Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [398]
I had stayed in my pretended swoon on Falkirk Hill as long as I could, but was roused before too long by a British dragoon trying to force brandy from a pocket flask down my throat. Unsure quite what to do with me, my “rescuers” had taken me to Callendar House and turned me over to General Hawley’s staff.
So far, all had gone according to plan. Within the hour, though, things had gone rather seriously awry. From sitting in an anteroom and listening to everything that was said around me, I soon learned that what I had thought was a major battle during the night had in fact been no more than a small skirmish between the MacKenzies and a detachment of English troops on their way to join the main body of the army. Said army was even now assembling itself to meet the expected Highland charge on Falkirk Hill; the battle I thought I had lived through had not, in fact, happened yet!
General Hawley himself was overseeing this process, and as no one seemed to have any idea what ought to be done with me, I was consigned to the custody of a young private, along with a letter describing the circumstances of my rescue, and dispatched to a Colonel Campbell’s temporary headquarters at Kerse. The young private, a stocky specimen named Dobbs, was distressingly zealous in his urge to perform his duty, and despite several tries along the way, I had been unable to get away from him.
We had arrived in Kerse, only to find that Colonel Campbell was not there, but had been summoned to Livingston.
“Look,” I had suggested to my escorting gaoler, “plainly Colonel Campbell is not going to have time or inclination to talk to me, and there’s nothing I could tell him in any case. Why don’t I just find lodging in the town here, until I can make some arrangement for continuing my journey to Edinburgh?” For lacking any better idea, I had given the English basically the same story I had given to Colum MacKenzie, two years earlier; that I was a widowed lady from Oxford, traveling to visit a relative in Scotland, when I had been set upon and abducted by Highland brigands.
Private Dobbs shook his head, flushing stubbornly. He couldn’t be more than twenty, and he wasn’t very bright, but once he got an idea in his head, he hung on to it.
“I can’t let you do that, Mrs. Beauchamp,” he said—for I had used my own maiden name as an alias—“Captain Bledsoe’ll have my liver for it, an’ I don’t bring you safe to the Colonel.”
So to Livingston we had gone, mounted on two of the sorriest-looking nags I had ever seen. I was finally relieved of the attentions of my escort, but with no improvement in my circumstances. Instead, I found myself immured in an upper room in a house in Livingston, telling the story once again, to one Colonel Gordon MacLeish Campbell, a Lowland Scot in command of one of the Elector’s regiments.
“Aye, I see,” he said, in the sort of tone that suggested that he didn’t see at all. He was a small, foxy-faced man, with balding reddish hair brushed back from his temples. He narrowed his eyes still further, glancing down at the crumpled letter on his blotter.
“This says,” he said, placing a pair of half-spectacles on his nose in order to peer more closely at the sheet of paper, “that one of your captors, Mistress, was a Fraser clansman, very large, and with red hair. Is this information correct?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering what he was getting at.
He tilted his head so the spectacles slid down his nose, the better to fix me with a piercing stare over the tops.
“The men who rescued you near Falkirk gave it as their impression that one of your captors was none other than the notorious Highland chief known as ‘Red Jamie.’ Now, I am aware, Mrs. Beauchamp, that you were…distressed, shall we say?”—his lips pulled back from the word, but it wasn’t a smile—“during the period of your captivity, and perhaps in no fit frame of mind to make close observations, but did you notice at any time whether the other men present referred to this man by name?”
“They did. They called him Jamie.” I couldn