Thirty-Five
It’s going to be a lovely sunset. Clad in helmet and leather cuirass and armed with her father’s sword and shield, Catherine watched from a hilltop overlooking the Killiecrankie Pass. The key communications route into the Highlands from Perth to Inverness, the six-feet-wide riverside track threaded through a steep, dangerous, densely wooded gorge, carved by the rushing waters of the Gary River. They’d been waiting, ducking potshots and sporadic cannon fire, since marching from Blair Castle and claiming the high ground in the mid-afternoon.
The ancient seat of the Dukes and Earls of Atholl, Blair Castle was the gateway to the Grampian Mountains. Whoever controlled it, controlled access between the Highlands and the Lowlands. The Marquis, its current owner, had prudently left to take the waters in Bath, and Dundee had taken steps to secure it for the Royalist cause. The moment he heard a government force under Hugh Mackay was on its way to reclaim it, he’d sprung into action. He’d held a brief war council with those clan leaders who’d arrived, and set out immediately to cut them off. They’d marched without halting, arriving before the Orangemen, and set up position on a ridge above the pass.
They’d been waiting nearly two hours for the sun to set so it wouldn’t blind them. Three hundred Irish under the command of Major-General Cannon had joined them, but from what Catherine could see, they were still outnumbered two to one. Outmanned, outgunned, but not outgeneraled. Her father had taught her that speed won battles, conferring the advantage of flexibility, choice of terrain, and element of surprise, but Bonnie Dundee was the first man she’d seen put it so adeptly into practice. A valuable lesson, if I survive to remember it.
A cloud passed overhead and she shivered, though it was late July and hot. It wouldn’t be long now, a few minutes at most. She looked toward the horizon. The sun hung low and the sky had taken an orange cast against a background of magenta and purplish-blue. This will be my last sunset. I’ll never grow old. I’ll never have a child. At least I had the chance to know a man. I’ve had a lover. I’ve loved Jamie.
Jerrod sidled over next to her, and their horses bumped noses. “You’ve led us here, Cat. Time now for you to go.”
She snorted and made a rude gesture. “I’ll go when the other chiefs do, Uncle, be it up or down the hill.”
“Your father’d be bursting with pride, could he see you now, lass.”
“My father would have counselled me to do like the Marquise of Atholl and take the waters in Bath.”
But he wouldn’t have. The first battle in the Jacobite cause, a daring gambit against desperate odds—despite all his words of caution and prudence, he’d shared the Highland thirst for wild adventure, and he’d not have missed it for the world. And here she was, after all her efforts to avoid it, about to embark on a piece of foolishness and destructive waste her people had romanticised and gloried in for centuries, and the part of her that had listened with childish wonder to the tales of storytellers and poets, trembled in anticipation. She was about to lead her clan into battle. She was about to take part in the kind of heroic deeds men wrote songs about. Swept by a fierce hunger, all her senses heightened; afraid, exhilarated, and never more ferociously alive, she looked down the hill, her heart pounding with excitement, and then looked to Jerrod and grinned.