Midnight Honor

Author's Note
    The phrase “labor of love” has been used so often, I think it sometimes loses its meaning, but in this case, with
Midnight Honor
, there is no other way to describe it. I actually started writing the story ten years ago, right after I had finished
The Pride of Lions
and
The Blood of Roses
. I had met Colonel Anne while doing research on the Jacobite Rebellion and knew she was a strong enough character to carry a story of her own. No, she
deserved
a story of her own. I started it, but put it aside after a hundred pages or so because I knew I had been in Scotland too long and needed to distance myself from Culloden for a while in order to do Anne justice. Nearly every year after that, I took out the folder and leafed through the pages I had written, but each time I put them back again knowing I wasn't ready, that I still retained too much from the first two books to enable me to look at Anne's story with a fresh eye. Okay, I'll admit it: I was more than a little afraid I had used up all the emotion and impact of the rebellion in the pages of
The Blood of Roses
.
    Three years ago, Marjorie Braman offered me the chance to revise and update both
The Pride of Lions
and
The Blood of Roses
for reissued editions. I had just finished writing one Regency,
Pale Moon Rider
, and was contracted for a second,
Swept Away
, but retyping the two Scottish books in the computer made all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The story was there in my mind, the characters kept nudging their way into my thoughts even as I was chasing coaches through the streets of London. The only question remained: How do I write a story about a woman in love with two vastly different but inherently similar men? How do I make the challenges and sacrifices of all three characters as believable and as heart-rending for the reader as they are for the characters themselves? And how do I make the gentle readers who lambasted me at the end of
The Blood of Roses
understand that the real tragedy isn't in the loss, it is in the forgetting?
    Anne and Angus Moy, John MacGillivray, Gillies MacBean, even Fearchar Farquharson, were real, living, breathing people; heroic figures out of the past who, I hope, will allow me my poetic license in weaving my story around them. I have been warmly rewarded by correspondence from the descendants of Lochiel and Alexander Cameron; I can only hope the MacKintoshes will be as kind.

“T hese deeds, these plots, this ill-conceived folly born of midnight honor …”
    —UNKNOWN

Prologue
    Inverness, May 1746
    T he fear was like a blanket, smothering her. Having witnessed and survived the obscene terror of Culloden, Anne Farquharson Moy thought she could never be truly frightened again, yet there were times her heart pounded so violently in her chest, she thought it might explode. Her mouth was dry; her hands shook like those of a palsied old woman. The slimy stone walls of her cell seemed to be shrinking around her, closer each day, and the air was so thin and sour she had to pant to ease the pressure in her lungs.
    And then there were the sounds….
    They were as bone-chilling and piercing as the screams that haunted her dreams day and night. She had watched the prince's army die on the blood-soaked moor at Culloden, had seen the rounds of grapeshot fired by the English ranks spray into the charging Highlanders and cut them down like the pins in a child's game of bowls. She had heard the dreadful, unimaginable agony of fathers cradling fallen sons, brothers dragging themselves on mangled limbs to die beside brothers. And she had heard their cries for mercy as the English completed the slaughter by stabbing and mutilating those wounded souls they found alive on the erstwhile field of honor.
    The sounds she heard in her gaol cell were the soft, barely audible groans of a dying faith, of crushed pride, and of the utter, complete hopelessness that permeated the walls of the old stone courthouse in Inverness.
    She was alone in her cell. Cumberland had called it a luxury, for there were easily a hundred half-starved men crowded into an area that normally held no more than twenty, some with festering wounds who were too weak or feverish to roll out of their own waste. An oatcake and small tin cup of water were the daily ration. Pleas and prayers went unheeded. The weak eventually grew too frail to squander their strength on such futile measures and simply died in silence. The stronger ones clung to their