By noon, Inverglass had invented seven versions of Eilidh Ross. In one, she had struck Provost Strachan across the face with the royal order. In another, she had kissed Captain Fraser in the council chamber to distract him, which proved the town possessed imagination if not accuracy. By the time she reached the tannery lane with her brother dragging her by the sleeve, she had allegedly declared herself queen, witch, saint, French agent, Jacobite bride, and ruin of respectable daughters everywhere.
‘I should have let Mam name you Patience,’ Jamie snapped.
Eilidh bent over, hands on her knees, breath burning in her chest. ‘Mam would not have lied to a priest.’
‘This is not funny.’
‘I know. That is why I am being funny badly.’
He looked seventeen when frightened, which was unfair because he had turned nineteen in November and had been shaving with solemn incompetence for two years. Soot streaked one cheek. His cap was gone. The knife at his belt remained untouched, praise God and every sensible angel assigned to impulsive young men.
They crouched behind stacked hides while the lane beyond filled with boots. Dragoons. Not many yet. Enough. Eilidh could hear the jangle of tack, the hard English vowels of one sergeant, the lower answering murmur of local men hoping accent might purchase mercy. Above them, from a window, Mrs Peat hissed, ‘In here, ye daft creatures,’ and dropped a rope ladder made from laundry line and what appeared to be her husband’s Sunday braces.
Jamie stared up. ‘Is that safe?’
‘No,’ Mrs Peat said. ‘But neither are you.’
They climbed. Eilidh went first because her skirt would tangle less if she cursed at it privately. The line burned her palms where the brooch had pricked her. Jamie came after, swearing in whispers. Mrs Peat hauled them through a room that smelled of onions, wool, and fear. Her youngest boy sat under the table with a wooden horse clutched to his chest.
‘You broke the seal?’ Mrs Peat asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ She shoved a cup of milk into Eilidh’s hand with the brutality of kindness. ‘Drink before you faint and make us all sentimental.’
Eilidh drank. Her stomach rolled. Outside, a horse screamed, then settled. The town was no longer waiting. That was the first thing she understood clearly. Waiting had been a winter habit, bred into stone and bone: wait for rent day, wait for a son’s letter, wait for the laird to die, wait for Parliament to remember the north existed, wait for hunger to pass like weather. She had not ended waiting. She had merely made it visible.
‘Where is Father Malcolm?’ she asked.
Mrs Peat crossed herself. ‘At the kirk, pretending a locked door can keep politics outside. Your aunt is at the bakehouse with half the women in town. They say the soldiers mean to quarter in the north crofts tonight.’
Jamie slammed his fist against the wall. ‘They cannot.’
‘They can,’ Eilidh said. ‘That is precisely the trouble.’
He rounded on her. ‘And what was your plan after making speeches? Did you have one, or were we relying on the power of your eyebrow?’
‘My eyebrow has opened more doors than your knife.’
‘Eilidh.’
There it was, the hurt beneath the anger. She looked away first. Leadership, she was discovering, was mostly the art of disappointing people who loved you while strangers cheered from a safe distance. She had brought the order into the public chamber because secrecy favoured the powerful. She had not accounted for boys with stones, soldiers with orders, women hiding children under tables.
Mrs Peat put her hand on Jamie’s shoulder. ‘Blame later. Move now.’
They moved through the attics because Inverglass women had always known the town better than its maps. Roof to loft, loft to storeroom, storeroom to the shuttered gallery above MacIver’s print shop. There, among type blocks and damp paper, Eilidh found the first miracle of the day: three copies of the eviction order, already set in type, with her margin statement beneath it in bold black letters.
MacIver himself stood over the press with ink to his elbows and a grin too large for his cautious face. ‘Before you scold me, Mistress Ross, I will say in my defence that history has poor handwriting unless printed promptly.’
‘You stole my words.’
‘Borrowed for the public good.’
Jamie picked up a sheet. His mouth changed as he read her sentence. She had written it in fury. In print, it looked less like fury and more like law. That frightened her.
‘How many?’ she asked.
‘Forty done. Two hundred possible by night if they don’t smash the press.’
‘They will smash the press.’
‘Aye, but think of the drama.’ MacIver’s grin faltered when no one laughed. He was the comic valve in town because someone had to whistle while the barrel rolled toward the cliff. ‘Copies are already at the harbour and with the women by the bakehouse. One went to Father Malcolm, though he held it like it might bite.’
Eilidh pressed the brass thistle to the table. The bent pin had drawn a crescent of blood across her palm. On the paper, beneath her printed name, a drop fell and spread into the fibres. The object had done its work: not ornament, not memory, but proof of cost. She closed her hand before Jamie saw.
‘We need witnesses,’ she said. ‘Not rioters. Witnesses. Names of every croft, every seizure, every soldier quartered, every cow taken, every loaf paid for or stolen. If they mean to use paper to make us disappear, we answer with paper enough to bury them.’
MacIver’s eyes brightened. ‘A ledger war.’
‘A truth war,’ she said. ‘Less catchy, more useful.’
From below came a crash. Then another. The front door. Jamie reached for his knife. Eilidh caught his wrist so sharply he winced. ‘No.’
‘They’ll take you.’
‘Not if I am not here.’
MacIver opened a trap behind the type cases. ‘Cellar passage to the cooper’s yard. Built for whisky. Redeemed by sedition.’
Eilidh looked once more at the printed sheet. THE WINTER REPUBLIC, someone had written at the top in a hand not hers. The phrase Captain Fraser had spoken had already escaped him. Words were turning feral all over Inverglass.
In the cellar passage, damp closed around them. Jamie went ahead with a candle. Behind them, soldiers entered the print shop. Eilidh heard MacIver begin, with magnificent innocence, to explain that he printed funeral notices, fish prices, and improving religious verse, none of which required bayonets unless the verse was very poor. A blow answered him. Eilidh flinched, but kept moving.
The tunnel ended under the cooper’s yard, where barrels rose like squat sentries. Aunt Morag waited there in a man’s coat, hair pinned beneath a cap, face arranged into the expression that had once made a tax collector apologise to her chimney. She took Eilidh by both shoulders and examined her for wounds as if assessing a horse she might buy only at a discount.
‘You’ve done it now,’ Morag said.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I was bored.’
Jamie made a noise of despair. ‘Is every woman in this town cracked?’
‘Only the useful ones,’ Morag said. She thrust a bundle into Eilidh’s arms. ‘Plain shawl. No green cloak. Too visible. And stop standing like a martyr. Martyrs are terrible at logistics.’
Eilidh changed behind a stack of hoops while Morag issued orders. Women to the north road with baskets concealing pamphlets. Men to the harbour but no blades unless attacked. Children indoors unless carrying messages, and then only the quick ones who could lie convincingly. It was alarming how much rebellion resembled preparing for a wedding breakfast.
‘Captain Fraser helped me,’ Eilidh said when Morag paused.
Morag’s face closed. ‘Did he?’
‘He gave me the stair.’
‘Men give doors when they want to choose which room you enter.’
‘You know him.’
‘I know his family. That is worse.’ Morag tied the shawl under Eilidh’s chin too tightly. ‘Callum Fraser was raised between two loyalties and has been punished by both. Do not mistake complication for safety.’
Eilidh thought of his hand over hers, his voice low: If you live, it might become a cause. ‘I do not mistake anyone for safety.’
‘Fine words. Try living by them when he looks tragic in candlelight.’
Despite everything, Eilidh laughed. It came out cracked, but it was laughter. Jamie looked offended by its existence. Morag looked satisfied. Fear loosened when mocked; not gone, never gone, but made small enough to carry.
They left by the yard gate into a town transformed. Smoke lifted from the square. Soldiers guarded the council house. A cart overturned near the pump. Yet market women still argued over fish. A dog stole a sausage from a distracted boy. Life, stubborn vulgar miracle, continued in the teeth of history.
At the corner by the apothecary, Eilidh saw Captain Fraser again. He stood beside two dragoons, speaking calmly while one held MacIver’s printed sheet. Fraser’s gaze moved over the street, passed her, returned. Recognition flashed. He did not signal. He did not betray. He turned his body a fraction, blocking the soldier’s view until Morag tugged Eilidh into the alley.
‘Dangerous mirror,’ Eilidh murmured.
‘What?’ Jamie asked.
‘Nothing useful yet.’
By dusk, the first council proclamation went up: any person distributing seditious print would be detained; any gathering of more than five would be dispersed; any tenant refusing lawful quarter would forfeit protection. Beneath it, before the paste dried, someone pinned Eilidh’s statement with the brass thistle drawn in the margin. By nightfall, the thistle appeared on doors across the north quarter, chalked, scratched, stitched in thread. A symbol could not feed a child. But it could tell a frightened woman which neighbours had decided not to look away.
Eilidh watched from the loft above the bakehouse as the town took her private refusal and made it public property. She should have been proud. Instead she felt the awful weight of being believed.
Morag came up with bread, cheese, and a pistol wrapped in linen. ‘Eat first,’ she said. ‘Then learn not to shoot your own foot.’
‘I am not leading an army.’
‘No. Worse. You are leading people with opinions.’
Downstairs, women sorted names into columns: taken, threatened, missing, safe. The ledger war had begun. Eilidh opened a fresh book and wrote the date. Her hand trembled only once. At the top of the page, without quite meaning to, she drew the thistle.
Outside, Inverglass entered its first night as a republic no map would admit existed.