Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
MORRIGAN
The shutters and curtains were drawn back. The midafternoon sun illuminated the three rows of etchings arranged neatly on the desk near the window. Morrigan had lined them up in the order she’d gathered them in Inverness.
Now, she and Maisie scrutinized each one.
“I barely had a chance to look at them the other night with Isabella here,” Maisie said, picking up a flyer and studying it thoughtfully.
Trying to learn where these caricatures came from was a diversion. Morrigan needed a way to distract herself. There was little else she could do about the fact that Wemys was so near. Isabella continued to visit him. Thankfully, Maisie accompanied her sister to the cottage.
The villain was dying, Morrigan kept reminding herself. Dying a slow and painful death. She couldn’t think of anything more fitting, even if she herself wasn’t inflicting it.
Maisie put the flyer back down in its ordered place.
“I know it’s foolishness, but whenever I think of satirists—and artists in general—I assume they’re progressive and radical.
That they have a natural interest in alleviating the suffering of people and use their talents to help their fellow man in some way. ”
Morrigan bumped her sister’s shoulder affectionately. “That’s because you have a good heart. A clear conscience. You always see the best in people. And you try to improve the world.”
A year ago, Maisie and Fiona, Niall’s sister, had founded Edinburgh Female Reform Society.
True idealists and revolutionaries, their efforts stopped dead and Fiona was arrested when the government used its iron fist to crush all opposition and protest. Since then, here in the Highlands, Maisie had continued her reform work, using the sharp point of her pen.
And now, with Fiona again by her side, she was planning to start another chapter of the Female Reform Society in Inverness.
“Artists generally put a signature of some kind on their work.”
“This one is too much of a coward to put his name to them.”
“If we look close enough, however, he might still reveal something about himself.” Her sister ran her fingers around the outside edges of one. “I’ve never known an artist who didn’t ache for some kind of recognition.”
“When Searc or Blair get their hands on him, he’ll learn the real meaning of ache.”
“I suspect he does this work for the money,” Maisie said. “For a Highlander to do this, I have to assume he’s starving. Maybe he has a family he needs to feed. You and I both know who’d be paying for such underhanded disparagement.”
Morrigan knew. They all knew. Sir Rupert Burney had been moved from London to Edinburgh to Glasgow to Inverness this year to crush the reform movement and the threat Cinaed posed in Scotland.
“The artist is also a storyteller, and there’s more than one story being conveyed here.” Maisie traced a circle on one, then the next and next. “Look at this area of each etching. Do you see the similarities? They’re all women.”
“You’re right.” Morrigan looked closely. “Are those crosses on their coats?”
“I believe they are.”
“They’re nuns.” Whether the etchings depicted a mob or not, the figures were repeated, artfully worked in. “Are there any nuns living in the Highlands?”
Maisie shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Is he saying that Catholics are behind the movement?” Cinaed and the reformers were on the same side, but these etchings cast them as opposites, with the son of Scotland depicted as corrupt, power hungry, and a potential tyrant.
“Perhaps.” Maisie leaned closer. “But look at the smaller faces, mixed in with the nuns. Children are standing with them.”
“School children,” Morrigan suggested. “A Catholic school?”
They both knew that practicing Catholicism had been illegal in Scotland and England for centuries, but the faith had survived in the Highlands by going underground, particularly in the north and in the Western Isles.
It had to. The religion had too many ties with the old Jacobite loyalty to the Stuarts.
“Could there be such a school in Inverness?” Maisie asked.
“Blair might know.”
“Searc definitely would.”
A knock on the door had both women hurriedly stacking books on top of the flyers. Despite the fact that Isabella had already seen them, she didn’t need constant visual reminders that the man she loved was at the center of a growing storm.
She was relieved to find Fiona at the door. Sister-in-law to Maisie, the young widow had spent some time in a British prison before being freed. As of last month, she and her two daughters also had found a refuge behind the walls of Dalmigavie Castle.
“Where are the girls?” Maisie asked.
“Terrorizing their grandmother.”
“How is John doing today?”
John Gordon had helped Isabella, Morrigan, and Maisie flee Edinburgh, traveling with them to Inverness. Because of his assistance, the young Edinburgh lawyer was arrested by the dragoons pursuing them and tortured until Cinaed and Blair managed to free him.
“Better than I’ve seen him since I arrived. He joined me and Catriona and Briana on a walk to the village and back.”
“He clearly enjoys your company,” Maisie said.
“We have a great deal in common.”
A shadow crossed Fiona’s face, and Morrigan knew she was still haunted by her months in captivity.
Since arriving at Dalmigavie, she wouldn’t talk of it.
She never shared how she was treated or what was done to her.
Morrigan understood. She knew that dwelling on some evils only made them loom larger in your mind. It only made matters that much worse.
And then the doubts took root and sprouted. What if people looked at you differently? What if speaking about the past brought the nightmare back? What if one lost the ability to forget?
Morrigan realized she was thinking of her own demons and not Fiona’s.
“I heard you and John Gordon are getting married,” Morrigan teased, deciding to lighten the mood.
Fiona planted her hands on her hips and flushed an unexpected shade of red. “Aye, right after you and that Aidan Grant fellow are wed. The word going about is that you two are long lost lovers.”
“Lies,” Morrigan gasped. She thought of the few moments they’d spent in each other’s company in the library a couple of nights ago. “Who’s been saying such things?”
“If you came down and took a meal or two in the Great Hall, then you’d know.”
She wasn’t ready to circulate amongst the castle folk. Not yet. A few more days, perhaps, when the bruises were gone.
“All I can say is,” Fiona continued, flashing a quick grin at Maisie, “a handsome young man has been mooning about.”
He was handsome…and mildly amusing. Not that she’d admit any such feelings to anyone. She did give him permission to make up a story. But would he go so far?
“I’ll blacken his other eye if he’s been lying about us.” Morrigan turned to Maisie. “Has he?”
“Now, that’s not very ladylike, is it?”
“I’ll cut his tongue out.”
“Much better,” Maisie replied. “The truth is, he hasn’t said a word. In fact, he’s been very much the gentleman. He says nothing at all in response to the tales Sebastian Grant is weaving at supper every night.”
“What tales?”
“That his brother made the mistake of getting too close to you in an alleyway in Inverness. That you thrashed him like a Latin master on examination day.”
“I’ll never be allowed to go back to town,” Morrigan huffed, walking back to the table. She removed the books from the flyers. Even from the few words she’d shared with Sebastian, though, she could see the man had a sense of humor.
She’d learned a little more about the Grants since that first day.
The brothers had come north to take up the case of the Chattan brothers at the request of Searc.
Aidan was quite famous, apparently, in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
But this case would help his standing in the Highlands, and it would help him move a few steps closer to a seat in Parliament.
Morrigan’s thoughts again meandered to their moments in the library. She wished she’d been brave enough to stay longer and continue their sparring. Or go back to that room the next night, knowing that was where he’d be working. The quickening of her pulse was as unwelcome as it was troublesome.
“Why are you staring at this twaddle again?”
Fiona’s question shook Morrigan free of her musing about Aidan. The young woman was standing at her shoulder and gazing down at the flyers spread out on the table. She’d seen the sketches the last time she wandered in here. Maisie explained what they’d discovered earlier.
“It’s a curious thing that he should repeat these suggestions of Catholicism in every one of the etchings we have,” Morrigan added.
“And you believe this is part of his signature?” Fiona asked, reflecting on it.
“Other than the nuns,” Morrigan asked, “do either of you see anything else?”
From the first time Morrigan laid her eyes on these flyers, she’d sensed there was something hidden in them.
“I wonder if this he might actually be a she,” Fiona suggested suddenly, motioning to the caricatures.
“In several of them, you can see a ring of women looking at the central images. We also have the nuns. The children, which appear to be girls. It’s the same thing in several of the others. It’s mostly women.”
Morrigan leaned over the table again. “It’s a possibility.”
Maisie nodded. “Particularly if she is somehow connected with nuns or a school for Catholic girls.”
There was a great deal more to these than immediately struck the viewer.
Morrigan tried to justify in her mind why a woman, a talented artist living in the Highlands, would draw these for the enemy.
She recalled what Maisie said only a few minutes ago.
People were hungry. Jobs were scarce. Perhaps she had children with no roof over their heads and no food to sustain them.
Desperation made people do terrible things.
And there were thousands upon thousands of struggling war widows throughout Scotland.