Island of the Swans (3 page)

“Nay, Jenny!” interrupted Catherine, using their pet name for Jane, and shaking her head vehemently. “We mustn’t race the pigs! Mama
was furious
the last time. She said if you disgraced the Maxwells like that again, she’d give you a thumping you’d ne’er forget!”

Ignoring Catherine’s protests, Jane signaled the others to follow her as she scampered along the High Street, ducking down another narrow passageway. Just before the alleyway dead-ended into a stone wall, the youngsters dashed through an archway and emerged behind the five-storied tenement that included their own lodgings. Jane and Thomas led the pack, running swiftly across the communal backyard toward a pig enclosure at the far side of the small, green pasture tucked behind the tall buildings. To the south of this clearing lay the stone boundary wall of the city, and below it, a sheer, four hundred-foot granite drop. The volcanic outcropping on which Edinburgh was built had protected it from its enemies for eight hundred years.

“Quickly, before old Hector sees us!” Jane cried, motioning to her companions. She prayed that the stableman at the Red Lion Inn, who also looked after the Maxwells’ pigs, would not catch the four conspirators and enforce Lady Maxwell’s stern strictures regarding Jane and any future pig contests.

In the dim light of the pig pen, the three Maxwell sisters appeared quite alike, with their chestnut hair and slender bodies. But Jane had a more finely etched brow than either Catherine or Eglantine and a nose of aristocratic shape, slightly Roman in cast. Her mouth, quick to smile, framed small, even teeth. Even at age ten, her features had that special stamp of a Maxwell: strong and stubborn. At the moment, however, her expression belied that. Jane was grinning happily at her companions as she settled her weight gingerly on the broad back of an enormous sow. She threw a challenging look toward her more sedate older sister, Catherine, who adamantly refused to join the competition.

“Let
me
race on Tattie! Oh, please, Jane—
please!
” begged Eglantine who, until she’d reached her ninth birthday, had been routinely excluded from Jane and Thomas’s mischief making.

Jane glanced over at the younger version of herself, hopping up and down excitedly in anticipation of her very first pig race. Eglantine looked eagerly for her approval as Jane, plagued by a momentary sense of guilt, noticed that the hem of her threadbare day dress was already streaked with filth. With a characteristic act of will, she quickly purged the thought of her mother’s displeasure from her mind and nodded to Eglantine her permission to take part in the competition.

Jane surveyed Thomas’s ragged breeches and frayed linen shirt as he lifted Eglantine on the back of a second sow, which twitched nervously in its pen. The lad was in an even poorer state than the Maxwells; the Frasers had been stripped of their land and hereditary titles when they supported Bonnie Prince Charlie against the Hanovarians who held the British throne. Clan Fraser had gambled everything on the Stuart Cause—and lost. And Thomas had never even known his parents, who had died amid terrible suffering.

Jane gazed at Thomas Fraser with a fierce sense of loyalty forged by a friendship with the lad who’d been her closest companion all her young life. His hurt was her hurt. His family’s loss of their estates and titles felt like her loss as well. She vowed she would always follow him, protect him and love him as if he were a Maxwell, not a Fraser. Briefly, Jane thought of her brothers William, Hamilton, and Dunbar living in Monreith with her Da, whom she hadn’t seen in three years. Before the gnawing sadness could take hold of her, she quickly pushed their shadowy images from her mind.

Thomas fumbled with the catch on the wooden gate that led into the hidden square of open green space, just off St. Mary’s Wynd.

“
Ready
, Eglantine?” Jane cried impatiently. She looked back at her younger sister, who seemed thrilled to be allowed a part in Jane’s favorite game: turning the dignified High Street into a racing course for swine.

Jane tensed every muscle in her body, anticipating the start of the contest. Thomas yanked open the gate of the pig pen, scraping the worn wood planking through the sucking mud. Jane repeatedly thrashed her mount’s sides in an attempt to urge the pig through the opening ahead of her sister.

“Shoo! Shoo!” shouted Jane irritably. “Give her a whack with the broom handle, laddie!”

“All right, minxes,” cried Thomas, addressing the riders as well as their recalcitrant porkers, “Out—out! Get along—shoo, shoo!”

He gave both pigs lightning whacks on their rears and roared with delight as Jane’s mount emitted an enraged grunt. She reached for a firm grip on the old sow’s ears.
This
time, she thought to herself excitedly, she was bound to win. The pig continued to make protesting squeals as it waddled hurriedly into St. Mary’s Wynd. The two sisters’ high-pitched shrieks echoed along the steep-sided alley as Thomas gave Eglantine’s slower beast another slap.

“The first one who passes Fountain Well wins the race!” he shouted so Jane might hear. “On with you, you filthy piggies!” he barked.

At the sound of the noisy contest, windows flew open on both sides of the alley and across the cobbled High Street. Peals of laughter reverberated merrily down St. Mary’s Wynd.

“Those Maxwell snippets are at it again,” chuckled Peter Ramsay as he stood in the door of the Red Lion Inn. His plump wife wiped her rough, chapped hands on her apron.

The innkeeper’s gaze followed the erratic path taken by the two pig riders whose mounts waddled toward the mainstream of city traffic. The strolling fishmongers and hawkers called out their wares to residents of the five- and seven-storied tenements rising up on all sides. Carts and wheelbarrows from the farms outside the city walls rattled alongside the elegant carriages of the gentry and the occasional sedan chair borne on the shoulders of burly Highlanders, for whom such menial labor was all that was left to them since the failed Rebellion fifteen years earlier.

From her perch on the sow’s broad back, Jane gave a jaunty salute to the couple standing in the doorway of the Red Lion Inn. Ramsay and his wife chuckled and waved back. Jane glanced over at Thomas, who was thumping Eglantine’s uncooperative sow with the broom handle.

“Not fair, Thomas!” Jane shouted as Eglantine’s pig bolted unexpectedly close to Old Swill.

“I’m looking forward to seeing you get your comeuppance, lassie,” he joked.

With a few quick strides, Thomas passed the girls as they bounced along, screeching commands to their pigs to move faster, kicking them wildly and cajoling them toward Fountain Well, a hundred yards distant. By now, a crowd had gathered and veteran observers were shouting to the carts and carriages on Edinburgh’s bustling thoroughfare: “Make way for the swine—make way for the swine!”

As the race proceeded, both girls kicked and shouted at their rebellious pigs.

“On there, Eglantine!” shouted old Duncan McClellan, pausing to cheer the saucy young challenger as he clutched a basket of unsold fish in his arms.

“Jane, lassie, you’re winning!” countered Matilda Sinclair, a bride of three months whose surly husband looked down on the proceedings from a second-floor window, his face puckered in a scowl.

Jock Sinclair, who worked long hours at the tannery built on the banks of North Loch at the foot of Castle Rock, was clearly upset. He resented having to wait for his morning tea, especially when the delay was caused by a lass whose pig racing had not long ago landed Jock unceremoniously in the mud. His mouth set in a hard line as he watched his new wife set down her wooden bucket of water pumped from Fountain Well and shout encouragement to her friend Jane. When the pig had run Jock down, Matilda had
laughed
at his indignity—and so had that Maxwell brat! To his way of thinking, both females needed to be taught a lesson.

“Matilda! Draw your water and make me m’tea, bitch!” he shouted through the casement window.

“I’ll be coming in a moment, Jock,” she shouted back defiantly, though it might earn her a beating later. “You’re safe enough on the second story, I’ll be bound!”

Soon scores of spectators appeared to view the contest from windows and shop doors. A handsome carriage with a ducal crest on its shining black door drew near where Thomas was posted at the finish line at Fountain Well.

As he watched the carriage curtains being quickly drawn aside, Thomas was caught off guard by the appearance of the widowed Dowager Duchess of Gordon and her three sons, Alexander and his younger brothers, George and William. Thomas’s jaw clenched at the sight of the quartet staring out at the unusual proceedings through the open window of their elegant coach. How he
hated
Clan Gordon!

“Ah, the famous Jane Maxwell,” commented Alexander, the seventeen-year-old Fourth Duke of Gordon, as the carriage came to a halt. “I have heard of her little competitions on the High Street.” He stared in amusement at the two riders whose mounts were stubbornly refusing to head in the same direction, despite frantic kicks from their pint-size jockeys. Thomas disdained even to nod at young Gordon. Alexander narrowed his eyes as he stared critically at Thomas.

“Are you not one of Simon Fraser’s young pups?” he asked with barely concealed scorn. “Master of the Swine Course, I presume?”

Thomas nodded stiffly and drew himself up in an attempt to look taller. His godfather had never forgiven this duke’s deceased father, Cosimo George, the Third Duke of Gordon, for refusing to come out in favor of the Stuart Cause in 1745. Gordon lands lay hard by Fraser territory. It might have made the difference at the Battle of Culloden Moor if the Cock O’ the North, as all Dukes of Gordon were called, had thrown in his lot with Prince Charlie’s men instead of the king’s.

“I am Thomas Fraser of Struy, Your Grace,” he said with as much hauteur as he could muster, “godson to Simon Fraser,
Master
of Lovat.”

Thomas stared insolently at the passengers in the carriage, remembering the grisly outcome of such Gordon treachery. From babyhood, Thomas had heard the stories of how, after the defeat at Culloden, Master Simon’s father, the old gout-ridden chief of Clan Fraser, the Eleventh Lord Lovat, known as Simon, the Fox, had paused during his hasty retreat and witnessed the king’s men burning to the ground the Fraser family seat at Dounie Castle.

“Ah, yes—Colonel Simon Fraser,” the duchess said derisively. “I had heard that after his father was executed in the Tower, the son was eventually released from prison and permitted to form a regiment of ruffians to fight the savages in the New World. How perfectly appropriate.”

The orphaned lad stared contemptuously at the countenance of the Third Duchess of Gordon.

“Master Simon Fraser is your Highland
neighbor
, madam, and serves
your king
!” he said in a barely civil tone. His adolescent voice cracked slightly and he flushed to the roots of his claret-colored mane. He
despised
these Gordons and their sneers!

Suddenly, the duke’s younger brother George emitted a shrill titter and pointed a slender white finger toward Eglantine’s and Jane’s sows, who were butting heads in the middle of the High Street. Thomas stared at the braying brat with disdain, recalling rumors that the odd-looking Lord George had a touch of the famous Gordon Madness—a malady that Thomas supposed must have resulted from too many Gordon cousins intermarrying. He jutted his chin in the air and met Alexander Gordon’s steady gaze.

Attempting to salvage some shred of dignity, Thomas added with feigned solicitude toward the Fourth Duke’s odd sibling, “Sink me—is he
ill
?”

Ignoring Thomas’s barb as well as the strange behavior of his peculiar younger brother, the aristocrat turned to gaze at Eglantine and Jane. The Maxwell sisters were still kicking and thumping their animals in an attempt to get them across an imaginary finish line near Fountain Well.

Refusing to accept Alex’s apparent dismissal, Thomas said challengingly, “You’ve finished at Eton, m’lord?”

“Of course,” the young duke replied airily. “However, my sainted mama is preparing to ship young William and me off next spring on an obligatory Grand Tour of the Continent before our studies at Cambridge commence,” he added with a sardonic look aimed at his imperious mother. “’Tis a vain attempt to civilize us, I suppose.”

Apparently his youngest brother, the giggling Lord George Gordon, was either too stupid or too high-strung to benefit from such travel.

Thomas noted the young duke’s English accent. It was free of any Highland inflection, insuring that the Duke of Gordon, to say nothing of his pudgy brother, would be welcome in the drawing rooms of London and courts of Europe. Their futures were assured in every way, while Thomas’s remained bleak and uncertain.

“The wagers!” Jane shouted at Thomas, interrupting his verbal sparring match with the Duke of Gordon. “Don’t forget to collect the wagers!”

She kicked her sow’s sides sharply, but made little progress toward Fountain Well.

“I’ll put a farthing on the challenger!” announced the fishmonger, Duncan McClellan, who handed Thomas a thin coin.

“Then let me put a sovereign on her sister Jane,” the young Duke of Gordon said suddenly, pulling out a coin from a pocket in his richly embroidered silk waistcoat.

“We’ve no need of your English silver, sir!” Thomas retorted scathingly. “We’re
Scotsmen
here.”

The intended insult hit its mark. Alexander glared through the window, speechless at Thomas’s effrontery. Just at that moment, the attention of the young men, the dowager duchess, and the rest of the crowd was drawn to the shrieking Eglantine, whose sow had discovered a puddle of water seeping out from the base of Fountain Well. The pig was snorting at the muddy water with single-minded fervor while its exasperated rider wheedled and whacked the animal with all her might. Jane’s pig suddenly spotted the mud puddle near the fountain and veered over to investigate. At the same time, Eglantine’s mount settled itself comfortably into the ooze. As Eglantine, her skirts and leggings slathered with mud, gripped her pig’s neck, the sow’s curlicued tail brushed against the far side of the base of Fountain Well.