Copyright & Information
The Stalking-horse
First published in 1933
© Estate of Rafael Sabatini; House of Stratus 1933-2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Rafael Sabatini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2015 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Rafael Sabatini was born on 29 April 1875 in Jesi, Italy, the only son of Maestro-Cavaliere Vincenzo Sabatini and his English wife, Anna Trafford, both of whom were opera singers. He was first educated in Zug, Switzerland, and then in Portugal, but finally settled in England where he married Ruth Dixon (from whom he was divorced in 1932) and became a British citizen in 1918, having worked in War Office intelligence during the First World War.
His first novel, The Tavern Knight, was published in 1904, and more novels followed before his first major success The Sea Hawk which was published just after the start of the war. This then led to renewed interest in his earlier novels and assured Sabatini an ardent and loyal following.
The majority of his novels are based upon events in European history, and many started out as short stories first published in popular magazines before expansion into full length works. Sabatini also produced two notable historic works, The Life of Cesare Borgia (1912), and Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (1913), which have been justly praised for being both comprehensive and definitive.
He touched on biography further in Heroic Lives (1934) in which he drew away from full life stories so as to concentrate on the circumstances and mind sets of the individuals studied in a determination of what made them into heroes touching the lives of others as they did. In The Historical Nights’ Entertainments (1918, 1919, and 1938), which is now combined into a single volume, he investigated numerous historical controversies and further delved into the personalities of selected historical figures.
It is Sabatini’s deep knowledge of history and his determination to ensure accuracy where facts were stated even within his fictional works, as to customs, politics, religion, together with ordinary everyday human behaviour in context that ensures his books maintain enduring popularity. He covered many periods, but revolutionary France and Renaissance Italy appear most often, with Cesare Borgia making more than one appearance.
Many of Sabatini’s works were turned into films, notably Captain Blood, Scaramouche, and The Black Swan, and this ensured immense popular success. It was, however, sometimes at the expense of the opinions of some critics who regarded his genre, fundamentally historic and romantic fiction, as a little outside of that ought to be of merit. Many fellow authors admired the manner in which he constructed his plots and his narrative. In particular, they and his army of readers fully appreciated the way his characters were life-like and convincing, and true to historical form.
In 1935 Sabatini married again, and he and his new wife, Christine, moved to Herefordshire. Fishing the local River Wye was one of his hobbies, but far from ‘retiring’ to the country he maintained all of his links with the publishing world in London.
Raphael Sabatini died in 1950 following a skiing accident in Switzerland.
Chapter 1
Lady Lochmore
In this twentieth century the Earl of Lochmore would probably be described as a permanent adolescent. In his own more direct and less sophisticated age he was quite simply called a fool, and so dismissed by men of sense and sensibility.
There is little to be said in his favour. At forty years of age he was callow, obstinate, rather vicious, and imbued with more than an ordinary amount of the self-assertion in which a stupid man will endeavour to swaddle his stupidity.
You conceive that to the high-spirited daughter of that high-spirited chieftain, Macdonald of Invernaion, Lochmore was hardly the husband of her romantic dreams. But it was only after marriage that she discovered how far he failed to realize them.
In the brief season of his courtship she had perceived no more than the surface of the man.
And on the surface of him there was a certain deceptive glitter. He had travelled a good deal, and in his travels he had acquired a certain veneer, impressive to a child whose age was not half his own and who had been reared in the stern environment of Invernaion. For although her father’s domain was wide – second only among the Macdonalds to that of Keppoch – and although he could bring a thousand claymores into the field, as, indeed, he had done at Killiecrankie, yet in the Castle of Invernaion life was uncouthly lived. The pale reflection of southern graces in which Lochmore arrayed himself lent him almost an effulgence against such a background. His powerful, stocky figure, in itself inelegant, gathered a spurious elegance from his satin coat, his laces and silk stockings. His self-assertiveness she mistook for strength of character. Moreover she did not see it at its most flagrant in those days when his chief concern was to render himself pleasing. And so, notwithstanding the disparity in their ages, she had suffered herself without undue reluctance to be married to him, whereafter she had gone south with him to reap completest disillusion.
It was unfortunate for her that his qualities were such as to exclude him from the friendship of his peers. Men of birth and culture, the very men whose society he desired, were aloof with him. Because he found them so, he increased in self-assertiveness, and as a result found himself so shunned that to avoid isolation he was driven to low company. By nature crudely jealous, his jealousy was nourished into a singular malevolence by the fact that the persons of quality who found him repellent discovered attractions in his wife. Had it not been for her, his fine house in the Strand would have seen little of the company it was equipped to receive. As it was, this house became, in spite of him, a resort of men and women of that courtly society by which his lordship would have sought in vain to surround himself. But because in his heart he was not deceived, their presence brought him less satisfaction than secret resentment.
And there were jealousies of another, less general kind, resulting more or less directly out of this.
So recklessly, in his fundamental boorishness, did Lochmore manifest the bad relations which had come to prevail between himself and his wife, that more than one of those professors of gallantry who perceive their opportunity in marital discord, became of a particular assiduity in attentions to her ladyship.
Of these the most enterprising was Lady Lochmore’s kinsman, the elegant, courtly Viscount Glenleven. He made use of his kinship so as to mask his approach, and assumed towards her ladyship a fraternal manner, which Lochmore, whilst observing it with suspicion, felt that he could not openly resent without rendering himself ridiculous. My Lord Glenleven, moreover, enjoyed a reputation as a swordsman considerable enough to be almost sinister. And this made men slow to affront him.
Slightly above the middle height, and of a figure which whilst slender gave signs of exceptional vigour, the young Viscount was possessed of a singularly pleasant, melodious voice, which had often served to correct the harsh impression made by his narrow face, with its hard blue eyes, long, straight nose and obstinate mouth. In age he was barely thirty and looked even younger as a result of the care he bestowed on his appearance. He was gifted, moreover, with a ready tongue, and could, when he cared to do so, display a peculiar charm of manner. He displayed it in full to her ladyship; but he displayed it in vain. Glenleven was an avowed Whig, enjoying a measure of favour at the court of the Dutch usurper; and this in a Macdonald was, from her ladyship’s point of view, to be a renegade.
So utterly was her own romantic loyalty given to the exiled King James that she was incapable of understanding that any Macdonald should hold different sentiments; and since sooner or later the tongue must touch where the tooth aches, she gave vehement and downright expression one day, at last, to the contempt with which Glenleven’s politics inspired her. She chose to do so in the presence of her husband, perhaps so that, obliquely, she might reprove him also for the complacency with which he accepted the usurpation.
Whilst Lochmore scowled and bit his fingernails, Glenleven smiled with a singularly sweet wistfulness.
“Dear Ailsa, there are times when it is possible to be right without being just. This is one of those rare occasions. Consider my shrunken means, so inadequate to my station. Active loyalty is a luxury beyond them. Our kinsmen in the Highlands may be as staunch as they please. They are safe in their fastnesses. But a Macdonald here in London must tread warily.”
“A man may tread too warily for honour,” said her downright ladyship.
This brought Lochmore into the discussion. “And a woman may talk too much for safety. My God, girl, have you never heard of treason and its consequences? Let me have no more of this Jacobite cant from you. Busy yourself with the concerns that are proper to a woman.”
“You see,” said Glenleven, with his gentle smile, “that I am not the only Scot who prizes prudence.”
“Lochmore is not a Macdonald.”
She spoke at once with pride of her race and scorn of those who were not of it. It was as if she said: “Lochmore is just a poor blind earthworm of whom nothing is to be expected.”
His lordship, perfectly understanding, empurpled. “I thank God for’t. You seem to think, girl, that all the virtues are resident in the offspring of that Highland dunghill. God a’ mercy! Did you ever hear tell of the Campbells?”
“I seem to be hearing one now,” said her fiery ladyship. “Only a vile son of Diarmid would speak as you do.”
Here was a chance for the astute Glenleven; and he took it promptly, suddenly severe of manner.
“Indeed, Lochmore, you push insult a little far. You seem to forget that I, too, am a Macdonald.”
“My wife’s reproof to you is that you’ve forgotten it, yourself.” With that jeer and a malevolent glance at her ladyship, Lochmore stamped boorishly out of the room without so much as a leave-taking.
Glenleven, standing over his seated kinswoman, sighed.
“Just now you uttered a veiled reproach of my prudence, Ailsa.”
“I did not mean to veil it,” said she.
“The more reason then why, if you need it, I should give you a proof of my courage.” He touched his sword-hilt caressingly with his long delicate fingers. “Shall I prove it on that lowland boor? You have but to say the word, and I’ll deliver you.”
She sat quite still, with hands folded in her lap, a woman of an arresting beauty. Her neck and shoulders and finely chiselled face were of the warm pallor of ivory under a cloud of blackest hair above. Slender black eyebrows were level above liquid eyes so deeply blue as to seem black in any but the clearest daylight. The lips of her delicately sensitive mouth grew faintly scornful now as she considered his proposal.
“Let be,” she said at last. “My deliverance is not your concern.”
“If I were so to make it?” He was eager. “That oaf has said enough to justify me. I am a Macdonald, as I reminded him.”
“And as I reminded you. He said so.” Her scorn became more marked. “You are too good a Whig, Jamie, to have retained anything of the Macdonald but the name.”
He hung his head. “Is that what stands between us, Ailsa?”
“It certainly stands between us.”
“You know what I mean. Is that what prevents you loving me?”
“To be sure you have all else to command the passion.”
“Why will you rally me, Ailsa? I am so earnest. So deeply sincere.”
“But still so ignorant of what it means to be a Macdonald, though you profess yourself one. When were our women wantons, Jamie?”
“Love is not wantonness.”
“So says gallantry. And the same of the betrayal of the marriage vows.”
“Is Lochmore true to them?”
“We are not talking of Lochmore, but of you and me, Jamie.”
“Yet Lochmore may not be left out. If he were what a husband – what your husband – should be, we should not be talking so at all.”
She looked up at him, and her dark eyes smiled serenely. The habitual serenity and self-command of one reared in an environment that to Glenleven was nothing short of barbarous, had long been a source of amazement to him. Himself born and reared at a distance from those Highlands to which his family belonged, he knew nothing of that innate dignity and self-assurance with which those who sprang from its princely houses were naturally imbued. As reasonably might he have marvelled at those accepted marks of breeding displayed in her lofty countenance, in the proud carriage of her small head, in the fine shapeliness of her hands, and in her clean-limbed grace.
Slowly she shook her dark head. “This will not serve. You lose your time and destroy the little regard I retain for you. I do not love you, Jamie. Perhaps that is the reason. Anyway, let us leave it there, since that, at least, you must understand, whatever else may elude you.”
“You do not love me,” he said slowly, a touch of the tragic in his manner. “Is it because I am not a hare-brained Jacobite?”
“What a man! Does it matter why?”
“More than life. Show me the reason; and, if it lie in human power, I will amend it. If you cannot love me because you hate all Whigs, why then I’ll cease to be a Whig tomorrow, whatever the cost.”
“Vanity deludes you, Jamie. I do not love you because I do not love you, Whig or Tory.”
He stood awhile silent, with bowed head. Then, since the heroic part was the only one which would permit him to retreat in good order, he played it bravely. He drew himself up, grave and calm.
“After all, to deserve your love was more than I should have ventured to hope. All that I ask is to be allowed to love you, who are of all women the most adorable. All that matters is that you should remember it against your need. If this boor to whom they have married you should strain your endurance beyond its strength, or if in anything else it should ever lie in my power to serve you, a word is all that I require. So that you remember that, Ailsa, I am, if not happy, at least resigned.”
Chapter 2
Glencoe
Glenleven departed with confidence that for all her fortitude and respect for the marriage-tie, the day could not be far distant when Lochmore by his oafishness would destroy the one and the other.
And so, indeed, it might have fallen out but for a dark event in the distant Highlands at about that time, and its curious repercussion in the politically indifferent bosom of the Earl of Lochmore.
There were rumours in London that spring of an affair in the North, in which some Macdonalds had perished. But to London the Highlands were as remote as the American colonies, and there was as much, or as little, knowledge of and interest in their affairs. Even those whose acquaintance with Scottish matters was a little wider than that of the general, and who troubled to repeat the rumours, described the matter vaguely as an affray between Campbells and Macdonalds.
It was in vain that Lady Lochmore sought the detailed truth of these disquieting stories. Some accounted that the affair had its source in the eternal feud between the two clans concerned; others asserted that the source was political, a punishment upon some stiff-necked Jacobites who had refused to take the oath of allegiance and so profit by King William’s offer of amnesty. But none could tell her what particular Macdonalds were involved. Few indeed among her London friends could even understand what such a question meant.
In those uneasy days she leaned more than usual upon Glenleven, departing from the prudent coolness she had practised towards him ever since he had so boldly wooed her. The anxiety which she conceived that he must share, since he was of the same blood, set up a bond between them. In his anxiety to please her, Glenleven ransacked every likely quarter for news. But he could discover little. Trouble there had certainly been in the Highlands, and Macdonalds had been the sufferers by it; but what branch of that great clan was concerned could not be ascertained. The further one investigated, the more was one confused by the conflict of assertions. One day the tale would be that the Macdonalds of Keppoch had been the victims; on the next the Macdonalds of Glengarry would be named. Macdonald of Sleat was mentioned once, and once Macdonald of Invernaion. Not to add to her ladyship’s distress Glenleven withheld this last rumour from his kinswoman.
Since her father had died at the end of the previous year, her brother Ian was now the head of the sept, and to Glenleven it seemed far from improbable that in whatever might have occurred Ian Macdonald should have been involved. He was of a wild, impulsive nature, as romantic and unpractical as his sister, and governed by two great passions: love of the House of Stuart and abhorrence of the House of Argyll. Consequently, thought Glenleven, who in all Scotland likelier than his cousin Ian to have refused the oath of allegiance to King William, and, thereby, to have provoked the vengeance of the Campbells?
And then, when conjecture could go no further, the whole truth was brought to Lady Lochmore by Ian Macdonald himself.
Attended by two grooms, who though breeched like Sassenachs, came bonneted and wrapped in their plaids, he rode in the dusk of an April evening into the courtyard of Lochmore’s little mansion in the Strand.
The earl and his wife had dined, but were still at table when Ian, booted and spurred and dusty, strode into their presence.
Like his sister he was tall – a half-head taller than she – and like her he was black-haired and pallid, with the same dark-blue eyes and the same sensitive mouth.
“I come,” he announced to Lochmore, “to beg shelter for the night. That and to embrace you, Ailsa. I am for France.”
“For France?” the earl and his countess made echo together.
“To carry my sword to King James. To join the army that is mustering for the invasion of England. To lend a hand in sending this knavish Dutchman back to his cheese and his schnapps.”
Lochmore was flung into a panic, for there was a servant present. “In God’s name!” he cried.
The servant, however, was a Macdonald, who had followed her ladyship from Scotland. He had been staring at his chieftain goggle-eyed in incredulity. He was grinning broadly now at his chieftain’s outspokenness. Nevertheless Lochmore was not reassured.
“I’ll not have such words uttered in my house Ian. Are you mad? You’re not in the Highlands now, where treason may be bawled to the winds.”
Holding his sister to him with one encircling arm, Invernaion’s face grew dark with scorn.
“Ye may be naught but a Lowland Scot, Lochmore; yet a Scot ye still are, and there’ll be blood in your veins. Has it not curdled at what’s happened yonder?”
“And where may yonder be?”
“Man!” Invernaion stared at him, and then at his sister. The blankness of her countenance, the question in her glance informed and amazed him. It was to her he spoke. “Is it possible ye’ve not heard what happened at Glencoe two months since?”
She shook her dark head. “There have been rumours, vague tales of an affray between Campbells and Macdonalds. But we do not even know what Macdonalds are concerned, and this although in my anxiety I have sought news everywhere. Nothing is known in London of the trouble.”
Macdonald smiled without mirth. “It’ll be known at Kensington, no doubt, whence the vile order came for that massacre. It failed to be as complete as was intended only because the scoundrel Campbells who did the Dutchman’s bloody work happened to be blundering fools as well as cut-throats. But it’s complete enough to cry to Heaven for vengeance. Not a hamlet, not a house has been left standing in Glencoe. There are some heaps of charred ruins there, as a monument to the false-hearted villainy of William of Orange. The Glen of Weeping has justified its name.
“You’ll not say now, Lochmore, that I am to be dainty in picking my words when I speak of such a man?”
“You must be,” his sister answered him. “Not for Dutch William’s sake, but for your own, and for as long as you tread the soil where he is master.”
“I give thanks that I shall not tread it long. Had it not been for the need to see you again and to tell you all, so that you may understand what moves me, I should have taken ship from Scotland.”
He held her at arm’s length, and looked with a fond, sad smile into eyes that were so like his own. “But it’s a long tale and an ugly, lassie; and I am a weary, hungry man. And so are the lads who ride with me. Maybe ye’ll give orders for their comfort.”
Order for their comfort was given, and order was instantly taken for his own.
When, at last, refreshed with meat and wine, he sat back, it was to give them the full tale for which they waited. And it was a tale of horrors magnified by the treachery in which those horrors had been perpetrated.
He spoke as an eye-witness of the actual facts. For it had happened by an odd chance that on the 12th February he was on his way to the house of a friend on Loch Leven, to whose new-born child he was to stand godfather. He travelled accompanied, as now, by only a couple of his lads.
Delayed on the road by foul weather, they had reached the head of the defile of Glencoe as night was falling. And as it was a wild, stormy night of wind and blinding snow, he decided to call a halt and seek until morning the hospitality of the old chieftain Mac Ian.
Welcomed as a brother by that patriarchal Macdonald, he discovered that he was not that night the only guest. He was surprised to find two redcoat officers at Mac Ian’s hospitable board, and none too pleased to discover a Campbell in the senior of these, Captain Campbell of Glenlyon.
It was explained to him that the captain and his lieutenant, a man named Lindsay, were in command of a company of a hundred and twenty redcoats of Argyll’s Regiment, who for twelve days now had been quartered upon Macdonald hospitality in the glen. He had never quite understood by what pretence they had imposed themselves upon Mac Ian; but he had vaguely heard that they were marching against some of Glengarry’s people who had been harrying the country. He had heard nothing of any such harrying, and the mere fact that these men were Campbells should have rendered them suspect. It may be, however, that any uneasiness Mac Ian might have felt was allayed by the fact that their captain’s niece was married to the chieftain’s younger son, Alexander Macdonald. The kinship thus established may, moreover, have been accounted to supply a reason why Glenlyon should quarter there himself and his men.
“That night,” Invernaion continued, “after the two officers had departed to their quarters, which were at Inveriggan’s, old Mac Ian and I sat long in talk over a bottle of old French brandy. He was in high spirits, relieved by the presence of these troops from anxieties that had been weighing upon him in connection with the manner in which he had taken the oath of allegiance. Never was bitterer deception, bitterer irony than that of his relief. You’ll know the facts of the oath?”
They did not, and he, therefore, proceeded to relate them. Enthralled by his narrative, and the sense of tragedy which his tone and manner brought to it, they sat watching him with eyes that glittered in the candlelight.
“You’ll know at least, maybe, that proclamation was made in Scotland of a general amnesty to all so-called rebels who should by the thirty-first of December last have sworn allegiance to the Dutchman.
“I know now that this was a trap in which the Campbell dog, Breadalbane, working through his knavish tool, the Master of Stair, hoped to take the Camerons and the Macdonalds. For it was added to the proclamation that after that date any who had not taken the oath would be pursued as enemies and traitors.
“Breadalbane’s malice and covetousness built hopes upon our staunch loyalty to the rightful King. What he did not know was that we had represented to King James our inability to hold out, and that his majesty had intimated to us that he would not take it amiss that we should submit to the usurping dynasty provided that we held ourselves in readiness to rise against it when the time should come.
“So, one by one, we took the oath, until all save only Mac Ian had made that enforced profession of loyalty. Since our course was resolved, I don’t know what delayed his submission. Maybe the postponement was prompted by repugnance, maybe merely by vanity to show himself more stiff-necked than his peers. We shall never know.
“Anyway, postpone he did until the last moment.
“On the thirty-first of December, accompanied by his principal vassals, old Mac Ian presented himself at Fort William to take the oath. To his dismay he was told that there was no one there competent to administer it. The nearest magistrate was at Inverary. In panic, as he told me, and cursing now a procrastination which might come to cost him his life and his estates, he made off in all haste for Inverary. But that is no light journey in the depths of winter. He was six days in performing it. Still, he carried a letter to the sheriff from the Governor of Fort William, which did bear witness to the fact that he had presented himself to take the oath on the thirty-first. The sheriff, although a Campbell, took a lenient view, administered the oath, and promised to send a letter of explanation to Edinburgh together with the certificates.
“Mac Ian returned home relieved, but in a relief that needed confirmation, for he knew the malice that was astir. This confirmation the old man thought that he possessed at last. This quartering of troops upon his people, he took to be a sign of the government’s confidence in him; and it was stressed by the friendliness towards him and his of these troopers and their officers, who for twelve days now had been enjoying his bounteous hospitality.”
He paused there a moment, his young face set and grim.
“I doubt,” he said, slowly and sadly, “if in the history of the human race, with all the cruelty and the treachery that disgrace it, there is an instance of a blacker, fouler treachery than this. Compared with Glenlyon and the vile masters who sent him to the work, Judas, himself, becomes almost a saintly figure.”
Then, with a sigh, he resumed his narrative.
“I was awakened, in the middle of the night as I thought, but actually, as I afterwards learnt, at five o’clock in the morning, by a shot in the room below.
“As I sat up in bed, listening, I caught distinctly above the howling of the wind, the sound of other shots in the open.
“With a sense of evil heavy upon me I jumped from the bed, hastily pulled on some garments, and with my plaid wrapped about me, went below. As I descended the stairs a woman’s scream came to me from outside, then another shot, and a long wail that ended abruptly.
“I flung open the door of the main room below, and stood horror-stricken on the threshold. The chamber was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, and some shards of broken earthenware littered the floor. In a corner two redcoats were besetting a woman who defended herself feebly. It was Mac Ian’s wife. Mac Ian himself lay, limp as a sack, prone across the table at which he and I had sat the night before; the table at which the officers had dined with us. He was dead; and just within the open doorway stood Lindsay still grasping the pistol with which he had shot him. Afterwards I was to learn that he had pistolled him even as Mac Ian was bidding him welcome to a morning draught, and calling his servants to come and minister to the soldier’s needs.
“I was without weapons; but I advanced into the room.
“‘What is this?’ I cried. ‘What is happening here?’
“Lindsay stared at me. ‘Invernaion!’ he said, and laughed. ‘Faith, I’d forgotten you. After all, you’re a Macdonald, and our orders are that by daylight there shall not be one of that damned name left alive in Glencoe!’
“He called over his shoulder, and in prompt answer to it, three redcoats with firelocks emerged from the darkness into the lamplight.
“‘Here, my lads!’ A wave of the ruffian’s arm pointed me out to his men. ‘Here’s another of the damned brood.’
“That was all the command he gave them; all the command they needed; for they had those general orders that not a Macdonald, man, woman or bairn, was to live to see that day’s light in Glencoe. They ranged themselves, and they were already raising their muskets.
“There was no reflection in what I did. Action anticipated thought. Before I even realized what I was doing, the room was in darkness. I had seized a chair that stood near me, and at a blow I had swept the lamp in fragments from the table. I leapt at the place where I had last seen the soldiers standing. The chair, used like a flail, met a yielding resistance, and I knew that one of them had gone down before me. I bounded through the gap left by his fall. Another bound, and I was in the open, where it was pitch dark and snowing hard. Curses followed me; then shots; then the blundering footsteps of those murderers.
“I turned to my right, whereabouts I knew of a ravine up which I proposed to make my way. I was not followed. In that darkness and with the hard-driven snow to render blindness absolute, the redcoats must have realized not merely the fruitlessness, but even the danger of pursuit.
“I stumbled upwards for perhaps a half-mile, and I came at last, bruised and with torn legs and hands, to a shallow cave, into which I was glad enough to creep for shelter from the pitiless weather. There at peep of day, I was joined by three other fugitives, one of whom was John Macdonald, Mac Ian’s elder son.
“Glenlyon, you see, was a fool as well as a butcher. The plan of which he was given the execution, failed – God be thanked! – through his blundering. Had he kept to cold steel not a Macdonald would have escaped, and his orders would have been fulfilled to the letter. It was the shots that gave the alarm, and enabled three-fourths of the dwellers in the glen to take to the hills.
“The direct victims of that butchery numbered in men, women and children, something over thirty. But what may have been the total indirect number had not been ascertained when I departed. Scantily clad as most of them would be when they fled through the snow, many must have perished of exposure. Their lot is even more pitiful than that of the slaughtered.
“Late on the following day, by when the redcoats had departed, we crept down to the ruined glen. All that was to be seen of its prosperous hamlets were the smoking ruins of the houses the soldiers had fired. Nothing had they left behind them save the corpses on the dunghills. The whole glen had been laid waste; the cattle, sheep and goats had been herded away.
“A heap of ashes was all that remained of the domain of Glencoe, and the unfortunates who crept back, returned to find themselves without means of subsistence, face to face with famine.”
He paused again wearily in that long narrative, paused as if overcome with the horror of it.
He poured himself a glass of claret, and slowly drank it under the sombre eyes of his silent audience before continuing. He spoke very quietly and slowly now.
“That evening in Glencoe I swore an oath upon the charred remains of old Mac Ian that I would take no rest nor thought for my own concerns until the authors of that abomination should have been brought to account; that I would spend myself without stint to accomplish this, and shrink from nothing that should forward that sacred task – sacred, indeed, to every man who bears the name of Macdonald.
