My stomach ached with the knowledge that if I helped this man, I could be tried as a traitor. Flora was convinced she had been called to help him, her passion for the cause of the Highlander was matched only by my father’s, and together, they convinced me to give the bonnie prince a change of my clothes.
And it was then your final letter arrived.
Before then, I’d suspected you’d perished like every other Highlander and Jacobite on the battlefield of Culloden, but it was then I knew you’d known the bonnie prince. You’d worked in his stead, and his plan all along was over the sea to Skye. I wept as I read your words over and over late into the night.
I loved you more then than I thought possible.
And I knew I had to see the bonnie prince again. I had so many questions that only he could answer.By the time morning light came, Flora and I set off over the shores of the loch, following the rocky coastline for nearly an hour before the small fishing hut came into view. Tucked into a tiny bay, shrouded by a small stand of trees, it was almost always blanketed in shadow and the perfect place to hide a prince in plain sight.
My feet ached from the long walk, my muscles wasting as the cold spring wind burned at my cheeks. My stomach was always rumbling for food, and while each of my mother’s patients always promised to pay her when they could, when they could rarely came. There was no one to blame, though, not when everyone was on their last ration, if not their last breath.
I imagined that must have been how you felt, frozen to the core with a hunger so profound it gnaws at your sanity.
I tried not to imagine your ending—death at the hands of the Royal Army by bayonet felt like a harsh end. I prayed then, as I do now, that my love would save your sweet soul.
As we dressed the prince in the trappings and trimmings of a lady, I pondered how best I could ask him of your whereabouts. Would he remember you? I struggled to imagine a soul you didn’t leave an imprint on. Flora spent hours strategizing a plan of escape for the prince. We would wait until late into the evening before following the path along the loch and out to the edge of the sea. From there, we were to follow the shore north until reaching a small inlet that housed a boat fit to sail across the sea to France. Then, the prince would be a free man, and I would be left to my loneliness without you.
By midnight that night, the plan to save the bonnie prince was underway. We walked with purposeful steps along the water’s edge until we reached the inlet. With the boat in view, I mustered my courage and finally whispered your name into the night.
“Excuse me?” the prince had whispered back.
I repeated your name, loudly enough that he could understand me this time, and then I asked him if he remembered you. My Atlas. My skilled archer, tender lover, and the stars in my sky. My everything.
The bonnie prince’s eyes fell closed when he realized who I was: the one who loved you soul-deep. He worried one of the large rings on his finger back and forth before uttering, “Without Atlas of Clan Campbell, we wouldn’t have made it to Skye.” He told me the story of your valor then, how you rode with the prince on horseback through the woods and glens until you reached the loch and a boat that could ferry him over the sea to Skye. He credited you with saving his life and was sad to say you’d perished in a raid near Fort William in the moments leading up to the prince’s departure. You saved his life…and lost yours in doing so.
My hands shook with grief as the prince nodded once and then turned back to the boat that awaited him. He waded into the water, skirts of my best dress swirling at his ankles. He’d ditched the heavy wig, in favor of ambiguity, I guessed, but he still looked horribly noble in the way he carried himself. I thanked him for his service to Scotland as he and his men piled themselves into the boat.
Flora turned to me then, a smile lighting her lips. This is it, she’d whispered, then kissed me on both cheeks before climbing into the boat after them.
I stood in the water up to my waist, imagining the waves cradling my form until I felt truly weightless and at the mercy of the sea.
“You saved me once.” I let my fingers skim the salty froth as my eyes darted up to the basalt columns that lined the salt caves. Tears stung my eyes as I remembered my mother mixing potions and tinctures under a full moon, chanting words that seemed meaningless then but stood profoundly against the test of time.
“From ash to dust, from salt to Skye,” I hummed under my breath as I planned my last moments without you.
Distraught by love’s last kiss, the sea beckoned, and I gave myself over to it. I needed only to write you my last words, seal them with my own last kiss, and then walk into the waves crashing into the salt caves without looking back.
Until my soul finds yours again,
Fawn
Fable
Isearched through the file cabinets of Leith library first. I hoped to come across a list of those who had owned Leith over the years or the names of those buried in the graveyard. Maybe then, I could follow paper trails in the hope just one of them might intersect with my own great-aunt’s fated life. I was distraught at the idea that Fawn had walked herself into the sea after losing her love at Culloden. I needed to know more about them and their time here at Leith.
A thousand possibilities swirled to life inside me as I thought of the ways her life might have ended. Alone in the woods, or at a stranger’s hand? Had she escaped and never returned on purpose? Or had madness gripped her mind like it did so many of the people who spent time inside Leith’s walls? Maybe her own mother had driven her away in a sort of hysteria, and her only hope for survival was to leave or become like little Annie Lee, orphaned and left to die.
When I finished searching the files, I moved on to the older records, tied together and bound with leather and written in the longhand of men who lived long ago. In one of the oldest records, dated 1626-1649, a list of crimes had been maintained by the registrar. Witchcraft was listed as the primary crime for many of the women brought forth, one accused by her neighbor because she’d recently come up with a scrap of silk too fine for a woman of her station. She was proven innocent, but the next woman was listed asdrownedin the verdict column. I rushed to find the list of her crimes, but the registrar had only writtentoo many to list.
Tears burned at my eyelids as I thought of the woman who’d stood accused of this nonsense for those deranged moments of time.
I closed the book on those particular periods of mass hysteria and moved to the next few decades. I searched the columns for familiar names—the births, deaths, enlistments, and disappearances were all listed.
In fact, so many were listed as disappearances, and all of them women, I began to wonder if this was the village’s way of handling deserters of Skye. Surely not all of these women had vanished, but where had they gone? I’d counted at least a dozen over the course of a few pages.
I thought of how much was lost to history, sometimes only a name left to earmark time. Flipping through pages dated in the 1730s, a shiver passed through me when a familiar name was listed under the live births column.
Baby: Atlas, Clan Campbell.
