We knew by now that English troops would be walking the streets and guarding the gates to Dumfries and Carlisle, so Lucy and I decided to travel by horseback across country to Newcastle. There we would catch the London coach. By midday we were ready to go, with the few belongings we could carry with us stuffed into bags and bundles and our oldest, most threadbare cloaks wrapped over our better woolens to make us look as ordinary and uninteresting as possible.

We need not have feared. At first the snowfall was unhurried, drifting at a leisurely pace as if it had no particular intention of covering the landscape by nightfall. During the first few hours, while we rode over the fields of our neighbors, avoiding the roads, we encountered almost no one. All were huddled indoors, grateful for whatever shelter they had. By evening the snow was falling harder and the wind was colder.

We stopped for the night in the little village of Ecclefechan, a bit worried that it was located on the high road between Carlisle and Glasgow and might see heavy traffic, but we had the small white inn almost to ourselves. The local fruit tarts in butter pastry were famous in those parts, as was the local whisky. But before we got ourselves off to share a bed and rise before dawn, the innkeeper insisted on giving us more unwelcome news.

He was a shriveled-up, little man, with greasy strands of hair falling flat on his shoulders, not the expansive, full-bellied kind of innkeeper I was accustomed to seeing in Scotland. I think he ate little because he was so busy attending to his pipe, which was constantly aglow. He came and sat with us, without a by-your-leave, as we chewed our way through the gristle of a stew that was no better than passable. At least the bread was fresh, and the tarts full of plump raisins and creamy custard.

“And who might ye be, traveling in such a cathadh-sneachda (severe snowstorm)?” he demanded.

Lucy and I looked at each other.

“Mrs. MacDonald,” I said.

“Miss Lennox,” said Lucy. We had both chosen common names. Scotland was full of MacDonalds and Lennoxes.

“From Portpatrick,” I said, naming a coastal town far to the west of Heath Hall.

“On our way to Edinburgh,” Lucy said.

“For a wedding,” I added. I reassured myself that the Blessed Virgin would forgive deception for a righteous cause.

“Hard weather fur a wedd’n. Who weds in winter?” he asked, but I think it was an idle conversational gambit, not an accusation.

Then he added abruptly, “Ye might meet soldiers on the road.”

I tried to catch his eye, but his gaze slithered towards the corners of the room or down to his pipe. Was he friend or foe? Or just a man who cherished most in life those moments when he had everyone’s attention?

“Did ye na’ hear word o’ Sheriffmuir?” he asked, still without so much as introducing himself. His wife—I assume it was she—was a small woman as meager as he, sitting by the fire knitting a shawl so long that it trailed across the floor, paying him no mind at all.

“What is Sheriffmuir?” I asked, coolly studying my fingernails.

“There was a battle there,” he said, “’tween rebels wi’ Mar and king’s army wi’ Argyll, no’ three weeks ago. Word came yesterday wi’ a small company o’ men going south who had been in the battle. If ye’ve been on the road in the snow…I thought ye might na’ve heard.”

Lucy jumped in, trying to spare me.

“Dear sir,” she said hastily, wiping her mouth on a little checkered cloth, “if this is vagaries and rumors and tales to make all the women widows before their time, we are not in the market for such news.”

I hushed her with a wave of my hand and put down my spoon along with my pretense of indifference. I looked at our innkeeper levelly and said, “Tell us what you know, sir, for we have only had tidings of the defeat at Preston. Does Mar still fight in the North?”

Now that he was sure of his listeners on this day with little custom, the innkeeper took his time taking out his tobacco pouch, carefully dropping pinches of tobacco into his pipe and then working for some minutes at setting the leaves alight with a spill from the hearth. I am afraid I cursed him silently but would not betray my anxiety by trying to hurry him into an explanation.

“Know ye Dunblane?” he asked. “Sheriffmuir is a far muir east o’ Dunblane.” I looked blankly at him.

“North o’ Stirling,” he said.

Well, yes, I knew where Stirling was, the site of William Wallace’s great victory over the English at Stirling Bridge.

“The rebels outnumbered the English at Sheriffmuir three ta one,” he said. He shook his head and his mouth turned down, which loosened his uncertain grip on his pipe with his remaining teeth and necessitated more tamping of the tobacco.

“Oor Scotsmen fought well,” he said. “Whether wi’ the rebels or agin ‘em, a Scotsman is always a gaisgeach.”

“Warrior,” said Lucy softly in my ear.

“But they lost?” I said softly. I could not help leaning towards him till my face was almost enwreathed in the spirals of smoke from his pipe.

“No’ exactly,” he said. “Tis said it was like a wheel.”

A wheel? What on earth did the man mean?

He took our two empty bowls and the trencher and spoons and began to demonstrate how the rebels’ right flank took the king’s army’s left flank, and on the other side, it was the other way round, so that the two armies wheeled around each other.

“But who won the battle?” Lucy pressed him.

“Nither a’ the twain,” he responded with some satisfaction. “Some died. Some wur captured. The twa sides withdrew. Sad tales all round, they say.”

He told us of the young Earl of Strathmore, John Lyon, a boy of nineteen, who was fighting with the rebels. He had been wounded in his innards, was taken prisoner and then was shot through the heart by an enraged dragoon in his cups. On the other side of the battle, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Forfar, only twenty-three, fighting for the Hanoverian, was wounded in seventeen places, lost all his life’s blood and died.

I shuddered and pulled away from the innkeeper. He was too matter of fact—no, too pleased with himself as he shared dark news. I thought his deep-set little eyes glinted in the shadows cast over them by his shaggy, gray eyebrows.

It was too easy to imagine Gavin in the place of one of these poor souls who had died. I thought I would rather see my husband taken prisoner and whole, than with his comrades still, but suffering agonies from grievous wounds.

“What happened after the battle?” I demanded.

“They say Mar’s troops withdrew to Perth,” he said, “and did nae follow Argyll’s men when they retreated to Dunblane. And now many o’ the Highlanders are leaving him.

“You know a Highlander,” said our host, pulling on what little there was of his sparsely whiskered chin and nodding sagely. “He will fight like a cat fiadhaich (wildcat) but niver will he sit and wait.”

The next morning we left at dawn again, eager to remove ourselves from that place before our garrulous innkeeper began to fashion a story around our visit, as I guessed he would. I wondered if anything he had told us was more than a fable woven out of contradictory accounts of the battle he had overheard when that small company of rebels he had mentioned stopped at his inn on their way home. Of course they would say that men were leaving the Earl of Mar’s force in droves to justify their own desertion.

As Mr. Jonathan Swift says, “Falsehood flies and the Truth comes limping after it.”

We plowed on over meadows and fields, still avoiding the roads. The snow stopped falling but did not melt. In some places it iced over on top, so that our horses seemed to be stepping on patches of glass and often broke through to the powder below.

The world around us was so whitewashed that I began to imagine I saw little black spots like tiny insects crawling across the bleached landscape. Even the sky was white, overhung with snow clouds. If I spied the gray branches of a bare tree, or a single brown cottage, it was a relief to my aching gaze and made the black spots disappear.

We were wrapped warmly enough but, even wearing three pairs of gloves, two pairs of thick woolen stockings, and high, heavy boots, our hands stiffened on the reins and our feet swelled in the stirrups. Whenever we grew so tired that it seemed we might simply tumble out of the saddle and be swallowed up by a snowdrift, we knew it was time to stop at the next town at whatever accommodation we could find, whether nightfall was upon us or not.

We were also forced to change horses frequently, having sent our own horses home with the inn’s hostler after that first night at Ecclefechan. Horses were quickly exhausted by this interminable floundering through heavy snow.

Everywhere we went we heard confirmation of the inconclusive battle at Sheriffmuir followed by Mar’s feckless withdrawal. Mar had retreated, it seemed, just when he had the advantage of Argyll, just as Forster had surrendered at Preston when he had no need to.

Scotsmen being Scotsmen, with their love of music and ever wry, jaundiced view of their own history, there was already a popular new ballad about the battle. I heard bits and scraps of in the street and in taverns, and once sung by a boy hard at work at a blacksmith’s forge:

There’s some say that we won,

And some say that they won,

And some say that nane won at a’, man;

But one thing, I’m sure

That at Sheriffmuir

A battle was fought on that day, man.

And we ran, and they ran,

And they ran, and we ran,

And we ran, and they ran awa’, man!

But now there were also new tales afloat that the Chevalier was on his way to Scotland at last, bringing with him vast quantities of men and gold.

Just as we were nearing Newcastle, the snow began to come down again. We were grateful indeed for the comfort of the Old George Inn, though I would not have taken refuge there if I had remembered that our martyred King Charles I had been held prisoner in the nearby home of Major Anderson before he was executed by Oliver Cromwell. Almost every afternoon, it was said, the doomed king had walked to the Old George Inn for a tankard of ale.

Unlike the wayside inns we had visited in small towns, the Old George was full of comings and goings, men on business but also king’s soldiers. The town had barricaded itself against the Jacobites who had threatened to besiege it, but Newcastle’s defenses were so formidable that the rebels had moved on and let it be. There was still an undercurrent in the town of rebel sympathizers—some had even gone to join the rebels—but the town authorities adhered to Wee Geordie.

I noticed a group of pompous, self-satisfied officers, whose waistcoats barely buttoned over their middles, regaling themselves with beer and loud tales of battle at a corner table. I also spied a man in a brown coat with slightly frayed cuffs preparing to leave the inn. He placed his coins on the counter before the innkeeper and then, when the man was distracted by another guest, he grabbed them up again, thrust them back in his pocket and quickly left. Not wanting to draw attention, I watched the innkeeper searching for the coins on the counter, even stooping to see if they had fallen on the floor, but I said nothing. At last the innkeeper shook his head, shrugged and went on to tend to the next guest.

We managed to get a small room where we slept in one bed and shared a cracked chamber pot, but at least there was a small fire burning. I told Lucy to stop even attempting to dress my hair, but just to let it hang in long straggles so that I would look like the merest country drab. At that she laughed heartily—the first time I had seen her laugh since we had news of Gavin.

“My dear,” she said, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, “you would look like a queen in exile if you garbed yourself in sackcloth and ashes! It’s your handsome face, your uplifted chin and straight back, the way you look around yourself as if you are about to improve on the management of the establishment with a few well-chosen orders.

“You will never pass for a simple countrywoman. If you open your mouth and speak, it is worse. You might conceivably be the wife of a wealthy merchant, come to Newcastle to see if your husband’s ships have arrived safely and inspect the cargo. You could not pass for any estate lower than that.”

Even amidst my constant state of dread about Gavin, I had to smile at her description.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “if I affect too much of a noblewoman’s air or look about me too haughtily, you must kick me under the table. ‘Tis true what you say. It takes more than a change of clothing to hide in plain sight.”

I even suggested that we might play that she was the mistress and I, the companion. But Lucy thought that my bearing and her long habit of service would give her away at once.

“Besides I have never been married,” she teased. “A lifelong spinster cannot master the manner of a wife overnight.”

It was the merest of casual observations but I thought there was something more in it, a mild resentment perhaps, or… something else entirely. Lucy seemed too good-humored and self-satisfied when she said it to be hinting at a hidden envy.

The money I had begged from Mairi and Dougal was waiting for me with the innkeeper, whom I believe took no more than the usual skim off the top for his trouble. It was my good fortune that he was the nearest thing to an honest man in these rough times. But my relief in receiving the funding I needed for my fight to free my husband was quickly squelched.

The next coach to London was already completely booked, we were told. I had been weary from the journey, but moving always towards Gavin had helped keep my spirits up. When I heard that our next move was blocked, I could not at first see a way out of our predicament. I was overcome with a sense of panic that made me gasp for breath and fall into the nearest chair. We had already wasted so much time traveling cross-country. What if we should come to London too late?

At that moment a rather squat, broad gentleman in a blue frock coat and yellow silk waistcoat saw my tumble into the chair and observed that I could not catch my breath. He ran for spirits of hartshorn to revive me and, what with my coughing and choking, it was left to Lucy to explain our situation.

This kindly gentleman sat with me until I had caught my breath again. Mr. Phineas Thrupp, as he turned out to be, was an importer of silk and a collector and sometimes seller of books—in other words, not just a man of business but a man of some learning. Was it possible that the Blessed Virgin had sent me an angel, in the unlikely guise of a middle-aged silk merchant?

I guessed that Mr. Thrupp was near sixty or so but with a round, rosy face that looked much younger. He lived in London in Westminster with his wife Amelia, he said. A grown son, who was a lawyer, lived nearby. Lucy and I introduced ourselves once more as Mrs. MacDonald and Miss Lennox.

As Mr. Thrupp bent over me, a folded, yellowing paper fell out of the pocket of his frock coat. He stooped to pick it up, and I caught sight of the title, The Spectator. I had heard of this extraordinary literary journal but had never seen it before, of course, since it did not come to the wilds of the Lowlands.

Mr. Thrupp was pleased to show it to me, and I read on the front page that the writer had been so deeply engrossed in his studies at Oxford, he hardly spoke one hundred words for eight years and thus could claim, “…there are very few celebrated Books, either in the Learned or the Modern Tongues, which I am not acquainted with…” What lover of books would not wish to know more about this remarkable fellow?

Mr. Thrupp explained that the author of The Spectator was one Joseph Addison. The copy of the paper that I was perusing was several years old, but he had saved it and had a habit of rereading it, finding some new scrap of knowledge in it every time. At once I was distracted and calmed. Mr. Thrupp and I fell into a delightful discussion of books, news of the London coffeehouses, and the plays now being performed on the London stage, as the tromp and babble of other guests of the inn rose and ebbed around us.

But, in our present quandary, this moment of ease could not last long. I turned my head slightly and glimpsed Lucy, sitting nearby, with an expression on her face halfway between surprise and amusement that caused me to turn back to Mr. Thrupp and explain our situation.

I said no more than that we needed to get to London as quickly as possible, and the stage from Newcastle was already booked. We could not wait the several days required before the next coach would depart. I offered no further explanation.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, slapping his thigh, “I am in the same difficulty! Business calls me back to London, but I too cannot get a ticket on the coach.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully, and then asked if we would attempt to go on by horseback.

“I must go on as well,” he said. “As I can probably cover ground faster than you, I will travel to York as quickly as I can and reserve places for all three of us on the continuation of the stagecoach’s passage from York to London. Will that suit you, do you think?”

He believed we could all make better time on horseback than the coach and could catch it up in York. Some passengers would disembark there and we three could take their places. As a final gesture of goodwill, having noted my interest in the document, he gave me the copy of The Spectator that he had treasured for four years.

Since this was our first meeting, I did not confide in him, having no idea of his political leanings or his position on matters of faith. I had discovered before in my life that the friendliest strangers, who seemed brimful of bonhomie, could become cold and turn away when they discovered we were Catholics. It was as if they had found out that we were devils disguised as humans and would next force them to endure a Latin mass.

But something about Phineas Thrupp seemed true and sound to me, even on such brief acquaintance. I was grateful for his help and put any suspicions I might have had away in a back pocket of my mind.