Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(94)
“She’s hung on like a tick,” he said grumpily. “Besides, no blue-blooded father worth his salt would give over his daughter’s dowry to the likes of yewrself.”
He was not listening. His vision, keen from constantly switching between a killdeer’s tiny tracks in the mud before him and a bald eagle perched on an outcropping of the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, searched now for a hike of ruffled skirt or toss of a beribboned and lacy white cap.
The afternoon’s festivities, a holdover from a feudal era, were a pageantry of military processions and games of brute strength and skill, demonstrated by clansmen brandishing their claymores. The games were invariably accompanied by revelry and heavy drinking – and especially dancing.
Despite the royal ban in England on tartan kilts, the Highlander men of the North Carolina colony flaunted their kilts during the Sword Dance as saucily as would a maid her petticoat. His mouth twitched. That feminine-like clothing would not serve well here, what with the snakes, briars, nettles, and poison ivy. Even when in breechcloth, he was not foolish enough to venture into the woods without his wrappers.
All was not gaiety that afternoon. Five weeks prior, back in February, these Highlanders, loyalists to King George, had clashed with a combined force of North Carolina Continental and militia at the bridge over Widow Moore’s Creek and had suffered a resounding defeat. More than 850 survivors had been taken prisoner. The Royalists’ first armed conflict with the rebels on American soil signaled a mighty discontent stirring throughout all the colonies.
Feared even more at the present were the intensifying conflicts with Indian nations, chiefly the Cherokees – and chiefly the reason Jacob found himself traveling in the river port area. Since he had to be at Fort Charlotte on April 15th, that left him only four days at Campbelton to court a potential bride.
His eyes swept a semicircle, past sweating foot racers churning up the dirt along one side of the parade ground. On the other side a kilted pipe band in spats, jacket, and sporran massed for a last practice competition. Their bleating and thudding was a painful screech to his ears, accustomed to more subdued chattering of forest critters. Farther along, a horse procession with standard bearers carried flags representing their Highlander towns.
His reconnoitering gaze reigned in abruptly at a large stage erected amidst a clump of great oaks and decorated with evergreens, floral wreaths, and garlands.
On the platform, near the royal standard, two women stood. One, a middle-aged woman in tartan and feathered bonnet, was addressing the fashionably dressed gathering. She spoke in that strange tongue native to the Gaelic aggregation and to the Royal Highland 84th Regiment of Foot. As she paused, enthusiastic applauding erupted.
“Who is she?” he asked of Fergus, while his own fascinated stare remained riveted to the stage.
Squint-eyed, Fergus had a wide tongue that rolled his every word. “She be the famous Flora MacDonald. The wee lass helped Bonnie Prince Charles escape Scotland. She and her family took refuge here a couple of years back. Her menfolk were captured at the battle at Moore’s Creek.”
“No, not her. The tall one.”
“Och, that be the Lady Catriona Kincairn. But don’t be getting any ideas about her, lad. Her mother was the chieftess of the Afton clan before emigrating here. The Kincairns be the most prominent family in the area after Flora Macdonald’s, and ye could not have chosen a lass less likely to accept yer courtship.”
“Wait for me.”
Long rifle in hand, Jacob strode across the trod-down grass, his focus never taken from the winsome Catriona Kincairn. Extravagantly tall, she had soft curves that enticed and, beneath a straw beribboned hat, hair flame-red enough to heat the most bereft heart. He knew he was bent on undertaking a seemingly impossible mission. But that had never stopped him. Not in the time spent with his mother’s Wolf Clan nor that with his father’s military peers.
Flora had finished exhorting the Loyalists to a skirl of bagpipes. A blast of bugles brought the younger woman forward. As she began to speak in that strange Gaelic tongue, he reached the edge of the red-haired-and-ruddy crowd. Taller than most, he could easily espy his quarry over their heads.
Beneath a beflowered wide-brim hat, her wide-set, lively gray eyes roamed with affection among the faces of the listening Highland Gaels. Her modulated voice, warm and lyrical, spoke in appealing tones. Then she switched from Gaelic to the King’s English.
Throughout all of this, a slow tremor started in him, like a small earthquake. He was thunderstruck. He could not believe what he was experiencing. But he could not deny the feeling either. Simply, he was overwhelmed by the wonder of it – a joy too great to hope for.
Yes, this was the one he knew he would take to wife. Something in the way she held herself, in her calm and poise, bespoke a strength. A strength she would need if she were to stand by his side in the primeval forests beyond civilized society – upriver, past where Hollering Squaw Creek mated with the wide Cape Fear and where he had claimed his father’s six-hundred acres and lumber mill.
Now all he had to do was make the impossible happen and claim the maiden, as well. That she could ever come to love him was irrelevant.
“I speak in behalf of me mam today,” she was telling the crowd. Her plaid, secured at her shoulder by a silver brooch, was slung back, as if rebelling against constraint. Amazingly, the maiden’s eyes altered shades. Earlier the lively gray of quicksilver, now the gray nothingness of dead peat moss. “Me mam attends me da, who is having a bad day. He was gravely wounded at the Battle of Widow Moore’s Creek.”