Free Midnight Honor by Marsha Canham Page B

conscience. Not that I haven't heard all the arguments already, of course.”
    Anne said nothing; she stood on ice cold feet, her toes curling nervously into the carpet.
    “Do you honestly think I want to force good men like Fearchar and Gillies MacBean and John MacGillivray to keepan oath that galls them to the very bone? Do you think I enjoy the sullen stares, or the sound of men spitting at me behind my back? Do you think, for one blessed moment, that a day does not go by without my agonizing over the decisions I have had to make?”
    “You did not have to make them on your own,” she reminded him.
    “Ahh, well, yes, you would think it would be easy just to gather all the lairds of Clan Chattan together and arrive at a consensus of opinion. But I have discovered it is easier to mix oil and water than it is to get two Highlanders to agree on any given point of an argument. Twenty of them in a room together could well result in a hundred opinions, ninety-nine of them ending in bloodshed and swordplay. No.” He shook his head sadly. “Part of the joy that comes with the mantle of chief is that such burdens are mine and mine alone to bear. How easy it would be if it weren't.” He paused and held up a hand to forestall her interruption.
    “Unfortunately, there are more than two thousand families who depend on my leading with my head, not my heart. For each man I order to take up arms in a reckless and ill-conceived plan, there are easily twice as many women and children and babes in arms who would be the first to suffer the consequences for such blind arrogance. You despair for your nephews and nieces having to live in caves now? Imagine a thousand others who could find themselves without a roof over their heads, their homes burned to the ground, their fields scorched, their livestock slaughtered. Imagine their fathers, sons, and husbands arrested and put on transport ships bound for an indentured life in a foreign land.”
    “The English cannot arrest every man in Scotland,” she argued. “And those they did might prefer such a fate to being forced to wear the Hanover colors and fight for a
Sassenach
king they despise.”
    “You believe they would prefer to fight for a king who has done nothing to even acknowledge the sacrifices they are willing to make in the name of loyalty? James Stuart has been in exile for sixty years. He has grown fat and indolent living off the sympathy of other fat, indolent monarchs who spout words of indignation and outrage even as they mock the verynotion of his ever reclaiming the throne. Did he even have enough confidence in his own cause to come to Scotland himself? Good gracious, no. He sent his inexperienced, vainglorious pup of a son instead—a man who had yet to see a battlefield, much less possess the wherewithal to overthrow a country. And not just any country, mind you.
England
, for God's sake. The most powerful military force in the world.”
    “He defeated them at Prestonpans,” she argued valiantly. “His army took Edinburgh and Perth and Stirling, and he has raised the Stuart standard in English towns all the way to Derby.”
    “Lord George Murray led the army at Prestonpans. If not for him and men like Donald Cameron of Lochiel, I doubt Charles Stuart would have had a thousand men follow him away from Glenfinnan. As for raising his standard in English towns, I warrant they were torn down the instant the dust settled behind his retreat.”
    Her fingers clenched around the folds of the quilt but Angus held up a hand for her to keep her silence a moment longer.
    “But even if…
even if
the improbable had happened and the Jacobite army had marched all the way to London, how long do you suppose he could have remained there? The English managed to rally thirty thousand within a week of the prince crossing the border, and they would have had five times that many had a real threat been made against the capital city. They also have the means and resources to feed and clothe