By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

sight. If James stole a glance over his shoulder, he could see the red-coated enemy plainly, in the process of debouching from the road he knew ran here all the way from Inverness. A number of the Spanish officers were waving to him as he sped past, Irishmen in the King of Spain’s service, who had befriended James during the weeks of waiting that had preceded this latest great convulsion of activity. In him they’d divined a lively, intelligent lad; fearless. And as they watched him rush dispatches from one end of their lines to the other, they admired the dash he displayed.

General Wightman couldn’t help but notice him, too. Crouched for speed over the neck of his elegant grey; a junior officer no doubt, in a bottle green small coat, lapels taped and cuffs faced in maroon and cut in the fashion of a French dragoon – no flapping tails to clutter his hand’s easy reach to his light cavalry sabre or the carbine holstered on his saddle. Also, he wore no hat, nor wig, and that allowed a luxuriant tangle of reddish brown hair to flow out, like a banner to measure the wind of his passing. And young, thought Wightman. Only a young man could ride with such verve. The range, however, was too great for him to perceive just how young. All that was discernible was that he appeared to be an aide, a mere messenger, a minor link in these rebels’ chain of command, which was probably why this flaunting of his bravado irritated the general. Who the hell did he think he was? The whippersnapper!

‘Hadden!’ bellowed Wightman, and a young officer from his own detachment of cavalry cantered forward. ‘See that young blade over there, all tricked out like a Frenchie and going hell for leather?’

‘General Wightman, sah! Yes, sah!’ said Hadden.

‘He’s being far too energetic for his own good. Take that machine you have there …’ Wightman gestured to an elegant, rifled carbine holstered on Hadden’s saddle – a weapon obviously designed less for warfare than for the sporting field – ‘and see if you cannot put him at his ease.’

‘General Wightman, sah! Yes, sah!’ said Hadden. Reaching down, he produced the weapon with a flourish, and cantered forwards to a hummock in the broken ground that would give him an easier shot at the galloping rebel aide de camp in the green dragoon coat.

While Hadden was cantering forward, James was reining in; he had espied the man he was seeking. Lord George Murray, commander of the army’s right flank, sat on one of a tumble of rocks on the lip of a steep-banked burn that ran down and away from the field. His lordship was deep in counsel with his subordinates. James had a dispatch for him; he’d even watched it being written by a more senior aide at the dictation of the Marquess of Tullibardine, their general. James had been too far away to hear the orders dictated, but close enough to witness the time they took to record, obviously a long and detailed scenario for the battle to come. James’ throat was tight with pride that he served alongside such men.

That pride was still with him as he dismounted. Before he’d first joined the king over the water’s army, all those weeks ago at the head of Loch Duich, he had never seen such a gathering of men; the ranks of fearsome Highlanders in dun jerkin and plaid, and the disciplined majesty of the scrubbed and blanco-ed Spaniards. And now, over there, was another host, a sea of marching red. The army of the Hanoverian usurper, King George I, filling the mouth of this ancient, usually silent Highland glen with the noise and hubbub of their bellowed orders, drummer boys and the pounding of their marching feet – and this was all before the sound of musketry had begun.

Lord George Murray had been his father’s friend since James could remember, a familiar face at the table. But James, full of the gravity of the hour, was sensible not use his customary greeting – ‘Uncle Geordie!’ – as he stepped forward.

‘My lord,’ he said, freeing the folded paper from inside his waistcoat. ‘A dispatch from the marquess, sir.’

Murray acknowledged the lad’s salute and took the folded paper. ‘Aye, Jaimie, how fare ye, laddie? Ye’ll have seen the wee German lairdie’s men have come to accept our invitation, eh?’ said Murray, gesturing over his shoulder with the hand that held his orders, before clapping James on the shoulder with his other.

James grinned at that initial, familiar greeting, but after it he heard not another word, his senses stunned by what he was witnessing. Murray, after a cursory glance at the scribbled address on the front of the dispatch, had held it out, unread, for his own aide to take and thrust into a satchel stuffed with similar documents, all of them still folded too.

When James turned back to his lordship, he was walking away to where his aide was already holding out a telescope. Dismissed, and trying to compose his tumbled thoughts – could such a thing have happened? A general throwing his orders into a bag, unread? – James distractedly slipped the reins of his filly, Sophie, from her saddle pommel with one hand, and brought them to his side. Then he lifted his left foot up into the stirrup. Later, he would remember hearing the crack of the carbine, and thinking nothing of it; then the two heartbeats, and then the punch that hit the back of his fist, and the searing slash across the top of his thigh, and Sophie’s fearsome whinny as she reared, flung him to the ground; and bolted.

This was, when he looked back on it, the moment James Lindsay stopped seeing the world through a child’s eyes and embarked upon the long, laborious and frequently demoralising task of learning how to think