“They did a slightly better job in rendering a likeness of your husband,” Balmerino observed, “but of course our dear Jamie does actually look somewhat like the popular English conception of a Highland thug – begging your pardon, my dear, I mean no offense. He is large, though, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said faintly, perusing the broadsheet’s charges.
“Didn’t realize your husband was in the habit of roasting and eating small children, did you?” said Balmerino, chortling. “I always thought his size was due to something special in his diet.”
The little earl’s irreverent attitude did a good deal to steady me. I could almost smile myself at the ridiculous charges and descriptions, though I wondered just how much credence the readers of the broadsheets placed in them. Rather a lot, I was afraid; people so often seemed not only willing but eager to believe the worst – and the worse, the better.
“It’s the last one I thought you’d be interested in.” Balmerino interrupted my thoughts, flipping over the next-to-last sheet.
“The Stuart witch” proclaimed the heading. A long-nosed female with pinpoint pupils stared back at me, over a text which accused Charles Stuart of invoking “ye Pow’rs of Darkeness” in support of his unlawful cause. By retaining among his intimate entourage a well-known witch – one holding power of life and death over men, as well as the more usual power of blighting crops, drying up cattle, and causing blindness – Charles gave evidence of the fact that he had sold his own soul to the devil, and thus would “Frye in Hell Forever!” as the tract gleefully concluded.
“I assume it must be you,” Balmerino said. “Though I assure you, my dear, the picture hardly does you justice.”
“Very entertaining,” I said. I gave the sheaf back to his lordship, restraining the urge to wipe my hand on my skirt. I felt a trifle ill, but did my best to smile at Balmerino. He glanced at me shrewdly, then took my elbow with a reassuring squeeze.
“Don’t trouble yourself, my dear,” he said. “Once His Majesty has regained his crown, all this nonsense will be forgotten in short order. Yesterday’s villain is tomorrow’s hero in the eyes of the populace; I’ve seen it time and again.”
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” I murmured. And if His Majesty King James didn’t regain his crown…
“And if our efforts should by misfortune be unsuccessful,” Balmerino said, echoing my thoughts, “what the broadsheets say will be the least of our worries.”
“En garde.” With the formal French opening, Dougal fell into a classic dueler’s stance, side-on to his opponent, sword-arm bent with the blade at the ready, back arm raised in a graceful arc, hand dropping from the wrist in open demonstration that no dagger was held in reserve.
Jamie’s blade crossed Dougal’s, the metal meeting with the whisper of a clash.
“Je suis prest.” Jamie caught my eye, and I could see the flicker of humor cross his face. The customary dueler’s response was his own clan motto. Je suis prest. “I am ready.”
For a moment, I thought he might not be, and gasped involuntarily as Dougal’s sword shot out in a lunging flash. But Jamie had seen the motion start, and by the time the blade crossed the place where he had been standing, he was no longer there.
Sidestep, a quick beat of the blade, and a counter-lunge that brought the blades screeching together along their lengths. The two swords held fast together at the hilt for only a second, then the swordsmen broke, stepped back, circled and returned to the attack.
With a clash and a beat, a parry and a lunge in tierce, Jamie came within an inch of Dougal’s hip, swung adroitly aside with a flare of green kilt. A parry and a dodge and a quick upward beat that knocked the pressing blade aside, and Dougal stepped forward, forcing Jamie back a pace.
I could see Don Francisco, standing on the opposite side of the courtyard with Charles, Sheridan, the elderly Tullibardine, and a few others. A small smile curved the Spaniard’s lips under a wisp of waxed mustache, but I couldn’t tell whether it was admiration for the fighters, or merely a variation on his normally supercilious expression. Colum was nowhere in sight. I wasn’t surprised; aside from his normal reluctance to appear in public, he must have been exhausted by the journey to Edinburgh.
Both gifted swordsmen, and both left-handed, uncle and nephew were putting on a skilled display – a show made more impressive by the fact that they were fighting in accordance with the most exacting rules of French dueling, but using neither the rapier-like smallsword that formed part of a gentleman’s costume, nor the saber of a soldier. Instead, both men wielded Highland broadswords, each a full yard of tempered steel, with a flat blade that could cleave a man from crown to neck. They handled the enormous weapons with a grace and an irony that could not have been managed by smaller men.
I saw Charles murmur in Don Francisco’s ear, and the Spaniard nod, never taking his eyes off the flash and clang of the battle in the grass-lined court. Well matched in size and agility, Jamie and his uncle gave every appearance of intending to kill each other. Dougal had been Jamie’s teacher in the art of swordsmanship, and they had fought back to back and shoulder to shoulder many times before; each man knew the subtleties of the other’s style as well as he knew his own – or at least I hoped so.
Dougal pressed his advantage with a double lunge, forcing Jamie back toward the edge of the courtyard. Jamie stepped quickly to one side, struck Dougal’s blade away with one beat, then slashed back the other way, with a speed that sent the blade of his broadsword through the cloth of Dougal’s right sleeve. There was a loud ripping noise, and a strip of white linen hung free, fluttering in the breeze.
“Oh, nicely fought, sir!” I turned to see who had spoken, and found Lord Kilmarnock standing at my shoulder. A serious, plain-faced man in his early thirties, he and his young son Johnny were also housed in the guest quarters of Holyrood.
The son was seldom far from his father, and I glanced around in search of him. I hadn’t far to look; he was standing on the other side of his father, jaw slightly agape as he watched the swordplay. My eye caught a faint movement from the far side of a pillar: Fergus, black eyes fixed unblinkingly on Johnny. I lowered my brows and glowered at him menacingly.
Johnny, rather overconscious of being Kilmarnock’s heir, and still more conscious of his privilege in going to war with his father at the age of twelve, tended to lord it over the other lads. In the manner of lads, most of them either avoided Johnny, or bided their time, waiting for him to step out of his father’s protective shadow.
Fergus most definitely fell into the latter group. Taking umbrage at a disparaging remark of Johnny’s about “bonnet lairds,” which he had – quite accurately – interpreted as an insult to Jamie, Fergus had been forcibly prevented from assaulting Johnny in the rock garden a few days before. Jamie had administered swift justice on a physical level, and then pointed out to Fergus that while loyalty was an admirable virtue, and highly prized by its recipient, stupidity was not.
“That lad is two years older than you, and two stone heavier,” he had said, shaking Fergus gently by the shoulder. “D’ye think you’ll help me by getting your own head knocked in? There’s times to fight wi’out counting the cost, but there’s times ye bite your tongue and bide your time. “Ne pétez plus haut que votre cul, eh?”
Fergus had nodded, wiping his tear-stained cheeks with the tail of his shirt, but I had my doubts as to whether Jamie’s words had made much impression on him. I didn’t like the speculative look I saw now in those wide black eyes, and thought that had Johnny been a trifle brighter, he would have been standing between me and his father.