‘No,’ said Graham, cutting through my thoughts. ‘They didn’t kill him. There were some of Queen Anne’s ministers who argued for it, but she wouldn’t listen. Oh, she kept him captive, but she let him keep his head, and in the end he died of plain old age.’
That made me somewhat happier. I hoped he’d had his chance to have a view of London from his window, as he’d wanted. Certainly King James, I knew, had never seen his hopes fulfilled. His ships had been pursued along the northern coast until bad weather finally made them give up altogether and set back to open sea, and France. And those on shore, who’d waited for his coming for so long, had been left hanging in the wind to face those evil times that Captain Gordon had predicted. ‘Graham?’
‘Aye?’
‘Was anybody else killed for their part in the rebellion?’
‘Not that I recall.’ His voice was very sleepy now, and had I known him less well I’d have half-suspected he was ‘not recalling’ with a purpose, in the hope that I’d stop asking questions.
‘But the English rounded up the Jacobites and put them into prison.’
‘Oh, aye. Most of the Jacobite nobles and gentry were thrown into prison, then taken in chains down to London. Paraded around for the mob.’
I was silent a moment, imagining this. Then I asked, ‘Was the Earl of Erroll with them?’
Graham nodded, and even that effort seemed great for him because his voice had begun to grow thicker, less clear. ‘Supposedly he got so out of temper as a captive that he pitched a bottle at the Earl of Marischal, and nearly took his head off.’
‘Well, the Earl of Marischal must have deserved it, then.’
I felt Graham’s mouth briefly curve on my skin. ‘You’re defending your own, are you?’
There was no way to explain that I knew the Earl of Erroll’s character better than any historian could—that he wasn’t a figure on paper to me, but a flesh-and-blood person held whole in my memory. All of them were. I remembered their faces. Their voices.
I was silent with my thoughts a moment. Then I ventured, ‘Graham?’
In reply he nuzzled closer to my neck and made a muffled sound of enquiry.
‘What happened to them when they got to London? I mean, I know they were eventually set free, but how?’
No answer came this time except the deep sound of his breathing. He had gone to sleep. I lay there for a while longer thinking in the dark with Graham’s arm wrapped safe around me and the warmth of Angus sprawled across my feet, but in the end the question would not let me rest, and there was only one way that I knew to get a proper answer.
XIX
THESE DAYS SHE WAS not often out of doors. Although two months had passed and spring had smoothed the sharper edges of the breezes from the sea, she kept inside with Mrs Malcolm and with Kirsty and the baby and she did not leave the house except on those rare days when her own restlessness consumed her and she felt that she must breathe the outside air or else go mad. Even then, she stayed as far as she could stay from the main road, mindful always of the fact that this was still a time of danger.
Mr Malcolm had not yet been heard from and they did not know how he had fared. At the beginning it had seemed that every day more men were taken and imprisoned, and from the single letter that the countess had been able to send down Sophia knew it was no better in the north. Indeed the only comfort in that letter had come from one small piece of news the countess had relayed, that she’d had in a message from the Duke of Perth, her brother, at the Court of Saint-Germain: ‘Mr Perkins,’ she had written to Sophia in her careful code, ‘does tell me that he recently did call upon your husband Mr Milton and did find him well recovered of his illness, and impatient to be up again.’ From which Sophia knew, to her relief, that Moray had managed to get safely back across the Channel, and was healing from his wounds.
That knowledge made it easier to cope with the uncertainty surrounding her, just as the sight of baby Anna sleeping in her cradle, small and vulnerable and trusting, gave Sophia every morning the resolve and strength of spirit to conduct herself with caution, so her child would be protected.
She would not, in fact, have been upon the road today at all if it were not for Mrs Malcolm’s housemaid falling ill, so that somebody else must go to market if they were to have the food to keep them fed the next few days. Kirsty had offered, but as she had been recovering herself from that same illness and was weakened still, Sophia would not hear of it. Nor would she hear of Mrs Malcolm setting out for town, when Mrs Malcolm had already been accosted twice by soldiers who were searching for her husband.