Read Online The Last Highlander by Sarah Fraser - Free Book Online

Tarbat’s son and Alexander Mackenzie, son of the Earl of Seaforth. As a Guards officer, Alexander was familiar with London’s best clubs and watering-holes. It would be chance too for the Mackenzie men to pick up the threads of their relationship with their Fraser cousins. Since the Murrays had taken over, Mackenzie influence at Castle Dounie had ceased.
    Hugh and Simon, choked by Lord Murray’s condescension, patronage, expectations and favours, now threw ‘themselves into the hurly-burly of fun-making, love-making, noise-making’ offered by the English capital. ‘Come at a crown ourselves we’ll treat,/Champagne our liqueur and ragouts our meat’, the Highlanders joined in with the songs in the alehouses. ‘With evening wheels we’ll drive o’er the park,’ then ‘finish at Locket’s and reel home in the dark’. Locket’s, near Charing Cross, was a popular gentleman’s club. The area roughly bordered by the Strand, Covent Garden and Charing Cross teemed with life. The theatres around Drury Lane brought taverns, coffee houses and bagnios in their wake. Socialising levelled all the classes, aristocrats, intellectuals, merchants and tradesmen, foreigners, Gaels, and the people who fulfilled all whims and desires. When the young men spoke Gaelic, very loud and very fast, they could talk treason with impunity, though many taverns and coffee houses welcomed Jacobites.
    Simon worked on his chief, showing Hugh ‘very plainly, that Tullibardine made a jest of him, and had brought him to London, in order to make his court to King William at Lord Lovat’s expense’. He and the Mackenzies counselled Hugh ‘to break with’ Murray, and free Clan Fraser from its predators. For once, Hugh openly defied his brother-in-law. He sent out a waiter for pen and paper, wrote to Murray, and resigned his commission. ‘I hope … you will be so kind as to bestow it on my cousin Beaufort,’ he added. Simon clapped his cousin on the back. This was the spirit they had looked for in him all these years. Simon followed up Hugh’s letter with one of his own. ‘If your Lordship have use for all my Lord Lovat’s men, I have, next to himself, most influence on them.’ It was a thinly veiled threat to take them away. Tullibardine made his own brother captain of Lovat’s men.
    A worried Tullibardine wrote to his wife Katherine, sister of the Duke of Hamilton, who had remained in London, and asked her to find out what the young Frasers were up to. ‘I am extremely angry Lovat is not come off,’ he wrote. ‘I blame Beaufort who I believe occasions his stay till he gets … [Lovat’s] captain’s act.’ Katherine replied that she had seen Hugh. ‘O! He is a sad creature, and keeps the worst of company. It is not fit to tell you here the way he lives,’ she told her husband, ‘but he says … he’ll stay here, and spend of his own, and take his pleasures a while … I’m afraid he’ll fall into some inconveniency.’ Besides the ‘inconveniency’ of drink, Hugh was whoring himself to a physical breakdown and keeping other very ‘inconvenient’ companions.
    The merry-making soon stopped with news from Dounie that Hugh’s only son, three-year-old John, had died. He still had his girls, but now no male heir. Simon could not help but be aware that with the infant’s death, the Beaufort Frasers were once again the only male heirs if the illegitimate marriage contract could be overturned. Simon discussed it with his cousin. The Fraser inheritance was nothing to do with an alien clan, he said. Murray had been deceiving him for years about what was best for the Frasers and disguising his real intentions. Even this trip: there was no colonelcy of the regiment or meaningful royal recognition for Hugh Lovat. Retrieve some loss of face, Simon urged him, and use the law to put right and undo what the Murrays had put wrong.
    Hugh conceded that his in-laws probably ‘despised him’. He was an easy-going fellow and he had let them do