesitation, and felt confident that he would not be able to resist the urge to make himself look grander by the tale of his adventures. She was right.
His nod was gracious. ‘I am touched by your concern, my dear. In truth, I deemed it an honor to be taken, and only wished I could have been here with my well-affected countrymen to stand in chains beside them in the king’s good cause.’
Sophia knew he did not mean a word of it. She knew that he had seen to it that he had been at his estates in Lancashire when young King James had tried to land in Scotland. From the countess’s own pen Sophia had received the tale of how a messenger had reached the duke with news the king was coming, and in time for him to turn back and be part of the adventure, but how he, with sly excuses that his turning back might give the English warning, had continued on to Lancashire, from where he could await the outcome, poised to either take young James’s part, should the invasion be successful, or to claim his distance from it, should the English side prevail.
It had given Sophia at least some satisfaction when she’d heard the English had imprisoned him as well, regardless. Though it now appeared he’d managed, with his usual duplicity, to orchestrate his own release. How many other lives, she wondered, had he been content to sell to pay the price of his?
She could not keep from asking, when he’d finished telling in dramatic style the tale of his arrest and journey down to London, ‘Did you see the other nobles there? How does it go for them?’
He looked at her with vague surprise. ‘My dear, have you not heard? They are all freed. Save of course for the Stirlingshire gentry, but I could do nothing to argue their case—they had taken to arms, you see, actually risen in force, and the English could not be persuaded to let them escape being tried, but I trust they will come through it fairly.’
Mr Hall, leaning over, explained to Sophia, ‘The duke did kindly take it on himself to argue for the release of his fellow prisoners, and the English were not equal to his arguments.’
Sophia took this news with mingled gratitude and deep distrust. However glad she might be that the Earl of Erroll and the others were now free and would be coming home, she could not help but think the duke would not have done such an enormous thing unless he stood to profit by it somehow. And her own sense told her still that he was not upon their side.
The coach drew rattling to a stop upon the cobbles of a crowded street, with people pressing round and voices shouting and a thousand jumbled smells upon the air. ‘Here is the market,’ said the duke.
Sophia, in her eagerness to leave that plush, confining space and get clear of the duke’s unsettling scrutiny, leaned forward with such sharpness that the chain around her neck slid from its pins and tumbled from her bodice, and the silver ring gleamed for an instant in the light before she quickly caught it in her hand and slipped it back again.
She was not quick enough.
She knew, when she glanced over at the duke, that he had seen it. And although his face to any other eyes might have appeared unchanged, she saw the subtle difference in it; heard the altered interest in his voice when he remarked, ‘I do have business to attend, but I will send my coachman back so that when you are finished here you may return in safety to the place where you are staying with your…friends.’ The emphasis on that last word was not for her to hear, but still she heard it, notwithstanding, and it made her blood run cold.
Sophia tried to keep her own face bright, to make her voice sound normal. ‘That is kind of you, your Grace, but I am being met and will be in good company, so there will be no need.’
His gaze was narrowed now, and fixed on her in thought. ‘My dear Miss Paterson, I do insist. I cannot bear to think of you, in company or otherwise, upon these streets without a fitting escort. Here, Mr Hall will walk with you and see you do not come to harm.’
He had her, and he knew it. She could tell it from his smile as he sat watching Mr Hall get out and hand Sophia down onto the cobbled street. The duke’s eyes in the dimness of the coach were like the eyes of some sleek predatory creature that had trapped its prey and could afford to wait before returning to devour it. ‘Your servant, Mistress Paterson,’ he said, and with a slight nod of his head he gave his driver orders to go on.
‘Well,’ Mr Hall said, looking round in expectation as the black coach clattered off into the growing crowd. ‘What was it in particular that you desired to buy?’
Sophia’s thoughts were racing far beyond her efforts to collect them, and it took her half a minute to reply. The market place was ringed with tall tenements whose upper storeys projected to more closely crowd the already close space and cast shadows across the rough cobbles. And over their roofs she could see the stern outline of Edinburgh castle set high on its hill like a sentry, and seeming to watch all that happened below. She could not see, at first, any route of escape.
Then her searching eyes fell on a small stand not too far away, set near a narrow gap between the buildings, and she forced a smile. ‘I should be glad to have a close look at those ribbons.’
‘As you wish.’
She’d always thought the priest a good man, and because of that she felt a bit ashamed of what she had to do, but there was simply no escaping it. She could not risk remaining here until the duke returned—she did not know what he intended.
She thought of Moray’s parting words about the duke: ‘Ye must be careful, lass,’ he’d warned her. ‘He must never learn that you are mine.’
Too late, she thought. Too late.
The duke’s reaction to his glimpse of Moray’s ring had left her little room to doubt that he had recognized it, and knew all too well to whom that ring belonged.
But she was not about to let him learn about the child.
She’d reached the stand now where the spools of ribbon, lace and silk were all arrayed in bright display. Sophia took a moment to examine one, and then another, then in what appeared an accident she knocked three spools of ribbon so they tumbled from the stand and spilled their rolling trails of color on the stones and caused confusion in the steps of people passing.
‘Oh!’ she cried, pretending great dismay, and begged forgiveness.
‘’Tis a trifle,’ Mr Hall assured her, bending to assist the ribbon-seller in retrieving all the tangled rolls. ‘Do not distress yourself, we soon shall have things right again.’
Sophia waited through two more unsteady breaths, until she saw that everyone around was well embroiled in the mess, and then she turned and slipped into the shadowed gap between the houses and began to run as fast as she was able. The alley was tight-walled and smelled of refuse, but to her relief it brought her out into a steeply downhill street that seemed deserted, and from there she made her way through twisting lanes and winding closes till she came at last upon a churchyard with a high stone wall and gate, and taking shelter there she pressed herself into as small a form as possible behind the leaning stones, among the shadows.
She did not dare to attempt the road in daylight, for she knew that once she left the town’s last limits she would be exposed and vulnerable. The duke, on being told that she had run away, would surely seek her on that road before all others. Better she should wait for dark, and hope by then he’d think that she was either well away or safely hidden in the town.
It was the longest afternoon and evening she had ever spent. Her head ached, and the hunger raked like claws against her insides, and her thirst was something terrible, and every footfall on the street outside the little churchyard made her heart begin to race again in panic.
But at length the shadows deepened, and the noises in the streets grew more infrequent, and she took a breath for courage, straightened out her stiffened limbs, and cautiously set off again.
She did not afterwards remember much about the journey back along the open road, except that it was long and dark and filled with terror and imaginings, and by the time she finally reached the Malcolms’ house she’d nearly reached the limit of her strength.
But she had some small portion of it yet to spare. Her entrance caused much turmoil in the house as Kirsty and their hostess met her at the door with questions and concern, but she brushed all of it aside and would not sit in spite of all their urgings.
Struggling to catch her breath, she fixed her gaze on Kirsty’s. ‘Has anybody been here?’
Kirsty answered, ‘No,’ but in a tone of apprehension. ‘What has happened?’
‘We must go.’ Sophia looked to Mrs Malcolm. ‘Can you find us horses, or a coach, at this late hour?’
‘I can but try.’
‘And Anna…’ Turning worried eyes toward the closed door to the bedchamber, Sophia said to Kirsty, ‘We must wrap her well, the night is not a warm one.’
‘Sophia,’ Kirsty tried again, more firmly. ‘What has happened?’
But there was no way to answer that in Mrs Malcolm’s presence without giving more away than would be wise. She only said, ‘We are not safe here any longer.’
‘But—’
‘We are not safe,’ Sophia said again, and with her eyes implored her friend to silence.
It was best, she knew, if Mrs Malcolm did not know the details of their journey, for then no one else could force her to divulge that information. Sophia did not know herself how she and Kirsty would be able with the baby to endure the hard trip north to Slains—she only knew that they must somehow manage it, for Anna’s sake.
They must return to Slains, and to the countess. She alone, Sophia thought, would know what they should do.