stood as empty as a stage set of
“This is a lovely ceremony,” Elizabeth whispered to Cameron. “Watch.”
One by one, a kilted representative from each clan ran across the field, holding aloft a burning torch. When all of the clansmen stood on the field, the torches formed a Cross of St. Andrew that they held in flickering silence for a few moments, followed by wild cheering from the spectators in the darkness.
“Yes, that was quite nice,” said Cameron. “What happens next?”
Elizabeth pointed to a dark shape in the center of the field. As the cheering died away, each torchbearer laid his firebrand on the stack of logs, igniting it into a roaring blaze. From the shadows a tenor voice sang the first line of “Annie Laurie,” and one by one other voices joined in from all sections of the field.
“Do you know this one?” whispered Elizabeth.
“What do you mean do I know this one?” Cameron hissed back. “It’s a Scottish song! We bloody wrote it! Of course I-Well, I’m a bit hazy on the verses, though.”
Elizabeth joined in for the chorus. By the time they had sung it twice, she had noticed that “Cameron Dawson” had almost the same number of syllables as “Annie Laurie” and while she was careful to sing the words correctly, there was unusual fervor in her rendering of “lay me doon and dee.”
Cameron began to feel relaxed for the first time all day. The soothing sounds of a familiar song, mingled with the darkness and the beauty of the mountain setting, made him feel that the trip hadn’t been such a waste after all. He smiled at Elizabeth, and reached down to pet the sleeping bobcat. Somehow it was all beginning to make sense.
Jimmy McGowan stared into the flames of the bonfire, thankful that his parents were not around to foist marshmallows off on him. Beside him, Lachlan Forsyth was leaning forward and swinging on his cane in time to the music.
“That’s the only good song they’ll sing tonight, lad,” he roared as the crowd struggled with the high note with varying degrees of success. “From here on out, they won’t half come out with some rubbish.”
A voice across the meadow began to bellow:
“I’ve heard this one,” said Jimmy.
“Sung just like that, I’ll wager,” growled Lachlan. “Folk should nae sing a tune if they haven’t any idea what it means. Listen to them belting it out like they were singing about a bloody hiking competition!”
“What does it mean?” asked Jimmy.
“It’s a Jacobite song from the ’45,” Lachlan said. “When Charles Edward Stuart-”
Jimmy recognized the name. “Bonnie Prince Charlie?”
The old man grunted. “He was nae bonny, and nae much of a prince, but he was a right bloody Charlie. Anyway, he and his Highland army invaded England, and this song is about a Scottish soldier dying. He says for his mates to take the high road-the highway-back to Scotland, and he’ll take the low road, which is the way the fairy folk travel-in a twinkling of an eye.”
Jimmy nodded. “So he’ll be in Scotland before them because he’s using magic.”
“Aye, but it won’t profit him any to get there, because he’ll not be meeting his sweetheart again, being dead like he is.”
Jimmy was still thinking about the prince. His parents were always bragging about a McGowan ancestor who’d fought with him, and how Jimmy ought to be proud to wear a kilt in his honor. “My parents want me to get a kilt,” he told Lachlan. He explained about his Jacobite ancestor, and the old man listened, shaking his head. “Do you think I ought to let them buy me one?”
The voices on the hill had begun to croon “The Bluebells of Scotland.”
“Ah, your braw McGowan ancestor,” sighed Lachlan. “Let me tell you how it was, laddie, as if you was him.”
James Stuart McGowan pictured himself astride a white horse, wearing the red and black Gow tartan, sword at his side. Too cool, he thought.
“April 16, 1746… and the Highland army under his right bloody Charlie is waiting to meet the English at Culloden Field. McGowan. He wasn’t a clan chief. Nobody very important. Say he was a subtenant. So part of the rent for his little piece of land was that he had to go and fight when he was told to, or else have his house burned over his head and his one cow killed. He might have been quite young-say fourteen.”
“Did he have a horse?” asked Jimmy.
Lachlan laughed. “He did not. And nae food, either. They left the food back in Inverness by mistake. And brought the wrong size ammunition for the cannon, as well.”
“What about a sword?”
“Oh, aye, a bloody great claymore ye canna lift. And waiting for you across the field is a well-fed English army led by the Duke of Cumberland-Stinking Billy, he was-and they’ve got loaded muskets, bayonets, and cannons with grapeshot.”
Jimmy shivered.
“Aye. So there you are, McGowan of the prince’s army. You’re cold and ragged; you have nae eaten for three days n’er slept for twa, and you did nae want to come and fight in the first place, but the laird said you had to. And you’re holding a sword ye canna lift while looking down the barrel of a bloody musket, or at an army of grinning faces who’ll bayonet you on the field if you don’t die during the battle. Aye. Sounds a treat, doesn’t it, Jimmy? And McGowan of Clan Gow is thinking tae himself: ‘If I can stay alive long enough to get off this sodding field, I’ll get me out of Scotland and ship out to whatever godforsaken colony will have me, and please God that I never see that stinking tartan of my landlord’s ever again.’ ”
“What a stupid war,” grumbled Jimmy.
“Well, don’t go blaming McGowan for it. Sometimes I think of the likes of him, though, in some celestial distillery looking down on his descendants parading around in that great bloody tartan that got him killed, and I think how fash’t he’d be with you.”
“Then why do people make such a big deal out of it?” asked Jimmy.
“Because people like to think that glory and honor existed in the world somewhere, sometime, and that it has aught to do with them.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose they do any harm, though.”
Jimmy didn’t answer. He was listening to the wail of a bagpipe somewhere in the distance, and trying to imagine how it would feel to walk into the crossfire of an army.
“I always cry at this one,” said Elizabeth, dabbing her eyes. “ ‘The Bluebells of Scotland.’ When they say, ‘O where and o where is your Highland laddie gone?’ I always think he must have been killed in the war.”
“War?”
“Oh, yes. In Charlie’s year, when the Highland clans fought the English. For Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“Is he popular over here? I saw Princess Diana in a parade once.”
“You
“Oh, him. Of course I have. I think I had to do a report on him once.”
“Isn’t it sad that the Rising failed?” sighed Elizabeth. “If only they hadn’t had such bad luck-”
“Yes, but then we’d be out of the United Kingdom,” said Cameron reasonably. “And that would simply kill the economy. It would set us back forty years industrially.”
Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn’t see what economics could have to do with such a just and noble cause as the Stuarts’ right to the throne. Men had such odd ways of looking at things. But, she thought, snuggling closer to Cameron, it didn’t seem worth fighting about this late in the day.
As a student of theatre, Geoffrey thought that the Hill-Sing had the most dramatic potential of anything that had happened thus far. He wondered if he could incorporate something similar into the second act of
