Midnight Honor

honor.”
    “You won't leave me?”
    “I'll never be more than a heartbeat away, lass. Never more, never less.”
    Angus rubbed his eyes, feeling the grit beneath the lids. He was not sure of the time, but he guessed it was well past three in the morning. He was working by the light of a single candle, copying out numbers, names of regiments, commanders, supplies, equipment. It was more of an exercise to keep himself from going mad, since he had no idea to whom he should pass the information now that there were several hundred miles between himself and Adrienne de Boule. She had been his contact in Edinburgh, smuggling out packets of documents he had either copied or stolen from Cumberland's headquarters.
    His billet had been in the same house he had occupiedbefore the ill-fated foray to Falkirk. Roger Worsham was still down the hall, and Adrienne de Boule was once again a regular visitor. She had been taking larger and larger risks, carrying the documents under her corset, passing them on to whoever her contact was in Edinburgh. Twice in the week before he had shipped out, she'd had to find new conduits after the old ones were arrested. The city had turned into one huge garrison, with more soldiers on the streets than citizens, all of them impatient with the weather, the inactivity, the humiliating repercussions of the army's loss at Falkirk.
    There were hangings every day, lashings nearly every hour. The city was placed under a military curfew that began at dusk; anyone found out on the street, citizen or soldier, was subject to arrest and punishment.
    Angus's return had gone relatively unchallenged; he had simply reported to headquarters with the rest of the released prisoners. He had endured perhaps an hour of intense questioning as to his stay in the enemy camp at Falkirk, most of it conducted by the brooding, ill-tempered Duke of Cumberland and a select number of his senior officers. Garner had been among them, as had Worsham and the ill-fated Blakeney before he was sent north to Inverness. Hawley had been present, but for the most part had sat silent and ignored in a corner.
    Round and swelling with fat, Cumberland was a month away from his twenty-fifth birthday. He had spent the last five years fighting wars in Europe, earning himself a well-deserved reputation for success. He had a precise military mind and appreciated order, discipline, and logic—the three things that seemed, to his analytical mind at any rate, to be most lacking in the Jacobite camp.
    “I confess I am at a loss, gentlemen,” he had said, fixing his cold stare on each of his officers in turn, “to explain the contradictions I encounter from one day to the next. I am assured by my advisors at every turn that this rabble is unseasoned and untrained, and comes to a battlefield armed with pikes and pitchforks. How then have they managed to humiliate two of my most brilliant”—his voice dripped sarcasm as he crucified Hawley with his eyes—“generals? How do they manage to escape us time and time again? I am told by peoplewho should know these hills the best that there are no passable routes through the mountains at this time of year, yet my cousin has vanished into the high snowy reaches, apparently unaffected by the same weather that leaves our men gasping and strengthless in the drifts. I am told there are no possible encampments between Atholl and Inverness where more than five hundred men could subsist in a body. Yet Lord George has disappeared into the wilds somewhere with upward of three thousand men and horses, both of whom must have fodder to survive.”
    “Lord George knows the lay of the land, Sire; his family seat is Atholl.”
    “And my family seat is all of England, Scotland, and Wales, gentlemen. I will prevail over these skirted rebels. If it takes another ten years, I will prevail.”
    Angus had felt the bulging toadlike eyes fasten on him down the length of the table. “You, sir. You are related to Lord George Murray, are you not?”
    “He is a cousin, yes, by marriage.”
    “Your lovely wife and he must have had a fond reunion at Bannockburn.”
    Angus had trod carefully there. A bundle of beribboned letters may have worked once to cast doubt on the reports of Anne's whereabouts in Inverness and Aberdeen, but too many captured soldiers had seen her at Falkirk.
    “I doubt they met but once or twice before, Sire, and then only at official clan functions.”
    “And you, sir? You appear to have been given free