Chapter 35
“They’ll greet me as a hero, hen.”
“Don’t hen me,” Magda snapped. The day had come for James and his men to leave the Camerons and head south, to a fate Magda refused to contemplate.
He said he wanted to have a child, and she’d let herself see that as a sign they could finally settle down.
Make a life together. She’d thought it meant an end to his campaigning—a sign that he’d escaped an unthinkable end on the gallows.
He gave an easy laugh and cupped her chin for a kiss.
She pulled her head back to look at him, her eyes sharp on his. “Really, James.” Is this it, finally? The moment he’ll need her help, and she’ll be too far away? Just like Peter. “Don’t go. Please. Or, if you go, take me with you. But you can’t just leave me here.”
“I shall return to you, scores of Lowlanders at my back, to quell this turmoil once and for all.” He took her face in both hands and refused to let her go.
“Truly, Magda,” he said in a whisper, “it’s but a momentary parting.
I know you think there’s some gruesome fate I’m to meet, but I tell you that is not the case. ”
“You can’t know that.”
“I have it on good word that all is lost for the Campbell and his Covenanters. All are ready to rise and march for me.”
“But you can’t just leave me.” Her helplessness was turning to anger. Would their lives together always be this? Always good-bye? Would he still be rushing off to danger when they had children together? Rushing off to save the world? Just like Peter.
“Oho, pretty lass,” he said playfully. “But I can.” Her glare in response tempered the humor in his tone.
“Truly, Magda,” he added seriously. “Regardless of my destiny, it is far safer for you in my family’s care. You simply cannot march about the country with me and scores of fighting men.”
“What if you get killed? No, really,” she added bluntly, seeing the cavalier flash in his eyes. “What if this is the time? And you die? And I . . . what? I languish the rest of my days with a bunch of strangers, hundreds of years before my birth?”
Fear had been a constant drone, vibrating through Magda’s every cell since she’d arrived. She was utterly exhausted from it, and she finally felt herself snap.
“I tell you, hen, I will not—”
“Or . . . okay . . . say you don’t die this time.
” She pulled away from him and stepped back.
“Is this what I have to look forward to? To you gallivanting off at every opportunity, leaving me to sit around and . . . what? Sit with the other women all day while I worry I’ll never see you again?
Should I be like . . .” She pitched her voice to a low hiss.
“Should I be like Margaret? Napier is with you more often that he’s with her. Is that what you’d have for me?”
“I’d not—” he tried to interrupt.
“I can’t have your baby, James.” Her voice was flat.
Her feelings had ravaged through her, laying waste, leaving Magda feeling utterly empty.
James might be her world, but without him this place never would be, and somehow it’d been the question of getting pregnant that had shed a harsh light on it all.
Magda couldn’t be abandoned there, couldn’t envision bringing a child into a place so alien. Not if she might have to do it alone.
“I can’t have your baby in some filthy bed with some leech-using doctor, and then sit around for the rest of my life having more babies and watching them play while I spend my days hoping and praying that you return home alive. I can’t bear anymore loss, James.”
“That will not be your life,” he said evenly.
His voice was steely, his body rigid. “You have my word. But for now, Magda, I must go. Just this once more. The wheels turn, plans are set in motion, and I cannot simply run from it all.” He stepped toward her, and she flinched back to avoid his touch.
Hurt flickered across his features, but he pressed on.
“No man can know his own fate. But even if he could, my country’s destiny is larger than my own.
That is what I need to attend, at this moment, above all else.
But you have my promise, I shall do all in my power to return to you.
And I will be a good husband, here, with you.
And I will put that bairn in your belly,” he said, and Magda finally let him take her in his arms.
She didn’t doubt any of that. Nor did she doubt that he’d get himself killed with these crusades of his. Just like her brother had. She couldn’t endure that sort of pain again.
She wouldn’t endure it.
Summer was almost past, and MacColla had kept his word, leaving James a few hundred men of Clan MacDonald to stand at his back. Rollo and Ewen rode with him, but he’d sent Magda with Tom back to Montrose.
It had been hard parting as they did. There had been something in her look that he’d not seen before.
Defiance flashed in her eyes on the day they left, replacing her usual desire to satisfy, appease, accommodate.
He found he loved her all the more for it.
He would prove to her that he wasn’t just any man.
Magda deserved an extraordinary life, and that was what he would give her.
But turmoil and uncertainty reigned in his country, and his first priority was to ease Scotland into peace.
They marched south, not for battle, but merely to supplement their forces.
He would return safe, and spend the rest of his life proving his love to her.
He’d not let an army of nannies raise his children as he’d been raised.
He’d be by his wife’s side, reminding her every day, for the rest of his days, that she was his.
“What was that about?” Rollo trotted his horse up to James’s side. He’d started to wave at a woman peeking from a cottage window, but when their eyes met, the woman simply began calling frantically to her children to herd them inside.
Though they’d run into many friendly faces on the road, an equal number got skittish at the sight of them, as if the mounted throng were the angel of death itself, sweeping over the country, looking for a place to land.
James had been chilled to see that the majority of those he’d seen had been women and children, compared to so few men.
But despite the occasionally wary greeting, most of the Royalists traveled merrily along, buoyed by pleasant weather and their leisurely pace. The terrain became easier as they approached the Scottish borders, and the hard Highland crags smoothed into the gentle rolls of the Lowlands.
“Aye,” James replied, “the country’s on edge, and why not? Nobody knows who marches for whom, or where the wind will blow tomorrow.” He pitched his voice louder to be heard over the men as they broke into a rousing pub song, and Rollo spared a smile for him.
There had been much singing as they went, with the men crooning out ballads and battle chants, or the piper playing in time to the gait of the horses. James and Rollo laughed now, upon hearing the latest tune.
He left his lady with gentlemen, And he kissed the lass in the stable. Are you wi’ bairn, my chicken? Are you wi’ bairn, my chicken? If I am not, I hope to be, E’er the green leaves be shaken.
“What say you, Rollo?” James grinned. “When songs of battle turn to songs of bairns, I think it time to rest for the night.”
James read the relief clear on his friend’s face. Rollo’s great upper-body strength and custom saddle did much to mitigate the pain of such long marches, but at the end of a day’s ride, James could always spot the agony writ in the furrow at Rollo’s brow and in the lines that bracketed his mouth.
“Men!” he called. “Draw rein! We camp here.”
“You’ll camp here at Philiphaugh,” James told him. He looked around at the smooth stretch of moor. The River Ettrick glared white in the late-afternoon sun, drawing a ragged line that rent the lush swath of green in two. “There’s room enough for the cavalry and the Irish as well.”
“What of you?” Rollo asked.
“I’ll quarter at Selkirk, just across the river. ’Tis but a wee burgh but should be large enough to find most officers a roof for their heads.”
Tents appeared, studding the moor like spring shoots, and the black smoke and charred smell of cook fires soon choked the air.
His men seemed relaxed, unhurriedly setting up camp, squatting to chat, sharing pulls from flasks.
James and the other officers gradually left Philiphaugh, crossing the river to find beds in Selkirk.
Padraic O’Shaughnessy lay down for the night.
He and his Irish brothers had mocked the Scottish tartan, but withstanding such extensive marching and camping, he finally understood why the Scots had such a peculiar attachment to their plaids.
His saddle blanket was but a trifle when compared to the yards of wool the Highlanders rolled into every night.
He’d quartered his battle-scarred pony at Philiphaugh like the rest of the cavalry, but joined a dozen of his countrymen to camp the night in a copse away from the river. Imagining the air to rise cooler by the water, he welcomed the shelter the woods provided.
There was a small snap, and his head shot up.
Heart pounding, his eyes searched blindly in the darkness until, eventually, the silence convinced him that what he’d heard was just a breeze in the trees.
Or one from his group had been settling for the night.
Or that perhaps he’d even imagined such a sound.
Padraic pulled the gray wool up over his shoulders, exposing a stretch of muddy boot cradled in the leaves. Tucking his arm under his head, he shut his eyes to rest.
“We’ve found them, General.”
“Nicely done, lad.” Alexander Leslie smiled, revealing a row of small, square teeth. “Where?”
“At Philiphaugh, and the woods surrounding.”
“So close?” Leslie smoothed a drop of whisky from his moustache and stoppered his flask. “The Fates smile upon us.”
“Aye, and our spy at Selkirk claims Royalist officers are scattered through the burgh like bits of chaff on the wind.”
“Ah.” Leslie stroked his beard into a point. “An unexpected boon. Officers and their men separated by a river?” He barked a sharp laugh. “A foolish thing indeed to separate the beast from its head.”
Leslie stood and stretched, turning each foot in small circles.
He needed his wits sharp. The hour was late, but if they were to keep the element of surprise, they’d need to strike early.
There would be little rest that night, but the gold he’d get in trade for Montrose’s head would buy drink that would put to shame the horse piss he was currently forced to swill.
“Have all six cavalry regiments at the ready.” Leslie’s eyes narrowed, and his hatred and longing for retribution seeped into his features, transforming him from a merely small and crooked man into a devil.
“Rally the men,” he said. “We blaze like the sun’s fire at the dawn.”