Jamie dropped halfway to one knee, with a murderous jab upward that brought his blade whizzing past Dougal’s ear. The MacKenzie jerked back, looking startled for a moment, then grinned with a flash of white teeth, and banged his blade flat on top of Jamie’s head, with a resounding clong.
I heard the sound of applause from across the square. The fight was degenerating from elegant French duel into Highland brawl, and the spectators were thoroughly enjoying the joke of it.
Lord Kilmarnock, also hearing the sound, looked across the square and grimaced sourly.
“His Highness’s advisers are summoned to meet the Spaniard,” he observed sarcastically. “O’Sullivan, and that ancient fop Tullibardine. Does he take advice of Lord Elcho? Balmerino, Lochiel, or even my humble self?”
This was plainly a rhetorical question, and I contented myself with a faint murmur of sympathy, keeping my eyes on the fighters. The clash of steel rang off the stones, nearly drowning out Kilmarnock’s words. Once having started, though, he seemed unable to contain his bitterness.
“No, indeed!” he said. “O’Sullivan and O’Brien and the rest of the Irish; they risk nothing! If the worst should ever happen, they can plead immunity from prosecution by reason of their nationality. But we – we who are risking property, honor – life itself! We are ignored and treated like common dragoons. I said good morning to His Highness yesterday, and he swept by me, nose in the air, as though I had committed a breach in etiquette by so addressing him!”
Kilmarnock was plainly furious, and with good reason. Ignoring the men whom he had charmed and courted into providing the men and money for his adventure, Charles then had rejected them, turning to the comfort of his old advisers from the Continent – most of whom regarded Scotland as a howling wilderness, and its inhabitants as little more than savages.
There was a whoop of surprise from Dougal, and a wild laugh from Jamie. Dougal’s left sleeve hung free from the shoulder, the flesh beneath brown and smooth, unmarred by a scratch or a drop of blood.
“I’ll pay ye for that, wee Jamie,” Dougal said, grinning. Droplets of sweat ran down his face.
“Will ye, Uncle?” Jamie panted. “With what?” A flash of metal, judged to a nicety, and Dougal’s sporran flew jingling across the stones, clipped free from the belt.
I caught a movement from the corner of my eye, and turned my head sharply.
“Fergus!” I said.
Kilmarnock turned in the direction I was looking, and saw Fergus. The boy carried a large stick in one hand, with a casualness so assumed as to be laughable, if it weren’t for the implicit threat.
“Don’t trouble yourself, my lady Broch Tuarach,” said Lord Kilmarnock, after a brief glance. “You may depend upon my son to defend himself honorably, if the occasion demands it.” He beamed indulgently at Johnny, then turned back to the swordsmen. I turned back, too, but kept an ear cocked in Johnny’s direction. It wasn’t that I thought Fergus lacked a sense of honor; I just had the impression that it diverged rather sharply from Lord Kilmarnock’s notion of that virtue.
“Gu leoir!” At the cry from Dougal, the fight stopped abruptly. Sweating freely, both swordsmen bowed toward the applause of the Royal party, and stepped forward to accept congratulations and be introduced to Don Francisco.
“Milord!” called a high voice from the pillars. “Please – le parabola!”
Jamie turned, half-frowning at the interruption, but then shrugged, smiled, and stepped back into the center of the courtyard. Le parabola was the name Fergus had given this particular trick.
With a quick bow to His Highness, Jamie took the broadsword carefully by the tip of the blade, stooped slightly, and with a tremendous heave, sent the blade whirling straight up into the air. Every eye fixed on the basket-hilted sword, the tempered length of it glinting in the sun as it turned end over end over end, with such inertia that it seemed to hang in the air for a moment before plunging earthward.
The essence of the trick, of course, was to hurl the weapon so that it buried itself point-first in the earth as it came down. Jamie’s refinement of this was to stand directly under the arc of descent, stepping back at the last moment to avoid being skewered by the falling blade.
The sword chunked home at his feet to the accompaniment of a collective “ah!” from the spectators. It was only as Jamie bent to pull the sword from its grassy sheath that I noticed the ranks of the spectators had been reduced by two.
One, the twelve-year-old Master of Kilmarnock, lay facedown on the grassy verge, the swelling bump on his head already apparent through the lank brown hair. The second was nowhere visible, but I caught a faint whisper from the shadows behind me.
“Ne pétez plus haut que votre cul,” it said, with satisfaction. Don’t fart above your arsehole.
The weather was unseasonably warm for November, and the omnipresent clouds had broken, letting a fugitive autumn sun shine briefly on the grayness of Edinburgh. I had taken advantage of the transient warmth to be outside, however briefly, and was crawling on my knees through the rock garden behind Holyrood, much to the amusement of several Highlanders hanging about the grounds, enjoying the sunshine in their own manner, with a jug of homebrewed whisky.
“Art huntin’ burras, Mistress?” called one man.
“Nay, it’ll be fairies, surely, not caterpillars,” joked another.
“You’re more likely to find fairies in that jug than I am under rocks,” I called back.
The man held the jug up, closed one eye and squinted theatrically into its depths.
“Aye, well, so long as it isna caterpillars in my jug,” he replied, and took a deep swig.
In fact, what I was hunting would make as little – or as much – sense to them as caterpillars, I reflected, shoving one boulder a few inches to the side to expose the orange-brown lichen on its surface. A delicate scraping with the small penknife, and several flakes of the odd symbiont fell into my palm, to be transferred with due care to the cheap tin snuffbox that held my painfully acquired hoard.
Something of the relatively cosmopolitan attitude of Edinburgh had rubbed off on the visiting Highlanders; while in the remote mountain villages, such behavior would have gotten me viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility, here it seemed no more than a harmless quirk. While the Highlanders treated me with great respect, I was relieved to find that there was no fear mingled with it.
Even my basic Englishness was forgiven, once it was known who my husband was. I supposed I was never going to know more than Jamie had told me about what he had done at the Battle of Prestonpans, but whatever it was, it had mightily impressed the Scots, and “Red Jamie” drew shouts and hails whenever he ventured outside Holyrood.
In fact, a shout from the nearby Highlanders drew my attention at this point, and I looked up to see Red Jamie himself, strolling across the grass, waving absently to the men as he scanned the serried rocks behind the palace.
His face lightened as he saw me, and he came across the grass to where I knelt in the rockery.
“There you are,” he said. “Can ye come with me for a bit? And bring your wee basket along, if ye will.”
I scrambled to my feet, dusting the dried grass from the knees of my gown, and dropped my scraping knife into the basket.
“All right. Where are we going?”
“Colum’s sent word he wishes to speak with us. Both of us.”
“Where?” I asked, stretching my steps to keep up with his long stride down the path.
“The kirk in the Canongate.”
This was interesting. Whatever Colum wished to see us about, he clearly didn’t want the fact that he had spoken with us privately to be known in Holyrood.