Page 79 of Highland Crown
“I ache for you,” he growled. “I want to bury myself deep inside of you.”
They had no time to go back to their tower room. He was leaving soon, and she couldn’t desert the people she’d assembled here.
Isabella lifted up her skirts with a smile.
“Now? Here?”
“Now, Cinaed,” she replied softly, sliding her hand inside his trousers. “We must make the most of every minute we have.”
Across the black waters of the canal’s wide basin,HMS Pitt, a third-rate ship of the line, sat at the new Merkinch Wharf. According to Captain Kenedy’s friends in the harbor master’s office, the vessel was delivering, along with kegs of gunpowder, a special shipment of experimental weaponry—exploding shells for the long guns at Fort George. Unloading would begin in the morning.
Cinaed could not have asked for better.
He and Blair crouched in the tall grass, wearing only their trousers, waiting for the clouds to cover the moon. Time was running out. The few short hours of darkness in the summer night were being made even shorter by the light of the white half-moon shining over Inverness.
Cinaed felt Blair’s soot-blackened hand on his arm. He pointed to the armed sentries patrolling the wooden drawbridge at Telford Street. The men were talking with three sailors in a small skiff in the basin. The muzzles of the muskets, on the bridge and in the boat, gleamed in the moonlight. A moment later, the skiff pulled away and moved the length of the ship and continued down the row of smaller vessels. They’d be back in just a few minutes.
Nothing would awaken the British military authoritiesfaster than losing prized weaponry. Inverness, a conquered town to them for more than fifty years, was a forgotten place, beaten and subdued. Cinaed believed this was why Hudson, after the protest assembly and the day of strikes, felt emboldened to do as he pleased.
Everything was about to change.
A red-coated marine patrolling this side of the waterway came along, his musket and equipment signaling his approach from fifty yards off. The two men, still and silent as death, watched him come closer. When he was no more than ten feet away, he stopped. Standing by the edge of the water, he unbuttoned the fall of his breeches and pissed down the bank.
They waited impatiently until the sentry moved off, buttoning himself up as he went.
As a cloud slipped across the face of the moon, Cinaed and Blair moved to the water’s edge and waded in. It took only a few minutes to cross the canal, and they used the tow lines hanging down the side to climb to an open port hole on the lower gundeck.
They crept stealthily amidships between the rows of guns and hammocks and descended to the cargo holds. As Blair stood watch, Cinaed set the fuses and lit them. Moments later, they were back in the water, swimming for the far shore.
When the ship went up, a series of fireballs rose in quick succession high in the sky, as one hold after another detonated. Without doubt, the explosion would be visible as far as Fort George.
Come out of your hole, Hudson, Cinaed thought as they gathered their clothes. Come out and play.
CHAPTER23
That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When heaven and earth shall pass away,
What power shall be the sinner’s stay?
How shall he meet that dreadful day?
—Sir Walter Scott, “Hymn for the Dead,” Canto VI
Two miles west of the city, Cinaed sat astride his mount on a rocky rise, looking out over the tiny cluster of fishing cottages at Clachnaharry. The mud flats of Beauly Firth lay below him, along with the narrow cart path that his foe would need to travel to reach the half-built monument outside of the village. Whitecaps crowned the chop on the grey firth, and the wooded hills behind offered a lush, green place to hide his men. Toward the port, a few small plumes of smoke were all that remained of the ship they’d destroyed last night.
Stretched out along the ridge on either side of him, fifty Highland fighters waited. With his men, gathered from the area’s clans—Fraser and Innes, Macpherson and Chisolm, Grant and Mackintosh—he would finish this mad dog today, as he should have done the day they met.
“The lads are all in position,” Blair said, reining in his horse beside him.
Cinaed nodded and looked across the canal toward the city. Immediately after the ship exploded, he’d sent one of Searc’s men out to Fort George with a message for Lieutenant Hudson. The woman on the handbills, he’d been told, had been found and would be turned over to him at the half-built monument at Clachnaharry at noon today. The message had come back that Hudson and his men would be there to take her into custody.
He glanced at the fighters. Situated where they were, they would cut the Hussars down with the same lack of mercy Hudson had been showing throughout the countryside for the past fortnight.
Ever since the ship had burned and sank at its berth in Inverness last night, Fort George had reportedly been in an uproar. Word from the weavers had come that dispatches had already gone out to Fort William, where the Deputy Governor of Fort George was meeting with the Governor of the Highlands. The expectation was that the two generals would be coming north directly, which meant Hudson’s time off the leash of his superiors was coming to an end.
Taking Isabella into custody would mean the successful completion of the lieutenant’s mission to the Highlands. Cinaed knew Hudson would never be able to resist the bait.
