Tales from the Tent Read Online Free

whom she thought of as Mother sat young Charlotte, now eighteen, down and revealed the awful truth.
    It was hard for her to understand the revelations pouring forth, and she at first refused to believe such apparent untruths.
    ‘It is the God’s truth, my lady. You are Scotland’s rightful heir.’
    ‘Then why do I not sit on the throne?’
    ‘Because the chiefs would have you silenced. They have word from the Vatican that a young prince, my rightful son, is as we speak being groomed to bring Scotland freedom.’
    ‘Then, mother, for that is who you will always be to me, time for planning.’
    From that night onwards Charlotte lived only to be Queen!
    Three more years passed, and having reached a certain status under the roof of her mother’s employers she spread, not the wings of a fair dove, but the sharpened claws of a fierce bird of
prey. Soon she found a position nursing in a home for recovering soldiers. In no time she caught the tired eye of a captain home from fighting in some far-off land. He was of blue-blooded stock
with property, just what she was looking for. Her claws gently dug in to the heart of this man twenty years her senior. Before fewer than ten months had passed she was the honourable Lady Lister,
seated in her new home three miles north of Inverness, with her so-called mother installed as housekeeper, and keeper of the secret. More important than anything else she was pregnant. ‘If
the clans do not accept my blood, then they will accept my son.’ She swore her womb carried a male child. If it did not, then she would continue producing children until it did! For this was
Charlotte’s plan.
    But oh, how the best-laid plans fall prey to fate.
    Much to her horror her husband fell, fatally wounded, during a skirmish in France, and never lived to see his twin sons being born. More’s the blessing on him, because the babies were so
badly deformed that Charlotte dared not let any eye fall on them. How could she now approach the chiefs? This was not foreseen. But so deep had her intent become that she refused to be daunted. She
would find a way, right or wrong.
    There had still been no sign of the ‘impostor’. Perhaps he would refuse an invitation from the now restless clans. After all, having lived a charmed existence under the cloak of rich
indulgence in the fine palaces of Rome and France, he was hardly likely to put his life in danger for such a futile cause.
    Seventeen years passed, her sons never having set an eye upon an open door or window. She herself found it difficult to spend any more time than necessary in that stinking room in the attic of
Lister House, set in the thickest of Caledonian forests. Only her once mother, the now old and bent housekeeper, fed and cared for those sad cripples who had once held all her hopes of bringing the
crown home from those greedy southern jailers.
    Charlotte’s plan to put Scotland into the Royal Stuarts’ hands was indeed honourable, but she was becoming desperate, and desperate people do dishonourable things. In the days ahead,
not only did she stoop to unmentionable depths, but the Devil himself would have been proud of her, to say the least.

    I now take a moment, reader, to tell you that my host, narrator of this historic tale, closed his journal and reminded me of the time, which was entering a summer midnight
hour. ‘I think our friend Portsoy is for staying the night in Perth, lassie. Do you think he’ll mind me kipping down on his bed?’
    Mac certainly looked the worst for whatever journey he’d taken that day, and after all the poor soul was over sixty. I, however, was only fifteen, and this story would not keep in my head.
I needed desperately to know its end.
    Just then, before either of us could say a thing, the door opened and there was my Daddy with the man himself, old Portsoy Peter.
    ‘This daft Morayshire man broke doon upon the Perth road,’ laughed Daddy, ‘I found him hitching a mile north o’ Scone.’
    I