Summary
The year is 1751; mist clings to the stone tenements of Edinburgh like a guilty conscience. David Balfour, callow heir to the House of Shaws, is lured by a serpentine uncle into a maritime ambush: a clapped-out brig christened Covenant, its decks already reeking of bilge and betrayal. Enter Alan Breck Stewart—brocaded, swaggering, a prism of Jacobite defiance—whose purse of gold ignites mutiny in the fo’c’sle and sets the Atlantic churning with musket-smoke. A night of cutlasses and conscience ends with the ship splintered on the iron ribs of Mull, the two fugitives pitched onto a rain-lashed coastline where every glen echoes with the drum of redcoat boots. Thus begins a heather-scented odyssey across peat bogs and moonlit crags, a Highland danse macabre where loyalty is measured in dirks and the law is a scarlet wolf-pack baying for blood. From the basalt bastions of Stirling to the echoing stone of Corrynakiegh, David and Alan swear the blood-oath of the ‘Sgian-dubh’, their flight braided with ballad, treachery, and the slow dawning that inheritance is less a deed of parchment than a covenant of the heart.
In Scotland in 1751, young David Balfour is shanghaied aboard a ship where he meets Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart with whom he escapes to the Scottish Highlands, dodging the redcoats.
