Chapter 9

  Bareheaded, maniac-hair sprung skyward towards the beech tree branches above him; cheeks flushed and discoloured, the man’s face was scrawled in fury, lips snarling among an ill-formed razor shave which had clearly been self-administered while in a profound darkness. More monumentally alarming was the costume of woman’s attire: dress and petticoat hoisted extremely high, perhaps bound there by string, revealing corkscrewed stockings, muddy lady shoes; and as he advanced on Mr Kingsburgh, a wooden cudgel was held threateningly in his right hand. ‘Name your business,’ the apparition demanded. ‘You shall not leave if you mean ill.’

  Kingsburgh was speechless. In the face of his regal imaginings, he now met a figure who looked like a refugee from a stricken theatre troupe, the acts of their already-wayward play blundered into some terrible catastrophe halfway through.

  ‘Your Royal Highness. I am your Alexander of Kingsburgh, factor to Lady Margaret of Monkstadt, and her husband Sir MacDonald. I come down the hill with greeting from Donald Roy of Baleshere, who you know and is up by the house.’

  ‘Ah, yes, MacEachain expected me of you. Donald Roy of Baleshere is here? He was with me at our army. I was by his brother Hamish of Baleshere just some time ago.’ The figure had dropped his raised arm and seemed to immediately change demeanour into that of a common fellow, enthusiastic for gossip. ‘Is Donald Roy well, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Your Royal Highness. Though an injury to the foot from that last fight to defend Inverness heals poorly. Your Royal Highness, I bring bread and wine.’

  ‘Ah, well, I am grateful for both. Shall we take some and jockey on somewhere?’ To further corrupt the debased femininity, the Prince produced an unlit pipe, which was placed in his mouth, where he chewed and munched at the end for want of tobacco.

  ‘Government troops are everywhere, Your Royal Highness. Officers are sat at Lady Margaret’s Sunday table this moment, with the troopers stood out past the garden by the road there, jesting. But they have no comprehension you are here on Skye, such is the skill of concealment Miss MacDonald operates. There has been parliament with your Mr MacEachain and with Donald Roy about the most secure means of forward movement for you, and we feel that to my home for now is best.’

  ‘I am ever obliged and grateful, Mr Kingsburgh.’

  ‘It is to my honour.’

  ‘You will deduce from my disguise I travel incognito?’

  ‘Incognito. I can see for the boat crossing you undertook that this adaptation of a woman’s appearance would have been good business, Your Royal Highness.’

  ‘I fear I make a desperate woman of gentility but being taken for an Irish hooley suits my abilities well. The role seems to work but has been untested beyond my protectors. How do I look to you, Mr Kingsburgh? As long as I am not encountered face-to-face, I conclude I pass at a distance relatively well as an Irish servant. It is the impression which counts. Don’t have doubt I possess a headpiece adapted to cover my hair and face, which gives me as good as the itch.’

  ‘Sir, I am sure I am unworthy as a critic of theatre.’

  ‘Well, Mr Kingsburgh. We struggle hard enough to understand female kind. Surely, they are guided by the moon, so imagine the difficulties on me to become one?’

  Early that evening, the Prince in costume strolled the open roads with MacEachain and Kingsburgh both, along the track round Uig Bay towards Kingsburgh House on the Loch Snizort Beag, where awaited him his first real bed of mattress and linen in months. They were overtaken on horse by Miss Flora, and Mrs MacDonald of Kirkibost, who had Kirkibost’s maid accompanying on a pony. The riding party were headed onwards, making a cover and reconnoitre of what might lay over the roads ahead. Miss Flora still held the passport letter close, in case of intervention.

  The maid of Kirkibost knew nothing of the operations afoot around her. Recognising what she thought of as one of her own dominion, Mrs MacDonald’s maid gave a stern eye to the shocking, overgrown servant woman walking along by them, accompanying Factor Kingsburgh. Kingsburgh was a propertied man of canny high standing, and with him also for his walking companion was a sober-seeming Mr MacEachain. But the maid was affronted by the display of that . . . Irish servant thing, it was said to be, clearly with expectations far beyond her scrawny gifts. Even on a Sunday, the sniffen thing carried its skirts shamefully high in both hands. Crossing the low ford at Romesdal stream, it wholly leapt, like a hopping ewe, slapping its knapdallicks – with her starved dancer legs all a-showing in glaured and messed stockings, petticoat swishing, like a pintle-seeking-tumble-me-now-pox-trembler in a godless port city, rank with sin. Then, mighty Lord, the same skinnymalink, how it moved! God save us, it walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse; this Irish grappler, loupen in malkin strides, it threw its lanking arms about as it strode – was it flies and clegs pestered at it? Doubtless drawn by its clart, aye, and here it was, turnin and gawping at every sight they don’t have in all of low Ireland all about it, then ramming its heid low if you tried to get a glear in at it, so’s ye would recognise it again about the island, or in Portree, and could mark it as a sure pongster.

  Worst of all, it seemed to believe it had the liberty to walk alongside Kingsburgh himself, he who normally was a strident, upward fellow of gey guid sense – yet here he was, accepting of this strachled creature at his right arm, cavorting at his side as if she were his equal in this life, laying off there with elbows flung this way and that, as though debating matters of state and higher things than a bog trachle husbandless land-glaik could. The Prince of the House of Stuart himself was loose in these lands, with hardy troopers everywhere a-searching him and thirty thousand pound on his bonny head. Yet look at that thing, free-as-can-be, while nobility is hunted; why, thirty thousand to be had, but that mess would sell itself to a trooper out in the midden, and lift its skirt full, not for fourpence ha’penny. Damned foreigners. Silly daft hoor.

  Kirkibost’s maid passed on after her lady.

  After some time, to the dismay of MacEachain and Kingsburgh, scattered parties of Sunday evening Holys, dressed in black, came the other way towards them, passing as they returned in from kirk towards the shielings round Uig. A people used enough to spotting a stranger on their isle, not one of them failed to mark, to monitor then stare upon this tall Irish spinning servant gallivanting at Kingsburgh’s rear – having been ordered back there by MacEachain. The Prince strode as if he was still in the open moors of the flow country, unobserved. Each stride had his knees knocking the dress skirtings hither, wildly, like a fluttering bird trapped within a covering cloth, then, instead of diverting round each rain puddle on the track, the dress and petticoats shot up and he hopped the wetness onto a sturdy landing, maintaining the skirt’s elevation if he observed another puddle still ahead.

  MacEachain found himself emotionally trapped between helpless bouts of hilarity, where he had to hold his hand to his mouth at the entire predicament, but also gluts of fear and anger at the man’s inability to accept stark advice. MacEachain hissed at him in temper, ‘For God’s sake, sire, take care what you are doing, for you will certainly discover yourself.’

  When the churchgoers were passed, the Prince advanced on Kingsburgh – not to his side, but cheekily walking a few steps behind him. ‘Mr Kingsburgh, do I fail poorly at imitation?’

  Kingsburgh replied, ‘Sire, it is custom of the government to address you as the “Young Pretender”. It is an ill name in many ways, but also as you are surely the worst pretender I have ever seen.’

  Yet they arrived at Kingsburgh House without interception. And that night, before his fresh bed, the Prince – still dressed as a thespian – was in about a good few bumpers of brandy when Alexander of Kingsburgh asked the Prince what would have become of him had Kingsburgh not by chance been up at Monkstadt that day. The Prince aired the explanation again. ‘But, Kingsburgh, sir, it was providence itself that you were to be there this day to spirit me away. I have all faith in such providence that I shan’t be discovered up, and so many have been my tight escapes it can only be explained by providential manoeuvres. How else, sir, how else?’

  And again, was it perhaps not so? This escaper’s progress was clear: he always evaded capture, but it was a supernatural providence aimed at the Prince alone, for wreckage was left around him in all places.

  Less than a week later, Captain Fergusson of HMS Furness came to Kingsburgh House with no invitation, accompanied by a sergeant and fifteen troopers who waited outside. Kingsburgh said to his wife, ‘The captain has come to examine you about some lodgers you had lately in this house, so perhaps you could be distinct in your answers,’ but she was evasive.

  Captain Fergusson asked directly where Miss Flora MacDonald and ‘the person along with her in woman’s clothes’ had slept.

  ‘I know in what room Miss MacDonald herself lay,’ Kingsburgh said, ‘but where the servants are laid up when in my house, I know nothing of that matter; I never enquire anything about it.’

  Fergusson leaned towards Kingsburgh’s wife. ‘Tell me then, please, madam, whether not you laid the Young Pretender and Miss MacDonald in one bed together – perhaps in innocence that passion would be unspent, and her every virtue assured, as it was merely one lady lying abed with another, her servant. Would that have been the libertine arrangements of the summer nights here?’

  The lady replied, ‘Sir, whom you mean by the Young Pretender I shall not pretend to guess, but I can assure you it is not the fashion in the Isle of Skye to lay the mistress and the maid in the same bed together.’

  ‘I will reassure many real ladies, should they choose to visit. If you can really pound at your memory, madam, then please show me the room Miss MacDonald slept in, and also the room of her maid – so-called – on that night.’

  When Fergusson returned to the hall, he said to Kingsburgh, ‘I find it remarkable such provision is made for servants at this house; why, the rooms were of equal comfort. In fact, the maid’s room was somewhat superior to that which Miss MacDonald reposed in. How strange. What a lucky visit for servants the world over is your house here, sir. I will inform all servants I meet where they might spend such a commodious and boon evening, should they visit with their masters.’

  Kingsburgh bowed.

  The military party left, but cruelly, one hour after, returned and Alexander of Kingsburgh was arrested – almost one year later he was finally released from Edinburgh Castle, where Captain Felix O’Neil had also found himself incarcerated.

  Chapter 10

  His disguise abandoned, now landed on Raasay, the orbid moon at far past midnight was strident. The Prince seemed to walk in transfigured daylight – a highly powerful but eerily precise light that appeared to examine every article on the silent island earth around him; it was as if an observant intelligence had placed the whole world and its every detail under the quiet scrutiny of its watch. While standing erect, he could see black ants on a large round stone moving in this celestial brilliance.

  The Prince and two companions were casting shadows behind themselves, traversing the land in the still night, and the rough track took them through routed and denuded dwellings under that planetary glow. In the short fields the cones of the haystacks had been torched and hauled down, and their charcoal candour seemed made more satanic black in the light’s acute insistence.

  The corpses of cows, occasional horses, lay right against the dwelling walls, as if they had sought initial mercy there and were only fallen into a hypnotic sleep, awaiting some more vivid colour than this lactic flood to wake them from their dream spell – but with many, the fabrics of their dried flesh were sunk between their ribs, and an especially whitened bone pushed from one horse thigh, the hoof seemingly levitated in air against gravity’s law.

  The walls mainly stood, but the roofs were burned or had fallen in, and the sour smell of wettened charcoal was sharp. Household goods and utensils had been thrown outward at the front of some doors, then rampaged. The Prince saw a wooden bucket, the hemp handle deliberately sliced through, and even its sturdy bottom had been precisely hammered with forensic perversity, to render the object forever useless in all ways.

  They came upon a blackhouse, the clod roof of which had been driven inward by somehow dragging a two-wheeled dung cart loaded with stones up and completely over the cottage, so the home’s innards were ruptured and squeezed outward from its doorway and squat windows; torn fabrics and ripped, blemished canvasing extruded, like gasping tongues. Some few items of clothing were scattered, marked with unthinkable stainings in the moonlight.

  To ensure their eternal redundancy, the two cart shafts that pointed to the planet Jupiter, throbbing in agreement with universal laws above that sunken roof, had been methodically sawn halfway up, and the poles of both cuttings used to ram and lever over a gable wall that had been toppled into rubble.

  The Prince walked on with his two silent escorts on this grim circuit of patrol. At the bottom of the sloping brae, there was the debacle of another sacked croft house, utterly mutilated, as if a herd of apes fevered by rare possession had tumbled berserk in one side and out the other.

  Here again there was the deflated essence of a horse, fabric laid on a frame, previously so starved that its flanks had not been flailed for meat, and next to it, the Prince saw a single collie dog lay slain, about which the maggots had done huge work. Close by, forelegs outstretched as if still in the art of diving, lay two dead cats, lifeless eyes now like dried black raisins, their ribs showing where they had been each pierced and hoisted on bayonet. They seemed to have been placed in this neat display, either from the hand of a grief-stricken carer, torn free of the scene – or conceivably, they lay displayed there in an arrangement of their own murderers?

  This sight drove the Prince to a surprising and unexpected inner outrage – he had seen men slain with his own eyes, and here farm animals and dwellings were exterminated to punish and crush the culture of these peoples, to destroy any chance of recovery; a dog may snarl in protection of a master, and thus receive an unfortunate musket ball. But cats! And not even cats: the smaller creature was a one-month kitten. How could troopers recalculate the configurations of this world to such a conception where the massacre of a kitten conforms with just and manly action of war? The Prince stared down on the dead cats under the moon, recognising that these deaths acted as proof of the perpetration of some delirium, where men have moved beyond the cruel stratagems of dominion and entered a derogatory state of shame and self-detestation, a fury at the fundaments of existence.

  These perpetrators, after bayoneting a small kitten, failed in their compulsions; for real continuity, they should have returned to that large rock where the Prince saw the moonlit ants, and each crawling insect should have been similarly and meticulously executed, one by one, by musket discharge, to carry this demented philosophy to its just terminus.

  Yet the Prince’s thoughts failed to establish the chronology of waypoints of logic that would succeed in fully connecting the atrocity he saw around him to his own presence in this new country. For him, these barbarities suggested a pre-existing aberration in the establishments of his enemy; like all of us, he found it hard to suggest to himself that by stepping to the right or by stepping to the left, he had initiated or been culpable for anything which could have conceivably led to the two dead cats laid out before him, the summer grass they lay on made to look as if it was coated in winter spiderfrost in that moonlight.

  Chapter 11

  The air was very clear, the day mild, the waters of the long loch beneath astonishingly still. The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface – it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom.

  Close to eight hundred feet above, on the Ben Alder screes, was a dipped grove of trees and saplings, shielded from the lower world, the stage set placed among an outcrop of tumbled boulders, some the size of travel trunks, some of horse carts, some of cottages. This eccentric den had seized boulders into itself, two levels: an upstairs and a downstairs, though there were no stairs – only two ten-foot ladders formed from the nearby trees: one for ascent, and one for descent. The mountain slope was steep in its cant here, but the hidden chalet was made true along its propped ground floor by level-shaped log cuts, spread with pounded soil and woven mattings. Rope lengths as thick as on a mainmast sail were bound through an agreement of trees, to pull themselves together like a sheaf, and then above the second floor, a rough sack roofing was fixed, daubed with oily waterproof caulk.

  A fusion of nature and of man, this refuge could easily hold six or seven bodies overnight, and ten visitors. At the back of the ground floor, formed from two vertical rocks at angles, a large oven of stone was presented, where a baking fire could burn all night, the smoke debouched upward in a natural channel of these boulders then gathered into a wooden flue. The fire smoke was unobservable by day, but there would only ever be a very rare government patrol in this domain anyway, so desolate and uninhabitable was it.

  Ewen Cluny MacPherson, creator of this architecture, was on the top floor, sat with the Prince, laying off, as was his wont, for both men were in the dram. In the fair weather, the other lodgers there – Locheil, with his sore legs, Dr Cameron and others – had gone off down the land a little to sit.

  Chief MacPherson poured another bumper for his Prince. Cluny’s father was dead of a broken heart amongst their destroyed estate at Laggan, but there was rogue gold in the heather, and he poured another drink for this Italian aristocrat in his mad dwelling. ‘Their law, as called, sire, is the law of straight streets and cities, and there are neither before my eyes in this place, nor in all my country here. It is their law as they want to use it; it cannae have existence here, sire, nor dominion on us. It is no a physical force here. They can come up this hidey-hole, and my far whispering posts will have them ten mile good away with my runner ahead, but they will no have us catched, because with our vantage we will be two mile away before they have halfway of our slopes. What are they to do? And what if they did come uphill at us here – ten of them, fifty, four hundred – do you think we will be feart to fight back in a land of no witness, where a grave is easy made? And then what? None shall escape, for my boys will chop them on their flight, so they send more – and what then? Even if they found this worthy skulk, and it is destroyed as we watch from the summits above here, we can come back in a month and make it again – do they dare leave a sentry in this lonely waste? They’ll find them hanging chin down in a week.’

 

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