Highland Crown Read online

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  To Ammara Mayya McGoldrick, with love

  PROLOGUE

  Abbotsford, the Scottish Borders September 1832

  Some say I’m a hero. Some call me a traitor.

  My time grows short now. I feel nothing in my right side. My hand lies inert on the bedclothes. The apoplexy has robbed me of any useful employment. I’ve tried, but I cannot hold a pen. Not that it matters. Those exertions are behind me now.

  Some will say that I, Sir Walter Scott—author of Waverley and Rob Roy and Red Gauntlet—invented the new Scotland. That I was the unfailing champion of the noble traditions of the past. That I revealed the Scottish identity all now wear with tartan-emblazoned pride.

  What they say is a lie.

  My family has brought down my bed and propped me up before the open window of my dining room. In the meadow outside, the yellow of the rockrose, the scarlet of the campion flower, the pure white of the ox-eyed daisies nearly blind me with their reckless brilliance. The water scratches over the pebbled shore of the Tweed at the end of the field, but instead, I hear the haunting voices of hungry, homeless Highlanders, dying by the thousands.

  How many have died as the ancient hills continue to be cleared of their tenant farmers in the name of progress? Pushed from their homes, driven to the sea, to the cold, hard streets of our cities, to lands far away … if they survive the journey. All to make way for a few more sheep. All in the quest of a few more shillings.

  I did what I believed at the time was right for Scotland. I convinced myself I could not let my country descend into the lawless chaos of bloody revolution, the throat of civility ripped out by the mob. It happened in France. The guillotine’s dread machinery flew out of control, splashing far too much innocent blood into the streets in its ravaging thirst for the guilty. And the cobbled lanes of Paris were not yet dry when a new terror arose in the form of their arrogant tyrant Napoleon. I told myself I could not let that happen here. Not here. Not in my homeland.

  But now I see the truth clearly, and the bitter gall of that knowledge rises into my throat. I spent a lifetime creating an image of Scotland I knew was not real. I closed my eyes to the suffering and the deaths of my own people, and instead told stories depicting the grandeur of an imagined Highland past. And as I worked, I held my tongue about the bloody decimation of the clans and their way of life. Men I dined with daily were profiting from the killing, and I said nothing. Worse, I, too, made money from it with my romantic tales.

  Many are those who see me clearly. To them, I am Walter Scott—turncoat, bootlicking lackey of the British Crown. They say I sold the independence of Scotland for a shabby box of tawdry and meaningless honors. They say that because of me, the Scottish people will never be free again. That I betrayed them for a wee bit of fleeting fame and the price of a few books.

  Now, after all these years, I find myself forced to agree. And that is all the more difficult to bear because I lie here with Death stalking the shadows of Abbotsford.

  He’s been dogging my faltering steps for some time now.

  This fever struck me as we returned from our travels. Rome and Naples, Florence and Venice. Those places had offered no relief. Death was coming for me. London was covered in yellow fog when we arrived, but the rest is a blur. They tell me I lay close to dying for weeks. I don’t recall. Then the final journey home. The steady rumbling rhythm of a steamboat remains in my mind, but I remember very little of that. I only know that I am home now.

  Two of my hunters have been turned out into the meadow. Fine mounts. The golden sun glistens on their powerful shoulders as they begin to graze. I wish I could be as content, but life has buffeted me about, and the choices I’ve made give me no respite. Nor should they.

  My mind returns again and again to the upheaval of 1820, to the “Rising.”

  We called those men and women radicals, when all they wanted were the rights and freedoms of citizens. In the name of equality and fraternity, they cried out for representation. They demanded the vote. Some called for an end to what they saw as the iron fist of Crown rule. They wanted to sever our northern kingdom from England and restore the ancient parliament of Scotland. In my lifetime, those men and women were the last chance for Scotland’s independence, and I blinded myself to their cause. And when Westminster made it treason to assemble and protest, they willingly gave their lives. The heroic blood of the Bruce and the Wallace ran in their veins. I see that now. Too late.

  That same year, that same month, as the blood flowed, I returned to Scotland from Westminster bearing my new title. Even now, I feel the weight of the king’s sword on my shoulders. But as I reveled proudly in my accomplishments, the cities across the land were tinderboxes, threatening to explode in a wild conflagration of civil war. The weavers and the other tradesmen in Glasgow and Edinburgh had just brought the country’s affairs to a halt with their strikes. Some of the reformers had courageously marched on the ironworks at Carron to seize weapons.

  Scotland teetered on the brink of anarchy. I was afraid. So I took the well-worn path of weak men.

  My single moment of courage came when I saved a woman who would help change the course of history.

  Isabella Murray Drummond. A marvel of this modern age. A doctor, no less, who’d studied at the university in Wurzburg, where her eminent father held a professor’s chair. When he passed away, she married an Edinburgh physician who’d gone to further his studies under the tutelage of her father. He was a widower with a growing daughter. She was a single woman left with a younger sister and a small inheritance. It was a marriage of convenience.

  Isabella, who had the loveliness of Venus and the bearing of a queen, saved me from losing my leg—lame since my childhood—after the carriage accident in Cowgate. I was carried to their infirmary. The husband was away, but I was fortunate that she was there, for Isabella was the very angel of mercy I needed at that moment, and her skill as a physician saved my life.

  No matter my regrets, or what I do to right wrongs, or what I write to change the fate of Scotland, some will always think me a traitor. I know now that I have helped in giving away my country’s chance for independence … perhaps forever … in return for a peace that was profitable for a few. But one thing in my life that I’ll never regret was my action on that woman’s behalf when the time came.

  The news spread across the city. Isabella Drummond’s husband was dead, and she was in hiding with her sister and her stepdaughter. The government had declared her an enemy of the Crown, placed a bounty upon her head. Her husband’s rebellious allies wanted her, as well, believing she’d inform on them.

  I succeeded in helping the women escape from the city, far to the north where they would board a ship bound for Canada. She was to join all those Highlanders who were journeying to a new life. But she would never board any ship. She would never reach the shores of that far-off place.

  For on the rugged coast of the Highlands, she disappeared … and
lived a truer adventure than ever flowed from my pen.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,

  Morn of toil, nor night of waking.

  —Sir Walter Scott, “Lady of the Lake,” Canto I, stanza 31

  Duff Head, Northeast Highland Coast June 1820

  “Hard times been choking folks around here for a long while, and most of them would sell their own kin if they thought there’s a ha’penny to be made from it.” Jean paused and fixed her eye on her guest. “And one look at ye, and they’ll know yer good for more than that.”

  A loud pop from the driftwood fire in the old woman’s hearth drew Isabella’s gaze. Sparks rose from the blue and lavender flames, struggling to find their way up the chimney. Wind and rain from the storm hammered fiercely at the shutters and the cottage door.

  From what she’d learned on the journey here from John Gordon, Jean’s nephew, the village that huddled around the cove in the shadow of Duff Head consisted of no more than a few dozen families of fishing folk trying to scratch a meager living out of the sea. Desperate. Hungry. Poor. Though she’d always lived her life in the city—Wurzburg, Edinburgh—she’d known many people like them. They didn’t frighten her.

  The soldiers pursuing her posed the real danger.

  A ha’penny, Isabella mused. She was worth a fortune. These Highlanders knew nothing about the thousand pounds sterling on her head—the bounty offered by the government to anyone who could bring her back to Edinburgh alive to face interrogation, trial, and a public execution. Certainly, Jean had no knowledge of this. Nor did she know of the lesser amount bandied about by the radicals for her corpse to guarantee her silence. Both sides wanted her dead.

  “I’ve lived here my whole life. The sea makes ye hard, and these folks are hard as stone,” the woman continued, perhaps reading a hint of skepticism in Isabella’s face. “They give their loyalty to no one. In the Rising of ’45, they wouldn’t fight for any side. If ye weren’t born here, yer an outsider. To them, even the Bonnie Prince was a stranger. And they don’t trust strangers.”

  If only her husband, Archibald, had been a little more like them, Isabella thought. Perhaps he’d still be alive. But it was his nature to take a side. And now, she and her sister and his daughter were running for their lives from the same butchers who cut him down in his own surgery as he tried to care for injured men. Men who’d simply stood up as citizens against a line of British Hussars in the streets of Edinburgh.

  “Yer a stranger and an unprotected woman traveling in the Highlands. An easy mark, to be sure,” Jean warned. “They’ll figure ye to be carrying at least a shilling or two, and they’ll cut yer throat for it. And then yer carcass’ll go into the sea. Them waters have swallowed up more than a few strangers.”

  The older woman’s dire prediction was surely an exaggeration, but the fate that Isabella faced if she fell into the hands of the British was not. Her late husband’s friends, newly released after being held by the authorities, had often been brought to the surgery bearing horrible wounds. Their bodies had been broken. Unspeakable tortures had been inflicted on them. And it mattered naught if they were man or woman.

  “Ye keep to the cottage,” Jean ordered, her tone as sharp as the needle she stabbed into the mending on her lap. “And if by chance anyone sees ye here, ye say nothing, ye hear? Ye look no one in the face, and ye answer no questions. If there’s anything to be said, I’ll do it.”

  Outside, the storm continued unabated, and the wind whistled and rattled loose shutters. The stone cottage, poor as it was, provided safety and a thatched roof to keep most of the weather out. The rustic meal they’d shared of stewed fish and bannock cakes warmed and filled her. She was grateful to have it. The journey north through the Highlands had been wet and rough.

  “I appreciate you taking me in like this.”

  “I took ye in because my nephew asked me to … and gave me enough for yer room and board. But I don’t know what John is up to. Other than yer name, he didn’t say much about who ye are or where ye came from or where yer headed. But he’s a good lad, and he’s all the kin I have left. I trust him.” The hard glare softened with affection. “He says to me, all I need to know is that yer a good woman and some vile Lowlanders’ll pay to get their hands on ye. Says I’m to keep ye hidden for maybe three days. He’ll come back for ye.”

  Jean’s nephew had gone back to Inverness to book passage for Isabella, her sister, and her stepdaughter on a ship that would carry them across the Atlantic to Halifax. But that meant three days of worrying and waiting before she was reunited with Maisie and Morrigan. Still, she hadn’t let the lawyer tell her where he’d placed the young women in the port town. Isabella was afraid she’d be forced to divulge their whereabouts if she fell into the hands of her British pursuers. She had to keep faith that John would do right by the girls. He’d been charged by Sir Walter to look after them all until they left Scotland.

  Isabella’s gaze fixed on Jean’s trembling right hand. She’d noticed it before while the woman was eating, though her hostess tried to hide the infirmity. Now Jean’s needle could not find the target, and she sat back in her chair in frustration as the piece slipped off her lap to the stone floor. Isabella bent over and fetched it, along with the woman’s darning mushroom.

  “Let me finish this for you.” Sitting across from her, she studied the threadbare stocking. There was hardly anything left of the heel to work with, but she put the needle to the task. From the corner of her eye, Isabella saw Jean using one hand to try and quiet the other.

  The Shaking Palsy. Jean’s shuffling gait, the forward stooping, the occasional wiping of drool from the corner of the lips, and the trembling hand that wouldn’t be controlled confirmed it. A disease with no cure that would become increasingly difficult to manage for a woman of advancing years who lived alone. Especially living in a place as desolate as this lonely outpost. Duff Head was a rocky bluff pushing out into the cold green-grey swells of the sea to the east of Inverness. And Jean’s cottage sat like a hunchbacked sow between two stone-studded hills below the coast road, away from the village. She had no neighbors close by. Isolated as it was, Isabella understood why John suggested this would be a safe hiding place for her.

  Her own difficulties aside, it was troubling to think Jean lived alone, out of reach of immediate help if she needed it.

  Isabella made another covert survey of the cottage. The iron cooking pot was too heavy, and earlier, when Jean had struggled to swing it out from over the fire, Isabella had jumped to help her. The threadbare rug on the stone floor certainly presented a hazard as the ailing woman dragged her foot. If she fell and broke an arm or a hip, she could lie there helpless forever. “Does anyone visit you?”

  Jean bristled. “If someone comes to the door, I’ll do the explaining. I’ll say yer Mrs. Murray, a friend of a cousin, on yer way down from the Orkneys. Heading to the Borders, ye are. Resting here for a few days. That’s all they need to know.”

  Murray was her family name, and she’d lived as Isabella Murray for twenty-eight years until she’d married Archibald Drummond six years ago and returned to Scotland, to a homeland she hardly knew.

  “I only asked out of concern for you.” Isabella looked at the gaps in the shutters where rain-drenched wind was coming through. And the thatched roof was hardly watertight. A stream was running down one wall and pooling in a dark corner. “I’m sure a cottage like this requires a great deal of upkeep and—”

  “I manage. Always have and always will. And I’m not about to hearken to John’s talk of forcing me to live with him.” The cap sitting atop the grey hair bobbed in agreement. “Feet-first is how I’ll go. That’s how my sainted husband left our house, and they can take me out the same way.”

  Isabella had known very little about John Gordon’s aunt before they got here. Their entire trip north, she’d been more worried about getting Maisie and Morrigan beyond the reach of the men who would surely be chasing them.

 
; “The curate does his duty and looks in on me once a fortnight when he comes through. And the women in the village stop by with a basket now and again.”

  The door shook from the force of a gust of wind. Jean followed Isabella’s gaze and frowned.

  “If one of them comes calling, remember what I said. No talking. Even a whisper of that Lowland accent’ll give ye away.”

  “I’m quite good at following directions. I’ll cause you no trouble.”

  The roof of the cottage shook as if in disagreement and showered them with broken bits of thatch.

  Trouble. Isabella plied the needle to the stocking. Trouble had been a constant companion to her from the moment Archibald brought them all back to Scotland, to their house on Infirmary Street near the surgical hospital. In Wurzburg—thanks to her father’s tutelage and influence—she was living a quiet and productive life as an accomplished physician and surgeon, well-versed in the science of medicine, privileged among her sex for being allowed to practice in a profession dominated by men.

  Archibald had promised all would be the same in Edinburgh. Neither of them pretended that theirs was a love match. It was a marriage based on respect. It would meet their mutual needs, for her sister and his daughter would be provided for. She could practice medicine in his clinic and lead the same kind of life in Scotland. But he’d only spoken half the truth; he said nothing of the other part of himself.

  He was a political idealist, a reformer, and his nationalist consciousness had reawakened the moment he stepped foot on the soil of his homeland. From then on, her husband led two lives. One, as a respected and learned doctor who was sought after by Edinburgh’s elite. And the other, as an activist whose evenings were constantly filled with secret meetings and radical efforts to change the repressive direction of the government in London. But that covert life of his, Isabella wanted no part in. She was Scottish by birth, but she’d lived nearly her entire life away from this land. Scottish nationalism and reform were lost on her, for she’d dedicated herself to one passion: medicine.