Island of the Swans (88 page)

“He come so fast, Captain Fraser,” Mehitabel blubbered, nearly incoherent after what she’d just witnessed, “I didn’t know what to do… I didn’t know how… I—”

“You’ve done the best you knew how, Mehitabel,” he said over the cries of his newborn son. “When it happens this way, there’s nothing to be done. Wash him, please, and send for the—”

He bent low and pressed his ear to Arabella’s lips. There was no movement of breath. Frantically, he searched for a pulse point, and when he found none, he cupped her swollen left breast in his hand, praying for a heartbeat. It was still. His wife’s glorious black hair was matted with sweat, her dark lashes beaded with tears. Thomas sank to his knees, his shoulders wracked with sobs that made no sound. He wept for the love he had known in his life, love that never seemed to survive his loving in return.

Thirty-Two

N
OVEMBER
1793

T
HE
D
UCHESS OF
G
ORDON FOUND IT UNCOMFORTABLY IRONIC
that the broad lawns at Ayton House, where she and Alex had been married in 1767, provided the setting for their daughter Lady Susan Gordon’s wedding to the Fifth Duke of Manchester. However, Jane’s sister Catherine and John Fordyce had kindly offered their estate, and it certainly cut down on expenses when compared to holding such festivities in London.

Jane and Alex had hardly exchanged a word the entire day and the one unexpected bright note was the ardent attention paid Louisa by young Charles Cornwallis, Viscount Brome, the only son and heir of General Cornwallis, late of the unfortunate war in America—a national hero, despite his defeat.

Staring moodily at the bride and groom, Jane was startled to feel a hand gently take her elbow.

“Mama, may I have the honor of this dance?” Lord Huntly asked his mother gallantly during the reception held beneath a sheltering cloth pavilion. “’Tis the Babbity Bowser!”

Jane smiled at her son gratefully, relieved to have an excuse to escape the mood of depression that came over her whenever she was in the presence of her mother or husband. As Jane and Huntly wove through the patterns of the rollicking dance, she tried to ignore her spouse who was lounging on the sidelines, wearing a faint scowl.

“You know, Mama, there is now real fear of a French invasion, and we must once again raise recruits.” Lord Huntly said to her as the music ended.

“Aye, so I’ve heard,” she replied, casting a glance at Viscount Brome who had elbowed his way to the front of a queue in order to secure a glass of punch for Louisa.

“Would you help with the recruiting?” Huntly blurted suddenly.

“For the Gordon Highlanders?” Jane asked, surprised. “Whatever for?”

“Because we must get a thousand lads to volunteer. The War Office will be sending letters patent in January, and we’re afraid that previous recruiting has bled the Highlands dry.”

“Really, Huntly, my dear,” she chastised her son mildly, “I don’t think your da would take kindly to the idea.”

“’Twas
he
who suggested it,” her son said, grinning mischievously. “You may not be the best of friends, but he still remembers your success in ’75!”

Jane glanced in Alex’s direction with surprise.

“Even so,” she said quickly, “don’t you think your mother’s a mite too advanced in years to be dancing jigs in village squares to fill the ranks?”

“Never, Mama, never,” Huntly teased. His face grew serious. “At forty-three or
eighty-three
—you have that magic power. I know you’ll think of something. We
must
fill the rolls. The Gordon honor is at stake!”

Jane gazed at her eldest son fondly. He tried so hard to please both Alex and her. Their rift had been perhaps hardest on him, she thought sadly. He tried to keep a boot in both camps, and it had long been a strain.

“Of course I’ll help you,” she said, kissing him softly on the cheek. “Or, at least, I’ll do what I can.”

The effort to raise the Gordon Highlanders in the spring of 1794 took Jane and her son, the Marquess of Huntly, throughout the Highlands, from North Uist and the Isle of Barra to the shores of Aberdeen. At first, it was slow, discouraging work, reminding Jane of those weeks twenty years earlier when she helped recruit for the 71st Fraser Highlanders to fight in the American War for Independence. Huntly had adopted her idea to create a new Gordon tartan, taking the basic Black Watch pattern and overlaying it with thin yellow stripes both vertically and horizontally.

As Jane scanned the sparse number of spectators lurking in front of the jail in the old square at Elgin, she wondered if even purple peacock feathers would garner anyone’s attention these days. The drum major in his spanking new kilt monotonously beat his drum to signal their arrival, but few seemed to take notice. One hulking young lad caught Jane’s eye. He was staring at her, apparently not much impressed by their entourage.

“Ah, my lad,” Jane hailed the youth, an outrageous idea forming just then in her head. “May I introduce m’self? I am Jane, Duchess of Gordon, and this is my son, the Marquess of Huntly, who’ll command the brave Gordon Highlanders.”

She flashed the lad her warmest smile. The local boy continued to stare at her rather stupidly.

“Have you a mind to see the world?”

The feckless youth shook his head. “Been no further than the next village over, m’lady.”

She held up the traditional King’s Shilling, which sealed the bargain between recruit and the Crown when a lad agreed to join the ranks of the King’s Army.

“Have you a mind, then, to tell your friends you’ve kissed a
duchess
?” she asked slyly.

The lad’s eyes widened, and a wolfish grin formed slowly on his features.

“Aye… that I do. I can kiss
you
, Duchess?” he said, leering appreciatively.

Jane could sense her son shifting uneasily in his saddle.

“But of course you can, if you accept the King’s Shilling and enroll in the Gordon Highlanders today.”

“Your Grace,” Huntly said formally. “Really, do you—”

“You may kiss your duchess, lad,” Jane said in her most commanding voice, “
If
you take the King’s Shilling from my lips!”

A gasp could be heard from the bystanders, and for a moment, she, too, wondered if she had gone too far. How humiliating it would be if the youth refused to accept the shilling from a forty-four-year-old woman who brazenly placed the coin firmly between her teeth and tilted her face to be kissed.

Jane’s eyes bore into the lad’s with deliberate, sexual intensity. As if in a trance, the youth leaned forward, wiped his mouth with the back of a dirty sleeve, and brushed his lips against hers. With her tongue, Jane pushed the coin from her lips to his. A cheer went up from the crowd that had grown considerably larger as word of this transaction spread up and down the little town.

“Hear! Hear!” Lord Huntly exclaimed, both relieved and delighted to acquire such a brawny recruit. “The King’s Shilling for a kiss from the Duchess of Gordon! A fair exchange if you were to be paid only
half
the price!”

In the next few days, their recruiting party traveled to other town squares—Forres, Barnhill, Buckie, and Keith, and even to remote glens and the Monaughty Forest—and everywhere, men came forward to take the King’s Shilling for the price of a kiss.

Within two months, Huntly and the regiment were bound for Gibraltar, playing a waiting game with France’s new
Directoires.
Jane’s recently revived memory of recruiting on behalf of her brother so many years earlier was made all the more poignant on receipt of the news that Hamilton had died in India earlier that year.

Hamilton…
Jane thought sadly, staring at the parchment from Ham’s commander, which contained details of her brother’s last hours. Hamilton, the tease, the perennial bachelor, the ambitious professional soldier. She and her brother had drifted apart after his return from the American War. Ham had rarely sought her company and seemed preoccupied solely with his advancement in the ranks.

And now he was dead from some dreadful foreign malady.

It was with a heavy heart that Jane and her two youngest daughters returned from Inverness to London the following season of 1795. In order to raise their spirits, the trio stopped in Badenoch for the final inspection of Kinrara House. As their coach came around a bend, Jane caught her breath at the sight that greeted them.

Rising among the stately larch and pine trees loomed the well-proportioned residence whose bricks were now disguised with cream-colored plaster. The small, graceful house stood as a welcoming beacon, harmonizing with one of the most beautiful settings in the world.

“’Tis so perfect, Angus,” she sighed to the Gordon factor who was confined to his cottage with a gnarling of joints that had shrunk his already stunted frame even further.

“Aye, Your Grace,” he agreed chuckling. “You’ve got yourself a fine, fair shieling. Now the question is, when are you going to live in it?”

“Soon, Angus, soon,” Jane laughed. “I’ve still two daughters to marry off, you know… and to London I must go to do it, unless you’ll consent to marry one of them!”

“And forsake m’Flora? Never!” He smiled at the large-boned woman who hovered over him. “And, besides, I couldn’t afford ’em… I hear your last two bairns also have a taste for dukes?”

“Not Louisa,” Jane bantered back. “I’m thinking a future marquess would suit her just as well.”

In London, Jane leased scaled-down apartments on Picadilly, wondering what direction her life would take, once the last two lasses were safely settled with husbands. She avidly followed accounts of General Napoleon Bonaparte, the French commander who put down a royalist insurrection in Paris, and she worried incessantly over the fate of her son and the Gordon Highlanders. To keep occupied, she attended the opera in her private ground-floor box at the King’s Theatre, and went to all manner of soirees and card parties. However, Jane and Prime Minister William Pitt had drifted apart since the overt troubles with Alex began, followed by her own preoccupation with building Kinrara House. When they did see each other, Jane simply didn’t seem to spark to gossip and intrigue any longer, and she and Pitt found they had little else in common.