Daylight is failing. Moonlight is fractured by dark fingers
of the forest. Somewhere ahead we’ll find Rousell’s Sandhill, and there we
should recall the next step of our route home.
The trees part. A misty clearing opens ahead. Is it the sandhill
at last? It’s hard to tell in this peculiar half-light. I send my sergeant to scout ahead.
There are shadows in the gloom, and no word from my sergeant,
who seems to have gone the way of all sergeants. One of the shadows moves out
of the trees, a huge mass of darkness looming towards us. We raise our pistols.
Four ghostly horsemen rear from the shadowy mass. Their costumes
reek of another time, with feathers and flounces, their leader garbed in a
quaint floppy hat.
The phantom horsemen gallop towards us, a ragged flag of Scotland
fluttering around them, a tattered bundle slung between them.
“Fire!” I remember to cry.
As it turns out, some of our guns were actually loaded. Bullets
rip into the shadows.
A voice cries out, a voice that sounds somehow familiar.
The horsemen vanish as the bullets rattle through them,
their bundle falling to the ground at our feet. Unsurprisingly, that bundle has
a familiar face. The man is dead. The ghostly fiends have riddled him with lead.
In his fist, he grips a scrap of parchment, a torn page which appears to be
some sort of personal history:
“much of his biography has been lost to us, redacted by the
red pencil of Time, making it difficult to determine what may now be relied
upon, and what may be no more than rumour.
Earl Stoons of Aberbernarna was so-called, it is said,
because he would habitually ‘url stones at his neighbours, whom, he claimed,
were trespassers on his estate.
That estate was 90% bog, and 10% peaty moorland,
the particular king of land designed by the universe to inspire depression, Drenched in the claggy mists of the Highlands, in that purpose the universe is
generally successful. Any buildings erected upon bogland depress the
sodden ground, sinking slowly into a peaty grave, gradually declining, to be reduced to little
more than the foundations for yet another storey.
Year after year Earl Stoons
built new storeys to his house, only to watch them sink into the mire, never managing to build more than two
storeys before the lowest vanished into the bog. Invariably, as it was sucked
into the mud, so also sank his vast supplies of whisky, his reserves of haggis, many
of his servants, most of his contemporary clothing (leaving nothing but antique costumes
in the family museum) and all of his self-respect.
So powerful was this erosive malaise that it corroded even the
very language of the Scots. Letters, sounds and whole syllables disappeared
into the sucky muddiness of the Scottish miasma. You’ve only to read a few lines
of Robbie Burns’ poetry to experience it. (For example, that poet’s original
name turns out to have been Roberta Heartburns). So when Earl Stoons’
illustrious ancestor, the Marquis of Montrose, died, and his heritage
passed down the line, by the time it reached Stoons both the T and the N had disappeared
into Scotch Mist, leaving him only the title “the Marquis of Morose”.
The military record of the Marquis remains more than uncertain,
to say the least. He was probably involved in the Monmouth Rebellion, but it’s
not exactly clear on which side. Possibly both. He almost fought for the
loyalists in the War of Jenkin’s Knee, the War of the Four-Cornered Hat, the
War of the Badger’s Sandbags and the Skirmish at Horseradish Bottom, and he was
probably the cause of the War of the Unexpected Musketball.
However, he did make quite an impression on the battlefield,
as he had a very fetching collection of hats [and here the manuscript breaks
off]
And as it does, the mist, too, clears and we see that, yes,
indeed, we’ve found our way to Rousell’s Sandhill. Its familiar shape reminds
us of – sand! sand! We’d come here from the sandy sand of Sander’s Sand-dunes – oh no, we need that wretched balloon
again. I feel air-sick.
---
Okay – so I still don’t have any 1660s+ figures (although I’m
getting tempted by recent articles in Wargames Illustrated) so I have to come
up with another cheat. These are two vignette command bases of the Marquis of
Morose, hero of the Scots in and around 1660-1690 (coincidentally), dressed in
the antiquated style of the period of the Marquis of Montrose because the rest
of his clobber was lost in the bogs of his homeland.
The figures are from Wargames Foundry, picked up in one of
their sales. They are certainly not the most stylish figures produced by that
firm, but they’re reasonable and paint up quite nicely.
I’m not sure of it’s ok
to give the flag of the king of Scotland to a cornet (rather than use it as a Standard,
carried by an infantry ensign) but I like it. I’m also aware that the flags
carried by ECW cavalry were boringly small. However, Montrose was certainly flamboyant
and fond of the dramatic gesture, so that’s my justification for such a flag, unhistorical
as it may be.
Score: 4 x 28mm cavalry and one flag: 41 points
Noel, it is time you got a book deal, or a better therapist. These guys are cool and appear to have found a dry bit of land.
Martin
