She hitched the creel higher on her back, and willed her muscles to cooperate. They’d traveled on horseback for as long as they dared, then as Magda and Tom had approached Selkirk, they’d had to adopt their disguises in full. Encountering a peddler family on the road, they had traded Tom’s pistol and the last of his coin for a cart filled with pots and the basket she wore at her back, heavy with salt.
The town buzzed with excitement. Word had spread quickly about James’s capture, and everyone had gathered to see the great hero, bound and helpless.
“I don’t get it,” Magda hissed. “What’s the matter with these people?” Her arisaid began to slide off and she tugged it back over the crown of her head, her frustration with the scratchy, over-large garb only adding to her outrage. “They’re Scottish too, right? James fought forthem.”
“Aye, Magda,” Tom whispered, “Scotland is not so simple as that. You’ve Highlands and Low, and a mix of different religious beliefs, with clan grudges to leaven the dish.” He was sweating profusely, the tan of his cloak already soaked to a dark brown at his back. “Not so simple at all.”
James came into view, and Magda clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp. He’d regained control of his body, but remained immobile, hands trussed behind his back, tied to the seat of a cart. Despite his condition, he sat tall, sunlight picking gold highlights in his brown hair. Magda’s throat closed as she forced her tears not to fall.
It was suddenly clear to her that worries over battles and babies could come later. She couldn’t think of the future, or what it meant to be in the past. Magda only had the now, and what she knew in that very moment was that James was hers. She needed him by her side, and if that meant living in seventeenth-century Scotland, then so be it.
There was a challenge in his eyes as he discreetly scanned the crowd. They swept over Magda and Tom, and just when she thought James had missed them, she caught the hidden smile twitching his lips. That he’d seen her, that he knew she was there with him, gave Magda courage.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I think the show’s starting.”
Tom pushed the cart, and at once a wheel caught in the dirt-packed road. “I traded my pistol for this?” he grumbled, struggling to lever it up and over the rut. “Did you see the butt of it? Heart-shaped,” he said wistfully, “like the rump of a French courtesan. And engraved too. It was a fine piece. Fine.”
She silenced Tom with a glare, then looked around quickly to ensure nobody had heard. Though Campbell was nowhere to be seen, Magda was certain he was out there somewhere, lurking, and she made certain to keep her borrowed plaid draped over her head and pulled low over her brow.
They walked for some time, having no choice but to follow the growing mob, all angling for a glimpse of the Royalist hero before he was hanged. A handful of Campbell’s men drove James’s cart, pulled by a two-horse team. It was slow going, forced as they were to haul their load over drover’s tracks whenever the dirt road faded into grass, but Magda made sure she and Tom kept the ragged jolting and dipping of James’s cart constantly in sight.
“Had I known the intention was to march James all the way to Edinburgh, I would have posed as, say, a solicitor.” Tom struggled with the wheels of his wagon. “Then I’d have had no need for this godforsaken thing.”
Magda greeted Tom’s nervous chattering with empty, unfocused stares. She’d made her decision to stay, and every bit of her was concentrated on James, as if he were some celestial body whose gravity drew her to him at all costs. In her mind, this was the moment. This was the single test, her chance to save James and live out her days by his side. Or she could lose everything. Magda somehow knew that, despite Lonan’s assurances, in turning her back on the portrait, she’d lost her chance to return to her world. And now she could lose James forever too.
Campbell’s men stopped frequently along the road and at every village and hamlet between Peebles and Edinburgh, and a distance of less than thirty miles stretched into a week of degradation for James. But despite the many humiliations suffered upon him, his posture never wavered. He always sought her in the crowd, managing to steal glimpses of her through the day.
Their peddlers’ disguise was easy to maintain, and whenever Campbell’s men stopped, Magda and Tom would set up keep not far from him. She was startled the first time someone approached her to buy salt, but was happy to lighten her load in trade for some bread and hard cheese.
On the morning they approached Edinburgh, rain fell far in the distance, looking like a gray veil billowing along the horizon. The weather followed close at their backs, and when they finally entered the capital, a gunmetal sky pressed in on the mass of granite buildings, robbing the city of color and shadow. Despite the gloom, Edinburgh throbbed with life, and Magda was overwhelmed by the bustle of what seemed like a remarkably modern city. The roads were narrow and buildings closed in on either side, many reaching higher than she’d have expected.
When Campbell’s men turned the cart onto the smoothly cobbled stretch of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a buzz swept through the crowd. The mob was expectant, and the sense of imminent change crackled in the air.
“I warned him of this,” Tom muttered. “There was a time I warned him he’d end his days swinging from three fathom of rope, a day’s diversion for the merchants of Mercat Cross.”
“Where are they taking him?” Magda tucked her head toward Tom in an effort to make herself invisible. The crowd was growing now, a sickening crush of people smelling of sweat, smoke, and sewage.
“He’ll be imprisoned at the Tolbooth, of course.”
“So they’re not going to hang him immediately?” she asked with relief. “There’s still time to help him escape then.”
“No, lass.” Tom stopped abruptly, looking at her with pity in his eyes. “There’s no saving him now. James is lost to us. None escape from the Tolbooth.”
But Magda walked on, Tom’s words merely a drone in her ears. She was certain now of what she had to do.
“This is Canongate,” Tom whispered, catching up to her. “We’re close now.”
They creaked along for a time, struggling not to let the tide of people drive them too far from James. “Sweet Alba,” Tom suddenly swore. Pulling his bonnet low, he pressed tight to Magda’s side. “Look, quickly, to Moray House.” He pointed to a building, two stories high. With its sharply pitched roof it was almost quaint. The elegant stonework around its windows was the only thing to announce it as a place of import.
Then a movement caught her eye, and Magda spotted him. Campbell, receding from a second floor window, disappearing from view as the curtain fell back into place. Even as adrenalin spiked her heart, relief that he hadn’t spotted them flooded Magda. Just to make sure, she canted her body away from Campbell’s building, only to accidentally knock into the person in front of her.
Magda felt the shadow pass overhead like a great cloud, and a dead chill crept over her. The crowd had stopped, and she looked up to see what she knew instantly could only be the Tolbooth. It was a solid, grim thing, constructed of gray stone, and looming high above the street. A boxy, two-story antechamber clung to the side of the building, topped by a balustrade gruesomely decorated with rotting skulls. One drew Magda’s eye, and its wispy gray hair floating in the breeze seemed to ridicule her innocence. The skull angled toward the empty iron spike at its side, corroded black and waiting to be adorned.
The hum of the crowd intensified into loud and distinct calls, and people jostled roughly, trying for a final a glimpse of James.
It happened quickly then. He was whisked from the cart, flanked by burly Campbell men on either side. Planting his feet down hard, he struggled to hold them outside the doorway, frantically scanning the mob for sight of her, but it was in vain. James vanished into the blackness of the Tolbooth, and this time Magda was unable to stop the cry that tore from her throat.
Chapter 38
