‘Oui, monsieur, la pintade.’

  ‘As a child I was up at Gaeta, warring again, and there I would take note to the bird names in my carnet.’ He considered Neil, while holding the short gun in an odd way, horizontal in both arms, as you would carry a sleeping child. ‘I commanded artillery, but a child younger then than you now, do you know? As young as MacLeod’s boy, Murdoch, but I commanded.’

  ‘I am sure you did with commendation.’

  He laughed sharply. ‘I was a war-maker from youth.’

  ‘I like to hear of these exploits, sire. Your most recent too, but, not being military, I also have a mind to hold my curiosities as conscience scolds me.’

  ‘Why, Neil, ask of me as you please. Talking is always a cure for this foul hunger.’

  ‘The excitements of war, sire – battles – they call to all young men. I don’t want to talk of sore things. It is never for a curious fellow to ask you for scenes I only make in my own foolish head.’

  ‘Aye, well. There were battles, for sure. You will have learned from my talk with MacDonald, Baleshere and others. And there will be more battles when the French come back to join with us in doubled force. But, Neil, take heed to have a steady nerve. When you see ball, cannon ball, move towards you from above, they come in slow then with damn haste in your close presence – they too are like black birds, but with a sting, a sting, for sure.’ He took the gun in one hand, and with the other made a motion, an upturned parabola across the sky, taking in the shore, a phantom object advancing in on Neil then accelerating vastly.

  ‘Yes, sire. Magnificent victories, though.’

  ‘Not at that despicable skirmish on the Culloden parks before Inverness. What an upset. Ned Burke was there, my earlier companion, and the same Murdoch, Donald’s boy, one of my oarsmen, who I talk with. Captain O’Sullivan on the retreat. But what a ruffle. Much better was a big fight we made on what they call the Glads Muir by Edinburgh, where we put them to flight around the walls, and another as we came out from the Bannockburn House and Stirling Castle’s siege work, beyond the woods. In line order for two days and the start of a third, my army stood to tempt them onto us, General Hawley’s mob, then we moved swift and caught them unformed at the place called Plein. Or closer to above Falk Kirk.’

  ‘Gallant stuff, sire?’

  ‘Men from these very isles put King George’s ignorant to flight. Take no pride in such cruelties, though. You, young Neil, are a sprightly fellow of good mind. A university man. You will understand, this was both fair and sore to me, even the enemy who hunt us here today are my father’s misled subjects. I called this out as many times on the bloody fields, to give them some mercy, but was not always heeded by my Highland men.’

  ‘Are there blooded sights, sire? On the field, is blood as prominent as new rain?’

  He laughed. ‘Not so, but things remain beyond forgetting. I saw cannonade take a poor messenger in middle breast, and the ball carry him backwards until some of him went this way and some that, legs loosed and twirling like a stick you throw for the dogs. A lot of unnameable matter of him went upon the ground. His humours, spleen and heart, perhaps. Our forms are taken apart in horrid ways by the needs of it all. Beyond Plein, the enemy cavalry rode over their own to flee the top brae, and the foot ran for sport from the Highland men. The weather was filth yon day. In your rash Janvier, hard snow drops struck your eyes to close. Graupel. Often I thought the ball of muskets, or bones of men, had struck at my face, but it was your weather.’ He laughed. ‘The next day the stripped naked bodies of their dead lay up on the braesides like so many white sheep.’

  ‘Men would thrill to stand on a field near your command then charge.’

  The Prince spoke quietly. ‘My Highlanders could be hard, Neil. Hard on the horses, I will remark. At Glads Muir I saw them attack riderless horses and bring them down cruelly. Being foot soldiers, they conceived of any horse as a beast which, once escaped riderless from the field, could hence return to them remounted and do equal mischief. Thus, they took off their forelegs and executed them on any opportunity at battle. At the hill beyond Plein and Torwoods, above the Falk Kirk, I saw the Atholls fall to the ground, let the horse go full over them and sword upwards into the bellies, to bring dragoons to ground. I comprehend they also saw all horses as property of the quality which they were helpless to profit from on campaign, so the instinct was to destroy. I tended to the rear – to the rear command, by custom – kept wracked by my fool Lord Murray, engineer of my misfortunes in some manner. I talked harshly of him to you the other morn. Murray was hard toil but steady. The Irish speak poorly of this man, and I have also, but this warrior had much to lose in coming out this year past, as he did in the 1715 rising; why would he do it just in order to betray me? It is an odd reckoning that we must do bad to do right justice. I have learned of the suffering of our people here at the hands of these government officers, and their raping, spoiling legions.’ He raised his voice angrily, as if Ned were a culprit. ‘Men nor do battles make kings, Ned. God makes kings alone, as he made these birds for our taking. The Almighty makes my own good father. This is why a wrongness was made with this King George, a failing in the fabric of my father’s Godly right, and I am here to do justice for what the Almighty needs. The Holy Father speaks with me. Remember me to this. I saw my army go off for me and God, and I shook on my saddling, not with fear, but with fire to join them in this work.’

  ‘You saw our pursuers put to flight as well.’

  ‘Many times, many times, and we shall again.’

  Neil laughed, a non-combatant’s delighted, unlearned laugh.

  ‘At Edinburgh, by Plein and through England, I had the resistor thrown aside. Though the filthy garrison at Edinburgh cannoned its own roofs from the castle, their balls reached not to Holy Rood. My palace. In England, bridges cleared and towns fell without musket discharge, by good sense of clever fellows. I can only understand that God wants to heighten the stakes to make the final justice so much sweeter, when the French come back and we take the crown, which we shall. I assure you, God is with me on that. I am his servant on this matter. These are all my father’s lands, and I rightly claim them.’ He stared out at the desolation, the shores and the birds. Which ignored him.

  Neil nodded curtly.

  The Prince turned aside and spoke no more, visibly moved. They came together down a steep slope that forced them to rapidly scramble sideways, then their feet scattered broken seashell on a stony cove. To their right, another gull, dappled in its second winter feathers, tipped off a rock and flew, hugging the water where it was doubled in its turned-over reflection, but the Prince had not recharged his weapon and only stared at the bird. He stood still and slowly loaded. His face daubed with smoke soot as usual, now with black powder around his neat mouth – the lips of a sweet girl but for the rough beard.

  A young black whale crossed the cove waters before them, bizarrely close in and putting the slow bulk of its curved spine clear above the surface with no noise, so initially both men had thought it a reef of dark rock revealed by a rogue swell – or surely just a large seal? Despite MacDonald of Baleshere’s imprecations for silence in these hiding places, the Prince screamed, ‘A monster, Neil, take heed, a monster from the deep, and enough flesh for a year!’

  Neil was astonished at this manifestation so close to shore, and the more so as the short musket was shouldered by the Prince, who fired directly at the sea beast. The shot jingled up the water too short of the glistening flank, like a fist of casually thrown gravel. The man crouched and violently reloaded, abandoning the rod in his excitements as he ran further along the shoreline to keep pace with the leviathan. A piece of the heel on his shoe flew off. The whale seemed to come so close in to the rocky point that it must surely flounder there. It passed tight enough to the promontory; had they been so positioned, they could have hit its flank with a tossed stone. He fired again from his shoulder, but the shot must have travelled beyond as no strike was apparent.

  He lowered the arm, let out a call of frustration in another language. The beast sounded and did not reappear. The slow coiling of the oily surface reconfigured to its former state.

  ‘I cannot swim, Neil. Come for me and remove all of your clothing, if you please. Step from your breeches and all, and swim out and pull that terrible beast back in shore for us all. I cannot swim, boy.’

  Neil stared at the Prince, meeting his eye momentarily. ‘But, sire,’ he whispered, then pointed, looking away from that demanding face. ‘Sire, it does not die. It is gone. Into the profundities.’

  ‘I tell you, I never miss. Disrobe fully at once and swim out, for its strength will be gone and it will come easy to your hand. Kick with all your strength.’

  ‘Sire, don’t ask this of me – the waters are fiercely chilled.’

  ‘Remove your clothes! Not only would it invigorate me by example, it is a royal command. Swim!’

  Neil glanced down then whispered, ‘Vous vous trompez, la bête est vivante.’

  The Prince turned sharply from Neil and stared hard at that remorseless dividing line below the still sky: the surface of water, and the appalling unknown beneath the ominous slick, the divide where the air of life existed, and those ungoverned spheres below, where air did not.

  After long moments, the Prince breathed less intently, nodded, his temper calming, and he looked Neil up and down in all his slim youth. ‘Ach, you have the truth. It lives and travels on to cross the oceans. I could have had it, though. Tell no one of this moment, MacEachain. I hit a starling and I missed a baleine – it could be my epitaph in London.’

  Chapter 6

  My dear Marion,

  I have sent your daughter from this country, lest she should be any way frightened with the troops lying here. She has got one Betty Burke, an Irish girl, who, as she tells me, is a good spinster. If her spinning pleases you, you may keep her till she spins all her lint: or, if you have any wool to spin, you may employ her. I have sent Neil MacEachain along with your daughter and Betty Burke to take care of them.

  I am your dutiful husband,

  HUGH MACDONALD

  In darkest, moonless night, down from the shallow hill, onto the hidden flatlands, came the Prince, Neil MacEachain and Captain Felix O’Neil, through waves of rain in their sleepless state. They had haplessly veered again from the winding sheep paths in the darkness. The Prince thrust a foot out before him, as before – as ever – one foot after another foot, but he was still pulling the boot in the suck of the previous stride, as the rain tickled in his eyes and around his nostrils; more than any inclemency, this was the true irritation.

  They stopped.

  He had his baggage slung upon his back, impossible as it was to carry his fine pistols to hand, and what would be their use in such darkness? Not just damp powder. He could not see to shoot, and they could not see to shoot him. A body would need to come nose-to-nose in this dark rain and wind to discover its foe, to discover mutual presence, never mind duelling at paces. Paces had almost ceased to be – more lunges than paces – the lunges of proceeding cripples.

  How would you know it was foe or friend without frank discussion? And in this dark, how would he be discovered? Using Gaelic, MacEachain would claim to be a sheep herder in the dark, and they would bid one another a Samaritan’s goodnight, before each passing on. The Prince, MacEachain and O’Neil needed to call out to find one another, moving in an ant-line. Sometimes MacEachain followed behind him, clinging on to the back of the Prince’s slung baggages, and O’Neil placed a hand on MacEachain’s shoulder, like blind beggar men in a candleless night church, come in procession for alms.

  The way to have peace on this earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. It would take armies of the unsighted for peace to be; one week of shouting to form into battle line, their slaughtering diminished into a tribe of the enfeebled. No arguments, then, about who takes the right flank. For where is the right flank and where the left? The whole army calling one to another in terms of detachment and formation. From reveille to night sentries, infinite babble. Formation in a formless void. When is it night to the sightless? Calling to the enemy across the parks of darkness with their separating distances, We are here; are you there? Yes, but you stand at right angles in flank to us – straighten up, straighten up. Call to us, please, call to us, and face us, so we can begin to shoot at you, in about one week more. The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?

  ‘Neil, my shoe is lost again. Hold up, if you would be so good.’ They stopped. He turned and felt at MacEachain’s body, using it as a signal post to move his palms down towards the youth’s pale feet. The Prince knew his own shoe must be sunk somewhere forward of the cold bare toes of Neil; for Neil was now walking unshod in these prodigious rains, through the night bogs. The left and the right turns they had taken to regain the better ground, up through the quagmires. The Prince was too cautious to go bare-footed like a farm boy, to cut or blister up his heels, for mobility was his only possibility of saviour. The Prince knelt before Neil, and it was the same performance: ‘But, Neil, I cannot find the thing.’ MacEachain smiled grimly and stooped once more, his fingers in bog water and myrtle, the cold, as he dug at the muck, locating and forcing up the footwear slowly free from the gruel, like peeling out the rib bone from the flesh of broiled meat. ‘Ah. Here it is, sire.’

  ‘Ach, Neil, I am minded to give up the ghost, and us lay together for warmth in our plaids till dawn light.’

  Captain Felix O’Neil shouted from behind, ‘We have to go on, sire, we must go on now, we cannot embrace quilting-up yet. We must achieve Rossinish, the clear beach to its north, to find these ladies and our exit point.’

  The Prince sighed, rose to his full height, felt for MacEachain’s cheek and jaw before putting a hand onto his shoulder to balance on one foot and wedge his footwear back on. The boot was like a liquified putrescence, melted by some heat apocalypse. The leather hide was straight, meaning it mattered not what shoe was placed on the left foot or what on right, which was of practical use when both were simultaneously seized by the mud, and the pair tugged and slurped free together. He spoke out in the dark. ‘Have we ever struggled so severely to make the acquaintance of two handsome ladies on any night before this, my gentlemen?’ MacEachain and O’Neil had to chuckle aloud. ‘For it must be promise of a mightily romantic rendezvous for such penance as this.’

  But O’Neil coughed, signalling he was a little discomfited at the rude jest, a little holy around the topic of Miss Flora: twenty-four years, unmarried with black eyes and well familied, having MacDonald of Armadale as her stepfather.

  So, on they went through the obscurities, dragging their bodies ahead. Forward, northward they came to the borders of Rossinish at the midnight hour itself, close to the shore and the shieling they were to meet at, but not the embarkation cove itself, which was better hidden even further north. They heard the breakers on the shingles with no visible feature to mark it. MacEachain went ahead, alone, to seek the shieling, instructing O’Neil and the Prince that, despite lack of sanctuary from the elements, he would never discover them on a solitary return to a featureless bog, so they must take themselves to lie upon the rough shore there. Thus, without shouting aloud, he would come upon them efficiently by following the line directly along.

  In the rain, O’Neil and the Prince sat waiting, receiving wet on top of wet, until within the hour MacEachain returned out of the dark, accompanied – as far as could be made out – by a starved-looking urchin boy, who clung to Neil’s sleeve to prevent their separation. In low voice, MacEachain spoke. ‘We find matters not as we would wish, sire. Flora and the Lady Clan are not with us as yet, and worse, twenty or so militia are tented hard by. This lad of the shieling will show us a modest bothy not far distant, for this night at least.’

  ‘In God’s name, I am undone once more by you all. God’s name. Undone, MacEachain. Damn this, and damn you all.’

  At the outburst, the child retreated behind MacEachain.

  ‘They will take me with certainty, and what prize. Baiser une truie! Christ! Here, man, here, waste no time hanging me first.’ The Prince knocked his fist hard onto his breast then fumbled in the wet shirt that stuck to his chest, tugging the fabric from his breastbone using thumb and forefinger. ‘Take one of the dirks this moment and break in through these bones to gouge out my heart, burn it before my living eyes – huh, if you could strike fire in this filth. For in London town, after a farce of judgement, this is my fate, after our glories – hung, drawn and quartered, butchered like a young sow.’ He shouted, ‘Or worse, placed in confinements and, by stage, poisoned in my food month-on-month, so it can be said that my weakened self declined in confinement and my supporters have no execution to high martyr me upon.’

  ‘God’s sake, Highness, lower your voice, please. Silence, s’il vous plaît. This enemy could be open to our cause, but there is as good odds they have a Southerner amongst their lot.’

  MacEachain and O’Neil both tried to assure him that Miss Flora and the Lady Clan would not fail him, though the Prince mumbled to himself frequently in Italian, as if in high fever. The child led the trio on through the blackout to that alternative bothy, which was not so very distant – though this in itself was a matter of unease with enemy so close.

 

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