The Bookseller of Inverness by MacLean S.G

Author:MacLean, S.G.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

They’d told Flossie and Eppy to stay with Mairi and see that she didn’t get up again till morning, and then taken Dod Fraser down to the kitchen and made him drink brandy. Poor Dod was distraught. He had served his master forty years at that little inn by the Bona ferry where Loch Dochfour met Loch Ness. They’d seen roads blasted where before there had only been drovers, and bridges built. They’d watched General Wade’s great boat arrive to transport the redcoats down the loch to their barracks of Fort Augustus at Kilchuimen. They’d given shelter to clansmen on the way to join risings in the name of King James and again when they returned, hungry and bedraggled at their end.

Hector was a long time in unpicking the threads of those forty years, going carefully with Dod, asking the right questions, all under the sharp black eyes of Aeneas Farquharson. ‘Glen Shiel,’ he said eventually. Aeneas leaned in closer as Dod looked down at his hands. ‘Tell us again what happened in the year 1719.’ And so Dod went through it again. There had been a messenger on his way to the clans in Strathspey, to tell them of the landing of the Jacobite exiles with three hundred Spanish troops. The plan had been to join with other chiefs and clans, Rob Roy MacGregor amongst them. After the messenger had left the invading forces’ encampment at Eilean Donan, word had come of the government navy scouring the west coast. Down out of Ross the messenger had come, through the country of the Mackenzies and the Frasers, to cross the loch at the Bona ferry. It was the innkeeper himself, Mairi Farquharson’s brother, that had the tack of the ferry, and Dod Fraser that manned the oars whenever a traveller should need to be transported across the narrows at Bona. And so it had been the day in 1719 that the messenger had come to rouse the Strathspey clans.

Iain knew the rest. Before the messenger ever got near the clans, Major General Wightman at Inverness had been informed of the Jacobites’ landing and their location and was marching his forces westwards. The armies had met at Glen Shiel on the tenth of June, King James’s birthday, and had fought it out hard. In the end, the Jacobite forces came off worse, over a hundred of them lying dead and many more wounded. The rising of 1719 had ended before it began.

Hector had it worked out before Iain did. ‘Kenny Farquharson told the redcoats, didn’t he?’ said Hector. Dod started to shake his head, but Hector went on. ‘There were rumours at the time, until Mairi threatened to cut out the next tongue she heard it from.’

Dod was looking terrified now. ‘What could Kenny know of Glen Shiel? He never heard of it until after it happened.’

‘Oh, did he not? He knew something was in the wind though, when you took that messenger across at Bona,’ said Hector.

Dod put out his hands.

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