Page 37 of Highland Crown
Seemed to have known a better day.
—Sir Walter Scott, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”
The summer sun barely set in the Highlands, and Isabella had no idea what time it was until the church bells of the ancient port city tolled the hour. It was after six o’clock when the cart reached the muddy banks of the River Ness.
A fine stone bridge of seven arches spanned the water, but only a single row of buildings lined the far bank. Open fields, farms, and pastureland dominated the landscape beyond. For the most part, the city lay on this side of the river, and the thoroughfares were bustling with workers on foot and late-day vendors hawking their wares. The people in the street barely spared them a glance.
Isabella was relieved that Cinaed was asleep, fitful as his rest appeared. Touching his brow, she knew his fever was soaring dangerously high. And each bump on the road made him groan in pain, sharp reminders to her of the injuries that needed to be tended. She’d spread her cloak over him to avoid attention as they passed throughthe city. Without it, he looked like a wounded soldier returning from the war. The abuse his body had undergone matched any battlefield injury. As for her own blood-spattered dress, she sat beside him with her travel bag on her lap to hide the worst of it.
Jean stopped the cart and queried a pair of women carrying wash baskets about directions to Maggot Green. After receiving curious looks from them, one pointed toward a second bridge of blackened timber downriver. Thankfully, they hadn’t far to go.
Cinaed freed an arm from beneath the cloak and tried to push the covering away. She couldn’t understand his mumbled words. Isabella imagined his dreams had turned to nightmares, and she reached for him. His hand closed around hers, and she stared at the contrast between his strong callused fingers and her own pale ones. A sprinkle of dark hair spread across sun-browned skin. She peered into his handsome face. His labored breathing deepened her worry. She hated the feeling of helplessness but told herself there was nothing she could do until they arrived at their destination.
“Look ahead, mistress,” Jean said over her shoulder. “I’m thinking these are some places ye’d be loath to pay yer social calls. Maybe never seen alleys quite like these.”
They were approaching Maggot Green, and though Isabella had seen neighborhoods nearly as bad as these in Edinburgh, she understood Jean’s words. And she now grasped the meaning behind the washerwomen’s looks.
The twisting lanes grew narrower and muddier, and the stench from the river grew stronger. It seemed asthough half the buildings were deserted. Many of them had collapsed, and their crumbling walls had fallen into the lanes. Cottages and houses that offered any shelter at all were crowded with poor folk, who stood in the doorways and the alleys and watched them suspiciously as they passed.
“What happened here?” Isabella wondered out loud as Jean negotiated the cart around a pile of rubble.
“The earthquake two years back,” the older woman told her. “Never felt anything like it. It was like yer insides were all aquivering. It was worse here than at Duff Head, they say. The steeple of the High Church back there twisted and nearly fell in.”
Larger buildings of red stone crowded the banks of the river. They also seemed empty, even those that appeared intact. Of course, there was no telling who might be living in them.
Jean noticed where she was looking. “Some of them’s warehouses. Some, auld malt houses.” She gestured downriver. “The port is moving toward the firth. When they open the canal, if they ever do, all this’ll be left to rot.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My husband came to Inverness to sell his fish.” The older woman’s lips thinned. “Back in the day, that is.”
Jean looked away, and Isabella saw her bat away a tear. The two of them, she thought, had been thrown together for a reason. They sat quietly for a few moments, and then she broke the silence.
“What will happen to the poor who are living here? When they open the canal, I mean.”
“From what I’ve seen in my life, no one cares muchabout the poor.” Jean shrugged. “I don’t know why it’ll be any different then.”
When no one cared about them, people were forced to take control of their own future. If there was one thing Isabella had learned since coming back to Scotland, it was that people would only stomach so much suffering.
Not too long ago, forty thousand Scots made their voices heard at a meeting on Glasgow Green to end the Corn Laws that kept the grain prices high and to demand a more representative government. A week of rioting rocked Paisley. Protest meetings stirred the hearts of folk in Ayrshire, Fife, Stirling, Airdrie, Renfrewshire, and Magdalen Green in Dundee. The riots in Glasgow and Edinburgh this past April. She knew every name Cinaed had mentioned, but she couldn’t admit it to him then.
The aristocracy feared the kind of revolutionary turmoil that had been seen in France and Ireland could take place in Britain. But they did nothing to help people or give them a voice in Parliament. Instead, they passed laws that made public gatherings criminal and speaking out in protest sedition. South of the border last August, sixty thousand people had been peacefully protesting in Manchester when government forces attacked, killing and injuring hundreds of innocent citizens. The newspaper called it the “Peterloo Massacre” in spite of the authorities’ efforts to suppress information about the event.
The hypocrisy of the elite and the repressive efforts of those in power were only stoking the fires they sought to extinguish.
Isabella took a deep breath and tried to calm the rush of temper heating her veins. For all these years, she’d told herself she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t interested in politics. Reformers and radicals had a job to do, and she had a job to do, and a solid line existed between them. She’d worked hard not to cross it. But sometime during these recent weeks, the line had been erased.
“Maggot Green, mistress,” Jean announced, breaking into her thoughts. “Though it looks to be more maggot than green.”
She was right. Maggot Green was a flat, muddy field at the edge of the Ness, empty except for wrecks of boats and broken casks and crates along the shore. Ragged children were sorting through the trash for anything of the least value. Next to the field, a distillery appeared to be operating, and smoke from its chimneys had coated the crowded buildings around the green with heavy, black soot. To Isabella, the area smelled like a combination of barnyard and wet dog.
A young lass steering a pair of filthy boys along the lane pointed out the house of Searc Mackintosh.
“The Shark,” one of the little ones whispered to Isabella before they moved on.
Searc’s house appeared to be as dilapidated as the rest of the area. It was set back a little from a busier main road, behind a high wall. They followed a narrow lane down one side of the wall until they reached a gated opening. Farther on, the lane appeared to drop off into the river. She studied the house. It was large and appeared to be attached to a warehouse of some sort. Inside the gate, she could see a yard and neglected gardens, anda small stable standing at the end of the yard. A round, tower-like structure had been added to the front at some time, with a square block of a room perched on top.
“Not too inviting, I’d say,” Jean noted as she reined in their horse.
