Highland Ballad

Excerpt

One

The red sun rose slowly, achingly across the high Scottish moor, touching with melancholy gold the patching hoar frost and purple heath. For this was a land of pain, and stark beauty, and restless dream. Here the spirits of the dead walked by night through grim castles of shadow and dust, their glory long past. Here the spirits of the living grieved by day for a proud and chivalrous time forever lost.

For now the English ruled the land. The battle of Culloden was three years lost and Bonnie Prince Charles, the drunken fool in whom they had placed such hope, was living in exile in France. For what then had the pride of Highland manhood shed their blood, leaving behind them the heart-broken wives, aging fathers, and uncomprehending child sisters? Was it to see the Lord Purceville establish his thieving court at the ancestral home of the MacPhersons? Was it to pay hard tribute in grain and goods which could not be spared, to an Empire already bloated and corrupt?

None felt the pangs of lost promise more deeply than young Mary Scott, aged sixteen years, with a future as uncertain as the fretting October wind. Her father had died before she could say his name, leaving their estate in the keeping of guardians until Michael came of age. Now it was completely lost, their legacy ruined. Now she lived with her mother and aging aunt in the fading cottage that had once belonged to the chief steward, all that remained of the family property. It was neither beautiful nor poetic; but it was warm, and for the time at least, safe from the hungry eyes of soldiers. The dangers to a young girl in an occupied land need hardly be detailed.

And there were other dangers as well.

On this morning, as on many others, she walked slowly down the narrow, winding path to the gravesite of her clan. Bordered by scrub oak and maple, alone in its silent dell, it was a place removed from time, hallowed, and to her, sacred. For here, among the stones of four hundred years of Stuart knights, lay the body of her beloved, her soul. Her brother. Brushing back a long lock of raven hair, she stepped furtively towards the mound of earth that was like an iron door between them.

                         Michael James Scott
                            1719 —- 1746
                        He died a man's death,
                        fighting for his home.

The words on the small tombstone had always seemed to her a blasphemy, the hurried cutters finding it more important to speak of patriotism than to give the date of his birth. These trite, inadequate words were all that future generations would ever know of him. They could never see him as he had been in life—-the shock of curling, golden hair, the fierce and penetrating sapphire eyes. He had been strong and stubborn like all his blood, but with a sudden tenderness that had long ago stolen her heart. Her friend, brother and father. And in the most secret depths of her heart, her lover as well....