By My Sword Alone by David Black (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

and stone stronghold, tucked into a strategic little kink in a meandering glen worn out of the landscape by Spindie Burn over millennia, as it made its way to the River Tay. You could only come upon the castle, for that was what it was, by accident. It lay in verdant slumber below the skyline and was on a road to nowhere now, but for 400 years it had sat here, denying this strategic defile in and out of the land of Breadalbane to any uninvited interloper. It was also James Lindsay’s family home, and where he had come after what was now being called the Battle of Glenshiel.

When he finally arrived, there was only the family factor Mr Cowie there to greet him. It was a Sunday, and as the factor was of the Catholic taste, he had nowhere else to be, the last chapel thereabouts having disappeared long ago. The other very few family retainers left at Kirkspindie had all been at the kirk.

James had come hobbling up the drive, leading Sophie because the wound she’d received – from the bullet that had taken her master’s two fingers and the gouge out of his thigh – was still healing and that had made her too tight on her flank to ride for long.

‘Oh, I see yer back, then,’ was all Mr Cowie had to say to him.

James hadn’t expected more. Kirkspindie had always been a cold, dislocated place, and with him now about to be the only Lindsay under its roof for the foreseeable future, it never occurred to him that would change. All he could look forward to was a household full of strangers – whom he’d lived with all his life.

There was a cook and a scullery maid; a farrier and a stable boy, and a gardener who saw to the orchard and vegetable plots. The cook was a short, fat, monosyllabic old woman – the only fat person for miles around – with a dark, saturnine nature and a collection of warts. The maid, on the other hand, was a scrawny, whipped and charmless little creature who seemed to spend her life endlessly trying to efface herself from the world. As for the gardener, James hardly ever remembered seeing him face to face. He was just a bent back, with a bent head haloed in manic tendrils of flyaway grey hair, always disappearing round a corner.

But then there was Gideon, the farrier.

One of the bevvy of platitudinous aunties who populated the fringes of James’ early life had once assured him that ‘a man who is capable of love, will always have something about him deserving of love.’ It had stuck in his head as utter guff, until he considered Gideon.

Gideon had been his father’s man, when his father fought with Marlborough’s army, from the upper Danube to the low countries. And Gideon loved horses.

Gideon had always been there. Gideon, with the carrot hair and the gap-toothed grin. Gideon, who had sat the baby James on his first horse, before the little boy had learned to walk. When James thought about Gideon, it was always with a smile.

The summer passed. And James spent much of the time with his thoughts.

Then his brother Archibald arrived from Edinburgh, and his father’s notary, Mr McKay, from Perth, to discuss the family’s prospects.

Both had immediately gone into a huddle, hardly saying hello to James, or asking ‘how d’you do?’ Discussions had taken place – about the politics of the country now, then about the current law, as it viewed the Lindsays in the aftermath of their most recent treasons. Discussions to which James was not invited. Not that he cared, at first. He’d had a bellyful of the discussions and disputations of great men by then. It was only when the issue turned to James’ own future that his attention was pricked.

Up until then, James had spent his days riding Sophie and then yarning with Gideon afterwards; or in his father’s extensive library, where he had embarked on Suetonius’ History of the Twelve Caesars.

There had been a lot of wonderment to be had at richness of the ancient world, but also a lot that was vainglorious. It had left him wondering – if James Francis Edward Stuart had really wanted to be King James III so much, why hadn’t he been there that day in Glenshiel, where not a few of his future subjects had shed their blood for him, and even more had ruined their families’ futures?

Indeed, his memories of the battle were never far away – the confusion of it and the disorienting sense of unleashed chaos. The seeming powerlessness of those in command to control it had chastened him, and the overwhelming impressions of pointlessness and waste had left him crying at times with frustration.

And it hadn’t just been his own blood he’d seen that day. So not surprisingly, it had all felt like a rite of passage, and as if, as a result, he had become a man of parts. A person who should no longer be taken lightly.

And now, here was Archibald.

‘It is time we turned to the matter of your education, James,’ his eldest brother had pronounced one morning as James sat to his porridge. ‘And to your future. You cannot languish here forever.’

James had not thought himself lacking in the matter of education. He had been able to read and write since he was five years old, the chance to learn being a gift his late mother had bequeathed him before her untimely death. For written into her estate had been a codicil setting aside money, ring-fenced from her husband’s predatory dabbling, that would provide for a tutor to be hired and overseen by Mr McKay.

Mr McKay’s choice had been an impecunious Huguenot scholar James knew as only as M’sieur Eugene, whose family had tried to remain in France even after the revocation