The Insurgents

In troubled times, Arabella was concealing a secret – but did she dare share it?

- Gabrielle Mullarkey

MAY 1792

Bella sat in the sycamore tree, amid the bright green leaves and dangling clusters of flowers. Folding her legs under her shift, she tried to peer through the foliage. She could hear the ditch diggers approaching but couldn't yet see them. However, her voice would still travel.

‘You shall not pass! And if you dare try, I challenge you with my sword!’

She swished the thick switch she'd plucked from the side of the road against a nearby branch, where it made a thwacking sound. ‘Do you hear, you Jacobite ruffians? And do you yield?’

The approaching tramp of boots stopped. Then came a solitary dog bark.

A seam of doubt entered Bella's 13-year-old soul. Surely that bark was familiar!

‘Arabella?’ called Hugo Whiston, her father. ‘Come down from the tree this instant!’

Bella scrambled to obey, grazing her bare knees and elbows, the switch she'd been holding falling to the ground. Her father picked it up and swung it speculatively through the air as he waited for her, musket cocked in his arm, his lurcher Samson panting at his spatterdashcovered feet.

Bella wiped her hands along the edges of her linen shift, painfully aware of her dirty feet and the leaves and twigs she'd gathered on her descent.

When she dared to glance at her father, a muscle twitching in his cheek gave little away. It could mean he was furious or secretly amused. She prayed for the latter.

‘Papa, I…’

He held up a hand to silence her. ‘You have slipped away from your governess and shed your modesty in the process, it seems.’

‘My skirts were too hot and heavy for the day. And for climbing.’

‘The same must be true of your shoes, stockings and garters, then. I returned from the far end of the estate an hour ago to find your governess searching everywhere for you.’