Highland Ballad Part 23

The lad looked back at him, startled by the change. "Master," he said plainly. "Who are you?" The Highlander breathed deep the sea air, then replied.

"I am Michael James Scott, a proud veteran of the war against tyranny, and a man who will hide no more." With that he gave rein to his fretting animal, and rode openly to the fisherman's cottage.

The old man had seen him coming, but remained smoking placidly as before. There was much here that he did not understand, and he had many questions. But he knew enough not to worry himself, or to act in haste. Life, in the form of young 'Jamie', was coming straight toward him, and would no doubt make itself clear.

Drawing up to the low stone shelter, Michael dismounted and tethered his horse, then strode quickly up the steps. The eyes of the two men met, and though everything had changed, nothing had changed between them. Michael was still in need, and the fisherman was still willing to help.

"Can we go inside and talk?" he said. The old man nodded.

Again they sat before the fire, grateful for its warmth, and for the strong walls around them. Michael had laid out the facts as he understood them, told his friend all that he knew. And now he waited on his judgment, seeking aid and counsel alike.

"Well," said the other, after mulling over all that he had heard. "I'd say it's more than clear we've got to get them out. . .and I'd have to say you're right, not trusting their fate to the English. There's good men among 'em, it's true. But when there's a struggle for power between adamant men, innocents are going to be hurt, and conscience swept aside.

"On one thing you can rest a.s.sured," he went on. "I'll be at the cove with a skiff, if and when you need me, with my boat anch.o.r.ed not far off. I'll move in at nightfall tomorrow, prepared to stay till dawn, then do the same the next night if need be. I know the place well enough, as I know most every coast from Skye to Inverness. It'll be a tricky sail coming out---with the wind against us. But I'll warrant the wind's been against us some years now, eh?"

"Thank you," said Michael. "It means a lot."

"Aye, but that's the easy part. First we've got to get them out."

Again he puffed on his pipe thoughtfully.

"Well then. I've seen that tower from a distance, and know the castle by reputation alone. It was built centuries ago as a defense against the Vikings, and word has it it's never been taken. It was built to withstand far greater force than any you or I could hope to bring against it." The mariner paused, considering.

"Stealth, you say. And rope..... Aye. A grappling hook might be the answer, if the window weren't as high as it's bound to be, and you had all night to make the throw. But I suspect you don't, and the weight of the attached line would make it all but impossible in any case."

"I'd thought of that," said Michael. "But I didn't know what else to try..... Tell me the truth, John. Is it hopeless? I think another prison cell would be the death of me. But if there's no other way. .

.I'll turn myself in along with Purceville, and try to reach the new Secretary---"

The fisherman shook his head. "No. Your kin have turned themselves in once already, and you see the result. And I did not say it was hopeless. You were on the right scent. You're just not the crafty old hound that I am." He gave the younger man a wink. "Where a rope won't go, perhaps a bit of string will, to lead the way."

Michael set his horse at an easy gallop, as the road leveled and he began the second, less arduous leg toward home. He felt heartened as his leg brushed against the saddlebag, and he thought of the bundles contained within. For the first time since the women had been taken from him, he felt a tentative hope. There was a chance.

The last daylight faded behind him; but now the feared night wind was less, and only urged his mount to greater speed. After a time he looked up at the waning, but still formidable moon, wondering if its light would be a blessing or a curse in the coming escape. For the hard clear skies of mid autumn had begun, with ten thousand stars looking down un.o.bstructed. There seemed little likelihood of change by the following night. Perhaps the fog would be a factor, though the high promontory on which the Castle was set.....

It was no use worrying, he told himself, with less conviction than he wished he felt. Again he fought off the familiar sense of dread which had never fully left him since the morning of the Battle, but only varied in theme and intensity. Familiar too was the dull, oppressive ache of his affliction. How much longer he could deceive his body with the promise of future rest, he did not know. He was worn, both physically and emotionally, to the last thread of resilience. And yet he could not rest. Still one more journey must be undertaken, before he slept that night.

Perhaps an hour later he came at last into sight of the lonely homestead. When he circled at a distance, to interpose the chimney between himself and the moon, a faint trail of smoke could be seen rising from it, and this encouraged him. Someone remained within. Any trap set by the English, he felt sure, would be presaged by absolute silence and stillness. But this did not rule out the possibility of an ambush by Purceville, who had not yet made his intentions clear.

With this in mind, he dismounted several hundred yards from the house, and wrapping the horse's reins about the branch of a sheltering tree, advanced on foot.

Opening the back door soundlessly, he slipped inside with the pistol

c.o.c.ked and ready. Nothing. Heart pounding, he advanced slowly down the pa.s.sage, toward the indirect glow of the hearth. He turned the corner.....

Purceville sat motionless facing him, a drained goblet in his hand. He evinced no surprise. Apparently his senses were sharper than the Highlander guessed.

"I will do it," he said evenly. "On the condition that I am never again left weaponless in an indefensible corner."

Michael came closer, unbuckled the dead officer's sword. He handed it to Purceville in the English fashion, then straightened and looked him square in the eye.

"I ask for no greater promise," he said, "than that you do what you know is right. Now, if you will take it, here is my hand."

The Englishman took it in his own, with the same measured gaze that he had worn since the Highlander's return. There was no time to wonder at the thoughts that lay behind it.

"Come on," said Michael. "We've got a long ride ahead of us."

"Where are we going?"

"To find a more defensible corner."

Thirty

The Lord Henry Purceville lay alone in the heavy framed bed, with sleep the distant memory of a child. And though he knew there were a thousand contingencies which he must antic.i.p.ate, and prepare against, still a single question drove all others from his mind.

How had it come to this?

His own son, whose hatred now seemed a.s.sured, had turned against him, and had to be bound and dragged away like a criminal. His beautiful, melancholy daughter, who had dared to stand up to him, lay pale and shivering in the Tower at his own command. And he himself, once a proud and fearless soldier of the line, lying and hiding to protect his pitiful gains from a withered aristocrat whose skull he could so easily crush.

Feeling suffocated, frothing with rage at his helplessness, he threw aside the covers and rose to pace about the room as if a cage.

Because the question that truly galled him was not Why , but Why now? If such a reversal had come when he was younger, with his future still ahead of him, he might have seen some justice to it.

He would have known there was a difference between good and evil, and all that this knowledge implied. He would have believed in something.

He could not lie, and say the knowledge would have changed him much.

But at least he would have known, as his daughter's plight had shown him, that real people were the victims of his blind aggression, people whose only crimes were not weakness and naivete, but kindness and compa.s.sion.

But he had not know, or so he told himself. His life had run on, untaught and un.o.bstructed, a raging beast crushing everything in its path. And now, just as surely, that killing momentum would hurl him from the brink of its dark height---down, down into the yawning abyss.

Of what lay at the bottom, he dared not even think.

And not only was it too late for him, but for his victims as well. How many men had he killed in battle, or destroyed in the political arena, to attain what he had once called power? How many women had he sucked dry and then discarded? And for what? Only to learn when the damage was already done that the actions of men, for good or evil, made a difference. They mattered!

The bile rose in his throat, nearly choking him. For now the mindless cruelty of life. . .was slowly turning back upon him. That same unyielding blade, the heartless razor that he had served and become, was proving to be double-edged.

But fear and a momentary helplessness were not to be confused with impotent despair. The Lord Purceville was far from defeated. He let the feelings run, because for the first time in many years he could not stop them, and he knew it was unwise to try. Time enough to master his emotions when the flood had died down. For now he must know where personal weakness was likely to occur.

For as Anne Scott had already glimpsed, the truly frightening thing about this man, was that he defied all the self-destructive traits of the storybook villain. And though he had given himself over to evil, he was still capable of a kind of wisdom. Though he lived on one side of the boundary, he never ceased learning from the other. He understood killing and healing alike.

Forcing all else from his mind, he looked back across the pages of his life, trying to find some common thread, some shred of lost meaning that would make him understand.

His childhood memories remained the most vivid of his life, and though long suppressed, it took little effort to bring them back in sharp detail. He shuddered as he sat again on the edge of the bed, antic.i.p.ating the grim scenes which had hardened him and made him cold, but never lessened in their stark brutality.

He had grown, a wild weed, among the wharves of London. His mother was a sometime prost.i.tute, his father a man he had never seen. The only thing she would ever say of him was that he had been a sailor, and had left her dest.i.tute when she was but a girl. He wanted to hate the man for it,

but he knew his mother too well to trust her version of the past, or to feel much pity on her account. She fed him, sometimes, and gave him a corner of the floor in which to sleep. In return for this he was expected to steal, to warn her of the police, and to keep silent when she brought home from the public houses the dirty, hardened wretches who filled her cup and purse alike.

One evening she had returned with a particularly evil looking Portuguese, a cut-throat pirate by the look of him, living like others of his kind under the King's protection, so long as they terrorized Spanish treasure ships and not his own. The man's dark eyes through their narrow slits spoke of a malevolence that even his mother must have felt. But she said nothing, gave him the wine he demanded though he already stank of it, and led him up to her room, oblivious.

Through the poor ceiling he could hear the clothes tearing, the blows and sharp curses of the man. But these meant little to him. The rougher sort were like that, and if his mother minded, it never kept her from bringing the same lot back again. So long as they paid in gold and silver, it was all the same to her.

But then he heard an unfamiliar sound, and it brought him up short.

His mother had screamed in earnest. He could hear her pleading, while the man before her had become deathly silent.