Amanda Scott Read Online Free Page A

had as much confidence in his illegal activities as he did, but she could not believe it would be long before his entire operation was unmasked and the English locked him away. Fergus Campbell was a dreadful man; worse, he was a tenacious one. The thought terrified her, for she knew not how she or the rest of the clan would survive without MacDrumin’s leadership.
    Life had been difficult the past four years since Culloden, for the relentless hunting down of Jacobites and their fugitive prince had resulted in months of terror followed by savage reprisals, the banning of all weapons, the outlawing of proper Highland dress, and the English garrisoning of all Highland fortresses. The English had even outlawed the bagpipe, calling it an instrument of war. Small wonder, she thought, that the Highlanders had turned increasingly to whisky as the answer to their problems. Chiefs who, like her father, had returned to their lands after Culloden had soon realized they were no longer patriarchs but merely landlords or stewards. Clan lands had been divided arbitrarily into tenants’ lots too small to support their occupants, who were in any case in no position to pay rents.
    Had the wicked English not been determined to change the entire system, the MacDrumin clan might still have continued to function as it had in the past, with those who made shoes for the clan continuing to make them in lieu of rent, and those who wove cloth, tended cattle, or farmed the clan’s more fertile acres continuing to do their bit as well, providing the clan with a thriving economy and the manpower to guard it. But MacDrumin had not been allowed to make the choice. Because of his known Jacobite sympathies, his lands had been forfeited and awarded to an Englishman, the mighty Earl of Rothwell, who lived in London and had never so much as set foot in the Highlands, and who no doubt never would set foot there unless he, like others of his ilk, decided to turn his Highland acres into a sporting estate to be visited as and when the spirit moved him. In the meantime, English factors, supported by the odious bailie Fergus Campbell, collected his rents and posted them to him in London.
    That was not the way things ought to be, but in Maggie’s opinion there was only one way to change them. If no one else could go to London, she would go herself. She was not, she thanked heaven, as volatile of temper as her father or Kate MacCain, but she did know how to get her own way when she set her mind to a purpose. And never had she believed in one more strongly than she believed in that of Bonnie Prince Charlie. MacDrumin and the others, surrounded by enemies as indeed they were, and likely to find themselves in the direst of straits at any moment, needed help desperately. If necessary, she would find their hero in London and drag him, and his army, all the way back to Scotland with her own two hands.

II
    London, August 1750
    E DWARD CARSLEY, FOURTH EARL of Rothwell, leaned back in the leather winged chair. Smoothing an imagined wrinkle from one lace-trimmed golden-brown velvet cuff with a perfectly manicured fingertip, he said languidly to the dour elderly man standing with apparent if unexpected composure before his desk, “Did you not hear me, MacKinnon? I said, his majesty the king has granted you a full pardon. You can go home to Kilmorie.”
    “Aye, I heard you, my lord.” Ian Dubh MacKinnon of MacKinnon, painfully thin, his face pale from three years’ captivity in the Tower of London, stared calmly back at him.
    “Is that all you have to say?” Rothwell glanced at the third man in the room, but although a glint of amusement lurked at the back of Attorney General Sir Dudley Ryder’s clear blue eyes, he remained silent, watching the old Scotsman.
    MacKinnon said evenly, “Did I ken what it is you wish me to say, Rothwell, mayhap I could oblige you, but as it is—” He spread his hands.
    “Good heavens, man, we know that you fought at Culloden and took part