Page 2 of Highland Sword
“I know who I am. And I know the path I must follow. Iamthe son of Scotland, and I’ll do what I must, but I’ll do it in the way that is best for the people.”
CHAPTER2
MORRIGAN
Inverness, the Scottish Highlands
October 1820
Morrigan Drummond stared at the half-dozen flyers posted to the wall of the abandoned malt house. Caricatures of Cinaed Mackintosh. Here in Inverness, within view of Maggot Green, where he heroically fought English dragoons trying to set the town on fire. She studied each unflattering depiction before peeling it off the bricks.
Unflattering was not the right term. Ruthless and false were closer to it.
One flyer showed Cinaed with a filthy boot pressed on the neck of a bairn. In front of him, ragged, starving people waited in a line to hand him their last ha’pennies from moth-eaten purses. Another showed what was supposed to be the son of Scotland’s head on the body of a spider and a score of frightened poor folk caught in his web, about to be devoured. One more, depicting him, fat and drunken, with two Highland maidens on his lap as he leered lecherously at a third. Each sketch was worse than the last. All offensive. In every picture, he wore a tarnished and dented crown.
Morrigan had seen caricatures similar to these the lasttwo times she came to Inverness. While Searc Mackintosh and the fighters who escorted them from Dalmigavie Castle were off seeing to their business—she’d collected copies of the flyers. She found them pasted on walls throughout the town, and the same thought nagged at her. There was something more in this series of colored etchings than the obvious insults. Shadow figures lurked in the backgrounds of each one.
Back in Edinburgh, she was a fan of political caricatures. For her, they were a kind of puzzle. They nearly all conveyed an obvious insult, but the better ones also contained subtle messages crying out to be discovered. The best artists used their platform to go beyond what he was ordered to draw.
This artist was talented, in many ways as good as those who worked for newspapers and publishers in Edinburgh and Glasgow. But Morrigan still needed to study his work more carefully.
A tall shadow blocked the late morning sun, and Morrigan stepped aside to make room for Blair Mackintosh. The leader of the fighters from Dalmigavie glowered at the flyers. “I’m looking forward to stuffing these down the throats of the bastards behind them.”
With a scornful glance at the busy street, he ripped what was left of the caricatures off the wall.
“Not bastards.Onebastard,” Morrigan corrected, folding the ones she’d peeled off and tucking them into her jacket. “This is the artwork of one person.”
This much she’d deciphered. The use of curved lines to indicate motion, a similarity in certain faces, the somewhat grotesque exaggeration of older figures all supported her contention.
“Aye, but it takes more than one to print them.” With the battered face of a brawler, Blair looked dangerous evenwhen he wasn’t angry. The fierce expression darkening his features now threatened violence. “And to pay for them.”
The Highlander didn’t care about details. He wasn’t interested in subtle messages. On their last trip to Inverness, he’d called on every printing house in town. Whether the proprietors were being handsomely paid or were simply too afraid, no one was admitting anything. No one would confess they’d had anything to do with the scurrilous caricatures, though each of them was quick to point the finger at someone else.
Morrigan wasn’t surprised when one shop owner suggested the flyers weren’t even being printed in Inverness. Searc Mackintosh, the little bulldog of a man who had a piece of every illicit business transaction on the east coast of the Highlands, had his men questioning printers in other cities. The more Cinaed’s name and popularity spread through the northern lands, the more virulent the campaign against him would become.
Morrigan was no politician. Still, she knew that while one person was drawing the caricatures, many stood to profit from planting the seeds of distrust regarding the son of Scotland. And not just the English military commands at Fort George and Fort William. The bloody aristocrats who were evicting thousands of families week after week, month after month, burning whole villages… they too had much to gain.
Perhaps not today, but someone would eventually pay the price. Of that, she was certain. It wasn’t only the Mackintosh clan that were ready to defend their beloved native son. Many others in clans across the Highlands believed in Cinaed. In what he stood for.
“Searc wants to leave no later than noon. I need to help the men load up the carts. Stay close, lass.”
Morrigan understood what the Highlander was tellingher. He wanted her within a stone’s throw of Searc’s house. Coming to Inverness with the Mackintosh fighters was a privilege that she’d earned, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize it. She was smart, capable, and strong. And too restless to remain cooped up within the stout walls of Dalmigavie Castle.
She gestured down the crowded street toward the center of town. “I’ll not go farther than the bookseller’s shop.”
Blair gave her a final nod and turned away.
As she watched him stride off toward Searc’s house through the bustling throng of carters, vendors, and ragged, tired refugees, Morrigan thought of how much her life had changed in these recent months. She was fortunate to be standing here. The outwardly quiet life she’d been living in Edinburgh had been destroyed in a single afternoon’s attack. A hussar’s bullet had killed her father as he tried to protect his patients in his own surgery, and then they’d fled north.
Her stepmother Isabella was now married to Cinaed, and a bounty was being offered for the two of them. As a result, anyone connected to them was at risk of being taken by the British authorities.
Morrigan bent down and picked up one of the torn flyers. This one showed Cinaed, again as a fat king with his crown askew, seated in a throne that was being carried through a crowd of people by clan chiefs with the faces of wolves. Ahead of them, a passage toward a distant palace was being cleared by club-wielding brutes. On all sides, scores of people were looking on in fear and anguish. She felt her frustration rising as she looked from the sheet to the poor, harried Highland folk passing by this side street in the Maggot. They were trying to turn the people against Cinaed… those who needed him most.
“Sparrow?” the deep voice of a man called from a few paces off. “Robert Sparrow.”
Morrigan didn’t turn, but as she slid the flyer into her jacket, the reply came from someone closer to her.
“Aye, by my auld heart.”
