Prologue
It was a fine day but a stiff breeze was blowing as the two ships rounded the Lizard. The long spur of Cornwall jutted far out into the mighty swell of the Atlantic. Charles Edward Stuart stood at the rail of the Doutelle, his cloak billowing out behind him. He had barely slept since they had set sail from St Nazaire in Brittany on France’s Atlantic Coast two days before but his eyes were bright. At last! He was on his way at long last.
The lookout’s cry sliced through the salty air. ‘Navire anglais!’
Charles gripped the rail. His escort vessel, the warship Elisabeth, was already bearing down on the Royal Navy ship. She had already furled some of her sails, protecting them from the coming action. Judging by the bristling battery of cannons protruding from the wooden hulls of both vessels, they looked to be evenly matched in firepower.
The frigate on which Charles stood was much smaller and much more lightly armed. The Elisabeth was carrying the bulk of his arms, ammunition and such fighting men as the French had been prepared to sanction giving him.
The two warships came alongside each other and their cannons opened fire. The thunderous boom was deafening, deep and terrifying. His chest vibrated like a kettle drum in response. He saw both ships hit, heard the hideous, jagged tearing of their timbers and rigging, saw them shudder, swaying wildly. There was little chance of either vessel righting itself again between one impact and the next.
Through the drifting white cannon smoke he could see the name of the British ship. HMS Lion. He watched in anguish as she pounded the Elisabeth.
‘Bring us closer!’ he yelled. ‘We must lend our own firepower to the fight.’
‘We are outgunned here on the Doutelle, your royal highness!’ the smaller ship’s captain warned. He was Antoine Walsh, a Franco-Irish merchant and slave trader. ‘Nor can we risk your own safety!’
Distraught, Charles turned towards him. ‘We cannot leave them to fight alone!’
‘We can and we must! The English ship could shatter us into matchwood!’ Walsh took the younger man by the elbow, pulling him away from the rail.
Angry, imperious words pouring out his mouth, the Prince continued trying to insist the Doutelle must join the fight. Under the flapping cloak, he tugged the sleeve of his plain black coat out of the captain’s grasp. Walsh grabbed him again, tightening his hold.
‘Highness, if you will not stand back, I shall have to order you down to your cabin. For your own safety, sir, and for the sake of this sacred endeavour you lead. There can be no hope of success without you!’
Charles let out a cry of frustration but he could not resist that plea. He stood back but stayed where he could watch the fight. It went on for several hours. Cannon balls and pistol shots tore into furled and unfurled sails, rigging and men. Their shrieks and screams of pain pierced the salty Atlantic air.
The horror ended only when both ships were virtual wrecks. Their masts were broken, their timbers splintered, their sails ripped and their decks red with blood and wounded and dying men. There was no more damage left to be done. The cannons fell silent only as day began to give way to evening.
The British warship glided away. ‘Probably heading to Plymouth for repairs,’ Captain Walsh muttered, watching the departing vessel through his telescope.
‘Not an option open to us,’ Charles said drily. His few companions and advisers – only seven men – were gathered around him on the deck of the Doutelle. They sailed closer to the stricken Elisabeth. She was listing badly now. A shouted conversation, deck to deck, established the cost of the encounter to her crew and the soldiers she carried. Over 60 men dead and well over 100 wounded.
‘Could we transfer the weapons and the surviving soldiers to us here?’
Captain Walsh shook his head. ‘Too risky. Such an operation might sink both of us. The Elisabeth’s only option is to limp back to Brest.’
‘Your highness,’ came another voice. ‘It might be wise for us to follow her there. She’s carrying the bulk of our muskets and broadswords, plus such fighting men as have survived this affray. Let us regroup and try again another day.’
Other voices joined in, all advocating the same course of action. ’Twas folly to continue with the original plan to sail to Scotland. Charles listened for a few moments, watching as the wounded Elisabeth slowly moved off.
‘No,’ Charles said. ‘We go on as planned.’
The men standing around him looked at each other but said nothing.
As they journeyed north through the British Isles there were other moments when they tried to persuade him to turn back. There was the day and night when a summer squall blew up, as ferocious as a winter storm.
The seas grew mountainous and the Doutelle was lashed by torrential rain. Even as the crew battled the power of the wind and the waves, Charles doggedly refused to think again and abandon his mission.
Instead, he chose to remember what the great French philosopher Monsieur Voltaire had said. God is not on the side of the big battalions but the best shots. Skill and strategy would always win through. Determination, too. History was not made by those who would not move until every possible condition was perfect. It was made by those who sailed into the storm.
He did not think of those who, all unwitting, were going to be drawn into the storm with him. There were men and women whose lives were going to be changed forever by one man’s unshakeable determination to fulfil his destiny.
One of those people was Redcoat Captain Robert Catto of King George’s Army. Another was apothecary and committed and passionate Jacobite Christian Rankeillor of Edinburgh.
They too were about to sail into the storm.
Chapter 1
‘She did that pretty damn quickly.’
‘Yes,’ Christian Rankeillor agreed. ‘I’ll be surprised if she hasn’t smudged her painting.’ Like Robert Catto, she was watching the rapidly retreating figures of Anna Gordon and her cousin James Duff as they walked away from them over the grass. They were carrying Anna’s painting things between them.
James had her collapsed easel under one arm, the other threaded through the legs of the stool she’d been sitting on. Anna was carrying her paints box, with the canvas she’d been working on tucked inside it. Like Christian’s, her box was ingeniously fitted out to shield a still-wet painting but she had placed the protective cover rather hastily over it. Both girls had been working on a depiction of the ancient stone circle which sat in the field next to Rothiemay House.
Until Anna had looked up in response to the sound of approaching male voices and urged Christian to look up too, excitement in her voice. Or maybe trepidation. Which was when Christian had seen Robert Catto walking towards her. Robert Catto, whom she had longed for through the dark reaches of so many lonely nights. Robert Catto who was now standing mere feet away from her. His red uniform was a startling splash of colour against the vibrant green of the grass.
Overwhelmed by the sight of him, she reached for a clean corner of the rag in her paints box and dabbed at the spot of colour on her skirts. It had got there when she’d abruptly lowered her brush, stunned and bewildered by his sudden appearance. After they had parted in Edinburgh a year and more ago, she had thought she would never see him again.
His eyes ranged over her hand, the brush and rag it held and her own paints box before rising once again to her face. ‘Hello, Miss Practical.’
She rose to her feet, drawing in a breath at that well-remembered nickname. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Take a wild guess. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours.’
She’d been discussing those with Anna only moments before. The rumours that Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed in the west, bringing with him only a few companions. As French domestic politics had changed course, French interest in supporting the Jacobite Cause had waned.
So if Charles really had come to Scotland, he’d done so with little more than the hope of Scotland rising in armed rebellion with the aim of putting his father James back on the British throne. If it had been a huge risk a year before, when the plan had been for him to sail for England with thousands of French troops backing him up, it was even more of one now.
‘ ’Tis a rash adventure, to be sure,’ Robert Catto said. ‘If the rumours are true.’
What she had been thinking must have shown on her face. He’d always been able to read her. Like an open book.
‘Are you here to find out if they are?’
‘You might say that. Gathering intelligence. Scouting out the lie of the land. Sounding out opinion. Inspecting defences. It’s what I do.’
‘You have once again been seconded back from Europe?’
‘An advance party of my regiment has been drafted back, and me with it.’
‘Where are you stationed?’
A tired smile briefly lit his face. ‘I wish I knew. It was initially to be Aberdeen, but I had a letter from the Lord President before I left Flanders, requesting me to join him in Inverness first. He has asked me to undertake a few commissions for him here in the north-east. After I have carried those out, I suspect I may be heading elsewhere. Not to Aberdeen. Not initially, at any rate.’
She raised her hand and drew it down through the air in a gesture which indicated his tall figure and the uniform he wore. ‘At least this time you are showing your true colours. Not pretending to be something you are not. Not pretending to espouse opinions you despise.’
When they had first met eighteen months before, back in December 1743, he had been acting as Captain of Edinburgh’s Town Guard, while subtly presenting himself as a covert Jacobite.
Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session of Scotland and one of the powerful men who ran Scotland on behalf of King George and the London government, had called Robert Catto back to Scotland then too. The plan had been to flush out the real Jacobites, fire a warning shot across their bows. The strategy had seemed to work. Until these last few weeks.
‘I’m glad you approve.’
‘That’s not what I said. Did you know I was here?’
‘No.’
‘So this meeting is as much a shock to you as it is to me?’
He folded his arms across his scarlet chest and extended one foot a little to the side, balancing how he stood. She remembered the stance only too well. In command of himself and apparently relaxed, although she knew he could not be. Any more than she was.
Drinking in the sight of him, she was remembering everything they had been to each other. Intimate conversations. Snatched kisses and caresses. Those magical two nights they had spent together. Making love. Laughing. Talking. In their own world, where all things were possible, including the planning of a future together. One they knew they could never have.
Even as the whirlwind of memories circled around her, she was doing her utmost to throw up an invisible barrier between herself and him. They had been forced to part back then, the decision made for them. By circumstances and the Lord President.
Also because the two of them stood on opposite sides of an unbridgeable political divide. One now threatening to yawn ever wider with every passing day. She could not go through all this again. She could not!
‘I had a little more warning you were here. If only a few moments. I came here today to see Lord Braco.’
‘He is away, not due home till tomorrow evening.’
‘So I have learned. His son offered to show me the policies. Although offered is not perhaps the right word. His mother suggested he should do so.’
‘Suggested not being the right word either? Lady Jean can be very forceful.’
‘Somehow I do not think her son’s politics and my own align. He does not care for my uniform, that’s for sure.’
‘I think a lot of people in Scotland do not care for your uniform. Are you not taking something of a risk travelling around wearing it?’
‘Our standing orders require us to make ourselves visible.’
‘In the hope of keeping us troublesome Scots in our place?’ She went on without waiting for him to answer. ‘I seem to recall you once telling me you take no interest in politics.’
‘I also once said the same thing to the Lord President. Who told me politics might well take an interest in me. He fears they may now be taking an interest in all of us.’
Feeling what had become over the past few days a familiar rush of excitement mixed with sheer blind panic, she folded her own arms. ‘I do not want to discuss politics with you. Your own, or anyone else’s. And if we are not to scandalize Lady Jean and the rest of the household, we should not stay out here for much longer on our own.’
He raised a derisive auburn eyebrow. ‘How would any of them know where we are? Or that we are alone together? Cutting our conversation short would surely also be demonstrating a shocking lack of gratitude to your friend Miss Gordon, who has engineered this opportunity for us to have these few private moments. Risking smudging her painting to do so.’
‘Robert,’ she began, and immediately wished his name unsaid. His reaction was all too obvious. It was there in his slate-grey eyes and the expression on his handsome face. During those weeks in Edinburgh, she had more than once accused him of wearing a mask, of hiding his feelings behind the stern military persona. As she had gradually broken through the outward shell, he had allowed her to see the real man. She was looking at him now.
A sequence of pictures glided into her head. A man who had spent too many weary hours riding along a dry and dusty road. Spotting a tumbling burn to the side of that road. Leaping off his horse and kneeling down on its grassy bank. Making a cup of his hands and lowering them down to scoop up some water. Raising his hands to his mouth and drinking a long, cold, refreshing draught. That’s what Robert Catto looked like now: and she could not bear it.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Don’t what … Kirsty?’ he countered. ‘What is it you don’t want me to do?’
‘You know,’ she said, feeling herself in turn react to the sound of her name in that longed-for voice. ‘You know very well.’ Unfolding her arms and dropping her eyes, hoping she didn’t look as adrift as she felt, she began packing away her painting things. In her haste, she dropped the brush again. This time it fell safely onto the grass.
He was there in an instant, crouching down to pick it up. ‘Let me help you.’ Springing back to his feet, he dipped the brush into the jar of water in the box before wiping it with the rag. ‘Does it go in here?’
‘Yes,’ she managed, watching as he bent forward and placed it with her other brushes, held safely in their own section of the box.
‘Order and method,’ he said, straightening up again. ‘Both of us have always liked order and method.’
He had made that observation on the night when they had first made love. Unpinning the stomacher of her gown, he had looked around for somewhere to safely stow the pins which held it securely to the bodice. She had offered him the little roll of quilted material where she habitually put them, the one she kept in the pocket under her skirts. He had placed them in two neat rows of four, as she herself always did.
Those pins and the little roll of material were in her pocket now, although she had no need of them today. Above her plain blue skirt and over her shift with its elbow-length white sleeves she wore a cream-coloured bodice. It too was quilted, giving her breasts some support but allowing her the freedom of movement stays did not. Printed with little blue and green flowers, the edges of the bodice were trimmed with the same blue material as her skirt and fastened at the front with matching blue ribbon ties.
As well as the pins, the little quilted roll held something else – a dainty little silver brooch in the shape of two hearts entwined. A Luckenbooth, the symbol of betrothal. She’d been carrying it around with her ever since Robert Catto had given it to her back in Edinburgh. She had accepted it on the basis that any betrothal between the two of them could only happen in their own world, the one where all things were possible.
She was only too well aware such a world did not exist in the cold, harsh light of day. Nor did she want him to know how precious the little brooch still was to her. Such an admission could only lead both of them into more danger than they already stood in right at this moment – this so completely unexpected and profoundly unsettling moment.
‘Shall I tip the water out onto the grass? Wipe the rag around the empty jar?’
‘Don’t,’ she said again. ‘Please don’t.’
The jar was already in his hand. ‘You’re not talking about me emptying out the water.’
‘No. I’m asking you not to speak about the past.’
‘Our past.’
‘That’s all gone,’ she said. If she could hear the sorrow in her voice, so could he. ‘You know that as well as I do.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped, her temper flaring. ‘You think I’m happy with how things turned out? Happy to see you walking towards me like a ghost out of the past?’
‘Kirsty,’ he said urgently. ‘There’s something I want to say to you. Will you please listen to me?’
‘No,’ she said. He looked at her as though he was going to say whatever he wanted to anyway. Until he turned his head away towards the stone circle. Or the five grey stones which remained of it. All were as tall or taller than a man, with one huge boulder on its side, like a giant altar. She couldn’t see his face. Something about the set of his shoulders made her wonder where his thoughts were now. Made her fear she knew.
His scrutiny of the ancient stones over, he turned back to her. Emptying out the murky water, he drew the rag around the jar before squeezing the moisture from it over the grass and replacing it and the jar in the small round blue and white pottery dish where they belonged in the paints box. ‘May I give you a hand to carry all this back to the house?’
Knowing how close she was to losing control, she ordered herself to stay calm. Stooping, she picked up the protective smock she had discarded because it had made her too hot on this warm and sunny day. ‘That would be very helpful.’
‘God Almighty,’ he said, suddenly fierce. ‘Why are we speaking to each other like well-mannered bloody strangers?’
‘Because that’s all we can be to each other.’ She took a step back, seeing in his face, his very demeanour, exactly what he was thinking now. He was fighting the impulse to take her into his arms. As she was aching for him to do so. Longing to feel his mouth on hers and his arms around her waist. Knowing she had to resist the impulse to respond.
‘I was hoping you might be happy to see me walking towards you.’ He gave an odd little laugh. ‘You don’t know how much I was hoping for that! But I can see all I am doing is distressing you. So I shall go away after I have helped you take your painting things back to the house and return to speak with Lord Braco tomorrow. I passed an inn shortly before I got here. I can stay there tonight.’
Christian lifted her chin, realizing she was in danger of making a bad situation worse for both of them. ‘Lady Jean would be deeply offended if you did that. As would her husband. I take it she has already offered you the hospitality of their home? We can surely manage to be civil to each other for a day or two.’
‘Civil to each other,’ he repeated. ‘Is that really the best we can do?’