“That minds me,” Archie said, and turned to Lily, “your friend Colonel Graeme is aboard a ship, here in our harbor.”
Lily stared. The voices… “Are ye certain?”
Archie gave her the look that meant he was insulted she would ask. “On Saturday he came to Edinburgh with General Buchan and Brigadier Cannon and others who’d been granted passes to go beyond seas. I don’t doubt their intent was to stay in town until their ship was made ready, but they were too well received. Your colonel, I’m told, could scarce walk in the street without meeting a friend or admirer, and there is nothing the government does distrust more than a popular Graham. So now they’ve been all ordered onto the ship, even though it’s not ready to sail.”
Henry asked, “Why were they given passes by the king, and not made prisoner?”
Archie had been told it had to do with the arrangement made between King William and the Highland forces last year, when they’d ceased their fighting, as a way to keep the peace.
Walter said, “Aye, we’ve all seen how well the Prince of Orange does intend to keep the peace. Did not he show us at Glencoe?”
There was a silence then. The news from Glencoe had just lately reached them, and reports were yet confused, but what they’d heard had left them horrified.
When the fighting in the Highlands had come to an end last summer, King William had offered terms of peace to all the clans if they would swear oaths of allegiance to him. That had been, as Walter had explained to Lily at the time, dishonest. “He expects them to refuse,” Walter had said, “because the Highlanders are Jacobites. No doubt he has signed letters of fire and sword and holds them ready so his troops can move against the Highland men the first of January, when the limit of their time expires.”
But all the Highland clans had sworn the oaths. The rumor was they’d written for permission to James Stewart at his court across the sea, and he had given it because he knew their hearts yet lay with him, and he would rather that they swallow a false oath and save their land and lives. And so King William’s plans to seek revenge upon the Highland clans appeared to falter.
But the chief of clan MacDonald, though arriving at the place and time to swear the oath, had found no one to hear it, and been forced to journey on some extra days, so the king’s men did use this as a reason to say he had sworn too late.
And in his valley of Glencoe there was quartered a detachment of the soldiers of the Earl of Argyll—grandson to the Argyll who had been Montrose’s enemy, and son of the Argyll who’d lost his head for treason in the summer Lily’s father died. All these soldiers, who till then had peaceably enjoyed the hospitality of the MacDonalds, then received their secret, wicked orders and rose early in the morning and began a slaughter of their hosts, within their homes.
Henry looked at Walter. “So it’s ‘Prince of Orange’ now, and not King William? Are ye turning to a Jacobite?”
“A crown will never make a king,” said Walter. “There were women at Glencoe. And children. I will call him what I please.”
Archie said, “Aye, within this house, but mind your tongue when ye step out that door. They hang men here for less.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Walter.
Archie looked across at him a moment. “Are ye not?” His voice was calm, and yet beneath there was an undercurrent Lily had not heard before, and one that left her cold.
Matthew said, “Let him be.”
He said it quietly, and without any movement, but again there was that challenge and the sense that there had been a shift within the household.
Archie smiled, and turned his gaze on Matthew. “Ye’ll be turning me out of my bed now, will ye?”
“No. I’ll take lodgings. I’m out of the business.”
“Oh, aye? And what else can ye do, then?”
A shrug. “There’ll be plenty of work at the harbor.”
That didn’t suit Barbara. “They’ve had gangs at work, taking lads from the taverns and off the Shore, pressing them onto the English ships,” she said. “The king said he’d stop it if we gave them one thousand men out of Scotland to serve in the navy, but it hasn’t stopped. It’s not safe, being there on your own.”
“Don’t you worry for me,” Matthew said. He was talking to Barbara but looking at Archie when he answered, evenly, “I can take care of myself.”
*
The past days had brought storms, but now the skies had cleared and Lily took heart from the fact that Colonel Graeme’s ship had not yet sailed. She might have time.