‘I see your point on the law, Cluny, but some laws must be immutable, irrespective of place. This is revolution which we don’t want, and there is law of God at least – the law of King George, of course, does not sit among my favourites, for that is the one which puts a price on my head here, a price that was not put on the head of Lord George or Lord Elcho, despite what they tell me of their risks. Here is you, with all lost, sir, which I am sensitive to.’

  ‘Your Highness understands what matters to me is my Prince. The arrangement has aye been. We are an element to ourselves with the enemy, Highness – oh, we so are. It’s a fierce puzzle for them, no for us; it is the very nature of this mountain land itself, sire. The nature of it horrifies them, which means they cannae ever command us here for one hundred years. They cannae beat us in the long take, sire. We can only beat ourselves – by losing who we are. They would need to stop living every one of us by some unspeakable means to geld us. Their law is no more to me than an insistent bleat up here, an uncanny, desperate thing. Our dominion shall no be defined, sire, by a judge in London or Edinburgh toun. Law can nae mair tell us it holds dominium than can a buzzard fly in here and tell me no to take my dram.’

  ‘I understand, Cluny,’ said the Prince, who had heard this thematic extemporisation before.

  ‘We can see three mile south, leagues and more, and if you take a walk up the top there, I think sure there might be a wee view of London church spires.’ He chuckled.

  ‘Yes, Cluny.’

  They had been playing piquet cards on the upper floor while the bread was baked by Cluny’s two men below, one of whom was formerly his horse breeder. The warmth was very pleasant, for that south-facing compound caught sun most of the day during that season.

  ‘I enjoy to hear your thoughts on the future fighting, Cluny, and past. The fighting bothers me most of this affair, for we all agree I had to fight, and it has made the enemy hard on our people.’

  ‘Could I have done Your Majesty better service if I had been present at Culloden parks? I have read Lord George Murray’s word on it as ye showed, but a man can pick out one thousand imperfections on any battle, sire, including the ones of victory. People talk of the ground no being good for us there – that there were walls – but, sire, there were walls at the Glads Muir. Was it not ever the same ground as at Glads Muir and Falk Kirk and yon hall outside Penrith in England?’

  ‘The same ground?’

  ‘There was flat moorland bog and walls or obstruction there on every battle, and now they talk of the ground, like as we just tripped over and no more; but it was aye the bonny charge put paid for the government troops in this rising and before. Which is how we fought one another here in the olden times. Like as the land, sire, we are an other people that they couldna find control with. It was the swift charges of our Highland men that ever put them to flight, sire, no cannonades and ordered musketry, and they couldna fight the mass of us when we were mad and in among them, like a swarm of bees round a woman at bath – they dropped their guns and ran, being nothing with sword, just a big show of musketry.’ Cluny had placed his cards flat on the box before and he reached out to just touch them on their worn edges. ‘And the great problem is, they have beaten the charge once now, and the magic is gone – it could be the charge for us is no more. The way of war from now on may be neat, ceaseless skirmishes from these hills. And politics action for you, sire, on the bandits of St James’s Palace. For more help will surely come, sire. It may be from France, it may be from Spain, but the song goes on.’

  The Prince nodded. ‘Murray wanted to make stand over the River Nairn, or at least forward of the Culloden parks upon a seam of land by a building called Card Ross. Or Carden Ross. I will remember it from the map; I will need to look again.’

  ‘Aye, well, what’s done. When the egg is broke, it is broke all round it. If you had stood there and made torments for their guns and cavalry to move over uneven ground, it would have done no harm for your army in line, Majesty, but it might no have changed things in the charge, as that would be giving the same uneven ground onto your chargers also. But Your Highness knows, I am aye of a simple thing to mind in all battles.’

  ‘And what is that again?’

  ‘They are won and lost in two or three minutes only. They can take days to align, go for a few hours of shufftying about, but the charge goes in, and the moments that follow are how the dice roll: shall these cards turn up good or ill for ye?’ He tapped the wood box they had played on. ‘No one can really assay their wishes on those few minutes which matter, sire; it’s a hanging bird in the sky as how it goes.’

  The Prince replied, ‘This, commanders don’t like to hear, so victory is accurately claimed and loss inexplicable.’

  ‘It is all in a few minutes, and what controls those moments is out our hands, sire.’

  ‘It is providence.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe, I would not know what to call it, but the issue is how much we control what is in our command. Look at these other battles that myself and even you, Highness, have missed. I mean the banging on Loch nan Uamh. We are in September month here today, and in May month, after you were away from the battle of Inverness, was a big noisy action when the money came ashore. And so many gathered on the shore to spectate that the rascally Navy of King George put cannons onto the people upon the land and had them fair running homeward that day. I wish I had seen it all: the ships were banging all day.’

  ‘It was such when I left France.’

  ‘Aye, and we have the money.’

  ‘Keep it good, Cluny, and if I am ever away from here, I shall be back with more, and we will be there in St James’s Palace with no battles at all. If we landed in the south and so unbalanced their nerve.’

  ‘Ah, take good cheer, sire. Take good cheer and be glad. There will be nae boats there on Loch nan Uamh, sire. If you have to dig in here for some of the winter, it will be the way of it.’

  ‘They say the Isle of Mull may be my next place of hope.’

  ‘Word will come down my lines, sire; you shall be armoured with these facts.’

  One of the men, Cluny’s piper in fact, called in Gaelic from above them, seeming like the voice of God from on high. This was because the watch could descend the rock escarpment directly over them, to call down through the canvas and leaf roof, and speed the telegraph.

  Cluny shrugged as the Prince looked up. ‘Only the messenger comes uphill towards us, as usual, sire. A bit swift in the day, but he comes.’

  Yet this messenger carried urgent news which was thrown all about. He called it aloud before he had even entered the dwelling, as he had met Lochiel and Cameron lower down the slopes. Cluny turned to the Prince. ‘Sire, it is in the utterly contrary to what I just spoke a short moment ago. That is of remark. Two French vessels lie in the Loch nan Uamh.’

  The Prince looked aghast. ‘Two ships at rest there. But how so?’

  ‘He is unsure, sire, but the command involves a relation of Mr Thomas Sheridan’s.’

  ‘Ah, this is Michael Sheridan, I am certain of it.’

  ‘I think your carriage awaits, sire. We should be off directly – it is three or four days’ walk, depending.’

  Chapter 12

  It was as if God or the Devil had made a pier of stone for his feet to walk onto Scotland and then off. Strange that he should arrive, and leave forever, on the stepped tongues of very flat stone at the top north shore of Loch nan Uamh. Fishermen casting their nets on the loch must have long known and used these perfect lozenges for berthing, even net drying, but that day, anchored out on the evening slick, was L’Heureux, a corsair of thirty guns and three hundred crew, and closer in, Prince de Conti. In that fair weather, there was something oddly tropical about the calm soft air, clear light and profusion of little inlets with a surfeit of still pool water resting against this open stone coast.

  In a tender, the overall commander of both vessels, Colonel Richard Warren, was oared in and came ashore to meet the Prince’s entourage, explaining that both vessels had only been able to remain at anchor there so long because savage weather off the west coast had kept the Navy from patrolling; however, the weather had lifted and they needed to be off. As a jolly boating party by the sea, it was decided there and then to form a return ferry.

  Cluny was to stay. The Prince would not see him for a decade, much of it, for MacPherson, spent at his mountain eyrie until he was pulled over to France. Old Lochiel, Dr Cameron – who was to be executed on a mission back to Scotland – Lochgarry, (brother to the spy), the poet John Roy Stuart . . . all were loaded aboard the oar boat as the Prince stood on the flat rock. A few local people, who happened by this odd staging post, stood watching these events, and one of Cluny’s runners was there by him. It was they and only they who saw what happened.

  The Prince was kissing Cluny as an equal, and embracing him – after all, he was leaving him in charge of a great deal of money with which he wished to buy the kingdom as his own on return. From within the boat, Colonel Warren himself reached up to take the Prince’s arm, and the Prince put his right foot on the wide gunwale and then lifted his left foot to step into the boat, but the very low swell dropped slowly, so in a spontaneous act, the Prince put his left foot back onto the rock. It seemed, for an instant, he might step again onto Scottish ground, perhaps to embrace Cluny once more, or even so moved that he could not depart, but the low swell itself now gently arose and thus the Prince’s foot was elevated up off this part of the world, not by his own volition but by the motion of the world itself, and here the Prince used that subtle, almost unnoticeable propulsion to step down deeper into the boat.

  The oarsmen to the shore, who had held the boat with their own hands against the rock, probed their blades onto the stone and applied pressure to drive the craft a little outward, swirling the still water, then the oarsmen to the starboard began to row and swing the bow round so it pointed towards L’Heureux at anchor, and, like that, he was gone. The party of men aboard now sat still, their heads drawn to the sight of their next concern.

  Two poor local fishermen, nameless and unlettered as such men always are, stood back from the shore there, idly watching, as in many classical paintings of sublime sights wherein two ideal watchers might be seen, thinly figured, somewhere in the shadows – a small detail added, watching, reporting to no one on these occurrences, but eternity itself, forever held silent.

  These two men knew little of the swell figures they had witnessed, who was who, and why they were there, and why they had turned their society into a slaughter chamber. They knew one of those men was said to be the Young Pretender to the throne of nations. They had been told the knowledge by a passing pedlar, and it explained the grand foreign ships out at anchor, but the two men had been ignorant of which of those men they stared at might have been the Prince, and their speculations had leaned to Dr Cameron.

  Sometimes over the coming years, in humble places of worship, these two watchers were to hear words spoken of a similar tale of a man, another fisher of souls, who came among a people with promissory of things to come and then left them again with a definite assurance of return and of glory. Yet neither the Prince nor the fisher were to come back among their peoples, whether their people waited forever or whether they did not wait, whether they cared or did not.

  Afterword

  On 16 August 1745, the first hostilities between Jacobites and government troops occurred in the Highbridge Skirmish. This small conflict took place initially at the now-ruined bridge, built by General Wade, that crosses the steep-sided River Spean, close to the modern village of Spean Bridge. Two companies of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots were marching from Fort Augustus towards Fort William on Wade’s road when they were ambushed by just eleven men of Clan MacDonald of Keppoch who blocked the south side and sent the Royal Scots – around eighty-five of them – into an ignominious retreat.

  Though a romantic sight, and despite being of huge historical significance, the Highbridge today is uncrossable due to its shameful neglect and the collapse of its upper sections in 1913. To visit the site, one must choose between the north or south sides, with the steep ravine of the River Spean below.

  In the winter of 2016, Paul MacDonald, who is an Edinburgh-based expert in historic weaponry, visited the Highbridge, accompanied by his young daughter. MacDonald decided to visit the south side, with the sensible hunch that perhaps more musketry was discharged from the government troops on the north side towards the ambushers on the south, rather than the other way round. He had a new metal detector with him that day, and it was his first time operating the device. He switched it on and began sweeping optimistically over the ground, close to where the bridge opens out on its south side. In just a few short minutes of this very first sweep, he received a positive indication. Reasonably expecting some piece of modern debris, he prised up some earth close to a mossy tree root and, to his astonishment, easily lifted in his fingers a perfectly preserved lead musket ball which had lain undiscovered in that spot for over two hundred and seventy-one years and was last touched by the government soldier of the Royal Scots who loaded and fired it lifetimes before.

  Mr MacDonald’s wonderful archaeological experience at Spean Bridge is a good example of how legendary historical events can suddenly manifest themselves as chillingly real. These episodes, which we visualise in our heads and call ‘history’, really happened to living, breathing humans. This is the challenge of ‘historical fiction’. In a way, this short book is my first attempt at ‘historical fiction’. Yet I wonder if all fiction writing is in fact historical fiction. Even if I set my novel last week, it is still a form of historical fiction. Also, perhaps all ‘non-fictional’ historical writing which attempts to illustrate a narrative is also fiction? By which I don’t mean for one moment to demean good historical writing. All the best history books which I have loved have told a pulsating, compelling story. But narrative is the issue. To write history is to reveal a narrative unknown to the subjects at the time. Even science-fiction novels and stories are intensely aware of history being projected forward, or of ‘alternative histories’.

  Writing about ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ has been a powerful, even overwhelming experience for me. I know, intimately, some of the landscapes this fiction is set in. I know of the incredible, surreal events which happened among these landscapes, but the historical sources often produce as many alternatives for a fiction writer as they do certainties. My feelings about Charles Edward Stuart are revealed in my writing. A chancer who brought havoc? Yes, but who are not chancers who bring havoc, including all of us today? Like most aristocrats building their hegemony, Charles was just a brigand, but a fascinating one. We live in times today where we all seem so very sure of our beliefs and our civic virtues; we have never been so certain we are not sinners. Yet what would we all do if we really believed we each had God’s will behind our more dreary aspirations for our two new cars, dinner sets and tarred driveways, and our personal concepts of what we and our families are entitled to? And what if we, too, could raise followers in our cause?

  In writing about such historical periods as 1746, surely the single common denominator, the fundamental mystery which burns under what we are all trying to answer as writers, is simple: what was it really like? And, of course, it was slightly different for everyone who was there – so how do we find any unifying subjectivity?

  For a fiction writer trying to portray this mystery of the past, it is frustrating, especially when we try to deduce what it was like for real people, for the ‘great men’ and women of history, and also for the often silent, untitled poor people. Our writing becomes based on other writings, for what else do we have but imagination? Of course the ‘Jacobite fictional tradition’ goes back to Walter Scott and Waverley, through Stevenson, Cosmo Lang and D. K. Broster. But I can see they struggled with the same conundrums. The limited, often staged photographic record of the American Civil War still fails to convey the experience, and as we move further back into eras before film, before photography, before audio-recording, the fiction writer journeys deeper into mystery. What did the Prince really look like when he was twenty-four years old? How did his spoken voice sound? How did men and women really sound when they spoke to one another in 1746? Fiction writers must ask these questions, perhaps more intensely than historians. Letters rarely reveal how we actually speak in our daily conversations. What did it sound like when Charles Edward Stuart and the most able commander of his army, Lord George Murray, had a conversation in English? It happened, and I would give anything just to hear it on a tape recording. It’s my duty to try and imagine it, but doing so is also impossible. Any intense consideration of the distant historical past, and of human action, always produces two uncomfortable, simultaneous conclusions: they were so like us, and they were so unlike us.

 

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